A legacy of bold and whimsy design

On 5 December 2025 one of architecture’s boldest visionary spirits passed away. Frank Gehry was the architect who not only changed skylines but also changed how we imagine what buildings can be.

Born Frank Owen Goldberg in Toronto in 1929 to a Jewish immigrant family, he changed his name to Gehry in his 20s in pursuit of greater acceptance, conscious of the antisemitism he and many others faced.

Raised in Toronto, Gehry migrated to Los Angeles in 1947. He studied ceramics at the University of Southern California before turning to architecture, setting up his own studio by 1962 after formative years in firms designing banal shopping malls.

The decision to adopt Gehry as his surname was an attempt to smooth his way in a profession not always welcoming to Jewish names. Yet he never abandoned his identity. Rather he absorbed his experience as an outsider into architecture, often defying rules and challenging conventions.

His early experiments, such as the radical remodel of his own modest Santa Monica home using plywood, corrugated metal and chain-link fencing, shocked neighbours but pointed toward a new form of architectural expression.

By the late 1970s, Gehry abandoned conventional commercial commissions.

“I was brought up with that curiosity. I call it a healthy curiosity. Maybe it is something that the religion has produced. I don’t know. It’s certainly a positive thing.”

Though Gehry designed dozens of remarkable buildings over decades, two stand out as his crowning achievements. The stunning Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain and the celebrated Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

The Bilbao museum, opened in 1997, was an audacious leap, a swirling, titanium-clad behemoth that looked like molten metal frozen mid-motion. As critics noted, it rewrote the rules of what a museum could be: part urban sculpture, part cultural magnet.

Its impact was seismic. The “Bilbao effect” became shorthand for how a single, daring building could reanimate a dusty industrial city and draw the world’s gaze.

A few years later, in 2003, Disney Hall opened its doors. It became a testament to Gehry’s marriage of art and acoustic science. From the outset, it challenged many to re-evaluate how architecture could serve music and public life. As critic Mark Swed wrote in an LA Times tribute:“Everything for Frank was a discussion — an ongoing discussion between a building and its place, between a building and all who saw it and used it. And the discussion between Frank’s buildings and music was on an exalted level.”

Walking into Disney Hall, Swed reflected, “you simply feel good.” That emotional, almost spiritual response is rare in architecture, but for Gehry, it was essential.

Gehry’s distinctive sensibility is not confined to Europe or America. His one Australian commission, the Dr Chau Chak Wing Building at University of Technology Sydney (UTS), completed in 2015, shows that architecture should surprise. The building’s crumpled-brick facade, likened to a “scrunched brown paper bag”, gained global attention.

As Gehry explained, the design sought to humanise a university building: “the fold is primitive, you’re in your mother’s arms when you’re a child, and so we tried to do that with brick.”

And his architecture genius continued inside with curved classrooms to encourage engagement, open staircases, and flexible spaces to inspire collaboration. It was such a bold feat that engineers had to invent bespoke methods to place over 320,000 individually shaped bricks by hand to achieve the effect.

What made Gehry extraordinary was not simply his flamboyant curves or metal sails. It was his willingness to treat architecture as living art. He blurred the boundary between building and sculpture; he saw materials like brick, wood, titanium and chain-link as clay to be shaped.

He was among the first to embrace computer-aided design in architecture. The fluid, complex shapes of Bilbao or Disney Hall, which would have been nearly impossible to draw by hand, became realisable through advanced digital modelling, enabling a new era of architectural freedom.

Moreover, Gehry changed the public’s expectations of architecture. It was no longer just functional, it was a work of art, inspiring those who viewed it and experienced it. Cities no longer needed to be bland towers. For all of this, Gehry was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 1989, known as the Nobel prize for architecture. Interestingly though, most of his major works were actually completed after he received the award. As well as the Pritzker Prize, Gehry was awarded the National Medal of Arts, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and Commandeur of the National Order of the Legion of Honour, among many others.

As for his Judaism, Gehry began to identify as an atheist shortly after his bar mitzvah. But in 2018, while he was working on ANU-Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv, he told the Jewish Journal that Judaism had influenced his career nonetheless.

“There’s a curiosity built into the [Jewish] culture,” he said. “I grew up under that. My grandfather read Talmud to me. That’s one of the Jewish things I hang on to probably — that philosophy from that religion. Which is separate from God. It’s more ephemeral. I was brought up with that curiosity. I call it a healthy curiosity. Maybe it is something that the religion has produced. I don’t know. It’s certainly a positive thing.”

While Gehry is mourned, his legacy remains. Gehry said himself that the best thing he could possibly do is to train young minds and “mother-hen them out into the world and watch like a proud papa while they grow”. And indeed, that’s what he has done, and will continue to do through his whimsy, unique work that inspired, and continues to inspire, wonder, whether it’s a shimmering concert hall, a rippling museum or a ‘paper bag’ building.