Legendary US architect dies aged 96

Frank Gehry, one of the most influential architects of the last century, has died aged 96.

Gehry was acclaimed for his avant garde, experimental style of architecture. His titanium-covered design of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, catapulted him to fame in 1997.

He built his daring reputation years before that when he redesigned his own home in Santa Monica, California, using materials like chain-link fencing, plywood and corrugated steel.

HIs death was confirmed by his chief of staff Meaghan Lloyd. He is survived by two daughters from his first marriage, Leslie and Brina; his wife, Berta Isabel Aguilera, and their two sons, Alejandro and Samuel,

Born in Toronto in 1929, Gehry moved to Los Angeles as a teenager to study architecture at the University of Southern California before completing further study at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1956 and 1957.

After starting his own firm, he broke from the traditional architectural principles of symmetry, using unconventional geometric shapes and unfinished materials in a style now known as deconstructivism.

“I was rebelling against everything,” Gehry said in an interview with The New York Times in 2012.

His work in Bilbao put him in high demand, and he went on to design iconic structures in cities all over the world: the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago’s Millennium Park, the Gehry Tower in Germany, and the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris.

“He bestowed upon Paris and upon France his greatest masterpiece,” said Bernard Arnault, the CEO of LVMH, the worlds largest luxury goods company which owns Louis Vuitton.

With a largely unpredictable style, no two of his works look the same. Prague’s Dancing House, finished in 1996, looks like a glass building folding in on itself; his Hotel Marques in Spain, built in 2006, features thin sheets of wavy, multicoloured metal; his design for a business school in Sydney looks like a brown paper bag.

Gehry won the coveted Pritzker Architecture Prize for lifetime achievement in 1989, when he was 60, with his work described as having a “highly refined, sophisticated and adventurous aesthetic”.

“His designs, if compared to American music, could best be likened to Jazz, replete with improvisation and a lively unpredictable spirit,” ther Pritzker jury said at the time.

Gehry was awarded the Order of Canada in 2002 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in the US, in 2016.