FRANK OWEN GEHRY

ABOUT GEHRY Born: February 28, 1929 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada Birth Name: Frank Owen Goldberg.  Left Canada: Moved with his Polish/Russian parents to

southern California in 1947. Choose U.S. citizenship when he turned 21.

Education: Los Angeles City College University of Southern California. Architecture degree

completed in 1954 Harvard Graduate School of Design. Studied city

planning for one year. Personal Life: From 1952 to 1966, married to Anita

Snyder, with whom he has two daughters. Frank Goldberg's name change to Frank Gehry is generally attributed to his first wife's encouragement. Gehry divorced Snyder and married Berta Isabel Aguilera in 1975. They have two sons.

GEHRY’S STYLE

Gehry’s signature style couples his interest in materiality with expressive form. These buildings are usually composed of discrete volumes, sheped with freely flowing curvilinear roofs. Metal panels are often used as cladding, either stainless or titanium.

CAREER OF FRANK GEHRY Buildings: Frank Gehry established his Los Angeles

practice in 1962. Early in his career, he designed houses inspired by modern architects such as Richard Neutra and Frank Lloyd Wright. Gehry's admiration of Louis Kahn's work influenced his 1965 box-like design of the Danziger House, a studio/residence for designer Lou Danziger. With this work, Gehry began to be noticed as an architect. As his career expanded, Gehry became known for massive, iconoclastic projects that attracted attention and controversy.

Furniture: Gehry had success in the 1970s with his line of Easy Edges chairs made from bent laminated cardboard. By 1991, Gehry was using bent laminated maple to produce the Power Play Armchair. These designs are part of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) collection in NYC.

Memorials: The Eisenhower Memorial Commission choose Frank Gehry's design for the Washington, D.C. memorial honoring Dwight D. Eisenhower's command of the Allied Forces in Europe in World War II and as the 34th President of the United States.

Gehry Designs: Because architecture takes so long to become realized, Gehry often turns to the "quick fix" of designing smaller products, including jewelry, trophies, and even liquor bottles. From 2003 to 2006 Gehry's partnership with Tiffany & Co. released the exclusive jewelry collection that included the sterling silver Torque Ring. In 2004 the Canada-born Gehry designed a trophy for the international World Cup of Ice Hockey tournament. Also in 2004, the Polish side of Gehry designed a twisty vodka bottle for Wyborowa Exquisite.

TORQUE RING

Ice hockey tournament trophy

vodka bottle

Awards 1977: Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize in Architecture,

American Academy of Arts and Letters 1989: Pritzker Architecture Prize 1992: Wolf Prize in Art, the Wolf Foundation 1992: Praemium Imperiale Award, Japan Art Association 1994: Dorothy and Lillian Gish Award for lifetime

contribution to the arts 1998: National Medal of Arts 1998: Friedrich Kiesler Prize 1999: Lotos Medal of Merit, Lotos Club 1999: Gold Medal, American Institute of Architects 2000: Lifetime Achievement Award, Americans for the Arts More than 100 awards from the American Institute of

Architects Numerous honorary doctorates and honorary titles

Merriweather Post Pavilion, Columbia, Maryland

Merriweather Post Pavilion is an outdoor concert venue nestled within the 40 preserved acres known as Symphony Woods, conveniently located in the Baltimore/Washington corridor in Columbia, Maryland. Originally built to be the home of the National Symphony Orchestra, Merriweather was designed by the renowned architect Frank Gehry. The natural outdoor setting, the state-of-the-art sound system and large video screens make this amphitheatre a favorite for bands and fans.

  Gehry House (Gehry's private home)Concept: Frank Gehry said "... I loved the idea of leaving the

house intact ... I came up with the idea of building a new home about. We were told there were ghosts in the house ... I decided they were ghosts of cubism. Windows ... I wanted to make them look like they're dragging. At night, since the glass is tilted reflect light ... So when you are sitting at this table all these cars are passing by, you see the moon in the wrong place ... the moon is there but it reflects here ... and you think it's there and do not know where the hell are you ... “

Materials: It makes use of unconventional materials such as fences with trellis, glass inner wire and corrugated metal sheets, wood framing, corrugated steel, plywood and light wood frames.

Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

It is one of the major landmarks on campus, situated on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River at the east end of theWashington Avenue Bridge. The building presents two faces, depending on which side it is viewed from. From the campus side, it presents a brick facade that blends with the existing brick and sandstone buildings. On the opposite side, the museum is a playground of curving and angular brushed steel sheets. This side is an abstraction of a waterfall and a fish.

Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, SpainConcept: The design of the building follows the style of Frank Gehry. Inspired by the shapes and textures of a fish, it can be considered a sculpture, a work of art in itself.   The museum is essentially a shell that evokes the past industrial life and port of Bilbao. It consists of a series of interconnected volumes, some formed of orthogonal coated stone and others from a titanium skeleton covered by an organic skin. The connection between volumes is created by the glass skin. The museum is integrated into the city both by it height and the materials used. Seen from the river, the form resembles a boat, but seen from above it resembles a flower.

Structure: The building is built with load-bearing walls and ceilings, which have an internal structure of metal rods that form grids with triangles. The shapes of the museum could not have succeeded if it did not use load-bearing walls and ceilings. Catia(three dimensional design software) determined the number of bars required in each location, as well as the bars positions and orientations. In addition to this structure, the walls and ceilings have several insulating layers and an outer coating of titanium. Each piece is unique and exclusive to the place, determined by Catia.

Materials: Built of limestone, glass and titanium, the museum used 33,000 pieces of titanium half a millimeter thick, each with a unique form suited to its location. As these pieces are so thin, a perfect fit to the curves is necessary. The glass has a special treatment to let in the sun's light, but not its heat.

Maggies Centre, Dundee, Scotland

Structure: Stability for the remainder of the single-storey structure was achieved by tying the square hollow sections to the walls. These are all curved on plan, and are constructed in brickwork. This was for two reasons: firstly, some of the walls are to small radii which was not easily achievable in blockwork, and secondly there was a need to minimize control joints. To maintain uniformity of beam sizes, raking kickers were provided to minimize overhang deflections.The tower was designed as a separate structure, inherently stable in its own right.

Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles CA

Concept:The design represents the style of their creator, architect Frank Gehry, could be considered a work of art in itself. The extravagance of its forms seems to defy any rules of harmony and symmetry. The forms are external inspired by a boat with sails drenched.The building is essentially a shell which consists of a series of interconnected volumes, some form of orthogonal coated stone and other forms of organic and surfaces covered with a corrugated metal skin of steel. As a bridge between the different volumes are used glazed surfaces.The centerpiece of the interior of the building was designed to represent the hull of a boat. The idea of the architect was to design a room with an evocative sculptural forms of music, achieving an intimate connection between the orchestra and audience.

Structure:To calculate the complex shapes of the curves Walt Disney Concert Hall was used to Catia software. This allowed us to determine the structure and shape of each piece of steel that covers them.

Materials:To coat the outer surfaces were used corrugated 12,500 pieces of steel together on the outside. No two equal parts, as each piece takes a unique form of agreement to their location.

In areas outside of regular forms, the stone was used. Glass surfaces function as a liaison between the various volumes.

The interior of the auditorium and rooms, is lined with fir wood. This is the same type of wood that is used in the back of violoncelos and violas. Here was used in floors, walls and ceilings.

The Experience music project ,seattle washington CONCEPT : The project idea was inspired by the Fender Stratocaster

guitar that Hendrix used to destroy after each concert. Hence, the museum takes the form of electric guitar deconstructed that invites people to get into his spine to discover how the music was born. This results in a fragmented and volumetry undulating, as the body of an amoeba. From the top as the complex is a conglomeration of various pieces of brightly colored plants. One of the volumes is crossed by the Seattle monorail, which travels through the interior of the museum.

MaterialsStainless steel, aluminum and glass. The restaurant industry is completely covered in wood.

