Frank Gehry is considered one of the most important and influential architects of the modern era known for his expressive and sculptural designs that feature bold forms and unconventional materials. His most iconic buildings include the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, which have become renowned for their undulating shapes and innovative use of materials like titanium. Through breakthroughs in computer technology, Gehry has pushed the boundaries of architectural form to create monumental structures with complex shapes and curves.

1. Frank Gehry: Builder With No Boundaries
By Peter Kupfer
When it comes to originality, few architects can rival Frank Gehry. The Canadian-
born architect is famous the world over for his audacious, inventive designs, which
are distinguished by their bold, sculptural forms and unconventional materials.
Gehry’s two most celebrated buildings are the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain
and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. With their undulating shapes and
shimmering titanium surfaces, these structures have become icons of 20th century
architecture.
Gehry is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential architects
working today. Vanity Fair magazine went even further, anointing him "the most
important architect of our age." His work appears in a multitude of countries,
including Czech Republic, England, France, Germany, Japan, Scotland, Spain,
Switzerland, and the United States. Ironically, it wasn’t until 2008 that he completed
his first project in his native country –– rebuilding a wing of the Art Museum of
Ontario.
A short, owlish man who looks younger than his 80-plus years, Gehry speaks quietly
when left to his own devices and has a tendency to meander, never quite finishing
one train of thought before lurching into the next.
He has described his work as “liquid architecture” because of its flowing, organic
quality and the way his buildings interact with their environment. “It's like jazz —
you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something,
they make something,” he remarked. “It's a way of trying to understand the city, and
what might happen in the city.”
Frank Owen Gehry was born in 1929 in Toronto, the son of Polish Jewish
immigrants. His original family name was Goldberg, but he changed it to Gehry
because of concerns about anti-Semitism.
Frank was a creative child who would entertain himself for hours building
imaginary homes and futuristic cities out of scraps of wood found in his
grandfather's hardware store. His use of corrugated steel, chain link fencing,
unpainted plywood and other utilitarian or "everyday" materials in his architectural
work was partly inspired by spending Saturday mornings at his grandfather's shop.
"The creative genes were there," Gehry recalled. "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."

2. In 1947, his family immigrated to the United States, settling in Los Angeles. Frank
got a job driving a delivery truck and enrolled in classes at Los Angeles City College,
where he studied several fields before settling on architecture.
He tried radio announcing and chemical engineering, neither of which he was very
good at. “I just started wracking my brain about, 'What do I like?' Where was I?
What made me excited?” he explained. “And I remembered art, that I loved going to
museums and I loved looking at paintings, loved listening to music.”
On a hunch, Gehry enrolled in some architecture classes, and he soon realized that
he had found his niche. He later enrolled at the University of Southern California,
graduating at the top of his class with a Bachelor of Architecture degree.
After college, Gehry got a job at a prominent Los Angeles architectural firm, but his
work was soon interrupted by compulsory military service. After serving for a year
in the Army, he entered the prestigious Harvard Graduate School of Design, but he
left before completing the program, feeling disheartened and underwhelmed. He
believed strongly in socially responsible architecture but felt the school didn’t share
his philosophy. The final straw came when one of his professors revealed that he
was working on a "secret project" to design a palace for Cuban dictator Fulgencio
Batista.
Gehry returned to California in 1962 and opened a small office in Santa Monica,
outside Los Angeles, where he focused on furniture design and residential
architecture. He had his first brush with national attention when he launched a
successful line of furniture called "Easy Edges," which was crafted out of layers of
corrugated cardboard.
Like many of his contemporaries, Gehry reacted against the cold, often formulaic
Modernist buildings sprouting up in Los Angeles and other American cities in the
1960s. Instead, he began to explore the expressive potential of quirky forms and
humble materials.
His early experiments are perhaps best embodied by the “renovations” he made to
his own home in Santa Monica. He essentially stripped the two-story house down to
its frame and wrapped it in chain-link fencing, corrugated aluminum, and unfinished
plywood. The project transformed what Gehry called "a dumb little house with
charm" into a showplace for a radically new style of domestic building. His bold,
avant-garde design scandalized his neighbors, but it caught the attention of the
architectural world.
After his daring home “remodel,” commissions began pouring in to build other
houses in Southern California. As his practice expanded, the scope of his work grew
to include exhibition design, libraries, office buildings, restaurants, schools, and
visual and performing arts venues.

