LOS ANGELES — Frank Gehry, who designed some of the most imaginative buildings ever constructed and achieved a level of worldwide acclaim seldom afforded any architect, has died. He was 96.

Gehry died Friday in his home in Santa Monica after a brief respiratory illness, said Meaghan Lloyd, chief of staff at Gehry Partners LLP.

Gehry’s fascination with modern pop art led to the creation of distinctive, striking buildings. Among his many masterpieces are the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; The Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the DZ Bank Building in Berlin.

He also designed an expansion of Facebook’s Northern California headquarters at the insistence of the company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

Gehry was awarded every major prize architecture has to offer, including the field’s top honor, the Pritzker Prize, for what has been described as “refreshingly original and totally American” work.

Other honors include the Royal Institute of British Architects gold medal, the Americans for the Arts lifetime achievement award, and his native country’s highest honor, the Companion of the Order of Canada.

After earning a degree in architecture from the University of Southern California in 1954 and serving in the Army, Gehry studied urban planning at Harvard University.

But his career got off to a slow start. He struggled for years to make ends meet, designing public housing projects, shopping centers and even driving a delivery truck for a time.

Eventually, he got the chance to design a modern shopping mall overlooking the Santa Monica Pier. He was determined to play it safe and came up with drawings for an enclosed shopping mall that looked like others in the United States in the 1980s.

To celebrate its completion, the mall’s developer dropped by Gehry’s house and was stunned by what he saw: The architect had transformed a modest 1920s-era bungalow into an inventive abode by remodeling it with chain-link fencing, exposed wood and corrugated metal.

Asked why he hadn’t proposed something similar for the mall, Gehry replied, “Because I have to make a living.”

If he really wanted to make a statement as an architect, he was told, he should drop that attitude and follow his creative vision.

Gehry would do just that for the rest of his life, working into his 90s to create buildings that doubled as stunning works of art.

As the acclaim grew, Gehry Partners LLP, the architectural firm he founded in 1962, grew with it, expanding to include more than 130 employees at one point. But as big as the firm got, Gehry insisted on personally overseeing every project it took on.

The headquarters of the InterActiveCorp, known as the IAC Building, took the shape of a shimmering beehive when it was completed in New York City’s Chelsea district in 2007. The 76-story New York by Gehry building (now known as 8 Spruce), once one of the world’s tallest residential structures, was a stunning addition to the lower Manhattan skyline when it opened in 2011.

That same year, Gehry joined the faculty of his alma mater, the University of Southern California, as a professor of architecture. He also taught at Yale and Columbia University.

Not everyone was a fan of Gehry’s work. Some naysayers dismissed it as not much more than gigantic, lopsided reincarnations of the little scrap-wood cities he said he spent hours building when he was growing up in the mining town of Timmins, Ontario.

Princeton art critic Hal Foster dismissed many of his later efforts as “oppressive,” arguing they were designed primarily to be tourist attractions. Some denounced the Walt Disney Concert Hall as looking like a collection of cardboard boxes that had been left out in the rain.

Still other critics included Dwight D. Eisenhower’s family, who objected to Gehry’s bold proposal for a memorial to honor the nation’s 34th president. Although the family said it wanted a simple memorial and not the one Gehry had proposed, with its multiple statues and billowing metal tapestries depicting Eisenhower’s life, the architect declined to change his design significantly.

If the words of his critics annoyed Gehry, he rarely let on. Indeed, he even sometimes played along. He appeared as himself in a 2005 episode of “The Simpsons” in which he agreed to design a concert hall that was later converted into a prison.

He came up with the idea for the design, which looked a lot like the Walt Disney Concert Hall, after crumpling Marge Simpson’s letter to him and throwing it on the ground. After looking at it, he declared, “Frank Gehry, you’ve done it again!”

“Some people think I actually do that,” he later told the AP.

Ephraim Owen Goldberg was born in Toronto on Feb. 28, 1929, and moved to Los Angeles with his family in 1947, eventually becoming a U.S. citizen. As an adult, he changed his name at the suggestion of his first wife, who told him antisemitism might be holding back his career.

Although he had enjoyed drawing and building model cities as a child, Gehry said it wasn’t until he was 20 that he pondered the possibility of pursuing a career in architecture, after a college ceramics teacher recognized his talent.

“It was like the first thing in my life that I’d done well in,” he said.

Gehry steadfastly denied being an artist though.

“Yes, architects in the past have been both sculptors and architects,” he declared in a 2006 interview with The Associated Press. “But I still think I’m doing buildings, and it’s different from what they do.”

His words reflected both a lifelong shyness and an insecurity that stayed with Gehry long after he’d been declared the greatest architect of his time.

“I’m totally flabbergasted that I got to where I’ve gotten,” he told the AP in 2001. “Now it seems inevitable, but at the time it seemed very problematic.”

The Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum in Abu Dhabi, first proposed in 2006, is expected to finally be completed in 2026 after a series of construction delays and sporadic work. The 30,000-square-foot structure will be the world’s largest Guggenheim building.

His survivors include his wife, Berta; daughter, Brina; and sons Alejandro and Samuel. Another daughter, Leslie Gehry Brenner, died of cancer in 2008.

