Frank wanted to show you everything you could become

LOS ANGELES

- Malissa Shriver, Tribune News Service

Architect Frank Gehry in his Playa Vista office.

(File/Tribune News Service)

Frank Gehry taught students at our nation’s most prestigious private universities, and at California's most underresourced public schools, that their signatures were invaluable. He had them compare and contrast theirs with their classmates’: It was a simple but profound lesson in personal expression, in the importance of both knowing oneself, and holding on to that knowing throughout one’s life.

Frank's life was his work — in architecture, in teaching, in public life. His art-making was vivifying. He wanted more years, more time to create, to apply the signature he had refined for nearly a century, until his death on Friday at 96.

Frank was a true master. He aspired to master the craft of architecture. For him it was a fine art, as it was for the Romans and the Greeks, not the bloodless work of engineers and applied math. He apprenticed himself to the great artists, ancient and modern. Frank invented an architecture born of his signature; he dreamed primordial designs that he translated technically. He drew the humane world he desired, and inspired others to do so as well. Frank wanted to be understood, to be felt, and he expressed himself through the disciplined mastery of his craft, but perhaps more profoundly through the painstaking study of himself. His life quest was a dynamic and visceral continuation and celebration of what he found moving in art, sculpture and classical music. He designed fantastic yet intimate cathedrals for the worship of artistic disciplines, volumes to hold sacred aesthetic time, magnificent vessels for personal emotional experience.