Frank O. Gehry, the architectural titan whose music pavilion and its accompanying serpentine-like bridge helped turn a sunken and forlorn section of Grant Park into the globally celebrated Millennium Park, died Friday.
The Canadian-born Mr. Gehry, who lived in Santa Monica, California, was 96.
“He was one of the people that will fit in the category of [Frank Lloyd] Wright, [Louis] Sullivan, [LeCorbusier] and Mies in terms of the esteem that these people are granted,” Adrian Smith, of Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, said. Smith and Mr. Gehry worked together on Millennium Park when Smith was a designer partner at SOM.
“He was an interesting architect. And a great person,” Smith said.
Mr. Gehry’s buildings, with their fluid, often sail-like and abstract metal shapes, were unlike anything before them. For his designs, former President Barack Obama awarded Mr. Gehry the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.
His Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, caused a wave of international visitors to the Basque Country city when it was completed in 1997, helping to coin the term “the Bilbao Effect” to describe when a major cultural investment drives tourism to an area.
Also in 1997, Millennium Park was being planned in hopes of fulfilling a generations-long civic dream of decking over a near wasteland of below-grade railroad tracks and parking lots on the north end of Grant Park with a grand urban and cultural space
Philanthropist Cindy Pritzker recruited Mr. Gehry to design the facility’s music pavilion and grounds and contributed $25 million toward its construction.
Pritzker and her family had been close friends of Mr. Gehry’s since their Hyatt Foundation awarded him the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1989. The park’s signature Jay Pritzker Pavilion is named after her late husband, who died in 1999.
Cindy Pritzker died in March at 101.
“This is a gift for the next century,” then Mayor Richard M. Daley said, when the pavilion’s design — with silvery curls of stainless steel around its proscenium — was unveiled in an event at the Art Institute of Chicago. “That’s what it is.”
Mr. Gehry said at the time, “It’s kind of a festive piece. It’s got to be entertaining. It’s got to be festive. I don’t think I’ve done anything like this.”
In an 2005 episode of “The Simpsons,” Mr. Gehry played himself. Marge writes a letter asking him to design Springfield’s new $30 million concert hall. He balls up the letter and tosses it on the ground but then becomes enamored with the letter’s crumpled shape and exclaims, “Frank Gehry, you’re a genius!”
He would also design the footbridge over Columbus Drive that links Millennium and Maggie Daley parks.
Millennium Park Foundation Chairperson and President Donna LaPietra said Mr. Gehry wasn’t initially excited about designing the pavilion. Cindy Pritzker helped change his mind.
The proscenium “unfurling in the air really reframed the whole eastern edge of the city … as it became as much a defining part of the cityscape as any towering building,” LaPietra said. “It’s just absolutely one of those things that literally takes your breath away.”
Jay and Cindy Pritzker’s son, businessman Thomas Pritzker said he, his parents, his wife, Margo, Mr. Gehry and Mr. Gehry’s spouse, Berta, often traveled together.
“We went scuba diving in Papua New Guinea,” he said. “We went to India. We went to Shanghai. “Actually, when we went to Papua, he didn’t dive. He spent the day designing what is now the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.”
Mr. Gehry had other connections to Chicago. From 2005 to 2007, he was part of a group that owned the modernist Inland Steel Building at 30 W. Monroe St. and designed an avant-garde seven-ton desk for its lobby.
“He loved the fact that … he had a small ownership stake in an iconic Chicago building — sort of like the way you might feel if you owned a little chunk of a professional sports team or something like that,” said architecture critic and author Paul Goldberger, who has known Mr. Gehry and documented the architect’s career since the mid-1970s.
“I remember some of his earliest work,” Smith said. “In the late ’80s, we were talking about doing [a third World’s Fair] in Chicago.”
Mr. Gehry was also close friends with the late-Chicago architect and visionary Stanley Tigerman and his wife, Margaret McCurry.
McCurry said Mr. Gehry put up a portion of the cash needed to publish the book, “Stanley Tigerman: Drawing on the Ineffable,” a retrospective of Tigerman’s work that was released this year.
“Frank always called Stanley ‘Tiger,’ and Stanley always called him ‘Frankgooch,'” McCurry said. “I have no idea where Stanley’s [nickname for Mr. Gehry] came from, but it’s just the kind of odd appellation that appears among friends.”
Mr. Gehry set the architecture world on its ear and started his path toward worldwide recognition in 1978, with the radical remodeling of his own Santa Monica home.
He turned the Dutch Colonial revival home into a brazen, fearless and yet stylish clash of corrugated metal, wood, glass panels, plywood and chain-link fencing.
Many of his neighbors hated it. But the architecture world took note.
“I was rebelling against everything,” Mr. Gehry told the New York Times in 2010. Of the dominant, minimalist architectural styles of some of his contemporaries, he said, “I thought it was snotty and effete. It just didn’t feel like it fit into life.”