FRANK GEHRY (February 28, 1929 – Present)

Canadian-American Architect

“The most important architect of our age” Vanity Fair

BRIEF BIOGRAPHY• “Frank Owen Goldberg” was his

real name.

• He was born on February 28,

1929 (age 81) in Toronto,

Ontario, Canada.

• Partly spends Sunday mornings

at his Grandfather's Hardware

Store where in he would spend

time drawing with his Father and his Mother which introduced him

to the world of Art.

• At the age of 17, he moved with his family to Los Angeles,

California. Where in, he got a job driving a delivery truck.

• Studied at Los Angeles City College and eventually graduated

from the University of Southern California’s School of

Architecture.

• After graduation from USC in 1954, he spent time away from the

field of Architecture in numerous other jobs. Such as, serving in

the United States Army.

• Later, He studied City Planning at Harvard Graduate School of

Design.

• In 1952, He Married Anita Snyder, which whom she told to

change Frank Goldberg to his current name which is Frank

Gehry. By 1966, He and Snyder got divorced.

• In 1975, He married Berta Isabel Aguilera, which was his current

wife.

• He has two daughters from his first marriage and two sons from

his second marriage.

• Since that time he has designed public and private buildings in

America, Japan and Europe.

• Having grown up in Canada, Gehry is a huge fan of hockey. He

began a hockey league in his office, FOG (which stands for Frank

Owen Gehry).

• In 2004, he designed the trophy for the World Cup of Hockey.

• Gehry holds dual citizenship in Canada and United States. He

Lives in Santa Monica, California and continues to practice out in

Los Angeles.

• Gehry’s work had earned him several of the most significant

awards in the Architectural field including Pritzker Architectural

Prize which was given at Tōdai-ji Buddhist Temple in 1989.

The Pritzker Prize serves to honor a living architect whose

built work demonstrates a 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.

• Some of his award were

- AIA Gold Medal,

- National Medal of Arts

- Order of Canada

ARCHITECTURAL STYLE

Much of Gehry's work falls within the style of Deconstructivism or

also known as “DeCon Architecture”

Deconstructivism, It is characterized by ideas of

fragmentation, an interest in manipulating ideas of a

structure's surface or skin, non-rectilinear shapes which

serve to distort and dislocate some of the elements of

architecture, such as structure and envelope.

It constricts 'rules' of modernism such as "form follows

function," "purity of form," and "truth to materials.

In spite of changes Gehry's design over the years, his approach

to a building as a sculpture retains.

Gehry has undergone a marked evolution from the plywood and

corrugated metal vernacular of his early works to the distorted but

pristine concrete of his work.

Most recently, Gehry has combined sensuous curving forms with

complex deconstructive massing, achieving significant new

results.

DESIGN PHILOSOPHY

“Every Building is by its very nature a sculpture. You can’t help it.

Sculpture is a 3-dimensional object and so is a building”

“I approach each building as a sculptural object, a spatial container, a

space with light and air, a response to context and appropriateness of

feeling and spirit to this container. This sculpture, the user begins his

baggage, his program, and interacts with it to accommodate his needs. If

I can’t do that I’ve failed.”

CELEBRITY STATUS

Gehry is considered a modern architectural icon and celebrity, a

major "Starchitect" — a neologism describing the phenomenon of

architects attaining a sort of celebrity status. The term usually refers

to architects known for dramatic, influential designs that often

achieve fame and notoriety through their spectacular effect. Other

notable celebrity architects include Jean Nouvel, Zaha Hadid, Thom

Mayne, Steven Holl, Rem Koolhaas, and Norman Foster. Gehry

came to the attention of the public in 1972 with his "Easy Edges"

cardboard furniture. He has appeared in Apple's black and white

"Think Different" pictorial ad campaign that associates offbeat but

revered figures with Apple's design philosophy.

He even once appeared as himself in The Simpsons in the episode

"The Seven-Beer Snitch", where he parodied himself by intimating

that his ideas are derived by looking at a crumpled paper ball. He

also voiced himself on the TV show Arthur, where he helped Arthur

and his friends design a new treehouse. Steve Sample, President of

the University of Southern California, told Gehry that, "...After

George Lucas, you are our most prominent graduate."

