Frank Gehry, the revolutionary architect who transformed the landscape of contemporary design with his daring and sculptural buildings, passed away at his home in Santa Monica on Thursday after a brief respiratory illness. He was 96. A spokesperson from Gehry Partners confirmed his death. Gehry's innovative approach to architecture, characterized by flowing metallic forms and unconventional materials, established him as one of the most influential and recognizable figures in architectural history during the second half of the 20th century and beyond.

Born in Toronto, Canada, Gehry moved to the United States to pursue his architectural studies at the University of Southern California, later earning a master's degree in urban planning from Harvard University. In 1962, he established his practice in Los Angeles, where he would remain based for over six decades. His career gained significant momentum in 1978 when he reimagined his own modest Santa Monica bungalow using industrial materials including cinder blocks, plywood, corrugated metal, and chain-link fencing. The renovation cost approximately $50,000 and attracted immediate attention for its radical rethinking of residential space. "We bought this tiny little bungalow in Santa Monica and for like 50 grand, I built a house around it," Gehry recalled in a 2008 conversation with TED founder Richard Saul Wurman. "And a few people got excited about it."

The Pritzker Architecture Prize, which Gehry received in 1989, catapulted him to international acclaim, but his most celebrated achievement came nearly a decade later. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, completed in 1997 in Spain's Basque region, represented a watershed moment in architectural history. The building's titanium-clad curves, which swooped and shimmered along the Nervión River, were designed using advanced software originally developed for fighter jets. The late Philip Johnson, considered the godfather of American modern architecture, was moved to tears upon entering the atrium in 1998 and declared Gehry "the greatest architect we have today" in a moment that united critics, academics, and the public in collective admiration. Vanity Fair correspondent Matt Tyrnauer described the structure as resembling "a gargantuan bouquet of writhing silver fish," referencing one of Gehry's recurring motifs.

Following Bilbao's triumph, Gehry received a cascade of prestigious commissions that reshaped cultural landmarks worldwide. These included the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle (2000), the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (2003), the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago's Millennium Park (2004), the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris (2014), and the LUMA Tower in Arles, France (2021). His contributions to American culture were formally recognized in 2016 when President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. Throughout his career, Gehry consistently rejected the label "starchitect," expressing his distaste for the term in a 2013 Financial Times interview. "You are not going to call me a f***ing starchitect?" he said. "I hate that."

Colleagues and collaborators remembered Gehry as a plain-spoken, soft-spoken, and good-humored individual, though occasionally cantankerous. Bernard Arnault, chairman and CEO of LVMH, who worked closely with Gehry on multiple projects including the Louis Vuitton Foundation, posted a statement on X calling the architect "a dear friend" and crediting him with one of the "longest, most intense, and most ambitious creative partnerships" he had ever experienced. Arnault praised Gehry as "a genius of lightness, transparency, and grace." Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi described him as "a gentleman titan of architecture and a master communicator of the future," noting that "Frank left an indelible mark on his beloved Los Angeles, in California, across America, and indeed around the world—not only through his designs, but also through his generosity."

Gehry's distinctive aesthetic evolved as a deliberate reaction against Postmodernism's historical pastiche. "Overall, the kind of language I've developed, which culminated in Bilbao, comes from a reaction to Postmodernism. I was desperate not to go there," he explained to Vanity Fair. He found inspiration in diverse sources including Japanese Buddhist temples, ice hockey, and Stratocaster guitars, but his most famous conceptual anchor was the fish, a form he traced back 300 million years. "I said to myself, If you have to go backward, why not go back 300 million years before man, to fish?" he reflected. "And that's when I started with this fish shtick, as I think of it, and started drawing the damn things, and I realized that they were architectural, conveying motion even when they were not moving." This philosophy resulted in buildings that seemed to defy gravity and conventional geometry, forever changing what humanity considered architecturally possible.