Gehry: The deconstructivist master who changed a whole city with a museum

Frank Gehry, one of the great names of American architecture , died this Friday at the ageof 96 at his home in Santa Monica, California, from a short respiratory disease.

One of his great works as a designer was the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, inaugurated in 1997; a bold construction that has become a symbol of the Basque city and represents a state-of-the-art architecture based on deconstructivism.

Frank Owen Gehry was born in 1929 in Toronto, Canada, but he acquired American nationality in 1947 after moving with his parents to Los Angeles. In 1954, he graduated in Architecture from the University of Lower California and started working at Victor Gruen's studio. After military service, he studied Urbanism at Harvard and returned to Gruen's office.

It began to stand out in the 1970s because of the construction of sculptural forms combining rare industrial materials such as titanium and glass. At the same time, it began to develop as a furniture designer with the Easy Edges collection, which emerged as a low-cost line consisting of fourteen cardboard pieces, followed by Experimental Edges with a more artistic character.

Since the late 1980s, the name of Frank Gehry has been associated with the deconstructivist movement, characterized by fragmentation and disruption of a linear design process, resulting in the creation of buildings with a striking visual appearance. The most notable examples of this formal language are the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (1997) and the Nationale-Nederland Building in Prague (1996).

His works also include the California Aerospace Museum (1984), the Vitra Design Museum (Weil am Rhein, Germany, 1989), the Frederick Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis (1993), the DZ Bank building in Berlin (1998), the Gehry Tower in Hannover (2001), the Cambridge Technological Institute's State Center (2003), the Walt Disney Concert Hall (2003), and the Maggie's Center in Scotland (2003).

Gehry has also worked at a contemporary art museum in Paris for the Louis Vuitton Foundation; he designed his first playground in New York, at the southern end of Manhattan Island, known as The Battery; and he reformed and recovered the Mayer Park in Lisbon, including the restoration of the Capitol Theatre.

His designs have received more than a hundred awards worldwide, including more than a dozen honorary doctorates and the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize (USA, 1977), the Pritzker Prize (1989), the Wolf of the Arts Award (Israel, 1992), the Praemium Imperiale Prize (Japan, 1992), the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (1994), the Friedrich Kiesler Prize (Austria, 1998) and the Twenty Five Year Award of the American Institute of Architects (2012).

He has also received the National Medal of the Arts of the United States (1998) and the Medal of Lotus of Merit (1999), as well as the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects (1999) and the Royal Gold Medal for the Promotion of Architecture (2000), the latter awarded by the Queen of England.