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Among these masterpieces are the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and the “Dancing House” in Prague. These and other buildings are widely considered modern icons.
Despite his advanced age, Gehry still designs complex, imaginative buildings.
His studio resembles a laboratory, where the Pritzker Prize–winning architect plays with shapes and materials and dissects meaning. His work is often read as an architectural response to Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction, which captivated intellectuals in the latter half of the 20th century. His buildings read like dynamic narratives, with carefully composed forms and turbulent gestures.
Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, photo – Piotr Musiol/unsplash.com
So who is this Frank Gehry—an explorer, a philosopher, or a storyteller?
Explorer
Frank Gehry’s architectural experiments began long before his career took off.
Frank Owen Gehry, born in 1929 in Toronto to an immigrant family of Polish Jews, later moved to the United States with his family. He considered his grandmother, who wasn’t an architect, his first teacher in architecture. Together they built odd structures from whatever materials they could find. Fortunately, Gehry’s grandfather owned a hardware store where they could gather all sorts of odds and ends for those experiments.
After earning his bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern California, he followed his instincts and eventually ended up at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. There he studied urban planning and learned to tame the unreal forms that emerged in his mind.
Philosopher
Gehry’s ideas felt constrained within the walls of universities and a few architectural firms in the U.S. and France, where he worked in the late 1950s.
This period was a search for philosophical grounding. The 20th century offered a dizzying variety of intellectual schools, and amid that colorful array, eager beginners could slip into eclectic or kitschy creations.
So Gehry faced a difficult path of self-definition. He navigated that trial with apparent ease, even though his first noteworthy project was fundamentally different from what he would create later.
The David Cabin, California, 1957, photo – Mmenorris/wikipedia.org
The David Cabin, built in California in 1957, reflected the young architect’s fascination with traditional Japanese culture. This stone-and-wood structure featured minimalist design and resembled a meditation retreat.
Meanwhile, postmodernism, which rapidly blossomed in art, design, and literature, also left its mark on architecture. By the 1960s, Gehry was ready to launch his own practice and had begun to define the direction of his creativity. Deconstructivism became the philosophical approach that fit the architect’s formalist ambitions. In 1962, he opened his firm, Frank O. Gehry & Associates, in Los Angeles (its successor, Gehry Partners, was founded in 2002). There the complex, whimsical, and bold forms that intrigued Gehry began to cohere into buildings.
Storyteller
Since then, he has amazed the world with stories embodied in fantastical buildings, furniture made from pressed cardboard, and bent wood. Each of these objects, despite their functionality, was seen as a work of art. One of Gehry’s first deconstructivist narratives came to life in the 1970s with the house he designed for his family in Santa Monica. Neighbors called that family nest ugly, while professionals regarded it as one of the iconic structures of its time.
Frank Gehry’s house in Santa Monica
Criticism didn’t shake Gehry’s confidence; he believed he was on the right track.
Indeed, each new story he crafted became a star. In 1989, Gehry received the Pritzker Prize in Architecture, after which prestigious awards and accolades followed almost every year.
Global fame did not make the architect arrogant or lead him to rest on his laurels. After receiving the highest honors, Gehry worked with even greater fervor, producing one dramatic architectural story after another. Few people on Earth have not seen at least one of these works by the master: the Marqués de Riscal hotel in Elciego, a building at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, the customs house in Düsseldorf, the Brain Health Center in Cleveland, the pedestrian bridge in Chicago, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, and the Museum of Music in Seattle.
Click on any image to enter the gallery of Frank Gehry’s whimsical buildings.
