Frank Gehry, renowned Canadian-born architect, dies at age 96

Gehry died in his home in Santa Monica after a brief respiratory illness, said Meaghan Lloyd, chief of staff at Gehry Partners LLP.

Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry, known for his distinct, unique design style of buildings all over the world, died Friday at the age of 96.

Gehry died in his home in Santa Monica after a brief respiratory illness, said Meaghan Lloyd, chief of staff at Gehry Partners LLP.

Born Frank Owen Goldberg on Feb. 28, 1929 in Toronto, he showed interest in building things from a very young age. Starting with scraps of wood and eventually graduating to more complex materials from his grandfather’s hardware store, he had a penchant for stylish original design.

His mother instilled a knowledge of art in him, and the two areas meshed together perfectly, leading him to develop a well-rounded approach to architecture.

Gehry and his family moved to Los Angeles in 1947, where he attended City College and worked as a delivery truck driver. After some preliminary waywardness and questioning about what he wanted to do with his life, he consciously seized on what made him happy, and that was art and architecture.

He graduated from the University of Southern California in 1954 with a Bachelor of Architecture. Post-graduation, he served a stint in the U.S. Army before returning to academics. He enrolled at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, but didn’t complete the program. Disillusioned with the incongruity of his ideas and established architectural practice, Gehry worked at several architectural firms before establishing his own company, Frank O. Gehry & Associates, in 1962. It was renamed Gehry Partners in 2002.

His first commercial success was the launch of his “Easy Edges” cardboard furniture line, which sold for a period of a few years. With the money he made from the venture, Gehry remodelled a home for his family in Santa Monica.

Gehry’s style — characterized by the use of chain-link fencing and metal cladding and by forms that twist the traditional rectangular structure of buildings or flow and curve in non-linear shapes — was exemplified here.