Frank Gehry

Frank Gehry was born Ephraim Owen Goldberg in Toronto in 1929, moved to Los Angeles as a young man, and became the architect of curling, crumpling metal buildings that look as if they are in motion. He won the Pritzker Prize in 1989, and his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, changed what a city expected a museum to do for it. He died in December 2025, at ninety six.

You can follow him across four of our cities. In Seattle, the Museum of Pop Culture at Seattle Center, built in 2000, ripples in colored metal beside the monorail. In Chicago, his Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park throws steel ribbons over the lawn. In Los Angeles, the Walt Disney Concert Hall of 2003 closes our downtown walk; climb the outside stairs to the rooftop garden. And in Toronto, the city of his birth, he rebuilt the Art Gallery of Ontario between 2004 and 2008.