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Frank Gehry
With heartfelt sorrow, we mourn the passing of Frank Gehry (1929-2025), 1989 Laureate, visionary and friend. His built works conveyed an audacious vitality, a rare technical virtuosity, and endless imagination, revealing a profound optimism through sculptural form.
Upon his acceptance of the Pritzker Prize in 1989, he remarked, “It is true, I am restless, trying to find myself as an architect, and how best to contribute in this world filled with contradiction, disparity, and inequality, even passion and opportunity. It is a world in which our values and priorities are constantly being challenged. It is simplistic to expect a single right answer. Architecture is a small piece of this human equation, but for those of us who practice it, we believe in its potential to make a difference, to enlighten and to enrich the human experience, to penetrate the barriers of misunderstanding and provide a beautiful context for life’s drama.”
His earliest works, including Danziger Studio (Los Angeles, USA, 1965) and his own residence (Santa Monica, USA, 1978) revealed the framework of architecture as expressive form, transforming humble materials into elemental vocabulary. He ushered the digital turn in the profession, manipulating complex spatial and planar relationships through physical models and custom software to yield structures previously thought impossible. His architecture invited people to inhabit space as a sequence of discoveries enhanced by natural light, shifting perspectives, and topography.
His love of sailing and music echoed throughout his work, inspiring the wave-like walls, steel ribbons, and glass ‘sails’ that became signature to his architectural vocabulary. His built works transformed not only landscapes and skylines, but the cultural and economic life of cities.
Cindy Pritzker, co-founder of the Prize, said, “if I could see the world through anyone’s eyes, it would be Frank’s.” He taught us to see in between spaces, through shadows and beyond heights.
Since founding his practice in 1962, he and his teams realized more than 150 works around the world. This included Vitra Museum and Factory (Weil am Rhein, Germany 1989); Guggenheim Bilbao, (Spain, 1997); DZ Bank Berlin (Germany, 2001); Walt Disney Concert Hall (Los Angeles, USA, 2003); Jay Pritzker Pavilion (Chicago, USA, 2004); Foundation Louis Vuitton (Paris, France, 2014); Biomuseo (Panama City, Panama, 2014); and the Dr. Chau Chak Wing Building, University of Technology Sydney (Australia, 2015). Guggenheim Abu Dhabi (UAE) is currently under construction and China Medical University Museum of Fine Arts, (Taichung, Taiwan) recently broke ground.
“If I were to be sitting with Frank, he’d say, ‘The Pritzker Prize changed my life,’” says Tom Pritzker. “But I’d say, ‘No, Frank, you changed the Prize.’”
