Frank Gehry (1929–2025) was a Canadian-American architect, born in Toronto and based in Los Angeles, known for sculptural buildings of curving metal and for using everyday materials in unexpected ways. His work is often called deconstructivist, a label he resisted, and he won the Pritzker Prize in 1989.
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His own house, the Gehry Residence in Santa Monica (1978), wrapped an ordinary house in corrugated steel, chain-link fencing and plywood while leaving the old walls visible. The Guggenheim Bilbao (1997), clad in titanium, gave its name to the "Bilbao effect": one building helping to revive a city's economy. To build the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (2003), with its stainless steel skin, his office used CATIA, software made for designing fighter jets. The Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris (2014) wraps its galleries in twelve glass "sails". Gehry was one of the first architects to see what computer design could do, and his projects show students how software can turn a complex sketch into a buildable form.