I first met Frank O. Gehry, who died Dec. 5 at his California home, in November of 1982 when I was an undergraduate architecture student at the University of Virginia. He was known at the time for his own home in Santa Monica — a roller coaster of a design that slashed plywood, corrugated metal and chain link through the carcass of a modest traditional bungalow. Assuming that he had his own version of the lit-crit-based theories of architecture that were popular at the time, my nascent architectural mind wanted to know something of the arcane personal theory behind it. “What’s the deal with the asphalt floor in your dining room,” I asked. “It’s functional,” Gehry replied. “We move the table and chairs out and hose it down.” I was so floored by his direct and unassuming response that I have no memory of what we discussed next. But I understood that he was somebody worth watching.

In Chicago, Gehry is best known for the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, completed just over two decades ago. My first direct experience of a Gehry space was at a 1987 exhibit in Houston. It had been mounted by the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis and was the first major overview of his work and it included a fish sculpture you could walk through. The small structure displayed eccentric wood framing clad in shingles that convincingly represented scales. In hindsight, it suggested much of what was to come, although those developments were still unknown.

It led directly to a much larger fish sculpture atop a seaside building in Barcelona that was completed in 1992 as part of a larger complex designed by the Chicago office of Skidmore Owings & Merrill. Gehry’s office developed the design with software used by the aeronautics industry — which unlocked the ability to realize these unusual shapes with accuracy and within budget. It also created a relationship between Gehry and Skidmore Owings & Merrill’s Chicago-based structural engineers who would help him build the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park.

More than a quarter century after its opening in 1997, Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao remains his most celebrated work and the quintessential building of its time.

Rafael Moneo compared it to the great cathedrals. Gehry molds and forms masonry, steel and glass — the essential materials of architecture — into forms previously explored solely in sculpture. While observers always acknowledge connections between Gehry and the contemporary artists who were his........

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