![\"Michele](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/MicheleDebczak.png\")
<\/p>\nDesigned for the Inland Steel Building in Chicago, the desk is made from more than a dozen blocks of jagged, green-tinted glass<\/p>\n
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Michele Debczak<\/a><\/p>\n | Correspondent<\/p>\n July 8, 2026 2:23 p.m.<\/p>\n Frank Gehry\u2019s Icehenge desk in the Inland Steel Building in Chicago Frank Gehry<\/a> is best known for designing massive, undulating structures, such as the Guggenheim Museum<\/a> Bilbao in Spain and the Walt Disney Concert Hall<\/a> in Los Angeles. Now admirers have the chance to own a much smaller piece of work from the architect. Icehenge\u2014a striking, 16-piece desk carved from green-tinted glass\u2014is up for auction<\/a>.<\/p>\n As Lee Bey reports for the Chicago Sun-Times<\/a>, Gehry designed the piece especially for the Inland Steel Building in Chicago\u2014a 19-story, modernist skyscraper that captivated him as a young architect in the 1950s. He purchased a partial ownership stake in the building in 2005 at a time when the structure was starting to show its age. One of his contributions was a security desk for the lobby resembling a set from science fiction dropped in the middle of Mid-Century Modern Chicago.<\/p>\n The seed of the idea came to Gehry when he noticed a piece of scrap glass while working on a separate project, per the Freeman\u2019s auction house. Rather than using glass to evoke perfection and clarity, he was inspired to show a different side to the material, arranging glacial blocks that were warped and jagged in spots and smooth in others. The result is a seven-ton structure<\/a> that has a chaotic, almost dangerous quality one wouldn\u2019t expect to find in an office building.<\/p>\n \u201cIt does look like an explosion in a glass factory, kind of,\u201d Gehry told the Chicago Tribune<\/a>\u2019s Blair Kamin in 2013. \u201cIf you actually had an explosion at a glass factory, apart from everyone getting killed, it would be pretty exciting visually.\u201d<\/p>\n Glass column of Icehenge<\/p>\n Freeman\u2019s, 2026<\/p>\n Gehry<\/a> was born in Toronto in 1929. He studied architecture at the University of Southern California and city planning at Harvard University before working for various architectural firms in Los Angeles and Paris. He established his own practice in 1962.<\/p>\n The avant-garde, sculptural style Gehry is known for today emerged in the 1970s and \u201980s. Gehry went on to play with forms and materials on a much grander scale, designing daring museums, skyscrapers<\/a> and music venues around the world. During a time when literal, Modernist architecture dominated so many urban spaces, his work was impossible to ignore.<\/p>\n Fun fact: Experimental home<\/p>\n One of Gehry\u2019s earliest experimental works was his own home in Santa Monica. In 1978, he began remodeling the traditional, two-story house by giving it a jagged, asymmetrical frame made from corrugated steel and chain link fences. Many architects cite it as one of the first examples of deconstructivist architecture<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cGehry was not the first to challenge the values of mainstream Modernism, but he went the furthest in tearing down its high art pretensions,\u201d art critic Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote for the Los Angeles Times<\/a> in 2001. \u201cIn the process, he laid the groundwork for a truly democratic architecture\u2014one in which the individual imagination triumphs over dogmatic formulas.\u201d<\/p>\n Gehry died<\/a> in 2025 at age 96. That year, New York Life Insurance Co. acquired the skyscraper from Capital Properties in lieu of foreclosure, per the Sun-Times. Now the building\u2019s most famous piece of furniture is being auctioned off online<\/a>. Freeman\u2019s expects it to go for between $100,000 and $200,000.<\/p>\n![\"Frank](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/medium_380264-1_4.jpg\")
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\n Freeman\u2019s, 2026<\/p>\n![\"Green](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/380264-1_18.jpeg\")
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