Architect Frank Gehry, who left his stamp on the neighborhood with New York by Gehry at Eight Spruce Street and the Issey Miyake store on Hudson and N. Moore, has died at age 96. (Not in the neighborhood, but you have driven past it a hundred times: the IAC white glass building on the Westside Highway in Chelsea.)

In its obituary, The Times called him “one of the most formidable and original talents in the history of American architecture.” And reviews of the residential tower that is 8 Spruce certainly contributed to that.

8 Spruce was not only Gehry’s first skyscraper, built for the developer Bruce Ratner, but when it opened in 2011 it was the tallest luxury residential tower in the city. “It seemed to epitomize the skyline’s transformation from a symbol of American commerce to a display of individual wealth,” The Times wrote in a review of the building.

“Only now, as the building nears completion, is it possible to appreciate what Mr. Gehry has accomplished: the finest skyscraper to rise in New York since Eero Saarinen’s CBS building went up 46 years ago,” The Times wrote. “And like that tower, and Philip Johnson’s AT&T (now Sony) building after it, 8 Spruce Street seems to crystallize a particular moment in cultural history, in this case the turning point from the modern to the digital age.”

The rental building is 76 stories high and contains the Spruce Street School on the bottom floors. (The review *did* criticize the orange brick facade of the base — a letdown, it said, after you’ve seen the tower above.) The towers are stainless steel, designed so the facade looks rippled. And it is quite spectacular in the afternoon light.

His first project in the city, in 2000, was the cafeteria at Conde Nast’s headquarters at 4 Times Square. The company is now downtown, but the installation there has been preserved by its new owner, the Durst Organization. “It’s aged very well,” Douglas Durst told The Times in 2015. “There’s no feeling that it’s from a different era at all.”

And then in 2001, he was commissioned to design the interior of the Issey Miyake store on Hudson and N. Moore. The brand is leaving for Madison Avenue at the end of the week, and the installation will be shipped to the Mikake archives in Japan.

And then in 2007, Barry Diller chose Gehry to design the IAC headquarters on the Westside Highway in Chelsea — a white glass building that seems to set sail right off the sidewalk.

Gehry has 20 projects that follow the 2011 unveiling of 8 Spruce, but that would be his last project in New York.