Frank Gehry

Gehry first drew wide attention for buildings made of unorthodox materials such as chain-link fencing and corrugated metal, notably his own house in Santa Monica, and in 1989 won the Pritzker Prize, whose jury called his architecture 'refreshingly original'. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (1997), which he won in a competition against two other architects, made him internationally famous; the critic Rowan Moore calls it the most influential building of modern times.

Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, began with a 1987 gift from Lillian Disney. Gehry won the design competition in 1988, and the stainless-steel hall was completed in 2003 after a 16-year process. He designed its vineyard-style auditorium with the Japanese acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota; the orchestra's executive director called the building an iconic landmark, while the Los Angeles planning critic Sam Hall Kaplan faulted it for not reaching out to the city.

Gehry's practice made digital modeling the basis for building his curved forms. From 1991 his office used CATIA, aerospace software brought in at the instigation of his partner James Glymph, to turn physical study models into digital surfaces, and a scholarly paper calls Bilbao the first major building designed with it. The practice later created Gehry Technologies, whose CATIA-based Digital Project platform was used on projects beyond his own commissions, and Engineering News-Record's obituary says his buildings pushed contractors and fabricators toward model-driven delivery.

After winning the Walt Disney Concert Hall competition, the architects sought advice from a wide range of musicians, and Gehry's team made about 40 scale models of existing auditoriums and alternative plans, which gave the office a better grasp of the technical issues and built trust with the acoustician Minoru Nagata. Nagata argued that older shoebox halls such as the Concertgebouw and the Musikverein were better models than the Berlin Philharmonie that the winning scheme resembled, and in the end the acousticians and architects compromised on the width of the hall.

This is consistent with a designer who works by making and comparing many physical models, though the account is a critic's retelling of the office's process and the models were built by his team. Experimentation

Some months before Walt Disney Concert Hall's first full-orchestra rehearsal in June 2003, Gehry called the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen at home one evening and asked to meet right away at the unfinished hall; Salonen asked the concertmaster to bring his violin, and the concertmaster played some Bach for them. At the June rehearsal, Salonen stopped after the opening bars of Mozart's Jupiter Symphony and told him, 'Frank, we'll keep it.'

This is consistent with a designer who tested the hall's sound with the musicians who would play in it, though the account is Salonen's as relayed in a Newsweek profile, and the acoustic design was shared with the acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota. Collaboration

According to Rick Smith, contractors who looked at Gehry's physical models and two-dimensional drawings often said his designs could not be built. In 1991 his office began using CATIA, brought in by partner James Glymph through the IBM consultant Rick Smith, who met strong reluctance among the drafters and model-makers ('There was a lot of reluctance') and worked around it by handing the model-builders printed sections of the digital model to build from, with Gehry reviewing and adjusting the results by hand. Bilbao, designed with it, proved the first successful large-scale application of CATIA in architecture, according to Metropolis.

This is consistent with a practice leader willing to rebuild how his office worked around a tool he did not operate himself, though the sources credit Glymph and Smith with bringing the software in. Adaptability