On December 8, 2025, the architectural profession lost one of our most consequential practitioners – Frank Owen Gehry. Like other well known architects before him, Wright, Pei, and Johnson, he practiced well into his 90s and left behind a staggering amount of work. For Gehry, his design talents extended into other artistic endevours, including painting, sculpture, furniture design, and lighting design.
Gehry, perceived by most as “futuristic”, was thrust into the public eye in 1997 with the opening of his iconic Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain . (See Architecture + MUSEUMS: Art or Architecture ). This powerful work did more than display art. It quite literally transformed the city of Bilbao from a bleak industrial town to a cultural hub.
Bear with me for a double diversion! Mark Twain once said, “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” It’ a stretch, but I fancy myself as a fly fisher. So, it stands to reason that, to me, everything looks a fish. Well, maybe not everything, but certainly a lot of Gehry’s work looks….kind of fishy! And there is a good reason for that. While other architects may have found inspiration from renaissance basilicas, greek villas, or Egyptian temples, Gehry found inspiration from further back, much further back, over 500 million years earlier! And it had nothing at all to do with manmade constructs. Gehry’s recurring inspiration was the fish.
While the inspiration of the fish is quite literal and easy to identify in his fish sculpture, it is less evident in his buildings. Let’s revisit Bilbao and see what associations we can make. Bilbao is sited on an old wharf with some of its most enticing views consisting of the building’s reflection in the water. The long, slender form of the building could be said to resemble a large fish surfacing. Like scales, the titanium panels cling to the body of the building form and glisten in the light. The form itself is not orthogonal or mathematical. It appears natural, not man-made. It has a sense of movement.
I’ll forego my desire to reveal hidden inference in other architectural works of Gehry, but I will note that the theme continued. Interestingly, toward the end of Gehry’s career, these implicit references became more explicit. To commemorate the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, Gehry designed the Golden Fish, known locally as Peix Durant. At 114 ft. high by 177 ft. long, it meshes architecture with large scale sculpture. Like Bilbao, its glass and cladding shimmer off the nearby sea.
Truly, Gehry was as much an artist as an architect. And while we think of sculpture as Gehry’s artform, he was constantly producing quick sketches. These sketches were typically used to develop his designs. In 2023, he returned to sketching fish. From his sketch, later titled Three Little Fishes, came a commemorative print for the 20th anniversary of his Walt Disney Concert Hall, one of his most loved, and fishiest, works.
Gehry has joined the canon of architectural greats, which includes another well known Frank. Join me soon to explore the connection between architecture and time in a post titled “To Be Frank.”
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