Frank Gehry, the greatest star in the firmament of starchitects, searched for transcendence. Gehry, who died on Friday at age 96, was born in Toronto but moved with his family to Los Angeles at age 18 and remained there the rest of his life.

He would adorn both cities with the most impressive buildings of recent decades — the Walt Disney Concert Hall in L.A., and the renovated and expanded Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. Both were completed after the 1997 Guggenheim museum in Bilbao made Gehry as famous for his distinctive buildings as great artists are for their paintings.

Often overlooked, and closer to home for Ontarians then L.A. or Bilbao, is the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis (1993), which was the test run for Disney and Bilbao. There Gehry deployed advanced design software to make possible the undulating panels of metal and glass that resemble the falling pages of a musical score (Disney), the sails of the ship (Louis Vuitton, Paris), a fish (Bilbao) — or, more simply, the crumbled paper from which Gehry said he took his inspiration. Perhaps. Little children can crumple paper. Gehry was singular.

He retained a childlike sense of wonder, like the little boy who is (temporarily) fascinated by a crumpled piece of paper. His preliminary sketches were not the rigid stay-within-the-lines work of a confined, conventional adult mind. His drawings burst in all directions, sweeping this way and that, not unlike a child who imagines possibilities that may not be achievable. He achieved them, very much a child of his technological age, when computer design made feasible curves, bends, arcs and bows previously impossible. The Vuitton building in Paris includes more than 3,500 panels of glass, no two of which are the same!

Gehry was 68 when the Guggenheim museum was completed, opening public architecture to new possibilities. He already had a long career, rooted in the modernist style popular in mid-century California. Some of his work includes the squat, unimaginative cubes that, despite praise within the architecture guild, were rather ugly. Ugliness in architecture was fashionable for much of Gehry’s career. There was no room for the spirit to breathe.

“I would like to design a church or a synagogue,” Gehry said in an interview for his 90th birthday. “A place that has transcendence. I’ve always been interested in space that transcends to something — to joy, pleasure, understanding, discourse, whatever a space can do to be part of the dialogue.”

He never got that commission, though he was a finalist for the new Catholic cathedral in Los Angeles, just a short walk from Disney Hall. A great shame, as the cathedral became a very large version of a confining cube in which the spirit does not breathe.

Gehry’s life coincided with a secular turn in which great religious buildings were rarely built. His later, celebrated work turned then to other places of transcendence — music halls, art galleries, museums, even haute couture. Such places are important for a culture. The great cathedrals are open to all, including the poor, where inspiring architecture and impressive art lift up the soul. Concert halls and galleries are not free, but are more accessible than office towers and sports stadia.

The poor need beauty as much, or even more than, the rich. Gehry’s success in making the exterior of his buildings as compelling as the interior was a great public service. Not everyone can afford a ticket to the Los Angeles Philharmonic but all passersby can be moved by the building. Indeed, more visitors gather outside the Disney concert hall to gaze upon it than do at Our Lady of the Angels cathedral nearby.

There are no straight lines in nature, it is observed; even light curves over long enough distances. So it is likely that there are no straight lines in heaven, either. Gehry’s buildings confirm that intuition, his own works pointing toward transcendence of a sort.

There must be delight in heaven, too, otherwise why bother with creation at all? In Gehry’s later buildings the delight of the architect is evident, to be shared, diffused to all who enter them, or even regard them from afar. The transcendent act of creation is something like that, delight diffused from a creative intelligence into the world of things, of beings, of buildings.

Delight is not the same as fun, which is a rather more superficial experience. But the two are related, and fun, play, has its place in allowing the transcendent to break in upon us. Gehry’s masterpieces were fun to look at, fun to walk around, fun to be inside. No doubt many came for the fun and were touched by the art, the music, the history encountered there.

As every architect has known since the first brick was laid upon brick, we shape our buildings and then our buildings shape us. That was the point, was it not, of the first great commission, the Tower of Babel? Modernist buildings confined the spirit, built by men of limited inspiration for men of even more limited imagination. Thankfully Gehry was granted length of days, that in his sixties, seventies and beyond, he drew shapes in the sky that elevated the eyes, and the spirit, to the transcendent which Gehry himself sought.