StructureThe roof is made up of 21 thousand panels of stainless steel with shades of purple, silver and gold, aluminum and painted red and blue. Each panel has a unique shape and size and is cut and warped to fit your specific location. For this, we used a laser guided by a French 3D, Catia, developed for aerospace engineering.

Fisher center for performing arts,Bard college,Annandale-on-Hudson,NY

The unusual shape of the Fisher Center grew out of the design for the two interior theaters. Undulating stainless steel canopies project over the box office and lobby. The canopies loosely drape over the sides of the theaters, creating two tall, sky-lit gathering areas on each side of the main lobby. The canopies also create a sculptural, collar-like shape that rests on the concrete and plaster walls of the two theaters.

MATERIAL : Frank Gehry chose brushed stainless steel for the exterior of the Fisher Center so that the sculptural building would reflect light and color from the pastural landscape.

Chiat/Day complex – Venice, California

The 1991 Venice, California, complex that Gehry built for advertising agency Chiat/Day commonly goes by the nickname Binoculars Building, thanks to the enormous pair of binoculars that mark the entrance to a parking garage—a collaboration between Gehry and artists Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Office structures resembling a ship’s prow and tree trunks flank the sculpture, which now welcomes 500 Google employees to work every day.

MIT Stanta Complex, Cambridge MA

Jay Pritzke Music Pavillion,Chicago,Illinoise

CONCEPT: The first design presented by Gehry had a much more austere , closer and inspired by the work of Mies van der Rohe and his influential works in the city as the Crown Hall or Lake Shore Drive apartments scenario . It seems that this time the Canadian architect wanted to break with his particular style in favor of a more rational , simple, minimalist and straightforward, but the client rejected the initial design indicating that Gehry had hired precisely because of its distinctive style and proven capacity to create architectural icons wherever he goes .The second proposal was inspired in large part on an earlier draft of Gehry made to reform the Hollywood Bown in Los Angeles, this project could not be performed as the initial design because the client at that time was much more conservative and ultimately chose just restore and update the existing structure instead of making a new one.

STRUCTURE N MATERIAL : As with most works of Gehry steel is undoubtedly the predominant material.The stage structure is formed based soldiers steel profiles to achieve each generate enough media for later stainless steel plates cover them giving the project its final finish.Moreover, the mesh covering the grassy esplanade is formed based stainless steel curved circular section that intersect creating a kind of giant network supported on a series of circular pillars placed at intervals on the long sides of the square tubes .

MARTa Museum ,Herford, GermanyIn the Words of Architect Gehry:"The way we work is we make models of the context that the buildings are going to be in. We pretty thoroughly document it because that gives me visual clues. For instance, in Herford I wandered around the streets, and I found that all the public buildings were brick and all the private buildings were plaster. Since this is a public building, I decided to make it brick, because that's the language of the town....I really spend time doing that, and if you go to Bilbao, you'll see that even though the building looks pretty exuberant, it is very carefully scaled to what's around it....I'm really proud of this one."

IAC Building , Newyork cityCONCEPT: The 10-story building is divided horizontally into two main levels of five floors each, with a narrowing on the sixth floor. It is divided into five vertical sections at lower levels and three on top, further enhancing the appearance of the sails of a ship. The sections appear twisted and joined together like the cells of a beehive. The skin of the cell units looks like candles on the skeleton of the building. Because of its shape, composition and color is also conceptually related to an iceberg.

MaterialsThe innovative building erected in this area of New York, used in construction reinforced concrete, steel and glass facade containing specially coated with ceramic particles embedded increasing energy efficiency.

Beekman Tower – 8 Spruce Street, New York City

Ripples run across the exterior of Manhattan’s Beekman Tower—dubbed 8 Spruce Street—as if a giant Super Ball had ricocheted through its interior. These pleats also function as bay windows for residents of the 76-story apartment building, which opened in 2011 and was commissioned by the development firm Forest City Ratner Co.

Biomuseo ,Museum of biodiversity,Panama

Olympic Fish Pavilion – Barcelona

The monumental golden steel-mesh fish sculpture Gehry created for the 1992 Olympic Village in Barcelona represented a technological breakthrough for the architect’s studio, which used three-dimensional aeronautical-design software to realize the concept.

