Frank Owen Gehry CC FAIA (/ˈɡɛəri/; né Goldberg; born February 28, 1929) is a Canadian-born American architect and designer. A number of his buildings, including his private residence in Santa Monica, California, have become world-renowned attractions.
His works are considered among the most important of contemporary architecture in the 2010 World Architecture Survey, leading Vanity Fair to call him "the most important architect of our age".[2] He is also the designer of the National Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial.[3]
Gehry is known for his postmodern designs and use of bold, unconventional forms and materials. His most famous works include the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris. These buildings are characterized by their sculptural, often undulating exteriors and innovative use of materials such as titanium and stainless steel.
Born in Toronto, Gehry moved to Los Angeles in 1947 and established his architectural practice there in 1962. He rose to prominence in the 1970s with his distinctive style that blended everyday materials with complex, dynamic structures. Gehry's approach to architecture has been described as deconstructivist, though he himself resists categorization.
Throughout his career, Gehry has received numerous awards and honors, including the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1989, considered the field's highest honor. He has also been awarded the National Medal of Arts and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the United States. Gehry's influence extends beyond architecture; he has designed furniture, jewelry, and liquor bottles.
Gehry was born Frank Owen Goldberg[4] on February 28, 1929, in Toronto, Ontario,[5] to parents Sadie Thelma (née Kaplanski/Caplan) and Irving Goldberg.[6] His father was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian Jewish parents, and his mother was a Polish Jewish immigrant born in Łódź.[7][8][9] A creative child, he was encouraged by his grandmother, Leah Caplan,[10] with whom he built little cities out of scraps of wood.[11] With these scraps from her husband's hardware store, she entertained him for hours, building imaginary houses and futuristic cities on the living room floor.[6]
Gehry's use of corrugated steel, chain-link fencing, unpainted plywood, and other utilitarian or "everyday" materials was partly inspired by spending Saturday mornings at his grandfather's hardware store. He spent time drawing with his father, and his mother introduced him to the world of art. "So the creative genes were there", Gehry says. "But my father thought I was a dreamer, I wasn't gonna amount to anything. It was my mother who thought I was just reticent to do things. She would push me."[12]
He was given the Hebrew name "Ephraim" by his grandfather, but used it only at his bar mitzvah.[13]
In 1947, Gehry's family immigrated to the United States, settling in California. He got a job driving a delivery truck and studied at Los Angeles City College. He went on to graduate from the University of Southern California's School of Architecture. During that time, he became a member of Alpha Epsilon Pi.[14]
According to Gehry, "I was a truck driver in L.A., going to City College, and I tried radio announcing, which I wasn't very good at. I tried chemical engineering, which I wasn't very good at and didn't like, and then I remembered. You know, somehow I just started wracking my brain about, 'What do I like?' Where was I? What made me excited? And I remembered art, that I loved going to museums and I loved looking at paintings, loved listening to music. Those things came from my mother, who took me to concerts and museums. I remembered Grandma and the blocks, and just on a hunch, I tried some architecture classes."[15] Gehry graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Southern California in 1954.[16]
He then spent time away from architecture in numerous other jobs, including service in the United States Army.[11] In the fall of 1956, he moved his family to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he studied city planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He left before completing the program, disheartened and "underwhelmed".[17] His progressive ideas about socially responsible architecture were under-realized,[clarification needed] and the final straw occurred when he sat in on a discussion of one professor's "secret project in progress"—a palace that he was designing for right-wing Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista (1901–1973).[6]
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Gehry returned to Los Angeles to work for Victor Gruen Associates, with whom he had apprenticed while at USC. In 1957, at age 28, he was given the chance to design his first private residence with friend and old classmate Greg Walsh. Construction was done by another neighbor across the street from his wife's family, Charlie Sockler. Built in Idyllwild, California for his wife Anita's family neighbor Melvin David, the over 2,000 sq ft (190 m2) "David Cabin"[18] shows features that were to become synonymous with Gehry's later work, including beams protruding from the exterior sides, vertical-grain douglas fir detail, and exposed unfinished ceiling beams. It also shows strong Asian influences, stemming from his earliest inspirations, such as the Shosoin treasure house in Nara, Japan.
In 1961, Gehry moved to Paris, where he worked for architect Andre Remondet.[19] In 1962, he established a practice in Los Angeles that became Frank Gehry and Associates in 1967,[11] then Gehry Partners in 2001.[20] His earliest commissions were in Southern California, where he designed a number of innovative commercial structures such as Santa Monica Place (1980) and residential buildings such as the eccentric Norton House (1984) in Venice, California.[21]
Among these works, Gehry's most notable design may be the renovation of his own Santa Monica residence.[22] Originally built in 1920 and purchased by Gehry in 1977, it features a metallic exterior wrapped around the original building that leaves many of the original details visible.[23] Gehry still resides there.
