Frank Gehry, an award-winning architect whose designs for museums proved widely influential, died on Friday in Santa Monica, California, at 96. According to the New York Times, which first reported the news, the cause was a brief respiratory illness.

More so than perhaps any other architect of the past half-century, Gehry defined the field of museum architecture. His designs, often composed of sloping, incongruous forms, helped move art institutions in a new direction, showing that they need not only be set in Neoclassical pantheons or hard-edged modernist structures.

The most famous of his museum buildings was for the Guggenheim Bilbao, the Spanish museum opened in 1997 in a city that was economically depressed prior to the institution’s arrival. The institution ended up rehabilitating the city, and its model ended up inspiring other museum directors to undertake similar projects, in what is now known as the “Bilbao effect.” Gehry’s design has been credited with contributing significnatly to the trend.

With an exterior composed of 33,000 titanium plates, the building was designed at the request of Guggenheim director Thomas Krens and was situated along a waterfront that had fallen into disrepair. The museum was unconventional in many respects. It was designed by Gehry utilizing a computer software known as CATIA, and the team constructing it involved mountain climbers who were taught how to install the titanium paneling because, as one project manager put it, it was “easier to hire climbers and train them as crimpers than to hire crimpers and train them as climbers.”

Almost immediately, the museum was hailed as a breakthrough. Upon its opening, architect Philip Johnson called the museum “the greatest building of our time.” ARTnews ranked the Guggenheim Bilbao at #12 on a 2022 list of the best museum buildings in the world.

Not everyone has been pleased with the museum, of course—including Gehry himself, who recalled that he once thought to himself, “I went over the hill and saw it shining there. I thought: ‘What the fuck have I done to these people?’” In a beloved 2004 essay, artist Andrea Fraser, who, for one performance, pretended to be so enamored of the Guggenheim Bilbao that she was turned on by it, wrote that the museum fed “fantasies of freedom” that were at “the foundation of neoliberal programs.”

But the institution has shaped many others that followed, and indeed, Gehry would himself design future art institutions after doing the Bilbao one.

Alongside a skyscraper in New York, a bank in Berlin, and a concert hall in Los Angeles, Gehry later oversaw museum buildings in locales ranging from Philadelphia to Paris. One of the great projects of his career—another Guggenheim museum, this one in Abu Dhabi—is currently being built.

Many of Gehry’s non-museum structures are stylistically related to the Guggenheim Bilbao. The exterior of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA, opened in 2003, likewise resemble a pile-up of forms that that seem impossibly stacked against one another. The Fondation Louis Vuitton museum in Paris, opened in 2014, has glass roofing that appears to undulate, just like the steel structures cladded with titanium in Bilbao.

Typically, Gehry is classified as an affiliate of the deconstructivist movement, a 1980s style that was characterized by “twisted shapes, warped planes, and folded lines,” all in an effort to “violate the pure forms of modern architecture,” as a 1988 Museum of Modern Art show about the movement put it. Gehry, who was not a part of that exhibition, tended to brush off any association with that movement—which may have been because he had a tendency to negate his interviewers. (In 2014, he famously flipped off a reporter during a press conference in which he described 98 percent of modern architecture as “pure shit.”)

Still, Gehry undeniably moved architecture beyond the accepted tradition of his day, pushing his buildings into a realm where they looked more like sculptures than structures to inhabit. Indeed, he also produced art, memorably even staging shows with Gagosian, one of the biggest galleries in the world—something few other architects have ever done.

Frank Gehry was born under the name Frank Owen Goldberg—which he later changed because he feared antisemitism—in 1929 in Toronto. After Gehry’s father had a heart attack during an argument with his son, Gehry and his family moved to Los Angeles. He attended the University of Southern California’s architecture program, graduating in 1954, and then joined the Army for a period.

He married Anita Snyder, his first wife, in 1952; they divorced in 1966. He wedded his second wife, Berta Isabel Aguilera, in 1975 and was still married to her at the time of his death. He had one child with Snyder and three more with Aguilera.

During the ’60s, Gehry fell in with a crew of LA artists that included Billy Al Bengston and Larry Bell. (Later on, he would even design the Venice Beach studio of another LA artist, Judith F. Baca) In 1962, he founded his architecture firm, which is today known as Gehry Partners.

Among his most significant early works is the 1977 renovation of his own Santa Monica home. Having heard that the house contained spirits, Gehry decided to view those souls as the “ghosts of Cubism,” transforming a quaint bungalow into a jagged arrangement of glass and corrugated steel. It was no longer a pretty abode in a classical sense (“The neighbors got really pissed off,” he recalled), but the Gehry residence paved the way for future architectural innovation.

In 1983, Gehry worked on the Temporary Contemporary, a venue of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles that involved linking two warehouses and refurbishing them as a space to see contemporary art. While that space has a refined, sleek look that seems oddly plain for Gehry, his first official museum project, the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, was decidedly more stylized. Opened in 1989, that institution is composed of swirling white structures arranged so that, from the outside, it appears as though the museum is composed of many pieces of differing heights.

During the later stages of his career, Gehry remained active, designing LUMA Arles, a luxe museum in Arles, France, in 2021. And one of Gehry’s most ambitious projects has not yet even been fully realized: the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, whose facade looks like a range of steel tubes that have been set against one another. The long-delayed museum is finally set to open in 2026.

When the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi finally opens, it will inevitably set off think pieces about all that Gehry has done to reshape art museums. Yet Gehry had always shown some embarrassment about his role in the Bilbao effect. Of that role, he told the Guardian in 2017, “I apologize for having anything to do with it. Maybe I should be hung by the yardarm. My intention was not that it should happen.”