Mocking Up Life: Frank Owen Gehry, 1929-2025

Toronto-born architect Frank Owen Gehry was 96 when he died on December 5, 2025. He practiced architecture for 71 years, reaching the pinnacle of his profession. He received the Pritzker Prize, the AIA Gold Medal, the RAIC Gold Medal, the RIBA Gold Medal, the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, and honorary degrees from 20 universities, the latter including the Technical University of Nova Scotia (Dalhousie) and the University of Toronto. As an architect, he was bold, sometimes brazen. As a friend for nearly 45 years, he was loving and generous. 

I met Frank through Globe and Mail architecture critic Adele Freedman, soon after I moved from Halifax to Toronto, in 1980. Adele and I were drawn to Frank’s imaginative form making and unconventional use of ordinary materials. We revelled in his openness and rebellious nature, and we went to Los Angeles to see his work first-hand. Frank and his wife, Berta, invited us to their house in Santa Monica, a remarkable, other-worldly renovation completed in 1978. We had dinner while their boys, Samuel and Alejandro, played in the background. 

Soon, Adele and I made more trips to L.A. to see work by Frank: the Temporary Contemporary, Rebecca’s restaurant, Loyola Law School, Santa Monica Place, the Aerospace Museum, and the shocking Chiat Day “binoculars building.” We marvelled over Frank’s Formica fish and snake lamps, forerunners of his later fish-like constructions, emanating, it seems, from memories of his Jewish grandmother bringing a carp home to make gefilte fish and his desire to instill Baroque-like movement into architectural forms. 

In those days in the 1980s, Adele and I often felt alone in our attraction to Frank’s architecture. Some Toronto architects and academics at that time were hostile towards his work, engaging in a kind of class snobbery—and even going so far as attempting to thwart a 1981 invitation for Frank to lecture in Toronto. (They didn’t succeed.) Amidst the conservative resistance, Adele and I soldiered on, feeling privileged to be part of Frank’s world. 

Fast forward: Capping four decades of engagement with Frank, we had lunch with him at his office in September 2024, joined by his chief of staff Meaghan Lloyd. Frank’s son, Sam, now an accomplished designer, toured us around the office. Adele and I had a wonderful afternoon, not knowing that, sadly, it would be our last time with Frank. 

Now, reflecting on Frank’s monumental legacy and iconic projects such as the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum and Disney Concert Hall, I’m even more in awe of his creativity and his complex, highly particular intersection of architect-artist sensibilities. Finally, what was it all about? Frank once commented that “I think all of us are, finally, just commenting in our own way about what’s going on in our cone of vision.” In his case, that was a kind of profound, abstract yet intensely material mocking up of life as he experienced it—starting in Toronto and ending in Santa Monica. 

Although Frank Gehry became well known internationally in the early 1980s, opportunities for projects in his native Canada unfolded slowly. In the mid-80s he was considered for Toronto’s Metro Hall as part of a proposal by Olympia & York and Adamson Associates. “Frank’s scheme was fantastic,” recalls Ron Soskolne, a long-time friend of Gehry’s and O&Y Vice-President at the time. “However, the Harbourfront site was controversial politically, and our vision didn’t fly. It was disappointing.”

Another non-start centered on the Montreal Museum of Decorative Arts (MMDA), which opened in 1979 and by 1988 quickly outgrew its home. Around 1991, the museum’s director, Luc d’Iberville-Moreau, noted in an exhibition catalogue preface that “At present we are working with the Canadian-born architect Frank Gehry to develop designs for a new facility. Our expectations are that he will design a remarkable setting for our collections and a structure that will add a notable presence to the city of Montreal.” Although the MMDA, working with Knoll, presented the exhibition, “Frank Gehry: New Bentwood Furniture Designs” in the fall of 1992, the hoped-for new museum by Gehry never materialized. 

