told the Guardian<\/a> the year the building opened, on leaving his mark on the city\u2019s skyline. \u201cMy father grew up in Hell\u2019s Kitchen, 10th Avenue, on the city\u2019s West Side \u2026 He had a hard life. I\u2019d like to share 8 Spruce St. with him. \u2018Hey, Pa! I got to build a skyscraper right by the Woolworth Building. That\u2019s me, Dad. Up there!’\u201d<\/p>\n(Gehry\u2019s father, Irving Goldberg, was a heavy drinker \u2014 and in the 1940s while arguing on their front lawn in Toronto, where Gehry was born and raised, he had a heart attack from which he never fully recovered. That memory reportedly haunted Gehry \u2014 who changed his surname to dodge the sting of antisemitism \u2014 for years down the line.)<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t want to do architecture that\u2019s dry and dull,\u201d Gehry told the Guardian. \u201cWhen you talk to New Yorkers \u2026 like my dad, you want to show them something like Bernini or Picasso, not some dumb thing that bores the pants off everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gehry won the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 1989. Getty Images<\/p>\n
But 8 Spruce St. isn\u2019t meant to erase his other designs in the Big Apple. Chelsea\u2019s IAC Building, familiar to those driving along the West Side Highway, resembles the many sails on a large ship \u2014 and marked Gehry\u2019s first full building in New York City. It was finished in 2007. Among his smaller-scale commissions around town, the titanium-clad cafeteria at magazine giant Conde Nast\u2019s former headquarters in Times Square.<\/p>\n
Indeed, titanium was a signature element of Gehry\u2019s designs. Perhaps his most famous example of its use is the titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which debuted in 1997 and quickly earned international acclaim. (The late architect Philip Johnson said he burst into tears the first time he laid eyes on it.) Its masterful design remains a work of art in its own right, but it created something greater: \u201cthe Bilbao Effect.\u201d The museum\u2019s presence in Bilbao, an overlooked post-industrial city, revived the metro by making it a destination, luring in 1.3 million visitors its first year.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe museum in Bilbao, Spain really had a dramatic impact on that city,\u201d Pulitzer Prize-winning architectural critic Paul Goldberger \u2014 who wrote the definitive biography, \u201cBuilding Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry,\u201d and spent a great deal of time with him \u2014 told The Post. \u201cWhen a single building makes a town a tourist center, then you know we\u2019re seeing architecture do something quite remarkable.\u201d<\/p>\n
The mighty presence of the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain transformed the dying industrial city into a buzzy destination. De Agostini via Getty Images<\/p>\n
The Walt Disney Concert Hall stands near where Gehry grew up in Los Angeles. Bloomberg via Getty Images<\/p>\n
The list of Gehry\u2019s other architectural accomplishments is lengthy. His 2003 Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles stands near City Hall and the Broad museum. <\/p>\n
(\u201cI love Walt Disney Hall in LA, which I think is probably the greatest public building in America of the 21st Century, at least,\u201d Goldberger added. \u201cIt showed that we can do a great, monumental building that doesn\u2019t look like anything that came before, but functions just as well and is just as exciting and as emotionally powerful.\u201d)<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Gehry\u2019s Fisher Center \u2014 a performing arts center at the liberal arts Bard College in New York\u2019s Hudson Valley \u2014 is far more tucked away and surrounded by the school\u2019s sprawling landscapes. Not limited to the US, his Fondation Louis Vuitton opened in Paris in 2014.<\/p>\n
The Fisher Center at Bard College in the Hudson Valley for decades has stood tucked away \u2014 but still glowing \u2014 in the school\u2019s greenscapes. Bard College<\/p>\n
Gehry was born in February 1929. As a teen, his father\u2019s deteriorating health forced a family move from Canada to Los Angeles \u2014 and they lived near where the Disney concert hall stands today. <\/p>\n
He\u2019s survived by his second wife, Berta Aguilera, and their two sons. Gehry had two daughters from his first marriage, one of whom predeceased him in 2008. His sister, Doreen Gehry Nelson, also survives him.<\/p>\n
Despite the prestige of his work, Gehry also remained down to earth.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was driven and ambitious, but had a manner that was incredibly relaxed and easy going,\u201d Goldberger said. \u201cIn fact, he was maybe more skillful than anyone I\u2019ve ever known at hiding how driven and ambitious he was, because he had an easy, relaxed manner about him.\u201d<\/p>\n
Though he\u2019s gone now, his work remains permanent \u2014 as does the ability to inspire future generations.<\/p>\n
\u201cHis work awakened the broader public to how exciting contemporary architecture could be,\u201d said Goldberger.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He designed some of the world\u2019s greatest buildings \u2014 and, in the process, he built an everlasting legacy.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":62261,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[5462,4343,8583,2999,1016,9,24,55,54,56,322,1491,2208],"class_list":{"0":"post-62260","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-city","8":"tag-architecture","9":"tag-financial-district","10":"tag-guggenheim-museum","11":"tag-historic-buildings","12":"tag-los-angeles","13":"tag-new-york","14":"tag-new-york-city","15":"tag-new-york-city-headlines","16":"tag-new-york-city-news","17":"tag-ny","18":"tag-obituaries","19":"tag-real-estate","20":"tag-spain"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62260\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}