Gehry, Frank Owen

Gehry, Frank Owen (1929- ), American architect, a leader in the later phases of the Postmodern movement in architecture. Gehry’s distinctive style emerged in the 1970s with his dramatic use of ordinary building materials, such as chain-link fencing, plywood, and corrugated metal, and continued in the 1990s and into the 21st century with his use of bold sculptural forms.

Born Ephraim Goldberg in Toronto, Canada, Gehry moved with his family to Los Angeles in 1947. There he studied architecture at the University of Southern California and worked for the architectural firm of Victor Gruen Associates. In 1956, Gehry studied urban planning at the Harvard School of Design and then returned to Los Angeles to work for Victor Gruen until 1960. After spending a year at the Paris office of French architect André Remondet, Gehry returned to Los Angeles where he opened his own practice in 1962.

Gehry’s earliest independent designs reveal the strong influence of Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier. By 1972, however, he had begun to use non-traditional geometric forms in simple buildings constructed of corrugated metal and other ordinary materials. For example, the Ron Davis house in Malibu, California (1970-1972), has a trapezoid-shaped roof. Gehry’s remodelling of his own house in Santa Monica, California, in 1979, became the focus of intense professional and journalistic attention. Gehry’s new rooms were formed by sharp angular roofs sided with corrugated metal and decorated with angled panels of chain-link fence. He designed numerous private residences, each exploring the discordant possibilities of angled, colliding planes, bright colours, and ordinary industrial materials.

While continuing to design private residences, Gehry received important public commissions. The first of these was a new campus (1981-1984) for the Loyola Law School, Los Angeles. His other important commissions include the California Aerospace Museum, Los Angeles (1982-1984), and the University of Toledo Art Museum (1990-1992), Toledo. In 1989, Gehry was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize, an international award recognizing professional excellence in architecture. In 1996, Gehry accepted the commission for the US$50 million Experience Music Project—also known as the Jimi Hendrix museum—in Seattle, Washington, and in 1999 he announced that he would design a new clinic for cancer patients in Dundee, waiving his fee as a memorial to a friend who had died of the disease.

Gehry’s most impressive projects to date have been commissioned by the Guggenheim Foundation, for whom he designed the Guggenheim Bilbao, a new museum in the industrial capital of the Basque Country, northern Spain, which opened in October 1997. The success of this futuristic edifice, which quickly became a symbol of the city's revival, marked a new high in Gehry's career, leading to plans for an even more ambitious new Guggenheim Museum to be located on the Lower Manhattan riverside in New York. Similar in design to the Guggenheim Bilbao, but twice as large, the Manhattan Guggenheim promised to be a cloud-like structure of shimmering titanium floating above the East River waterfront. The proposal for the building was approved by city authorities in 2000, but had to be abandoned in early 2003 because of a lack of adequate funds.

After a 15-year gap between being commissioned and opening, Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall became the new home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in 2003. The initial proposal for a new venue had come from the famous animator’s widow, who also loved flowers. In designing the building Gehry had been inspired by a bowl of roses, and so a floral theme runs through the shapely, stainless-steel clad building. The lengthy process involved revisions from a stone exterior to the metallic swathes of the new landmark, and was the result, in part, of consultation and modification to ensure that the acoustics inside should be as effective as possible.

Gehry’s partnership with the Guggenheim Foundation looked set to continue with the announcement in mid-2006 that he had been commissioned to design a new modern art museum for the foundation, to be located on an island off the coast of Abu Dhabi. See also American Art and Architecture.