When Frank Gehry visited the University of Waterloo in 1992, he did all the things expected of a prominent architect: he lectured, exchanged ideas with colleagues, and commented on student work. But what he really wanted was to play hockey. “He was wildly enthused about the games,” recalls Larry Wayne Richards, an architect and academic who was Gehry’s host for the visit. “He’d brought the uniforms with him – his passion for the game was absolutely real. There was this side of him that was very ordinary, very human.”

But this unpretentious and playful man had a steely side. Gehry, who died on Friday morning at his home in Los Angeles, was a creative force and a relentless innovator. He was 96. His death was confirmed by his chief of staff Meaghan Lloyd. He had become an unlikely star, the best-known architect of the last half-century.

Over a career of more than 60 years, spent almost entirely in Los Angeles, Gehry defined his own idiosyncratic path. His early buildings of the 1950s and 1960s were shaped by the orthodoxies of the Modernist movement; later, he was influenced by artist friends, and pursued experimental and varied work that overlapped with – but never quite fit into – the Postmodern architecture of the 1970s and 1980s, which engaged with history in a playful or ironic manner. “I want to engage people,” he said in a 2015 interview. “But I don’t want to copy the past.”