Now he unveils his first UK building - an altogether more intimate space - he calls it a "friendly little clubhouse" - designed for cancer patients and dedicate to the memory of a dear friend.
Our Arts Correspondent Nicholas Glass went to meet the architect at Maggie's Centre in Dundee:
It's the stainless steel roof - in a series of pleats that gives it away. Frank Gehry made his name designing buildings that curve and swoop and reflect.
The Maggie Centre in Dundee perches on a hill above the River Tay. It's a very personal project. Maggie Keswick Jencks was a good friend.
As she was dying of cancer in 1995, she planned the first of a series of care centres intended as she put it "to lift the spirit, not to sink it."
The model - at least one of them - was made at Gehry's offices in Santa Monica, California, three years ago. He always begins with a sketch or a doodle - followed soon afterwards by a model.
It turned out to be a pretty expensive small building - £1.3 million. And it took awhile for the community on Tayside to find the money.
Gehry's services came free.
For the roof, there was another source of inspiration - a painting by Vermeer. Gehry stuck up an image of the painting in his offices - saw his friend in the picture - and began to play with those corrugations or pleats.
Inside, the building is both welcoming and light and decked out in timber - mostly Douglas Fir.
It's the third Maggie Centre to open, after centres in Edinburgh and Glasgow.
From a relatively modest project in Dundee to another project on a vastly different scale, and one intended to raise the spirits of a city - Los Angeles.
Stainless and polished steel - a budget of $274m - 16-years in the planning, this is a commission that does come with a fee.
Disney Hall has risen slowly on the corner of First Street and Grand Avenue in Downtown LA - the great Gehry building that was very nearly never built. It has been completed long after the death of its main benefactor, Walt Disney's widow, Lilian.
As a sailor, Gehry has created a building of billowing shapes. There's a practical reason as well - the shapes help the acoustic of the concert hall inside.
Of course, Disney Hall might never have built but for the Guggenheim in Bilbao. That's what made him a star architect six years ago.
Gehry is now working - among other things - on a new house - for his wife and family - in Venice, California.
Like Matisse and his cut-outs, Gehry is peaking late. At 74, despite afternoon naps, he has no plans to retire.
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