In Memoriam: Frank Gehry (1929–2025)

Frank Gehry, whose groundbreaking designs made him one of the most innovative architects of his time and arguably of history, died at his home in Santa Monica, California, on 5 December 2025 at age 96.

Born in Toronto in 1929 and educated at the University of Southern California in the 1950s, Gehry launched his architectural practice in 1962 and burst onto the international stage with the completion of an idiosyncratic home for himself in Santa Monica in 1978. Here, Gehry wrapped an ordinary suburban home in a dramatic collage of exposed wood framing, wired glass, and corrugated metal to demonstrate how the “cheapskate architecture” he had been developing for more than a decade could offer a viable alternative to then-rampant postmodern historicism.

The house secured Gehry’s place among the most influential architects of the late twentieth century and made him the de facto leader of the Los Angeles School of architects. Other groundbreaking projects of the decade, including the downtown warehouses he converted into the Temporary Contemporary gallery for the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (1983), the abstracted Italian hill town he assembled in Santa Monica for the Edgemar shopping center (1988), and the dramatically sculpted forms of the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhine, Germany (1989), point to other, equally productive lines of investigation that secured him the 1989 Pritzker Prize in architecture.

Soon after, Gehry was at work on the project that would make him not just one of the world’s preeminent architects but also a widely recognized international celebrity. With the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain (1997), the architect drove his experiments with curvilinear surfaces, unconventional materials, and exuberant formal compositions to unprecedented ends, conjuring in the building’s billowing titanium surfaces a breathtaking new model for civic unity.

Over the next three decades, he delivered a parade of masterpieces that continued to open new lines of investigation. In Berlin, he addressed the neoclassicism of the Pariser Platz with quiet reserve and turned the emotional force of his sculpted forms inward to the atrium of the DZ Bank (2001). In downtown Los Angeles, he crowned Bunker Hill with the gleaming monumentality of the Disney Concert Hall (2003) and later, with the stacked dynamism of the Grand LA (now the Grand by Gehry) across the street (2022). In New York City, he answered the historic grandeur of Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building (1913) and other Manhattan towers with the rippling facades of 8 Spruce Street (2011). In Paris, he conceived a graceful composition in curved glass, reminiscent of the sailing ships he adored, to house the Fondation Louis Vuitton (2014). For the LUMA Foundation in Arles (2021), he recast the grandeur of the city’s Roman past in a contemporary idiom that recalls both the geometric purity of antique monuments and the picturesque informality into which they inevitably devolve.

Gehry remained an active force in his Playa Vista office until the final weeks of his life. Under the leadership of surviving partners and with a staff of roughly 100, Gehry Partners LLP will continue to operate and is currently at work completing projects including the Colburn Center for the Performing Arts in Los Angeles and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, a 30,000-square-meter museum scheduled to open later this year in that city’s Saadiyat Island cultural district.

Staffan Ahrenberg, Jean-Louis Cohen and Frank Gehry in 2018. Courtesy of Cahiers d’Art.

For over a decade, Cahiers d’Art has been committed to documenting Frank Gehry’s achievements and has worked closely with the architect and his staff to produce the most comprehensive presentations of the architect’s work currently available. In 2021, Cahiers d’Art released Frank Gehry: The Masterpieces, a survey of Gehry’s most notable projects by the acclaimed historian of twentieth-century architecture, Jean-Louis Cohen (1949-2023).

Frank Gehry: Catalogue Raisonné of the Drawings Vol I, 1954–1978,” Cahiers d’art,2020. Photo: Gaetane Girard.

In 2020, Cahiers d’Art published the first volume of Frank Gehry: Catalogue Raisonné of the Drawings, a planned eight-volume compendium of the architect’s work. Arranged chronologically, the Catalogue Raisonné documents the entirety of Gehry’s creative output, including every completed building and significant unrealized building design as well as the architect’s most important excursions beyond building into the design of exhibitions, furniture, furnishings, and other objects. It includes critical commentary specific to each project as well as introductory essays that trace the development of Gehry’s work, analyze his design method, and situate his efforts in broader cultural, disciplinary, and historical contexts. Central to this endeavor is Gehry’s personal archive of more than 12,000 sketches, which were the primary means by which the architect conceived his designs and communicated his intentions to clients and collaborators. The first volume, authored by Cohen, documents work completed between 1954 and 1978. Volume Two, devoted to work from 1978 to 1983, was left substantially complete by Cohen at the time of his death and will be released in Spring 2026.

In 2025, Cahiers d’Art commissioned the American architectural historian Todd Gannon to continue Cohen’s work and see Frank Gehry: Catalogue Raisonné of the Drawings through to completion. Gannon’s work on the Catalogue Raisonné commences with Volume Three (1983–88) and will include the development of companion monographs on Gehry’s most significant projects, including the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.

For fuller treatments of the life and work of Frank Gehry and Jean-Louis Cohen, we recommend obituaries by Gannon on Gehry and Gwendolyn Wright on Cohen in the American Journal, Architectural Record.

Todd Gannon