Other of Gehry's buildings completed during the 1980s include the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium (1981) in San Pedro, and the California Aerospace Museum (1984) at the California Museum of Science and Industry in Los Angeles.
In 1989, Gehry received the Pritzker Architecture Prize, where the jury described him: "Always open to experimentation, he has as well a sureness and maturity that resists, in the same way that Picasso did, being bound either by critical acceptance or his successes. His buildings are juxtaposed collages of spaces and materials that make users appreciative of both the theatre and the back-stage, simultaneously revealed."[24]
Gehry continued to design other notable buildings in California, such as the Chiat/Day Building (1991) in Venice, in collaboration with Claes Oldenburg, which is well known for its massive sculpture of binoculars. He also began receiving larger national and international commissions, including his first European commission, the Vitra International Furniture Manufacturing Facility and Design Museum in Germany, completed in 1989. It was soon followed by other major commissions including the Frederick Weisman Museum of Art[25] (1993) in Minneapolis, Minnesota; the Cinémathèque Française[26](1994) in Paris, originally The American Center in Paris;[27] and the Dancing House[28] (1996) in Prague.
From 1994 to 1996 a couple buildings by Gehry for a Public housing project were realized in Goldstein, part of Frankfurt-Schwanheim (1994) In 1997, Gehry vaulted to a new level of international acclaim[2] when the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao opened in Bilbao, Spain. Hailed by The New Yorker as a "masterpiece of the 20th century", and by legendary architect Philip Johnson as "the greatest building of our time",[29] the museum became famous for its striking yet aesthetically pleasing design and its positive economic effect on the city.
Since then, Gehry has regularly won major commissions and established himself as one of the world's most notable architects. His best-received works include several concert halls for classical music. The boisterous, curvaceous Walt Disney Concert Hall (2003) in downtown Los Angeles is the centerpiece of the neighborhood's revitalization; the Los Angeles Times called it "the most effective answer to doubters, naysayers, and grumbling critics an American architect has ever produced".[30] Gehry also designed the open-air Jay Pritzker Pavilion (2004) in Chicago's Millennium Park;[31] and the understated New World Center (2011) in Miami Beach, which the LA Times called "a piece of architecture that dares you to underestimate it or write it off at first glance."[32]
His other notable works include academic buildings such as the Stata Center (2004)[33] at MIT, and the Peter B. Lewis Library (2008) at Princeton University;[34] museums such as the Museum of Pop Culture (2000) in Seattle, Washington;[35] commercial buildings such as the IAC Building (2007) in New York City;[36] and residential buildings, such as Gehry's first skyscraper, the Beekman Tower at 8 Spruce Street (2011)[37] in New York City.
Gehry's recent major international works include the Dr Chau Chak Wing Building at the University of Technology Sydney, completed in 2014,[38] and the Chau Chak Wing, with its 320,000 bricks in "sweeping lines", described as "10 out of 10" on a scale of difficulty.[39] An ongoing project is the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi on Saadiyat Island in the United Arab Emirates.[40] Other significant projects such as the Mirvish Towers in Toronto,[41] and a multi-decade renovation of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, are currently in the design stage. In October 2013, Gehry was appointed joint architect with Foster + Partners to design the High Street phase of the development of Battersea Power Station in London, Gehry's first project there.[42]
In recent years, some of Gehry's more prominent designs have failed to go forward. In addition to unrealized designs for the Corcoran Art Gallery expansion in Washington, DC, and a new Guggenheim museum near the South Street Seaport in New York City, Gehry was notoriously dropped by developer Bruce Ratner from the Pacific Park (Brooklyn) redevelopment project, and in 2014 as the designer of the World Trade Center Performing Arts Center in New York City.[43] Some stalled projects have recently shown progress: After many years and a dismissal, Gehry was recently reinstated as architect for the Grand Avenue Project in Los Angeles, and though his controversial[44][45][46] design of the National Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, DC has had numerous delays during the approval process with the United States Congress, it was finally approved in 2014 with a modified design.
In 2014, two significant, long-awaited museums designed by Gehry opened: the Biomuseo,[47] a biodiversity museum in Panama City, Panama; and the Fondation Louis Vuitton,[48][49][50] a modern art museum in the