"Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness"
Early Life
Frank Gehry was born Frank Owen Goldberg on February 28,
1929, in Toronto, Canada. Frank was creative at a young age, building imaginary
homes and cities from items found in his grandfather's hardware store. This
interest in unconventional building materials would come to characterize
Gehry's architectural work.
Gehry relocated to Los Angeles in 1949, holding a variety of
jobs while attending college. He would eventually graduate from the University
of Southern California's School of Architecture. It was during his time that he
changed his Goldberg surname to Gehry, in an effort to preclude anti-Semitism.
In 1956, Gehry moved to Massachusetts with his wife, Anita
Snyder, to enroll at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He later dropped
out of Harvard and divorced his wife, with whom he had two daughters. In 1975, Gehry
married Berta Isabel Aguilera, and had two more children.
Architectural Career
After leaving Harvard, Frank Gehry returned to California,
making a name for himself with the launch of his "Easy Edges"
cardboard furniture line. The Easy Edges pieces, crafted from layers of corrugated
cardboard, sold between 1969 and 1973.
Still primarily interested in building rather than furniture
design, Gehry remodeled a home for his family in Santa Monica. The remodel
involved surrounding the existing bungalow with corrugated steel and chain-link
fence, effectively splitting the house open with an angled skylight.
Gehry's avant-garde design caught the attention of the
architectural world, ultimately launching his career to new heights. He began
designing homes in Southern California on a regular basis in the 1980s.
Santa Monica House
The Santa Monica home, like much of Gehry's work, is an
example of the Deconstructivist style—a post-structuralist aesthetic that
challenges accepted design paradigms of architecture while breaking with the
modernist ideal of form following function. Gehry was one of a number of
contemporary architects pursuing this style, which, for years, has been
particularly visible in California.
In 1977, Frank and Berta Gehry bought a pink bungalow that
was originally built in 1920. Gehry wanted to explore with the materials he was
already using — metal, plywood, chain link fencing, and wood framing.
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| Frank Gehry and his son, Alejandro, in front of their home in Santa Monica |
As of 2016, the house is still owned by Frank Gehry. Though
he has nearly finished construction of another residence overlooking Rustic
Canyon, he plans to keep the Santa Monica house in the family
Work
As Gehry
achieved celebrity status, his work took on a grander scale. His high-concept
buildings, including the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, the
Dancing House in Prague and the Guggenheim Museum building in Bilbao, Spain,
have become tourist attractions in their own right.
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| The Walt Disney Concert Hall at 111 South Grand Avenue in Downtown of Los Angeles, California. |
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| The Dancing House, or Fred and Ginger, is the nickname given to the Nationale-Nederlanden building on the Rašínovo nábřeží in Prague, Czech Republic. |
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| 8 Spruce Street, originally known as Beekman Tower |
Gehry is known for his choice of unusual materials as well as
his architectural philosophy. His selection of materials such as corrugated
metal lends some of Gehry's designs an unfinished or even crude aesthetic. This
consistent aesthetic has made Gehry one of the most distinctive and easily
recognizable designers of the recent past. Critics of Gehry’s work have
charged, however, that his designs are not thoughtful of contextual concerns
and frequently do not make the best use of valuable urban space.
Later Life and Awards
In recent years, Gehry has served as a professor of
architecture at Columbia University, Yale and the University of Southern
California. He has also served as a board member at USC's School of
Architecture, his alma mater.
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.
Gehry's recent and ongoing projects include a new Guggenheim
facility in Abu Dhabi, the new Facebook headquarters in California and a
memorial to Dwight D. Eisenhower in Washington, D.C., slated to be constructed
at the foot of Capitol Hill.
Among his
many official honors, Gehry was the 1989 recipient of the prestigious Pritzker
Prize—an annual award honoring a living architect "whose built work
demonstrates combination of those qualities of talent, vision and commitment,
which has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the
built environment through the art of architecture."
Gehry
continues to be one of the world's leading contemporary architects, and due to
his celebrity status, he has been referred to as a "starchitect"—a
label that Gehry rejects. In a 2009 interview with the British newspaper The
Independent, he explained why he dislikes the term: "I am not a
'star-chitect', I am an ar-chitect," he said. "There are people who
design buildings that are not technically and financially good, and there are
those who do. Two categories, simple."
In 2016,
Gehry was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama.
Sources
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