Frank Gehry was born Ephraim Owen Goldberg in Toronto in 1929 and spent hours with his grandmother Leah building imaginary cities on the floor from wood scraps out of his grandfather’s hardware store. His mother pushed him toward art and concerts while his father dismissed him as a dreamer. Fleeing anti-Semitism in Canada, the family moved to Los Angeles in 1947, where he drove a delivery truck, failed at radio announcing, hated chemical engineering, and finally tried architecture on a hunch. He graduated from the University of Southern California in 1954, changed his name to Gehry, and went to Harvard’s Graduate School of Design on the GI Bill, then walked away after learning a professor was designing a palace for the Cuban dictator Batista.

He launched Easy Edges furniture out of layered corrugated cardboard, then in the late 1970s wrapped his pink 1920s Santa Monica bungalow in chain-link fencing, plywood, and corrugated steel. Fish shapes crept into his lamps and buildings, and after the 1989 Pritzker Prize his firm borrowed Dassault’s CATIA fighter jet software to build the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, which opened in 1997. The Bilbao effect followed. He later turned to pro bono civic work and kept his fighting edge until his death in December 2025 at 96.

• How alternating the flutes of corrugated cardboard spreads weight across hundreds of tiny arches
• Why Gehry pointed out fish existed 300 million years before humans and asked why architects should stop at the Greeks
• How parametric modeling sent exact steel data to the mills and brought Bilbao in $3 million under its $100 million budget
• Bilbao’s estimated $160 million boost in its first year and over $3.5 billion by 2014
• Waiving his fee for the Children’s Institute in Watts, co-founding Turnaround Arts, and making a New York tower one foot taller than Donald Trump’s