Frank Gehry (born Ephraim Goldberg) was an architect who died on December 5th 2025, aged 96. He was born to Jewish immigrants in a run-down section of Toronto and later moved to southern California in 1947. He changed his name from Ephraim Goldberg to Frank Gehry, finding it brought him more success in winning commissions.
Gehry was widely regarded as the world's most innovative architect. He was a pencil-and-paper designer whose work was transformed from 1991 by Catia, software that allowed his assistants to digitise his models onscreen, create new 3D models and send them directly to be scaled up. He favoured workaday materials—plywood, tar-paper shingles, bricks, corrugated aluminium and even chain-link fencing—and wanted his buildings to feel alive, in contrast to what he saw as dead, stark modernism. He intended his buildings to be as comfortable as a baby in a mother's arms, and democratic.
He cited Le Corbusier, whose work he encountered in Paris in 1961, as a key influence. He befriended a circle of artists and sculptors in southern California, including Richard Serra, Lou Danziger and Claes Oldenburg. He treasured a tiny 17th-century church in Rome, San Carlino by Francesco Borromini, who he said had already done all the moves he might presume to have done first.
As a child in Toronto he was beaten up at school. His grandfather ran a hardware store where Gehry sorted nails and screws, cut glass and pipe, and took clocks apart. His grandmother bought a live carp each week to make gefilte fish, installing it in the bath; his hours spent watching the fish move and gleam later inspired myriad metal-scale designs and the fish motifs that recurred throughout his career. He sailed in a yacht called Foggy, which sparkled with hundreds of glass inserts.
The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions.