The Canadian-American Architect Frank O. Gehry, known for iconic architectural manifestations, has transcended to the next dimension. With his recent passing on 5 December 2025 at the young age of 96, the world has lost a visionary who dared the drab morphing steel and titanium into mesmerising magic.
Commissioned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen to create a legacy museum, Gehry exploded in a riot of smashed electric guitars and crumpled fret-boards as Experience Music Project (the EMP) established the musical tribute to Jimi Hendrix and the ensuing era, shaking up downtown Seattle. The visual vocabulary of morphing metal at the foot of the Needle with an emerging monorail captured movement and the maverick spirit of change that resonated beyond the Pacific Rim. Now christened Museum of Pop Culture or MoPOP, its design was so engaging and eccentric that it instantly riveted the attention of the architectural world to a realm of possibilities that were largely confined to the musings of Ayn Rand’s uncompromising architect in The Fountainhead.
Born in Toronto, Gehry graduated from the University of Southern California and briefly studied Urban Design and City Planning at Harvard. Establishing his practice in 1962, he became a formidable force deconstructing modernism to its fractal sculptural forms. His momentous manifestations wove materials into unimaginable spatial configurations crafted with sensual symphonic finesse of liquid languish in grand proportions, designed to induce external adaptations and internal movement, using software from Boeing that enabled the construction of jets.
While the Pritzker Prize in architecture, 1989, celebrated his body of work and his restless spirit, the sheer sculptural kinesis in titanium that embodied the creation of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, set him apart as a titan of transformation. The audacious architecture spread over 258,333 sq ft is an unfurling ordered chaos and confluence of titanium ribbons that change with moving clouds reflecting angled sun that turns from lavender to blue to amber and everything in between as a magnificent swirl of metallic paint layered in light. So great was its impact in the Basque region that it attracted architects Santiago Calatrava (airport ZubiZuri Bridge), Arata Isozaki (Isozaki Atea), Norman Foster (Bilbao Metro), Álvaro Siza (Bizkaia Aretoa), Santiago Calatrava (Airport, ZubiZuri Bridge), and Zaha Hadid (Zorrozaurre project), alongside influential Basque talents like Luis Peña Ganchegui, Rafael Moneo and historical architects such as Severino Achúcarro, creating the Bilbao Effect, adding more than $600 million to the annual local tourism and hospitality economy.
From the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Dwight Eisenhower Memorial in Washington DC to the LUMA Arles Museum, the Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris, designed like an ascending fashion cloud, and the quirky Dancing House in Prague, his buildings are unpredictable and often unforgiving, yet always iconic, which kept the client guessing through each creative iteration. The Olympic Fish Pavilion in Barcelona, Spain, inspired by the movement of fish, is a fish-net rendition in steel designed for the 1992 Olympic Village. Depending on the angle of the sun and weather conditions, the abstract sea creature changes colours.
His prolific pursuits redefined architecture and explored the unexplored treatment of light as a work of ethereal ambient aesthetic, where creativity found a new voice. In an age plagued by vanity and edifice legacy, his creativity had a wider influence beyond the client-commission relationship.
As his $1 billion Guggenheim magnum museum in Abu Dhabi stands unfinished in Saadiyat Island, there is nostalgia and a nascent desire to turn it into the world’s finest repository of contemporary art from West Asia, North Africa and South Asia.
India is in search of its own contemporary architectural icons beyond tall statues and forced monuments of the post-modern era. Its quest for an inspired visual statement that heralds a new perspective and lends vitality and verve to the city skylines cluttered with Lego blocks of laboured concrete stacked to the nines of functional brutalism continues. Though innumerable projects are dotting urbanscapes, making their presence felt with height and heft, there is still a schism in need of a sustainable bridge to leap across the gap between mediocrity and greatness. In the words of Frank Gehry, “Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness…”
The author is an India-born, world-renowned Canadian museum director, designer, spatial thinker and author of seminal books on the future of museum architecture, sustainable design and served on the Board of International Council of Museums US.