DOCUMENTARY

In 2005, veteran film director Sydney Pollack, a friend of Gehry's,

made the documentary Sketches of Frank Gehry with appreciative

comments by Philip Johnson, Ed Ruscha, Julian Schnabel, and

Dennis Hopper, and critical ones by Hal Foster supplementing

dialogue between Gehry and Pollack about their work in two

collaborative art forms with considerable commercial constraints and

photography of some buildings Gehry designed. It was released on

DVD by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment on August 22, 2006,

together with an interview of Sydney Pollack by fellow director

Alexander Payne and some audience questions following the

premiere of the film.

PROMINENT WORKS

THE GEHRY’s RESIDENCE

Location: Santa Monica

California

Date established: completed

1978

Construction System: Light

Wood Frame, Corrugated Metal,

Chain Link

Gehry and his wife bought this existing house in Santa

Monica, California. Gehry however, knew that he had

something to be done to the house before they moved in.

Soon, He transformed it into a symbol of Deconstructivism.

The Construction:

- The Original house was a small, 2 storey cottage covered by

shingle

- By wrapping the perimeter of the lot with construction

materials and leaving the original house as it was, Gehry

created a new space between the lot lines and the old house

- Low aqua concrete walls were used to build new spaces as

kitchen and dining

- Wooden plank walls were build in the backyard

- A new roof was added to the additional spaces created.

- Chain link fencing was used to enclose the floor added

- Glass cubes were placed over the kitchen and dining to

throw in light

GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM

Location: Bilbao, Basque

Country, Spain

Date established:

October 18, 1997

Construction System: Steel

Frame, Titanium sheathing

 The Guggenheim is one of several museums belonging to

the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. The museum

features permanent and visiting exhibits of works by Spanish

and international artists.

One of the most admired works of contemporary

architecture, the building has been hailed as a "signal

moment in the architectural culture" because it represents

"one of those rare moments when critics, academics, and

the general public were all completely united about

something."

Sited as it is in a port town, it is intended to resemble a ship.

Its brilliantly reflective titanium panels resemble fish scales,

echoing the other organic life (and, in particular, fish-like) forms

that recur commonly in Gehry's designs, as well as the river

Nervión upon which the museum sits.

VITRA DESIGN MUSEUM

Location: Weil am Rhein,

Germany

Date established: 1989

Construction System: White

plaster and Titanium-zinc alloy

The museum building, an architectural attraction in its own

right, was Frank O. Gehry's first building in Europe, realised in

cooperation with the Lörrach architect Günter Pfeifer. Together

with the museum, which was originally just designed to house

Rolf Fehlbaum's private collection, Gehry also built a more

functional-looking production hall and a gatehouse for the

close-by Vitra factory.

Although Gehry used his trademark sculptural deconstructivist

style for the museum building, he did not opt for his usual mix

of materials, but limited himself to white plaster and a titanium-

zinc alloy. For the first time, he allowed curved forms to break

up his more usual angular shapes. The sloping white forms

appear to echo the Notre Dame du Haut chapel by Le

Corbusier in Ronchamp, France, not far from Weil.

Architecture critic Paul Heyer described the general impression

on the visitor as

“... a continuous changing swirl of white forms on the exterior,

each seemingly without apparent relationship to the other, with

its interiors a dynamically powerful interplay, in turn directly

expressive of the exterior convolutions. As a totality it resolves

itself into an entwined coherent display...”

WEISMAN ART MUSEUM

Location: East Bank, University

of Minnesota, Minneapolis

Date established: completed by

Frank Gehry around 1993

Construction System:

Fabricated Stainless Steel skin

and brick

Located on the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus in

Minneapolis has been a teaching museum for the university since

1934. It has an overlook view of the Mississippi River at the east

end of the Washington Avenue Bridge.

The museum is named for Frederick R. Weisman, a Minneapolis

native who became well known as an art collector in Los Angeles.

He died in 1994. There is another Frederick R. Weisman Museum

of Art on the campus of Pepperdine University in Malibu,

California.

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.

DANCING HOUSE

Location: Prague, Czech Republic

Date established: Completed in 1996

Construction System: Concrete panels,

wood with unique forms

originally occupied by a house inthe Neo-renaissance style

from the end of the 19th century. That house was destroyed

during bombing in 1945, its remains finally removed in 1960. The

neighboring house (with a small globe on the roof) was co-owned

by Czech ex-president Vaclav Havel, who lived there from his

childhood untilthe mid-1990s.

