Charles Brammall on Frank Gehry (1929-2025 )
My architecture-trained wife’s favourite designer is the late Jewish Canadian architect Frank Gehry (who died on December 5, aged 96). She inspired me to understand, the most beautiful and skilful buildings are not just square, rectangular, round or cylindrical, with external adornments to create interest:
They are the ones in which the building ITSELF is strangely, interestingly and uniquely shaped. In this spirit, Gehry designed buildings in the shape of huge fish (think Jonah), giant ships, and wine being poured from bottles. Frank, the undisputed wizard of this philosophy of design, died 2 days ago from a short respiratory illness.
When Harry Siedler’s “Australia Square” was almost finished, my Dad (also an architect), took me, as a wide-eyed ten-year-old, up to the roof. We sat right on the very edge, dangling our legs over, 558 ft (170 m, 46 floors) above the city. A young boy’s dream.
Many years ago, we had a waking dream, spending nine weeks LSL in Europe, visiting missionary friends and seeing architecture, art, history and creation. We visited three of Gehry’s buildings, in Paris, Logroño, Spain, and Bilbao in the Basque Country. Earlier, I had seen three others- in Sydney, NYC and LA.
My favourite by a long chalk is the Bodegas Marques de Riscal Winery in Logroño. Its roof is designed to resemble rivers of wine being poured from bottles, both red and white.
It is a breathtaking masterpiece of design.
Gehry himself famously said that Sydney’s UTS Dr Chau Chak Wing Building (2015) looked like a “crumpled brown paper bag.” Others see it as a fluid masonry sculpture, or a sandstone cliff distorted by heat.
LA’s Walt Disney Concert Hall (2003) has stainless steel curves like billowing sails; Gehry said it was designed with “the metaphors of wind and music.”
The facade of 8 Spruce Street, NYC (2010) ripples like crumpled fabric or folded water sheets.
(Jimmy Baikovici/Flickr)
Fondation Louis Vuitton (2014), Paris, is a structure of billowing glass sails, as if a ship of air had landed in the Bois de Boulogne.
Howard Stanbury/Flickr
People often describe his Guggenheim Museum (1997) in Bilbao as shaped like a giant ship on the Nervión River. Others see a metallic flower. Gehry himself said the forms “look like fish”, echoing his lifelong obsession and fascination with aquatic shapes:
“I have a thing for fish. They’re perfect forms”. He has created sculptures of marine creatures worldwide. (Oh, the irony. “Fish” in C1 Greek is “Ichthys”, the first letters of the words “Jesus Christ God’s Som Saviour”)
Naotake Murayama / Wikimedia
But how did Frank’s spirituality, psychology and culture shape his architecture?
Canadian-born Frank Owen Goldberg (1929) entered a world already shaped by the tensions that would drive his imagination for the next nine decades.
Frank’s family’s Polish and Russian Jewish roots saturated his childhood with a cultural memory of struggle, diaspora, and survival. His grandpa “used to read Talmud to me. He said the Talmud starts with the word why,” a single syllable that became the intellectual refrain of his entire life.
Ghery was an outsider as a child, experiencing pain and curiosity, leading to his questioning of big ideas. His early experiences with antisemitism left deep, impressionistic scars. Little Frank remembered being physically attacked as a boy: “When you’re an 8-year-old kid, and you get beaten up for killing Christ… you’re the outsider.”
That memory’s rawness never dulled and shaped Gehry’s temperament, sensitivities, and instincts. Whether intentionally or not, he learned early that his position in the world was precarious, liminal, and slightly off-centre. Yet this outsider status also became the seedbed of his creativity.
With his grandma, he built imaginary cities out of scrap wood— tiny utopias of possibility: “I used to make cities with her,” he said, remembering the intimate, improvised urbanism of childhood. This small domestic ritual prefigured, in miniature, the destiny of his adult design.
Frank’s name, identity, and the silent wound of a name change were seminal. After moving to LA in 1947 when his father’s business collapsed due to illness, Gehry entered the architectural world with ambition, but also insecurity.
