‘Like an Explosion in a Glass Factory’: Frank Gehry’s Seven-Ton ‘Icehenge’ Desk That Once Graced a Skyscraper Lobby Is Up for Auction

Designed for the Inland Steel Building in Chicago, the desk is made from more than a dozen blocks of jagged, green-tinted glass

Michele Debczak | Correspondent

July 8, 2026 2:23 p.m.

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Frank Gehry is best known for designing massive, undulating structures, such as the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Now admirers have the chance to own a much smaller piece of work from the architect. Icehenge—a striking, 16-piece desk carved from green-tinted glass—is up for auction.

As Lee Bey reports for the Chicago Sun-Times, Gehry designed the piece especially for the Inland Steel Building in Chicago—a 19-story, modernist skyscraper that captivated him as a young architect in the 1950s. He purchased a partial ownership stake in the building in 2005 at a time when the structure was starting to show its age. One of his contributions was a security desk for the lobby resembling a set from science fiction dropped in the middle of Mid-Century Modern Chicago.

The seed of the idea came to Gehry when he noticed a piece of scrap glass while working on a separate project, per the Freeman’s auction house. Rather than using glass to evoke perfection and clarity, he was inspired to show a different side to the material, arranging glacial blocks that were warped and jagged in spots and smooth in others. The result is a seven-ton structure that has a chaotic, almost dangerous quality one wouldn’t expect to find in an office building.

“It does look like an explosion in a glass factory, kind of,” Gehry told the Chicago Tribune’s Blair Kamin in 2013. “If you actually had an explosion at a glass factory, apart from everyone getting killed, it would be pretty exciting visually.”

Gehry was born in Toronto in 1929. He studied architecture at the University of Southern California and city planning at Harvard University before working for various architectural firms in Los Angeles and Paris. He established his own practice in 1962.

The avant-garde, sculptural style Gehry is known for today emerged in the 1970s and ’80s. Gehry went on to play with forms and materials on a much grander scale, designing daring museums, skyscrapers and music venues around the world. During a time when literal, Modernist architecture dominated so many urban spaces, his work was impossible to ignore.

“Gehry was not the first to challenge the values of mainstream Modernism, but he went the furthest in tearing down its high art pretensions,” art critic Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote for the Los Angeles Times in 2001. “In the process, he laid the groundwork for a truly democratic architecture—one in which the individual imagination triumphs over dogmatic formulas.”

Gehry died in 2025 at age 96. That year, New York Life Insurance Co. acquired the skyscraper from Capital Properties in lieu of foreclosure, per the Sun-Times. Now the building’s most famous piece of furniture is being auctioned off online. Freeman’s expects it to go for between $100,000 and $200,000.

While small compared to Gehry’s most iconic works, Icehenge is imposing in its own right. Its largest column stands six feet tall. The highest bidder will be responsible for transporting the desk—all 15,000 pounds of it—away from the building within a week of the sale.

Michele Debczak | Read More

Michele Debczak is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn, New York. She appears in seasons four through six of History Channel’s “The Food That Built America,” and her work has been featured in Mental Floss, IndieWire, Eater and Vice.