By: Andrew Carlson

Frank Gehry, the Toronto-born visionary whose name became synonymous with the radical reimagining of form, volume and movement in contemporary architecture, died Friday in Santa Monica at the age of 96. His death, first reported by The New York Times, closes a chapter on one of the most influential and iconoclastic artistic careers of the last century. To survey Gehry’s oeuvre is to trace the evolution of a restless mind—an intellect forever trying to wrestle structure away from stasis, to bend the tyranny of the right angle and coax inert materials into sinuous, breathing life.

Gehry’s masterpieces—the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (1997), Walt Disney Concert Hall (2003) in Los Angeles, and the Fondation Louis Vuitton (2014) in Paris—have long entered the canon not merely as distinguished works of architecture but as seismic cultural events. They reshaped skylines, redefined expectations of what civic buildings could be, and inaugurated a new global conversation about the relationship between the built environment and the imagination.

Yet, as The New York Times noted in its obituary, Gehry was born not Frank Gehry but Ephraim Owen Goldberg, on Feb. 28, 1929, in Toronto. His Jewish identity—at once a private inheritance, a source of both pride and friction, and a cultural lineage that would surface in unexpected ways throughout his life—formed an understated but unmistakable thread in the tapestry of his work.

In official tributes, political leaders framed Gehry as both a visionary and a democrat of design. California Gov. Gavin Newsom hailed him as an artist “drawing on his working-class background” whose buildings “embraced the reality of living and the beauty of the everyday.” Gehry’s architecture, Newsom observed, sought to expand space for society’s outsiders—“making room for everyone in this world, especially the misfits like himself.”

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, speaking for a city physically and psychically marked by Gehry’s imprint, emphasized that Los Angeles had been not merely his professional headquarters but his “canvas” and “proving ground.” The Disney Hall, with its cascading steel petals unfurling like a metallic flower across Grand Avenue, became the most recognizable symbol of the city’s turn-of-the-millennium cultural renaissance, as was reported by The New York Times. Bass noted that Gehry’s civic commitment extended beyond aesthetics: he also lent his time to designing housing for homeless veterans, a role rarely associated with an architect of his international stature.

Rep. Eric Swalwell described Gehry as “the most brilliant architect of our time,” remarking that while his visionary talent dazzled, his “heart towered over every magnificent building that will forever carry his name.” The New York Times reported that he placed Gehry in a pantheon of Californian world-changers—Disney, Spielberg, Jobs—and insisted that Gehry belongs there “always, always.”

Curiously, none of these public elegies acknowledged the architect’s Jewish identity—something The New York Times report pointedly observed. Gehry was born to Polish-Jewish immigrants in Toronto and raised within the delicate latticework of immigrant anxieties, aspirations, and inherited trauma. It was Daniel Libeskind—the Polish-Jewish architect who designed the master plan for the rebuilt World Trade Center site—who articulated the importance of Gehry’s identity, even if the latter rarely foregrounded it.

“Even though Frank Gehry was reluctant to unveil his Jewish identity until later in life, his work displays subversion of convention,” Libeskind said, as noted in The New York Times report. That subversion—an intellectual suspicion of rigidity, hierarchy, and orthodoxy—is unmistakably resonant with a distinctively Jewish cultural sensibility. Gershom Scholem famously described Jewish creativity as a history of “productive disruption”—a phrase that could easily describe Gehry’s architectural trajectory.

Libeskind added that Gehry was “remarkably successful in changing the image of architecture and paving the way for a more unorthodox approach.” Indeed, Gehry’s vocabulary—curved planes, fragmented volumes, asymmetrical rhythms—became a visual manifesto against architectural dogma.

The narrative of Gehry’s childhood, as documented by the Jewish Museum in New York and echoed in The New York Times report, is an evocative portrait of how memory shapes art. His father moved the family to an Ontario mining town, where he supplied slot machines until the province criminalized gambling. The Goldbergs then journeyed west to Los Angeles, where the young Ephraim enrolled at the University of Southern California to study architecture. It was there, humiliated by childhood bullying and seeking admission to USC’s architectural fraternity, that he changed his name in 1954.

Such a gesture—an attempt to slip, unnoticed, beneath the prejudices of mid-century America—was hardly unique among Jewish artists and intellectuals. But in Gehry’s case, the reinvention seemed to liberate something in his imagination: the freedom to discard expectations, to become a creative provocateur unencumbered by tradition.