Dancing House – PragueThe Prague offices of the Dutch insurance company Nationale-Nederlanden is also known as Fred and Ginger, thanks to its signature pair of towers, which seem to resemble a couple dancing. The 1996 building, comprising a cinched volume of metal mesh and glass and a concrete cylinder, was a collaboration between Gehry and local architect Vlado Miluníc.

Neuer Zollhof – Dusseldorf, Germany

Gehry’s Neuer Zollhof complex spurred the transformation of Dusseldorf, Germany’s waterfront into what is now called the Media Harbour in 1999. The popularity of the trio of office buildings yielded nearby commissions for other prominent architects like Fumihiko Maki and Murphy/Jahn, and earned the three towers a spot in the Germand edition of Monopoly.

DZ Bank building – BerlinIn Berlin, local code prohibits any building from outshining Brandenburg Gate. Commissioned by Frankfurt-based DZ Bank & Hines to design a branch across from the triumphal arch, Gehry created a sober limestone façade in response. A spectacular stainless-steel conference room—whose shape Gehry has likened to a horse’s head—is tucked within the atrium of the now-14-year-old office building.

Peter B. Lewis Building – Cleveland

Since its construction in 2002, the Peter B. Lewis Building has housed the Weatherhead School of Management at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University. The building exterior is classic Gehry, with ribbons of stainless steel unfurling from a brick base. The open interior is meant to encourage cross-disciplinary socializing.

Art Gallery of Ontario renovation – Toronto

Born in Toronto in 1929, Gehry celebrated his first Canadian project there, a renovation of the Art Gallery of Ontario, just a few months shy of turning 80. The 1918 museum had already undergone expansion three times prior to the Gehry commission. In response, the architect reorganized the jumbled plan and inserted a variety of energetic and subdued volumes for additional exhibition space.

Lou Ruvo Center – Las VegasThe Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health was conceived by Las Vegas entrepreneur Larry Ruvo, whose father died of complications related to Alzheimer’s disease. In 2009 the Cleveland Clinic agreed to run the multifaceted medical center and research facility, which features a steel-clad event space anchored to a clinic and office building via a latticework courtyard.

New World Center – MiamiGehry composed the New World Center in Miami Beach as an uncharacteristic boxlike volume. A six-story glass curtain wall allows the public outside to look into the atrium, which contains several distinctly shaped rehearsal rooms. These spaces have theatrical lighting and performances can be seen from an adjacent park. People in the park can also watch concerts on a 7,000-square-foot outdoor projection screen.

Cinematheque Francaise, Paris

Gehry’s building along Paris’s rue de Bercy opened in 1994 as the headquarters of the American Center of Paris, but closed a year and a half later. In 2005 it became home to the Cinémathèque Française, a theater and archive of film history.

Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris

Commissioned by LVMH chief Bernard Arnault and completed in 2014, Frank Gehry’s Fondation Louis Vuitton is set in Paris’s Bois de Boulogne park. The shiplike exterior includes 12 glass “sails,” which cover the concrete-clad gallery spaces.

Vitra Design Museum – Weil am Rhein, Germany

Since the early 1980s, furniture manufacturer Vitra has enlisted up-and-coming architects to create buildings for its campus in Weil am Rhein. Among them is Gehry's Vitra Design Museum, which opened in 1989. For the 8,000-square-foot venue, Gehry piled simple simple geometric forms against a cubic volume, unifying them all with white plaster surfaces and zinc roofing.

Loyola Law School – Los AngelesThe 1978 commission to expand Loyola Law School would propel Gehry into institutional work. He reimagined Loyola’s downtown Los Angeles site as a neotraditional campus, arranging a stylistically diverse set of buildings and surrounding them with a knoll-like landscape. During initial design work, a strategy was developed to allow the expansion of the campus in several phases, cor responding to the priorities of the school. The last phase of the design was completed in 2003.

BY: RANDA BID 4rth SEM