Walt Disney Concert Hall Architect Was 96

World-renowned architect Frank Gehry has died at 96.

The prolific creator died at his home in Santa Monica, Calif., after a brief respiratory illness on Friday, Dec. 5. His chief of staff at Gehry Partners LLP, Meaghan Lloyd, confirmed the news. The New York Times was first to report his death.

The Canada-born, California-based architect and designer was behind some of the most iconic and instantly recognizable structures around the world, including the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Jay Pritzker Concert Pavilion in Chicago’s Millennium Park and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, all of which feature his signature undulating metal facades that often appear more sculpture than building.

Gehry rose to prominence in the 1970s after designing his own unconventional Santa Monica home and went on to win the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honor, in 1989. Decades later, in 2010 when he was 81, Vanity Fair called him “the most important architect of our age.”

Speaking to the Times in 2012, he said of his creative outlook, “I was rebelling against everything.” Of the dominant, minimalist architectural styles of some of his contemporaries, he shared, “I thought it was snotty and effete. It just didn’t feel like it fit into life.”

Gehry was one of the first in his field to be dubbed a “starchitect” for his bold style, global notoriety and unapologetically ambitious projects.

He was born Frank Goldberg, but later adopted the surname Gehry in order to avoid antisemitism, per the Times. 

As a young man, he was briefly in the army before entering the University of Southern California, initially studying ceramics before turning to architecture. 

He married his first wife Anita Snyder, and welcomed two daughters, Brina Gehry and Leslie Gehry Brenner, who died in 2008. The couple divorced in the 1960s, and in 1975 Frank married Berta Aguilera, who survives him along with their two sons, Sam and Alejandro, and his older daughter Brina.