3. By the mid-1980s, Gehry’s began to receive commissions for monumental projects
around the world, including the Vitra Design Museum in Germany and the American
Center in Paris. His international reputation was confirmed in 1989 when he
received the Pritzker Prize, the world's most prestigious architecture award, which
is bestowed each year to a living architect whose work demonstrates a combination
of “talent, vision and commitment” and which has produced “consistent and
significant contributions to humanity and the built environment.” His first
monumental work in the United States, the Weisman Art Museum at the University
of Minnesota in Minneapolis, was completed in 1990.
Gehry’s reputation soared to even greater heights in the late 1990s with the opening
of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which combined curvaceous titanium
forms with interconnecting limestone masses to create a spectacular feat of
sculptural engineering. The monumental structure was hailed by New Yorker
magazine as a "masterpiece of the twentieth century," and legendary architect Philip
Johnson called it "the greatest building of our time.”
The Guggenheim was also a mammoth hit with the public, attracting hundreds of
thousands of visitors from around the world and providing a major boost to the
Basque region’s economy. In the first 12 months after the museum was opened, an
estimated $160 million were added to the local economy.
After the mammoth success of Gehry's design, critics began referring to the
economic and cultural revitalization of cities through iconic, innovative architecture
as the "Bilbao effect." In recent years many attempts have been made to duplicate
this phenomenon in other cities by constructing large-scale, eye-catching cultural
buildings, but none have succeeded like the Guggenheim.
Gehry first envisioned the museum’s form, like most of his works, through a simple
freestyle sketch, but breakthroughs in computer software enabled him to build in
increasingly eccentric shapes, sweeping irregular curves that were the antithesis of
the severely rectilinear International Style then in vogue.
He further explored this approach in the Experience Music Project in Seattle, a
nonprofit museum dedicated to contemporary culture founded by Microsoft co-
founder Paul Allen. The structure, featuring a steel frame wrapped in colorful sheet
metal, was modeled on the shape of a smashed electric guitar. As with the
Guggenheim, Gehry employed cutting-edge computer technology to uncover the
engineering solutions that could bring his sculptural sketches to life.
Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles was originally designed in 1989, but
funding shortages and political infighting delayed construction of the project for
many years. When it finally opened in 2003 it was lauded by critics and became an
instant landmark in the sprawling city. Not only was the hall acclaimed for its
striking appearance, but it thrilled musicians and listeners alike with its acoustically
brilliant interior. The Los Angeles Times called it "the most effective answer to

4. doubters, naysayers, and grumbling critics an American architect has ever
produced."
Gehry approaches each new project as “a sculptural object, a spatial container, a
space with light and air.” Many of his works possess the “deconstructed” quality of
his Santa Monica home in which familiar geometric volumes are reassembled into
complex new forms. His use of unusual materials, such as corrugated metal and raw
plywood, lends some of his designs an unfinished or even crude appearance, but this
aesthetic has also made him one of the most distinctive and easily recognizable
architects in the world.
His buildings display a penchant for whimsy and playfulness previously unknown in
serious architecture. His fanciful design for the West Coast headquarters of the Chiat
Day advertising firm, for example, features an entrance in the form of a pair of giant
binoculars designed by his friend, sculptor Claes Oldenburg. His playful side
reappeared in the "Dancing House" in the Czech capital, Prague, which is comprised
of two undulating cylinders on a corner facing the river Vltava. The Czechs have
nicknamed the building "Fred and Ginger," after the American dancers Fred Astaire
and Ginger Rogers.
Critical opinion is divided over Gehry’s radical designs. Traditional modernists have
derided his work as arbitrary, gratuitously eccentric, and primarily in the service of
corporate branding. Others have complained that his buildings waste structural
resources by creating functionless forms, do not seem to belong in their
surroundings, and are apparently designed without accounting for the local climate.
But others, like Phillip Johnson, have lavished praise on Gehry for the bold
originality of his designs and his ingenuous use of innovative technology and
unconventional materials.
Gehry's style was strongly influenced by the California "funk" art movement in the
1960s and early 1970s, which featured the use of inexpensive found objects and
non-traditional media such as clay to make serious art. He has been called "the
apostle of chain-link fencing and corrugated metal siding."
In addition to the Pritzker Prize, Gehry has received many other prestigious awards,
including the National Medal of the Arts, the American Institute of Architects Gold
Medal, and the Woodrow Wilson Award for public service. In 2006, California
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger inducted him into the California Hall of Fame.
Gehry is sometimes referred to as a "starchitect" because of his celebrity status, but
that’s a label he firmly rejects. "I am not a 'star-chitect, I am an ar-chitect,” he told a
British newspaper. “There are people who design buildings that are not technically
and financially good, and there are those who do. Two categories, simple."

5. One thing is indisputable – Gehry’s work has made architecture popular and talked-
about in a manner not seen in the United States since the days of Frank Lloyd
Wright.
Despite his complex and ambitious designs, he is also known for his professionalism
and adherence to budgets. A notable exception was Disney Concert Hall, which
exceeded the budget by over $170 million and resulted in a costly lawsuit.
Over the years, Gehry has lent his imaginative designs to a number of products
outside the field of architecture, including a vodka bottle, a wristwatch, jewelry,
sculptures, household items, and even a hockey trophy (like many Canadians, he is
an avid hockey fan).
Gehry has played himself on television programs, including The Simpsons, and has
appeared in advertisements for Apple. In 2005, director Sydney Pollack made a
documentary film, Sketches of Frank Gehry, focusing on the architect's work and
legacy. In recent years, he has taught architecture at several leading universities,
including Columbia, Yale, Harvard, and his alma mater, USC.
His recent and ongoing projects include a branch of the Guggenheim Museum in Abu
Dhabi, the New World Center concert hall in Miami Beach, a new Facebook campus
in Menlo Park, California, a building on the campus of the University of Technology,
in Sydney, Australia (with a facade constructed of 320,000 hand-placed bricks and
glass slabs that has been described as resembling a crumpled paper bag), and a
memorial to President Dwight D. Eisenhower in Washington, D.C., which is slated to
be constructed at the foot of Capitol Hill. In 2011, Gehry returned to his roots as a
residential designer, unveiling his first skyscraper, 8 Spruce Street in New York City.
One of his most ambitious projects is a mammoth redesign of Grand Street in Los
Angeles, the thoroughfare running from City Hall to Disney Hall. When it’s
completed, a wide swath of downtown Los Angeles will bear the indelible stamp of
its adopted son, Frank Gehry, and his restless imagination.