A desk designed by Frank O. Gehry is up for auction. The starting price: $50,000. Per Freeman’s, the auction house, bids for the desk may go as high as $200,000.
Freeman’s described the desk as in “good overall condition” with “no fundamental structural breaks, cracks, losses or repairs present.”
Icehenge Desk, as its known by, has been sited in the lobby of Chicago’s Inland Steel Building since 2013, as the security desk.
As its title suggests, the piece looks like ice chiseled from a glacier, coarse edges and all, not unlike the crystal decanter Gehry designed for Hennessy cognac in 2024, together with Baccarat.
The desk weighs 15,000 pounds, and is made up of 16 reconfigurable pieces. It was carved from blocks of emerald glass, a few shades greener than the crystal on Bruce Goff’s headstone.
The fabricator that realized the piece was John Lewis Glass Studio, based in Oakland, California.
Inland Steel Building (Teemu008/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 2.0)
Chicago’s Inland Steel Building is a modernist landmark by SOM, completed in 1958. Gehry became a part owner of the building in 2005. SOM renovated the building in 2010.
Gehry had the idea for Icehenge Desk after he came across a piece of scrap glass working on another project.
After its installation in 2013, Blair Kamin wrote in the Chicago Tribune that the “U-shaped desk is best described as a piece of furniture that’s been elevated to the level of art, or is simply an emblem of excess.”
Gehry died in December 2025. His most famous furniture designs are the “Gehry Wiggle Chair” and “Gehry Wiggle Stool,” designed in 1972. Gehry later designed a series of bent-laminated maple chairs for Knoll.
In 2024, Gehry designed the bespoke decanter for Hennessy. The select few of Gehry-designed decanters were sold for $150,000 each, about the same price as Icehenge Desk is expected to go for.