CHANUKAH 5786 Sec. A, P10
By Menachem Wecker
Frank O. Gehry, one of the most renowned architects of his era whose buildings look like rolling sculptures, died in Santa Monica, Calif., on Dec. 5. He was 96.
Known for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (1997) in Spain, Walt Disney Concert Hall (2003) in Los Angeles and Fondation Louis Vuitton (2014) in Paris, among many other buildings, the artist was the “mind behind some of the most iconic architectural feats in the world,” according to California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“Drawing on his working-class background, Frank’s designs embraced the reality of living and the beauty of the everyday,” Newsom stated.
“His work encouraged imagination and freedom of thought, and recognized the value and the beauty of working people and neighborhoods, seeking to make room for everyone in this world — especially the misfits like himself.”
Karen Bass, mayor of Los Angeles, stated that the city “mourns the loss of one of its most beloved and impactful cultural giants.”
Gehry was “not only a legendary architect, but a true visionary who transformed the way our city, and the world, sees and experiences Los Angeles,” she said.
She added that over more than 60 years, Gehry “made Los Angeles his home, his canvas and his proving ground” and that he volunteered and developed housing for homeless veterans.
Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) stated that Gehry was the “most brilliant architect of our time,” who “had the greatest eye and most visionary mind,” but his heart “towered over every magnificent building that will forever carry his name.”
“When you talk about the most creative, world-changing Californians of all time, I know Walt Disney, Steven Spielberg and Steve Jobs may first come to mind. But always, always remember Frank Gehry,” the congressman said. “I know I will.”
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called Gehry “a gentleman titan of architecture and a master communicator of the future,” who “recognized that architecture is not just designing a building — it is creating a work of art.”
None of the politicians mentioned that the architect, who was born Ephraim Owen Goldberg in Toronto on Feb. 28, 1929, was Jewish.
Daniel Libeskind, a renowned architect and the son of Holocaust survivors, said that “even though Frank Gehry was reluctant to unveil his Jewish identity until later in life, his work displays subversion of convention.”
“He was renowned and remarkably successful in changing the image of architecture and paving the way for a more unorthodox approach,” Libeskind said of Gehry.
Fish scales
When Gehry was growing up, his father moved the family to an Ontario mining town, where he supplied slot machines to local establishments until gambling became illegal there, according to the Jewish Museum in New York.
The Goldbergs then moved to Los Angeles, where the artist studied architecture at the University of Southern California. Before he graduated, he changed his name in 1954.
“He had been picked on as a child and wanted to be admitted to the university’s architectural fraternity,” the Jewish Museum said.
He subsequently studied at Harvard Graduate School of Design and then returned to California, where, after working at other firms, he founded Frank O. Gehry & Associates in 1962. In 2002, he created Gehry Partners.
The Jewish Museum showed “Fish Forms: Lamps by Frank Gehry” from Aug. 29 to Oct. 31, 2010, which included “colorful, luminous lamps,” which, it said, explored “the significance of fish imagery in Gehry’s work.” The museum showed the lamps in “near darkness to create a gallery of glowing sculptural fish lit from within.”
According to the museum, Gehry broke a piece of ColorCore, a laminate product made by the Formica Corp. The company had asked him to create something out of the material in 1983. The resulting shards reminded him of fish scales and gave him the idea for the fish scales and gave him the idea for the fish lamps,” the Jewish Museum stated.
Ruth Beesch, deputy director at the Jewish Museum, said:
“They are a fantastic blending of idea and material with the translucent shards perfectly fulfilling Gehry’s artistic vision.”
The museum said that fish forms had been an “indelible and vibrant element” of Gehry’s work since the 1980s and “embodied his desire to create motion in architecture and represented a perfection that he could never realize in his buildings.”
“At a time when architects were inspired by ancient Greek temples, Gehry said, ‘If you really want to go back into the past, why not do fish?’” the museum said.
It quoted Gehry’s 1986 talk at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, during which he said that “in Toronto, when I was very young, my grandmother and I used to go to Kensington, a Jewish market, on Thursday morning.”
“She would buy a carp for gefilte fish. She’d put it in the bathtub, fill the bathtub with water, and this big black carp,” he said in the talk, “would swim around in the bathtub and I would play with it.”
Many medals for metalwork
In 2004, Gehry designed the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago’s Millennium Park — near Anish Kapoor’s reflective sculpture “Cloud Gate,” which is commonly called “The Bean.”
In 2020, Gehry’s Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial was finished in Washington, and the following year, he designed an interior expansion and renovation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which included a new cafe, whose ceiling resembles “undulating free-form sculpture,” according to Britannica.
The same year, a more than 150,000 square-foot tower that Gehry designed in Arles, France, a city associated with Vincent van Gogh, opened on the LUMA Foundation’s 27-acre campus.
The foundation called the building a “twisting geometric structure finished with 11,000 stainless steel panels.”
“We wanted to evoke the local, from van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ to the soaring rock clusters you find in the region,” Gehry said.
Among many architecture and other prizes that Gehry won are a National Medal of the Arts in 1998 and a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.
He is survived by his wife Berta Aguilera and their two sons, Sam and Alejandro; Brina Gehry, a daughter from a previous marriage; and his sister Doreen Gehry Nelson. The New York Times reported that Leslie Gehry Brenner, another daughter from his first marriage, died in 2008.
