Frank Owen Gehry was born Frank Goldberg in Toronto in 1929 and died on 5 December 2025 in Santa Monica, at ninety six, after a brief respiratory illness. His story runs from a hardware store and fish markets in Canada to a studio that reprogrammed how the world draws, builds and even photographs architecture.
Migration to Los Angeles in the late 1940s, architectural studies at USC and a short spell at Harvard shaped a designer who never quite fit the corporate modernist script. The renovation of his own Santa Monica house in the late 1970s, wrapped in corrugated metal and chain link, was a domestic shock wave that announced a new language of exposed structure, raw materials and fractured geometry.
