Remembering Frank Gehry, a titan of architecture and a brilliant human being

Frank Gehry was the greatest architect of the past 50 years and a lovable — if sometimes cranky — human being whose passing today at the age of 96 will leave a gap in the lives of his many friends.

We were never close but I consider myself blessed to have explored and written about so many of his buildings, and by his willingness to talk candidly about himself and his work. His range was extraordinary, designing an unrealized Xanadu for insurance mogul Peter Lewis and a vast Guggenheim satellite in Abu Dhabi while taking on humble tasks pro bono. Classical music was a passion and he created a dozen innovative venues, like the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin and the hall for the Coburn School of Music in downtown LA.

The early years were a struggle for survival. Gehry turned his back on commercial jobs that provided a steady income but little creative freedom and struck out on his own. Working on meagre budgets he employed clustered forms and commonplace materials to create a succession of quirky gems. His house served as a manifesto: a carapace of corrugated metal, plywood and corrugated metal wrapped around what he called 'a dumb Dutch colonial.' A few recognized it as a brilliant work of art but neighbours hated it and it was widely ridiculed. It now takes its place among the landmarks of 20th-century architecture.

In 1987, Gehry was the focus of a travelling exhibition at the Walker Art Center; had two monographs published; and had secured four high-rise commissions. One Sunday morning I went to interview him at his tiny office in Venice, Los Angeles and congratulate him on his success. He confessed he could barely make payroll and he shrugged off the prospect of working on larger projects. 'When they see the house they’ll all go away,' he remarked. They did, but it was the market crash that doomed the towers.

His misgivings were well-founded. When a jury headed by MOCA director Richard Koshalek chose him over three Pritzker laureates in the competition to design Walt Disney Concert Hall, a delegation of suits demanded they select someone else. Koshalek stood firm and the winning design morphed into the masterpiece that now symbolizes the best of Los Angeles just as his Guggenheim draws the world to Bilbao. Those two buildings and the 1989 Pritzker Prize cemented his reputation world-wide, but without turning his head. He continued to work—with a greatly enlarged team of associates and design partners—in the same hands-on, intuitive way that he always had. He had no interest in theory. Concept sketches would be followed by crude study models and finally large presentation models. These would be scanned and turned into the digital files that made it possible to build such complex forms.

The process is captured in a documentary, Sketches of Frank Gehry filmed by his friend Sydney Pollock in 2005. 'Is it hard to get started?' asks the director. 'You know it is,' Frank responds in an anguished tone. Cut to a sequence in which he and partner Craig Webb fiddle with a model of the Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi, Mississippi.

Years later, Gemini GEL, the LA print workshop he had designed early in his career, produced a limited edition in translucent resin of a maquette Frank made for conceptual artist Sophie Calle, who had it installed as a temporary structure on a bridge over the Seine. He called it a flower and its softly molded petals evoke an orchid.

That sense of artistry and craft infused almost everything he did. Intrigued by the dynamic character of a fish, he employed it as a monumental sculpture in Barcelona, a restaurant in Kobe, Japan, and as lamps, using jagged fragments of Formica as scales. Two series of cardboard furniture — one rigid one squishy — were followed by chairs and tables fabricated from bent maple strips and named for moves in ice hockey, a game the Toronto-born architect took up in middle-age.

Renaissance man is an overworked term, but Frank Gehry earned that distinction, rivaling Frank Lloyd Wright in the originality and breadth of his oeuvre. How we will miss him!

Read more about the life and work of Frank Gehry

• A guide to Frank Gehry's mesmerising — and sometimes controversial — architecture
• Frank Gehry’s Louis Vuitton handbags see fashion meet architecture
• Inside Frank Gehry’s office building for Facebook
• Frank Gehry's twisting tower opens in Arles