Like the most intuitive and brilliant minds, Frank Gehry tapped into the poetics of the world. He attended to the mystical and captured the ethereal in architecture. He was a decent human being and I’ll miss him. He lived to a fabulous 96 years old, but the planet feels a little more subdued and sadly conventional without him.

In a radical and fearless way, Gehry created a new language of ecstatic architecture, though he self-identified as a castoff, like so many of the greatest artists and musicians. Even in his own family, Gehry felt like an outsider, misunderstood by his father, Irving Goldberg, a former boxer and pinball-machine salesman who criticized his son for being a “sissy,” a “schlepper” and, worse still, a “dreamer.”

To dream requires the setting aside of old systems and timeworn benchmarks in order to touch fresh, glossy pearls. I was lucky to come to understand this during many years as this newspaper’s architecture critic. During a visit to Gehry’s studio in Los Angeles, I learned that there were a handful of people who taught Gehry to have faith in himself, even if his family couldn’t. One was a woman who visited a summer camp near New Liskeard, Ont., on the shores of Lake Timiskaming, and, after reading the palm of the eight-year-old Frank, told his mother that he would be an architect.