Frank Gehry, the architect of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, has died.

Barcelona"I approach each building as a sculptural object," stated architect Frank O. Gehry, who died this Friday at the age of 96 at his home in Santa Monica, California, after suffering a brief respiratory illness, according to his chief of staff, Meaghan Lloyd. Gehry made history from the beginning of his career with works such as his own house in Santa Monica, and in the late 1990s he cemented his impact with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, one of his greatest achievements and most beloved works due to its profound influence on his career. In fact, one of the great deans of American architecture, Philip Johnson, considered it "the most important building of our time." Indeed, one of his most recent works is the Guggenheim Museum Abu Dhabi, the largest of the Guggenheim museums: it covers 80,000 square meters and reaches a height of 80 meters. It is scheduled to open next year. Gehry himself, who was active until very recently, had described it as a journey from chaos to light. Gehry, who received the Pritzker Prize in 1989—the Nobel Prize of architecture—viewed his works as "a spatial container, a space with light and air, a response to the context," which users brought to life. "In that container, in this sculpture, the user brings their baggage, their program, and interacts. If they can't do that, I've failed," he said. Furthermore, before the Guggenheim, Gehry had designed the gigantic fish-shaped pergola next to the Hotel Arts in Barcelona. Later, another project—a headquarters in the Catalan capital, a transport museum, and a tower in La Sagrera—was shelved, and he did design a hotel for the Marqués de Riscal winery.

Among Gehry's other most notable works are the Vitra Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, whose steel skin, instead of the planned stone, was inspired by the success of the titanium facade of the Bilbao Museum. Also noteworthy are the Beekman Tower, a skyscraper with a sinuous facade in New York, and the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, whose image evokes a 19th-century greenhouse. His detractors accused him of neglecting function in favor of form. Of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, they said it was "a pile of broken crockery," "a runaway fortune cookie," "deconstructionist garbage," and "an empty trash can." Gehry brushed aside the criticism and in 2007 told The New Yorker magazine: "At least they look!"

Often the first impression of Gehry's buildings is a sketch so seemingly spontaneous that they appear to be four scribbles. But constructing them has been quite a challenge: the geometry of buildings like the Guggenheim Bilbao itself is so complex that, to bring it to life, he was the pioneer in using a software emerged from the French space industry, CATIA.

"Gehry, who is always open to experimentation, has a security and a madness that is resistant, in the mateixa way that Picasso goes, to be bound by critical acceptance and by his successes. His buildings are collages juxtaposed by spaces and materials that fan "that users can appreciate both the scenery and the bambolines, revealed simultaneously," the Pritzker jury will affirm.

But, however, Gehry always rejected the idea of spectacle architecture. When he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award in 2014, he responded to a journalist who had asked his opinion about people who thought his buildings were nothing more than spectacle: raising his finger to pluck it off, he said that he considered 98% of the buildings made in the world to be "pure." In the last two decades, he has continued to maintain this high standard, with buildings like the Dr. Chau Chak Business School in Sydney, whose brick facade resembles crumpled paper. It took more than 320,000 bricks to build and has been considered one of the city's most iconic buildings after Jørn Utzon's Opera House. Another of his major recent works is the Facebook campus in Silicon Valley, covering almost 90,000 square meters.

Gehry before Gehry

Gehry, born in Canada in 1929 and a naturalized American citizen in 1950, earned a living as a truck driver and furniture deliveryman in California before becoming an architect. He came from a Polish Jewish family and changed his surname from Owen Goldberg to avoid detection after experiencing antisemitism. As he explained, he was attending art school when a ceramics professor suggested he enroll in an architecture program and wrote him a letter of recommendation. He did so, graduating as an architect from the University of Southern California in 1954. Gehry's education continued with urban planning studies at Harvard, and before opening his office in Los Angeles in 1962, he spent time in Paris with his family, studying the work of European architects such as Le Corbusier. An anecdote that Gehry himself had explained from his time at Harvard was that he had refused to collaborate with Josep Lluís Sert because he had proposed that he work on the pilot plan of Havana commissioned by the dictator Fulgencio Batista.

His early works included several shopping centers and more conventional residential and office buildings. As he himself explained, the first project in which he began to forge a more personal path was the house for the painter Ron Davis (1972), five years before the family home that Gehry transformed into a manifesto of deconstructivist architecture, so fashionable in the 1980s, due to the way he experimented with wooden structures and industrial materials. It was as a result of that work, which he later modified time and again, despite the historical importance it acquired, that he decided to be so daring with external commissions. So he reduced the number of employees in his office and began a new phase that made him famous worldwide.

Before the Guggenheim Bilbao, Gehry built another of his buildings, known as the Binoculars Building, in collaboration with the artists Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. In a pop art gesture, the most striking feature of the facade is a pair of gigantic binoculars designed by the artist duo. Commissioned by the advertising agency Chiat/Day, it currently houses one of Google's offices.