Frank Gehry

Canadian-born American architect

• Born: February 28, 1929
• Place of Birth: Toronto, Ontario, Canada

A leading architect of his generation, Gehry designed a succession of adventurous buildings in the United States and Europe and led an innovative group of associates specializing in the application of computer-aided design to complex building projects.

Early Life

Frank Gehry (GEHR-ee) was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. As a child, Gehry's grandmother would set out three-dimensional objects on the floor for him to play with and later, with his father, he began to build in wood. From his teenage years in Canada, Gehry retained a treasured memory of attending a lecture on architecture, and much later came to realize that the presentation had been given by the great Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, who remained a source of inspiration for him.

In 1947, because of Gehry’s father’s poor health, the family moved to Los Angeles, California. Attending Los Angeles City College, the young Gehry worked for a time driving a commercial truck and once delivered a prefabricated breakfast nook to Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, the famous film couple who, he recalls, “treated me like family” and invited him to dinner. Around 1950, Gehry took a ceramics course at the University of Southern California (USC) and was soon urged by his teacher to enroll in the architecture program, where he completed his studies in 1954.

Gehry’s first marriage was to Anita Snyder, and the couple had two sons. Their marriage ended in divorce in the mid-1960s; it was at Anita’s insistence that Gehry changed his name from Goldberg. With his second wife, Berta, Gehry had two daughters. Gehry became a dual citizen of Canada and the United States, and though for decades he was considered a central figure in California culture, he retained a passionate love for Canada’s national sport, ice hockey.

Life’s Work

Following his studies at USC, Gehry worked for several architectural firms in the Los Angeles area, taking time out to enroll for one semester in Harvard University’s urban planning department. In 1961–62, he worked in France for the architect André Rémondet. Returning to California, Gehry opened an office in Santa Monica and began accepting commissions for residential and other structures. These early works fit comfortably within familiar categories of modernist style, with clear, cubic volumes, and the use of mainstream materials.

In the late 1960s, Gehry’s architectural vocabulary began to change. Finding more adventurous clients, he had increasing opportunities to design and execute imaginative projects, ranging from a simple hay barn to a major suburban shopping center. Many projects of these years reveal Gehry’s instincts as a sculptural designer. Critics and admirers of the his work have remarked on his affinity for the visual arts, and Gehry himself noted that, especially in his early career, he was more closely associated with the visual arts community than with his fellow architects.

A pivotal project for Gehry was his renovation of the house that he acquired for his own home in 1977. He took a typical, 1920s-style bungalow and broke through its existing walls to add a new envelope around the existing wood-frame structure. In the process he introduced into a domestic project such industrial materials as corrugated metal and chain-link fencing. Gehry’s Santa Monica home is a celebrated gesture in the history of contemporary architecture and announces many aspects of his subsequent work, including the reevaluation of traditional architectural forms and practices, novel use of materials, and a penchant for designing collage-like assemblages of volumes and surfaces to create exterior and interior spaces.

Among the best known-projects of the 1980s is the Chiat-Day Building in Venice, California (a district of Los Angeles). It combines deft site planning with humanely eccentric design statements, including an entryway in the form of giant binoculars that was created in collaboration with artists Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. The use of singular, assertive sculptural forms reappears in Gehry’s Fishdance Restaurant of 1987, in Kobe, Japan. Among the irregularly cubic forms of the restaurant rises an enormous fish shape constructed of steel mesh. Gehry often indulged his love of fish and snake forms, both in decorative, and sculptural work that he undertook independently of his building activities.

In 1989, Gehry received the Pritzker Prize, perhaps the foremost honor for an architect. In commenting on the award, Pritzker juror and architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable asked, “Will Gehry’s serious irreverence and non-formulaic art survive the institutional embrace?” In fact, a number of Gehry’s most “institutional” and public projects lay in the future. In 1991, he began work on what many consider to be his masterpiece, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. This museum is a branch of the famous Guggenheim Museum in New York City, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959); thus Gehry’s design can be thought of as a kind of challenge to the legacy of one of his greatest American predecessors. The project for Bilbao, Spain, occupied Gehry and his collaborators for six years, and resulted in a building that gained both public popularity and respect from critics. It is celebrated for its assertive sculptural forms based upon billowing sails, and for its thoughtful accommodation to the urban setting.

A contender for the status of Gehry’s most characteristic building and similarly implicated in issues of civic pride is the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, which was completed in 2003. The hall is the permanent home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, and thus required of the architectural team exacting attention to both acoustics, and to the circulation and seating of patrons. Upon opening, the hall was acclaimed on both counts, but unlike the Bilbao project it was completed neither on time nor on budget.