Editor’s note: Rogers, the principal writer of this obituary, retired from The Associated Press in 2021. Reporter Jaimie Ding contributed from Los Angeles.

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — The city of Pasadena, California, and the Rose Bowl Operating Company have sued UCLA for allegedly trying to move its college football games from one of the sport’s most iconic stadiums to the much newer SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, the Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday.

According to the Times, the suit accuses UCLA of “profoundly” betraying its trust by attempting to relocate its home games from the facility the Bruins have called home for 43 years to the home of the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers.

UCLA’s current lease runs through 2044. But the stadium is 26 miles from campus, and the Bruins (3-5, 3-2 Big Ten) have struggled with attendance in recent years. This season, UCLA’s average attendance for its four home games is roughly 35,000.

SoFi Stadium opened in September 2020, is about 12 miles from UCLA’s campus and has a capacity of 70,240.

“This lawsuit arises in an era when money too often eclipses meaning and the pursuit of profit threatens to erase the very traditions that breathe life into institutions,” the suit claims. “Some commitments are too fundamental to be traded away.”

UCLA has undergone several major changes over the past two seasons. It joined Southern California, Washington and Oregon in leaving their longtime conference home, the Pac-12, for the Big Ten in 2024.

Earlier this season, the Bruins fired second-year coach DeShaun Foster and replaced him with interim coach Tim Skipper. They’ve also changed offensive and defensive coordinators this season.

The Times reported UCLA’s outside counsel, David L. Scrader, sent a letter to Pasadena attorney Nima Mohebbi in March, saying the school’s efforts to conduct “preliminary discussions” about relocating games did not constitute a “material breach” of its contract.

But Pasadena officials and stadium representatives claim a potential move could cost Pasadena and its residents more than $1 billion in damages. City officials said in the suit that taxpayers have funded more than $150 million in renovations with an additional $130 million in bonds that were recently refinanced for additional upgrades.

The Rose Bowl, a designated National Historic Landmark, is best known for hosting the “grandaddy” of college football’s bowl games since 1922 and has a seating capacity of about 89,000. The Bruins have called the Rose Bowl home since leaving the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in 1982.

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LOS ANGELES — After a section of a large industrial tunnel caved in on Wednesday, more than two dozen construction workers who were hundreds of feet beneath the streets of Los Angeles raced for miles in the dark.

Remarkably, all 31 workers escaped Wednesday night, and none suffered any major injuries. The workers had to traverse the most treacherous part — 12 feet of loose dirt, while water rushed into the tunnel — themselves before rescuers could reach them and drive them to the only opening, Fire Department Chief Ronnie Villanueva said.

The tunnel, which is 18 feet wide and 7 miles long, is under the Wilmington neighborhood, a heavily industrial area filled with oil refineries slightly north of the Port of Los Angeles. The nearly $700 million project is designed to create space to carry treated wastewater to the Pacific Ocean.

The workers were 400 feet underground and as many as 6 miles away from the entrance/exit, said Michael Chee, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts. They had traveled for an hour in a transport vehicle to the work area, he added. They were supervising the operations of a machine that digs out the corridor and then builds the tunnel at the same time, he said. Panels that are installed are then used to move the machine forward, he said.

When workers learned of the collapse, they ran back and hopped aboard the transport vehicle, but it could move for only a mile before it encountered the debris.

“What we understand is the men who were in front of the collapse had approximately 6 to 8 feet of space above the debris where they were able to clamber over,” Chee said.

Then the workers — still in the dark and miles from the opening — continued on foot until rescuers were able to reach them and help them onto vehicles to take them to the shaft where a cage carried them out.

Aerial footage showed a crane hoisting workers out of the tunnel in a yellow cage.

“They’re shaken up,” Chess said, adding that all work has been halted and the workers will take time to recover.

Arally Orozco said her three brothers who were in the tunnel are too traumatized to speak to journalists. After escaping, one came out crying.

“He told me he thought he was going to die underground,” she said.

She said they described to her what they experienced: That night, at their work area, they heard a hissing sound.

“They heard like a psss sound, like air was going out, like pressure was escaping, and they didn’t know what it was,” Orozco said.

A while later, a couple of workers were heading back through the tunnel toward the opening when debris started raining down, the brothers told her. One worker ran back to alert the others while the other worker rushed ahead to get to the opening and call for help, Orozco said.

The group had to squeeze through a tiny hole that she said one of her brothers feared he would not fit through. Water was rushing in so forcefully that it pulled at the transport vehicle, she said. Her brother told her at one point the water reached up to his waist and he struggled to breathe because it seemed like the tunnel was losing oxygen.

“They felt helpless,” she said.

The project has been under way for two years without any problems, Chee said.

“The tunnel boring machine has been digging under streets, public right-of-ways, homes, parks, lakes, ponds, golf courses without incident until now,” he said.

Officials will investigate to determine the cause, Chee said.

“What our people and what our contractors and their specialists are going to do is a full assessment,” he said. “Everything from the engineering to the structural integrity to the safety, and obviously a very close inspection and look at the actual collapse point in the tunnel before anything else is done.”

