Renowned Toronto-born architect Frank Gehry dead at 96

Toronto-born architect Frank Gehry, who designed some of most imaginative buildings ever constructed and achieved a level of worldwide acclaim seldom afforded any architect, has died. He was 96.

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

Gehry’s fascination with modern pop art led to the creation of some of the most wildly imaginative buildings ever constructed and brought him a measure of worldwide acclaim seldom afforded any architect.

Among his many masterpieces are the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain and DZ Bank Building in Berlin, Germany.

Gehry awarded every major prize in architecture

Gehry was awarded every major prize architecture has to offer, including the field’s top honour, the Pritzker Prize, for what has been described as “refreshingly original and totally American” work.

Other honours include the Royal Institute of British Architects gold medal, the Americans for the Arts lifetime achievement award and the Companion of the Order of Canada.

Years after he stopped designing ordinary looking buildings, word surfaced in 2006 that the pedestrian Santa Monica mall project that had led to his career epiphany might be headed for the wrecking ball. Gehry admirers were aghast, but the man himself was amused.

“They’re going to tear it down now and build the kind of original idea I had,” he said with a laugh.

Eventually Santa Monica Place was remodeled, giving it a more contemporary, airy outdoor look. Still, it’s no Gehry masterpiece.

His buildings remade skylines around the world

Gehry, meanwhile, continued to work well into his 80s, turning out heralded buildings that remade skylines around the world.

The headquarters of InerActiveCorp, known as the IAC Building, took the shape of a shimmering beehive when it was completed in New York City’s Chelsea district in 2007. The 76-story New York By Gehry building, one of the world’s tallest residential structures, was a stunning addition to the Lower Manhattan skyline when it opened in 2011.

That same year, Gehry joined the faculty of his alma mater, the University of Southern California, as a professor of architecture. He also taught at Yale and Columbia University over the years.

Not everyone was a fan of Gehry’s work. Some naysayers dismissed it as not much more than gigantic, lopsided reincarnations of the little scrap-wood cities he said he spent hours building when he was growing up in the mining town of Timmins, Ontario.

Princeton art critic Hal Foster dismissed many of his later efforts as “oppressive,” arguing they were designed primarily to be tourist attractions. Some denounced Disney Hall as looking like a collection of cardboard boxes that had been left out in the rain.

Still other critics included Dwight D. Eisenhower’s family, who objected to Gehry’s flamboyant proposal for a memorial honoring the nation’s 34th president. Although the family said it wanted a simple memorial and not the one Gehry had proposed, with its multiple statues and billowing metal tapestries depicting Eisenhower’s life, the architect declined to change his design significantly.

As of 2014 the memorial remained unbuilt, with local planning officials again asking Gehry to make revisions.

Gehry did agree to tone down a proposed expansion for Facebook’s Northern California headquarters at the insistence of the company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, who said he wanted a more anonymous look.