Frank Gehry

Frank Gehry was a Canadian-born American architect whose sculptural, often undulating buildings made him one of the most influential architects of the 20th century. Born in Toronto in 1929, he moved to California in 1947 and studied architecture at the University of Southern California, later taking up city planning at Harvard before leaving to found the cardboard furniture company Easy Edges. He established his own Los Angeles practice in 1962 and rose to prominence in the 1970s with a style that mixed everyday materials into complex, dynamic structures. His Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, which opened in 1997 and became famous for its economic effect on the city, was followed by the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Gehry won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1989, the National Medal of Arts, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and he also designed furniture, jewelry, and stage sets. He died in 2025.