Frank Gehry

Born Frank Goldberg on February 28, 1929, he grew up between Canada and America before making his name in 1970s Los Angeles with a style that married chain-link and plywood to geometric chaos. His own Santa Monica house became a manifesto: everyday materials torqued into something strange. The Pritzker Prize came in 1989, but the real turn was Bilbao in 1997 - a Guggenheim wrapped in titanium waves that put a struggling Spanish city on the map and proved architecture could be destination in itself. The Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Louis Vuitton Foundation followed, each a sculptural experiment in steel and light. Critics called it deconstructivism; he shrugged off the label. By the 2010s he'd been named the most important architect of the age, collected a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and designed everything from furniture to vodka bottles. He died December 5, 2025, having spent half a century bending the built world into shapes it hadn't known it could hold.