Working so near the shoreline and at such a depth means crews could have been contending with very wet conditions that add challenges during design and digging, said Maria Mohammed, president of the Structural Engineers Association of Southern California.

“You would design not just for the pressure from the soil and the weight of the soil; you have to design for the pressure from the water,” said Mohammed, whose group is not involved in the project.

The investigation could take months, if not longer, Mohammed said. It will take some time just to make the tunnel safe for investigators to enter, she explained. Once inside, they’ll try to determine where the collapse originated, she said.

“It all comes down to: what’s the first element that broke?” Mohammed said. “Usually, a collapse is a propagating thing. One thing fails and it takes other things with it. So, you would try to figure out, of the broken elements, which one broke first.”

City Councilmember Tim McOsker praised the workers for keeping cool heads.

“This is a highly technical, difficult project,” he said. “And they knew exactly what to do; they knew how to secure themselves. Thank goodness for the good people that were down in the tunnel.”

Mayor Karen Bass said at a news conference that she met with some of the workers.

“I know when we raced down here, I was so concerned that we were going to find tragedy,” she said. “Instead, what we found was victory.”

Editor’s note: Watson reported from San Diego. Associated Press journalists Damian Dovarganes and Eugene Garcia contributed to this report.

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SAN FRANCISCO — California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday urged cities to clear homeless encampments, escalating once again his efforts to address an intractable issue of his time in office: the makeshift tents that line many underpasses, parks and local streets in the state.

Newsom’s administration drafted a local law that counties, cities and towns can directly adopt or modify to achieve the Democrat’s goals. He’s also releasing $3.3 billion in voter-approved funds to expand housing opportunities and treatment options for homeless residents.

“The time for inaction is over,” he stated. “There are no more excuses.”

Newsom, a former mayor of San Francisco, made tackling homelessness a priority of his administration when he took office in 2019. Other Democrats in government have since joined the effort to crack down on encampments. More than 187,000 Californians need housing; the state has one quarter of the nation’s homeless population.

With tents lining streets and disrupting businesses in numerous urban areas, homelessness has become one of the most pressing public health and safety issues in California and one sure to dog Newsom if he runs for national office.

His declaration comes a year after the U.S. Supreme Court made it easier for officials to ban homeless individuals from camping outside in public. It was a ruling welcomed by many Democratic leaders, including Newsom, despite critics describing the decision by the conservative court as cruel.

The key provisions of the model ordinance announced Monday include prohibitions on “persistent camping” in one location, a ban on encampments that block sidewalks and a requirement that local officials provide notice and make every reasonable effort to identify and offer shelter prior to clearing an encampment.

Providing a ready-made local law could bring uniformity to how cities and counties deal with encampments though Newsom is urging local officials to modify his proposal as needed.

Major cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco have already started clearing out encampments, saying they are not fair to children, seniors and people with disabilities who need access to sidewalks and parks.

San Francisco’s new mayor, Daniel Lurie, pledged to clean up city sidewalks. Meanwhile, in San José, Mayor Matt Mahan has proposed arrests if a person refuses shelter three times. Both cities have ramped up the number of shelter beds available, so more people have somewhere to go.

In Los Angeles, first-term Mayor Karen Bass, a Democrat, has made clearing encampments a priority. But sagging tents, makeshift shelters and rusting RVs remain an all-too-common sight in just about every neighborhood. An annual tally last year estimated that more than 45,000 city residents were homeless.

Efforts to reduce homelessness are facing increased stress, as the city contends with a nearly $1 billion projected budget gap along with the massive and costly job of rebuilding the Pacific Palisades neighborhood that was destroyed in a January wildfire.

Bass’ office did not promptly respond to a message sent Monday seeking comments on Newsom’s announcement.

Critics say there is no evidence that punitive policies reduce homelessness, and camping bans make it harder to link people up with stable housing and employment. People may lose critical documents or contact with a case manager, forcing them to start all over again, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

The California State Association of Counties stated that the state has not provided as much money to address homelessness as it says it has, and that half of the money has gone to housing developers.

In 2024, California voters approved a measure that imposes strict requirements on counties to spend money on housing and drug treatment programs to tackle the homelessness crisis. It was a signature proposal for Newsom, who campaigned for the measure’s passage.

Under the measure, counties are required to spend about two-thirds of the money from a voter-approved tax enacted in 2004 on millionaires for mental health services on housing and programs for homeless people with serious mental illnesses or substance abuse problems.

The governor has also pushed for laws that make it easier to force people with behavioral health issues into treatment. And he has repeatedly threatened to withhold state money from cities and counties that do not step up to address homelessness.

But despite the roughly billions of dollars spent on more than 30 homeless and housing programs during the 2018-2023 fiscal years, California does not have reliable data needed to fully understand why the problem didn’t improve in many cities, according to a 2024 state audit.

The audit found California spent $24 billion to tackle homelessness over the previous five years but did not consistently track whether the huge outlay of public money improved the situation.

Editor’s note: Associated Press writers Christopher Weber and Michael R. Blood in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

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