Frank Gehry, one of the most influential and acclaimed American architects, died on Dec. 5 at his home in Santa Monica, CA. He was 96, and still working on an 82,000-square-foot flagship store for Louis Vuitton on Rodeo Drive, and finalizing a 1,000-seat concert hall for the Colburn School of Music in downtown Los Angeles.

Gehry is best known for his work building the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, which opened in 1997; the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, which he completed in 2003; and the Foundation Louis Vuitton, which opened in 2014. He won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1989, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016 by President Barack Obama.

While working on the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Gehry was also completing his project in Bilbao, with its titanium panels and flowing movement imbued in the structure that became characteristic of Gehry’s work. The design for both buildings pioneered new ways of using technology in architecture to build more fluid shapes.

His later buildings included a 76-story residential tower at 8 Spruce Street in Lower Manhattan in 2011, the Pierre Boulez Hall in Berlin in 2017, a memorial to President Dwight D. Eisenhower in Washington in 20020, and the Luma Foundation building in Arles, France in 2021.