Renowned Architect Frank Gehry at 96
Comment on His Passing
By: Mark Favermann - Jan 04, 2026
On December 5, 2025, world-acclaimed architect Frank Gehry died at the age of 96. Not since his even more celebrated predecessor, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, passed away in 1959 has so much praise, adulation, and press attention been given to a star American architect.
Though both men came from extremely different backgrounds, and stood for distinct aesthetics, they had many things in common. Each changed his name, and their careers didn’t really take off until after they were fifty years old. They were both rather short; iconic Guggenheim Museums were among their seminal architectural creations; both designed buildings that leaked, and each worked intensely into his nineties.
On a personal level, my esteemed friend and Harvard Graduate School of Design classmate, Michael Lehrer, FAIA, worked for Gehry from 1984-1985. He described his year with Gehry as the most important in his professional training, a seminal experience marked by solving problems that triggered creative explorations that significantly influenced his own future practices. Along with 15 others, Lehrer worked directly with Gehry during that period. His project was Camp Good Times for children with cancer, the unbuilt first collaboration between Gehry and sculptors Claes Oldenberg and Coosje van Bruggen. Lehrer was deeply inspired by working with superstar artists and architects.
Lehrer remembers working on a design that Gehry made a sketch for him to develop. “I felt I could feel the folds in my brain cortex bending — more as I tried to make sense out of the drawing than attempting to develop it.” The honeymoon between the two men lasted about a year; the last month turned into a more conventional studio experience filled with heightened tension. Lehrer sensed, correctly, that those who worked with Gehry stayed until they were fired. He decided that that wasn’t going to be him, and left to start his own practice.
Like Wright, Gehry disrupted conventional views of architecture and art. He changed how we see the world by shifting our perspective and rearranging our sense of the built environment. Gehry made architecture art.
Reposted courtesy of Arts Fuse.