Frank Gehry: feel free to knock down my old home

The Los Angeles-based architect Frank Gehry, designer of the Bilbao Guggenheim and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown LA among many other spectacular buildings, is a believer in letting the past make way for the future - even when it affects his own heritage.

Told that his grandparents' home in the Jewish district of Toronto - where he was born and brought up as Ephraim Goldberg - was to be demolished to make way for a new apartment block, he said: "I don't think people should hold up the future for anchors from the past."

Speaking to the Globe and Mail newspaper, he went on: "There are some things that should be preserved, but there's a lot of stuff preserved that's irrelevant, and I don't think the fact that I or my grandparents were there has any real historic value to anybody."

Gehry moved to America while still a teenager and later changed his name and became a naturalised American citizen. But he has in the past credited his grandparents for encouraging his love of architecture, and has put his enthusiasm for corrugated steel and other materials down to the Saturday mornings he spent at his grandfather's hardware store.

While he didn't seem to care much about the unremarkable red brick house being demolished, Gehry had plenty to say about the apartment block going up in its place.  "It's awful," he said of the block named 12 Degrees, so called because each storey is offset at 12-degree angles.

"I hope they don't put a plaque in the lobby that says I lived there," he said. "I would be insulted by that. Who wants a plaque with your name on it in some shitty-looking lobby?" ·