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REUTERS\/Mike Blake\/File Photo<\/p>\nSakshi VenkatramanUS reporter<\/p>\n
REUTERS\/Mike Blake\/File Photo<\/p>\n
Frank Gehry, one of the most influential architects of the last century, has died aged 96.<\/p>\n
Gehry was acclaimed for his avant garde, experimental style of architecture. His titanium-covered design of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, catapulted him to fame in 1997. <\/p>\n
He built his daring reputation years before that when he redesigned his own home in Santa Monica, California, using materials like chain-link fencing, plywood and corrugated steel.<\/p>\n
HIs death was confirmed by his chief of staff Meaghan Lloyd. He is survived by two daughters from his first marriage, Leslie and Brina; his wife, Berta Isabel Aguilera, and their two sons, Alejandro and Samuel, <\/p>\n
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Getty Images<\/p>\n
The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, one of Gehry’s most famous works<\/p>\n
Born in Toronto in 1929, Gehry moved to Los Angeles as a teenager to study architecture at the University of Southern California before completing further study at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1956 and 1957.<\/p>\n
After starting his own firm, he broke from the traditional architectural principles of symmetry, using unconventional geometric shapes and unfinished materials in a style now known as deconstructivism. <\/p>\n
“I was rebelling against everything,” Gehry said in an interview with The New York Times in 2012.<\/p>\n
His work in Bilbao put him in high demand, and he went on to design iconic structures in cities all over the world: the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago’s Millennium Park, the Gehry Tower in Germany, and the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris. <\/p>\n
“He bestowed upon Paris and upon France his greatest masterpiece,” said Bernard Arnault, the CEO of LVMH, the worlds largest luxury goods company which owns Louis Vuitton.<\/p>\n
With a largely unpredictable style, no two of his works look the same. Prague’s Dancing House, finished in 1996, looks like a glass building folding in on itself; his Hotel Marques in Spain, built in 2006, features thin sheets of wavy, multicoloured metal; his design for a business school in Sydney looks like a brown paper bag<\/a>.<\/p>\n Gehry won the coveted Pritzker Architecture Prize for lifetime achievement in 1989, when he was 60, with his work described as having a “highly refined, sophisticated and adventurous aesthetic”.<\/p>\n “His designs, if compared to American music, could best be likened to Jazz, replete with improvisation and a lively unpredictable spirit,” ther Pritzker jury said at the time.<\/p>\n Gehry was awarded the Order of Canada in 2002 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in the US, in 2016. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sakshi VenkatramanUS reporter REUTERS\/Mike Blake\/File Photo Frank Gehry, one of the most influential architects of the last century,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":330433,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[449,458,459,64,63,460,134],"class_list":{"0":"post-330432","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=330432"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330432\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/330433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=330432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=330432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=330432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}