A reluctant starchitect who made poetry in solid form

Architecture critic Rowan Moore traces the legacy of Frank Gehry, who died on Friday at 96

- Rowan Moore

"It's like jumping off a cliff," Frank Gehry once told me of his work and life. "If you know what you're going to do before you're going to do it, don't do it.

He treated architecture, the most deliberated and static of art forms, like improvisation in music. He would, whether designing an artist's studio, concert hall or skyscraper, play freely with its shapes and materials.

Gehry, who died on Friday at the age of 96, was up for working with anything, from basic materials like plywood and chain-link fencing to shining titanium and sculpted stone. The furniture he designed out of corrugated cardboard in the late 1960s and early 1970s can now sell for thousands. He would use screwed-up balls of paper as the basis for designing projects worth hundreds of millions of pounds. He found inspiration in happenstance.

His career, contrary to F Scott Fitzgerald's saying about American lives, had several acts. First, after working for the shopping mall specialist Victor Gruen, he built a successful practice designing good-but-not-extraordinary commercial projects, while making quietly radical studios and homes for his many artist friends in his home city of Los Angeles.