"Once a week, his maternal grandmother would come home from the market with a live carp... 'We’d put it in the bathtub... and I’d play with this fish for a day until she killed it and made gefilte fish.'"

From "Frank O. Gehry, Titan of Architecture, Is Dead at 96/He burst onto the scene with an attention-getting renovation of his Southern California home before going on to design some of the world’s most recognizable buildings" (NYT).

Like many Angelenos, he was drawn to the laid-back, anything-goes atmosphere of the city, whose mix of garish mansions, flimsy bungalows, vacant lots, Googie coffee shops and colorful billboards was the antithesis of East Coast architectural academicism. And he became close to a generation of Los Angeles artists... whose surfboard-inspired aesthetic and raw work spaces suggested an alternative to the chilly austerity of late Modernism and the reactionary tendencies of postmodernism.... “I was trying to use the dumb, normal materials of the neighborhood,” Mr. Gehry said years later. “There must have been half a dozen cars in various states of deconstruction sitting around on the lawns; there was chain link in people’s backyards. They thought that was normal.”

For more about the fish, see "Frank Gehry, Fish Lamps/Paul Goldberger traces the history of the fish form throughout Frank Gehry’s career" (Gagosian.com).

So Gehry turned to the fish, at least in part as a way of solving the dilemma that postmodernism presented for him. He may have been making jokes when he said that the fish—which he called “the perfect form”—represented the return to history that the postmodernists advocated, but he was absolutely serious about seeing it as an inspiration for a new way of making modern architecture that would be both more sensual and more geometrically complex than the conventional modernist box. The double curves of the fish form fascinated him. So did its delicate skeleton, light and graceful in itself. The fish, he said, offered “a complete vocabulary that I can draw from.” He had plenty of other inspirations for his work, of course, but nothing else seemed so cogent a summary of his aesthetic. And it gave Gehry, an architect who generally shied away from conventional forms, the opportunity to use one of the most familiar shapes there is, and make it his own. If the fish allowed Gehry to thumb his nose at historicism, it allowed him to do the same to critics who found his work too abstract, too unusual, or too distant from forms they recognized. No one could fail to recognize a fish....