Gehry was born Frank Goldberg in Toronto in 1929, moved with his family to Los Angeles at seventeen, and studied at USC and briefly at Harvard's Graduate School of Design before opening his own Los Angeles practice in 1962. For two decades he built modest, inexpensive work, most famously the 1978 remodel of his own Santa Monica bungalow in corrugated metal, plywood and chain-link fencing, materials chosen because a client's budget could afford them, not for effect. Computer-aided design borrowed from the aerospace industry let his later practice translate the same instinct for torqued, improvised-looking form into buildable curved metal at the scale of an entire museum, starting with Bilbao in 1997. He kept a working office into his nineties and died in Santa Monica in December 2025, having reshaped what a public building was allowed to look like more than once in a sixty-year career.
