Frank Gehry

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Frank Gehry bigraphy, stories - Pritzker Prize-winning architect

Frank Gehry : biography

February 28, 1929 –

Frank Owen Gehry, (born Frank Owen Goldberg; February 28, 1929), Globe and Mail, July 28, 2010 is a Canadian-American Pritzker Prize-winning architect based in Los Angeles.

His buildings, including his private residence, have become tourist attractions. His works are cited as being among the most important works of contemporary architecture in the 2010 World Architecture Survey, which led Vanity Fair to label him as "the most important architect of our age".

Gehry’s best-known works include the titanium-covered Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; MIT Ray and Maria Stata Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles; Experience Music Project in Seattle; Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis; Dancing House in Prague; the Vitra Design Museum and the museum MARTa Herford in Germany; the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto; the Cinémathèque française in Paris; and 8 Spruce Street in New York City. But it was his private residence in Santa Monica, California, that jump-started his career, lifting it from the status of "paper architecture"—a phenomenon that many famous architects have experienced in their formative decades through experimentation almost exclusively on paper before receiving their first major commission in later years. Gehry is also the designer of the future Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial.for the design, see: http://www.eisenhowermemorial.org/design.htm

Honorary doctorates

  • 1987 – California Institute of the Arts
  • 1987 – Rhode Island School of Design
  • 1989 – Otis College of Art and Design
  • 1989 – Technical University of Nova Scotia
  • 1993 – Occidental College
  • 1995 – Whittier College
  • 1997 – Southern California Institute of Architecture
  • 1998 – University of Toronto
  • 2000 – Harvard University
  • 2000 – University of Edinburgh
  • 2000 – University of Southern California
  • 2000 – Yale University
  • 2002 – City College of New York
  • 2004 – Art Institute of Chicago

Architectural style

Much of Gehry’s work falls within the style of Deconstructivism, which is often referred to as post-structuralist in nature for its ability to go beyond current modalities of structural definition. In architecture, its application tends to depart from modernism in its inherent criticism of culturally inherited givens such as societal goals and functional necessity. Because of this, unlike early modernist structures, Deconstructivist structures are not required to reflect specific social or universal ideas, such as speed or universality of form, and they do not reflect a belief that form follows function. Gehry’s own Santa Monica residence is a commonly cited example of deconstructivist architecture, as it was so drastically divorced from its original context, and in such a manner as to subvert its original spatial intention.

Gehry is sometimes associated with what is known as the "Los Angeles School" or the "Santa Monica School" of architecture. The appropriateness of this designation and the existence of such a school, however, remains controversial due to the lack of a unifying philosophy or theory. This designation stems from the Los Angeles area’s producing a group of the most influential postmodern architects, including such notable Gehry contemporaries as Eric Owen Moss and Pritzker Prize-winner Thom Mayne of Morphosis, as well as the famous schools of architecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (co‑founded by Mayne), UCLA, and USC where Gehry is a member of the Board of Directors.

Gehry’s style at times seems unfinished or even crude, but his work is consistent with 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. Gehry has been called "the apostle of chain-link fencing and corrugated metal siding".(B. Adams) However, a retrospective exhibit at New York’s Whitney Museum in 1988 revealed that he is also a sophisticated classical artist, who knows European art history and contemporary sculpture and painting.