11 fascinating Frank Gehry buildings in Los Angeles

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Long before the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Walt Disney Concert Hall made him a global celebrity, L.A.served as Frank Gehry’s laboratory — where he could test materials, shift building types and blur the lines between art and architecture.

These projects reveal a designer learning to bend norms and shape spatial narratives, in the process shifting the cultural landscape of the city.(He died Friday at 96 at his home in Santa Monica.)From modest homes to major cultural institutions, Gehry’s L.A.

buildings capture an architect inventing a language that would eventually transform places around the world.Dreamed up by Walt Disney’s widow, Lillian, in 1987, the project wouldn’t be completed until 2003.

But it was worth the wait.Now the cultural and visual anchor of downtown Los Angeles, Disney’s riot of titanium sails reflect rippling waves of music, Gehry’s love of sailing, fish scales and other nautical themes, and the frenetic city around it.

Inside, the boat-like, wood-clad hall has an intimate, vineyard-style seating arrangement, with its superb acoustics shaped by Yasuhisa Toyota.Don’t forget the 6,134-pipe organ, which resembles a box of exploding French Fries.

Lillian Disney, a connoisseur of flowers, would die before the hall was finished, but its hidden rear garden is centered around the “Rose for Lilly” fountain, composed of thousands of broken blue-and-white Delft china pieces.Frank Gehry, through making concert halls that inspired new ideas, wound up doing more to advance music than anyone else in the 21st century.Gehry’s own Santa Monica home remains one of the most influential houses of the 20th century — a modest Dutch Colonial reimagined through an envelope of chain-link fencing, gray corrugated metal, exposed wood framing and sharply tilted glass planes.It challenged the idea of domestic respectability, treating the house as an open-ended...