He ordered the first architectural study from Vlado Milunic

(who has been involved in re-building Havel's appartment

in the neighboring house). 

Afterwards the Dutch bank ING agreed to build a house there,

and asked Milunic to invite a world-renowned architect.

Milunic first asked Jean Nouvel, who rejected the invitation

because of the small size of the site(491 square meters); he then

asked Frank Gehry, who and he accepted the challenge.

Gehry had an almost unlimited budget, because ING wanted to

create an icon in Prague. The construction started in 1994 and

the housewas finished in 1996.

It reflects a woman and man (Ginger Rogers and Fred Astair)

dancing together.

In 2005 the Czech National Bank issued a gold coin with the motif

of the Dancing House, as the final coin of the series "10 Centuries

of Architecture."

WALT DISNEY CONCERT HALL

Location : 111

South Grand Avenue, Los

Angeles, California

Date established:

completed in 1993

Construction System:

Fabricated Stainless Steel

skin

The Frank Gehry-designed building opened on October 23,

2003. Both the architecture by Frank Gehry and

the acoustics of the concert hall (designed by Yasuhisa

Toyota) were praised in contrast to its predecessor,

the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

As construction finished in the spring of 2003, the

Philharmonic postponed its grand opening until the fall and

used the summer to let the orchestra and Master Chorale

adjust to the new hall. Performers and critics agree that this

extra time taken was well worth it by the time the hall opened

to the public.

The walls and ceiling of the hall are finished with Douglas-

fir while the floor is finished with oak.

REFLECTION PROBLEMS

- The reflective qualities of the surface were amplified by the

concave sections of the Founders Room walls. Some

residents of the neighboring condominiums suffered glare

caused by sunlight that was reflected off these surfaces and

concentrated in a manner similar to a parabolic mirror. So,

the neighbouring buildings complaint about that ,  the owners

asked Gehry Partners to come up with a solution. Their

response was a computer analysis of the building's surfaces

identifying the offending panels. In 2005 these were dulled

by lightly sanding the panels to eliminate unwanted glare.

IAC BUILDING

Location : Chelsea,

Manhattan, New York City

Date established: completed in

2007

Construction System: Curtain

Wall Façade

InterActiveCorp's headquarters, it houses the offices of IAC

corporation. Reminiscent of several Gehry designs, it

appears at a gross level to consist of two major levels: A

large base of twisted tower-sections packed together like the

cells of a bee hive, with a second bundle of lesser diameter

sitting on top of the first.

The cell units have the appearance of sails skinned over the

skeleton of the building. The overall impression is of two very

tall stories, which belies its actual 10-story structure.

LOU RUVO CENTER FOR BRAIN HEALTH

Location: Las Vegas,

Nevada, USA

Date established: May 21,

2010

Construction System:

Fabricated Stainless Steel skin

It was Frank Gehry’s Latest Project which cost around

$100 million

For years, many felt Gehry’s signature style would

be a perfect match for Vegas’ decked out

architecture, yet the starchitect has continually

declined offers.  However, this

request to design a research facilitiy was quite

different; Gehry agreed to design the center only if

Huntington was added to the list of diseases the

new center would study and treat (Gehry’s good

friend Milton Wexler milton wexler, saw a wife and

three sisters-in-law succumb to huntington's disease. )

 Comprises two wings connected by an open courtyard: 

a dedicated research center, located at the northern end

of the building, and a ‘for-hire’ 

event space, dubbed the life activity center, located at the

southern end. the four storey 

clinic to the north, which holds medical offices, patient

rooms and  the research space, 

is relatively straightforward consisting of  a collection of

stacked boxes in white stucco and glass.

SOURCES:

Internet:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_gehry

http://www.matthewstraubdesign.com/483e_web/project04/

Franko/bio.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guggenheim_Museum_Bilbao

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney_Concert_Hall

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weisman_Art_Museum

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_House

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAC_Building

http://www.archdaily.com/67321/gehry-residence-frank-gehry/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitra_Design_Museum

http://www.archdaily.com/65609/center-for-brain-health/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Lou_Ruvo_Center_for_Brain_Health

Video:

SKETCHES OF FRANK GEHRY, SYDNEY POLLACK, Sony

Pictures Classic