Frank’s first realized project in Canada was a suite of offices for the Los Angeles-based advertising firm Chiat Day, completed in Toronto in March 1989. It was an interior project on the sixth and seventh floors of a squat, mirror-glazed building at 10 Lower Spadina, near the lakefront. Designed in collaboration with Toronto architect David Fujiwara, the Chiat Day offices combined plywood, tree trunks, crumpled steel, wool felt, and a focal, disconcertingly real-looking fish in a bathtub. It was a warm, witty, elegant place. An image of it was featured on the cover of the May 1989 issue of Canadian Architect, which included my review of the project. 

In the 1990s, I went to see projects by Gehry in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Prague, and Seattle. The Nationale-Nederlanden Office Building in Prague, completed in 1996, became one of my favourites. Located along the Vltava River in the central historic district, twin corner towers, affectionately nicknamed “Ginger and Fred” after the famous Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire Hollywood dancing couple, flow into a long, undulating façade scaled superbly to the urban context. 

For the Prague building, Frank’s office employed 3-D computer modelling to, as his office put it, “link the design process more closely to fabrication and construction technologies as opposed to the imaging software more typically used by architects.” Technological innovation became increasingly important for Gehry Partners and their subsidiary Gehry Technologies. They adopted Computer-Aided Three-Dimensional Interactive Application (CATIA) from aerospace engineering, eventually developing Digital Project, a platform that advanced BIM and complex geometric coordination. 

The highly sculptural, magnificent Guggenheim Bilbao Museum opened in 1997, followed by Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles in 2003. Meanwhile, Frank was working on his cloud-like design for the Le Clos Jordanne winery in Ontario’s Niagara Region, developed during 2002-03 but, disappointingly, unrealized. 

This period coincided with my deanship at the University of Toronto from 1997 to 2004, a time when I became even more engaged with Frank and his work. In 1998, I helped steer the University’s awarding of an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree to Frank. Then, in 2002, working closely with alumnus Bruce Kuwabara and others, I enabled our faculty to launch the endowed, Frank Gehry International Visiting Chair in Architectural Design, which has brought stellar architects to teach advanced design studios at U of T. Frank was thrilled with both recognitions from the institution where, as a teenager, he had attended a lecture by the extraordinary Finnish architect, Alvar Aalto. 

Then, in 2006, I curated the exhibition Frank’s Drawings: Eight Museums by Gehry” for the University of Toronto Art Centre and the Patricia Faure Gallery in Santa Monica. The exhibition included his alluring, wiry sketches and an array of telephone-pad/thumbnail sketches by Frank never before shown—scores of yellow sheets piled in Gehry-esque heaps. It made him smile! 

Meanwhile, the Gehry-designed transformation of the Art Gallery of Ontario was unfolding with its fish-skeleton-like galleria along Dundas Street, bold blue volume facing Grange Park, and radically changed Walker Court. Completed in 2008, this was Frank’s first major Canadian project. 

Soon an even grander Toronto opportunity came to Gehry—a large, mixed-use development, initially launched by David Mirvish, for a site along King Street West. As proposed by Frank, it entailed three soaring residential towers. The City’s planners reduced the ensemble to two towers, Mirvish bowed out, and the developer branded the landmark project “Forma,” announcing it in their promotional brochure as “A Homecoming Masterpiece Designed by Gehry.” The first tower—74 floors, exuberant, silvery-metallic—is now under construction. The second, taller tower is currently on pause, but Mitchell Cohen, COO of Westdale Construction, says that it will proceed when market conditions are less uncertain.

Such uncertainties have pervaded many of Frank’s projects in Canada, but it never seemed to diminish his pride in being Canadian. And sometimes that manifested itself in relatively simple ways. I recall how extremely happy he was in 1992 to be invited to the University of Waterloo, where I was a professor at the time, to lecture, visit a former high school classmate teaching there, and to play hockey! He brought along his own team, The F.O.G., stacked with ex-NHL players, and was totally in his Canadian element. Pure Frank. 

Now, as the curtain falls, family, office colleagues, and friends will gather at Disney Hall on January 20th for a special concert honouring this remarkable man. I will be there, embraced by the warm, wood-lined space that he created and the music that he loved. 

Larry Wayne Richards is Professor Emeritus and Former Dean of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto.

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