He studied at Harvard Graduate School of Design before returning to California, establishing Frank O. Gehry & Associates in 1962, and later forming Gehry Partners in 2002. It was in those years, amid the ferment of postwar Los Angeles, that he began the experiments in materiality—cardboard furniture, corrugated metal façades, layered plywood— that would eventually crystallize into the monumental aesthetic of the Bilbao and Disney Hall eras.

One of the most surprising threads in Gehry’s artistic biography is the recurring motif of the fish—a symbol that came to inhabit his lamps, sculptures, and architectural forms. In a 1986 lecture at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Gehry recalled a vivid childhood memory: accompanying his grandmother to the Jewish market in Toronto to buy a carp for Shabbat gefilte fish. The carp, still alive, would swim in the family bathtub until it was prepared for the Sabbath meal. The young Gehry played with it.

That memory lingered in a corner of his imagination for decades, until 1983, when he broke a piece of ColorCore— a Formica laminate—and the shattered edges reminded him of fish scales. Thus began his famed “Fish Lamps,” explored in depth in the Jewish Museum’s 2010 exhibition Fish Forms: Lamps by Frank Gehry. The museum noted that fish imagery became an “indelible and vibrant element” of his work, representing a perfection and fluidity he believed architecture itself could never fully achieve.

“If you really want to go back into the past,” Gehry once quipped, “why not do fish?” It was an answer, simultaneously playful and profound, to architects who insisted that beauty must be rooted in the idioms of ancient Greek temples. Gehry, with a shrug and a glint in his eye, pointed instead to a wriggling carp in a Toronto bathtub.

Gehry’s later decades were marked by a cascade of major commissions and critical acclaim. In 2004, he unveiled the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago’s Millennium Park—an explosive cascade of stainless steel ribbons that served as both an architectural gesture and a civic stage.

His Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington (2020) balanced monumental dignity with a subtle interpretation of Eisenhower’s Kansas childhood. Meanwhile, his expansion of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2021) introduced not bombast but an almost monastic restraint—an understated internal reconfiguration that revealed his understanding of architecture as both spectacle and sanctuary.

In Arles, France, Gehry designed the shimmering LUMA Tower (2021), a twisting geometric mass adorned with 11,000 stainless steel panels. Its form, Gehry said, evoked the swirling sky of Van Gogh’s Starry Night and the rugged geological formations of Provence. It also echoed the circular plan of the city’s ancient Roman amphitheater—an example of Gehry’s instinctual dialogue with history, filtered through abstraction and intuition.

Gehry’s accolades were as numerous as his eccentricities. He received the National Medal of the Arts in 1998, and in 2016, President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, praising his “bold, breathtaking structures that have delighted and inspired people around the world.”

Yet Gehry never behaved like a laureate. He carried himself with a mixture of endearing bluntness and puckish irreverence. When a journalist once asked how he felt about designing public buildings that cost hundreds of millions of dollars, Gehry famously responded with a raised middle finger. It was less an insult than a declaration: art is not a series of compromises.

Gehry’s architecture was often described in terms of rebellion: defiance of convention, defiance of symmetry, defiance of the notion that buildings must behave. But the deeper truth, as critics and colleagues long observed, is that Gehry was less a rebel than a romantic. His buildings move—they breathe, shudder, stretch, lean, and coil. They refuse stillness not because stillness is uninteresting, but because stillness is a lie. For Gehry, architecture was a dance, not a diagram.

His death, as The New York Times wrote, closes the life of a man who “transformed the way the world sees itself.” But it does not end the movement he unleashed. Gehry trained generations of architects to imagine new geometries, new sensuous possibilities, new ways of shaping the voids through which human life unfolds.

Gehry is survived by his wife, Berta Aguilera; their sons, Sam and Alejandro; his daughter Brina, from his first marriage to Anita Snyder; and his sister, Doreen Gehry Nelson. Another daughter, Leslie Gehry Brenner, died in 2008.

His family, friends, and countless admirers across the world now inherit a vast body of work—structures that look like frozen waves, unfurling flowers, desert mirages, metal storms, and celestial vessels. They belong to no tradition except the one Gehry created, a language of motion forged from steel.

In the end, Gehry’s Jewish inheritance—its diasporic restlessness, its refusal to accept rigidity, its contempt for idolatry of the static—was perhaps the invisible scaffolding beneath his most celebrated works. Buildings, he believed, should not stand still; they should move with the memory of migration, with the improvisational humor of survival, with the shimmering unpredictability of a carp in a bathtub.

That spirit— defiant, playful, wounded, hopeful—will continue to ripple across the skylines he remade and the imaginations he liberated.

Frank Gehry is gone. But the world he bent into motion keeps moving.