Frank Gehry once told Aaron Betsky that his favourite architect was actually an artist. After probing the work of late minimalist Robert Ryman, Betsky agrees that the painter's use of white made him a master manipulator of space.

When I asked Frank Gehry, for whom I was then working, who his favourite architect was, he responded in a split second: the painter Robert Ryman. In many ways it was a clever answer. How can any practitioner answer, when you make such a query, in any other way than to either pose or deflect their own work" By cutting to an artist working purely in paint, Gehry kept that option open.
That being said, it was also a perfect answer from an architect mining modernism for new forms of expression. Robert Ryman, that most material of minimalists, who could make white paint and a square format come alive just with the way he applied his material, made architecture with more success than any artist I know. White obsessed artists and designers from the beginning of the 20th century on
Ryman, who passed away recently at the age of 88, was never trained as an artist, kept a low profile, and had a limited range, to say the least. His complete output consisted of canvases, almost always square and usually rather modest in scale, to which he applied white paint.
Sometimes colours crept through from underneath the last blank layer, and sometimes there were grids. Sometimes he painted all the way to the corner, and sometimes you saw the canvas there. That was ...