Another of the candidates for his most iconic building is the Dancing House in Prague, Czech Republic. The uniquely shaped curved towers of this building were given that name because they resemble two people dancing together.

When social media giant Facebook wanted to expand its Silicon Valley campus in early 2013, founder Mark Zuckerberg turned to Gehry to design what at the time was billed as the largest open-plan office space in the world. The proposed design was intentionally understated—with a focus on functionality over form—eschewing Gehry's usual slopes and swoops in favor a flat, garden-covered rooftop meant to blend the structure into the surrounding natural environment. In November 2013, Facebook confirmed that Gehry had been signed to design additional office space in Dublin and London. Several Gehry projects struggled to move toward completion in the early 2010s. Though he was brought on to the Grand Avenue Project—a proposed residential, hotel, and retail center located across from the Disney Concert Hall—in 2006, Gehry's initial designs were put on hold while the real estate firm behind the project solicited designs by other firms. Gehry was eventually brought back on in 2013, after Los Angeles County officials dismissed alternate designs as bland. The Grand was completed in 2022.

In 2009, Gehry was selected as lead designer for the proposed Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, DC. His designs faced harsh criticism and backlash from the Eisenhower family, as well as numerous prominent architecture and design critics, and initially failed to receive approval from the necessary federal agencies. A modified version was approved in 2014 and completed in 2020. Other Gehry projects included his first skyscraper, 8 Spruce Street in New York City, in 2012, and three buildings in 2014: the Biomuseo museum of biodiversity in Panama City, Panama; an art center for the Fondation Louis Vuitton, in Paris, France; and a distinctive building for the University of Technology, Sydney, in Sydney, Australia, that was compared to a crushed paper bag.

Gehry continued to build renowned architecture in the 2020s. In addition to completing the Eisenhower Memorial and The Grand, between 2021 and 2022, he finished projects for the Philadelphia Museum of Art; built a futuristic tower for LUMA Arles in tribute to the Ancient Romans and artist Vincent van Gogh; transformed a bank building into a concert hall for the Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles; and completed a pro-bono building for the Children's Institute.

Significance

Gehry emerged from the 1970s as a leading architectural innovator. Though he was increasingly sought by local, national, and international clients, Gehry appreciated that merely to pursue his signature style to work, in a sense, more as an artist than as an architect would be insufficient to fulfill his vision and promise.

Balancing Gehry’s deeply rooted sculptural imagination was his understanding that architecture was collaborative if not in its very essence, then certainly in practice. Like few others, Gehry expanded and enhanced the collaborative element of his architectural work. This fact intersected in a timely and perhaps crucial way with the growing use of computer aided design (CAD) technology in architecture: In the early 1990s, Gehry and his associates began to employ the aerospace design application CATIA, developed by Dassault Systèmes of France, and the software proved indispensable not only in refining design concepts but in communicating them to clients and builders alike. Success with these changes to the process of architecture led, in 2003, to the founding of a new company, Gehry Technologies, to refine and market a variation of the software. Gehry continued to practice in Los Angeles, having founded Gehry Partners, LLP, in 2001.

Gehry’s many imaginative buildings form the core of his contribution to the art of architecture. However, the example of his professional experience over more than a half century is equally vital and noteworthy. In addition to the Pritzker Prize, he was honored for his work with the 1992 Praemium Imperiale from the Japan Art Association, the National Medal of the Arts in 1998, the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal in 1999, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Architecture in 2002, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.

Bibliography

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Dal Co, Francesco, Kurt W. Forster, and Arnold Hadley. Frank O. Gehry: The Complete Works. New York: Monacelli, 1998.

Freidman, Mildred, ed. Gehry Talks: Architecture + Process. New York: Universe, 2002.

Pauker, Benjamin. "Frank Gehry." Foreign Policy July 2013: 24.

Pollack, Sydney, dir. Sketches of Frank Gehry. Culver City: Sony Pictures, 2006.

Smith, Laura Massino. Tour of Frank Gehry Architecture and Other L.A. Buildings. Atglen: Schiffer, 2007.

Sokol, David, Nick Mafi, and Katherine McLaughlin. "33 Spectacular Buildings Designed by Frank Gehry." Architectural Digest, 23 Sept. 2023, www.architecturaldigest.com/gallery/best-of-frank-gehry-slideshow. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

Waldrep, G. C. "A Short History of Frank Gehry." Midwest Quarterly 53.4 (2012): 349.

Willsher, Kim. "Frank Gehry's Luma Arles Tower to Open in South of France." The Guardian, 25 June 2021, ww.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/jun/25/frank-gehrys-luma-arles-tower-to-open-in-south-of-france. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.