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Bold shapes and binoculars: Frank Gehry’s stunning California architecture

From his home town of Los Angeles, the architect designed a career around defying what was predictable

In Frank Gehry’s world, no building was left untilted, unexposed or untouched by unconventional material. The Canadian-American architect, who died in his Los Angeles home at 96, designed a career around defying what was predictable and pulling in materials that were uncommon and, as such, relatively inexpensive.

Gehry collaborated with artists to turn giant binoculars into an entryway of a commercial campus, and paid homage to a writer’s past as a lifeguard by creating a livable lifeguard tower. And while dreaming this up, he transformed American architecture along the way.

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© Photograph: Ted Soqui/Corbis/Getty Images

© Photograph: Ted Soqui/Corbis/Getty Images

© Photograph: Ted Soqui/Corbis/Getty Images

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World of Warcraft : promis, juré, Blizzard n’abandonnera pas le housing à l’extension suivante

WoW housing logis

C'est une crainte légitime chez celles et ceux qui entendent investir du temps et de l'or (et même du vrai argent) dans le tout récent système de housing (logis) lancé sur World of Warcraft : tout cela finira-t-il à la poubelle dans deux ans, comme tant d'autres fonctionnalités ? Nous avons posé la question aux développeurs et leur réponse tient en un mot : « evergreen ».

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World of Warcraft : promis, juré, Blizzard n’abandonnera pas le housing à l’extension suivante

WoW housing logis

C'est une crainte légitime chez celles et ceux qui entendent investir du temps et de l'or (et même du vrai argent) dans le tout récent système de housing (logis) lancé sur World of Warcraft : tout cela finira-t-il à la poubelle dans deux ans, comme tant d'autres fonctionnalités ? Nous avons posé la question aux développeurs et leur réponse tient en un mot : « evergreen ».

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Frank Gehry: maximalist master who created instant icons like the Bilbao Guggenheim

He made buildings that looked like slouching drunks and quarrelling couples but it was the Spanish museum that secured his ‘starchitect’ status – a creation that became something of a curse

Frank Gehry once had a cameo in The Simpsons in which he designed buildings by scrunching up pieces of paper. There was a bit more to it than that, but from Prague to Panama City, his scrunched contours were instantly recognisable, expressed in an exuberant parade of buildings that cranked and slumped as if hit by a wrecking ball, or crashed and whirled like dervishes, defying laws of gravity and structural logic. Though Gehry, who has died aged 96, came of age in the era of modernism, it was as if he were physically incapable of drawing a straight line.

In his prime, Gehry’s architecture was a rebuff to modernist imperators such as Mies van der Rohe and his po-faced injunction, “less is more”. The American postmodern theorist and architect Robert Venturi turned it on its head, quipping “less is a bore”. It summed up the maximalist Gehry perfectly.

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© Photograph: John G Zimmerman Archive/Courte/Shutterstock

© Photograph: John G Zimmerman Archive/Courte/Shutterstock

© Photograph: John G Zimmerman Archive/Courte/Shutterstock

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