Antisemitic discrimination followed him into his college years; he remembered being rejected from an architecture fraternity because his surname was “Goldberg.” So in 1954, reluctantly and painfully, he changed it to “Gehry”, and did not hide the regret:
He later expressed with both candour and sadness: “I felt I had to change my name to get work.” And although he understood the pragmatism, he also described the act as cutting off a part of himself — an amputation of ancestry done in the pursuit of acceptance.
It symbolised what he would later call “the outsider problem,” a continual negotiation between belonging and estrangement: “When you’re the outsider— whether you like it or not— you’re the outsider.”
A young Gehry also rejected faith, God, and religion. Despite his Jewish upbringing, he walked away from formal religious belief early. He said that after his Bar Mitzvah, having felt the social posturing and hypocrisy of the celebration, “I stepped away from religion at thirteen.”
Later, he stated unequivocally in an interview: “I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in anything.” No statement about Jesus or Christianity appears anywhere in the public record of the designer’s life. He never aligned himself with Christian doctrine, expressed belief in Jesus, or spoke of conversion, salvation or divine revelation.
And yet… Gehry was unmistakably drawn to the idea of transcendence. He once said, “I would like to design a church or a synagogue— a place that has transcendence”.
But he immediately qualified this: “Forget the religion aspect. How do you make a space feel transcendent? A sense of ease with the universe, the rain, the stars and the people around you?”
His longing was architectural, not theological; and existential, not doctrinal. Gehry was left utterly cold by liturgy, but was fascinated by awe. His spirituality was not religious, but atmospheric. Although God reached down for him (as He does for us all), Gehry never reached for God; he was reaching for something like wonder itself.
The Canadian genius’s architecture was humanistic, empathic, and perpetually questioning. Gehry’s design method mirrored the restless Talmudic “why” of his youth: “I’m never willing to settle”:
He said, “I make a model, look at it, find some value in it and save that value. Then I move on to the next model.” He believed the process was akin to jazz improvisation— unstable, dynamic, alive.
Gehry sometimes joked about his own signature forms— curving metal, asymmetrical surfaces, fluid distortions- saying once with dry humour, “You can’t escape your signature,” as if architecture had become something like handwriting: unconscious and inevitable.
But his architectural philosophy was not simply about shape. It was about human dignity: “Architecture has always been a very idealistic profession,” he said. “It’s about making the world a better place. Maybe the art around us— or lack of it— is a measure of how we’re doing as individuals and as a civilisation.”
And yet he seemed to contradict himself at other times: “I don’t position work as going to change the universe. But I’m very serious about it.”
For all his fame and genius, Gehry retained extraordinary humility; “I don’t take myself seriously.” Yet his buildings did change the cultural universe— or at least the skylines of it. And I believe they have changed me, by convincing me even more of God’s Common Grace. That is, His good gifts to, and gifting of, both believers and nonbelievers- to create exquisite things:
Psalm 145:9- “The Lord is good to everyone; his compassion rests on all he has made.”
Mat 5:45- “(God) causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.”
Frank’s buildings are indisputably iconic, with their signature shapes, colours, and dimensions. Their metaphors and meanings. But the artist spent his life chasing a question to which he never found a satisfying answer. He was a paradox:
An atheist yet spiritually sensitive; Jewish yet estranged from religion; famous yet self-deprecating;
a titan of architecture who still felt like the boy building cities from scraps.
He once said: “I love hanging out with people who don’t know what they’re doing or why— and then they do it”. It is an extraordinary credo, and in it we see Frank’s soul: fascinated by mystery, by emergence, and by the “why” that began with Talmud and never left him.
And in His coming to earth at Christmas, we see Jesus’ soul- creating Frank, loving him, and dying for him at Golgotha to adopt him as a dearly loved, forgiven adopted brother.
Main Image: Image credit: Summerdrought / Wikimedia