Frank Gehry stands as a pioneer of innovation in the contemporary architecture world, building a decades-long career on novel engineering of form and geometry to create aesthetically stunning buildings. His designs are structured around the way people live, work, and interact with the space. … (read more)

Frank Gehry stands as a pioneer of innovation in the contemporary architecture world, building a decades-long career on novel engineering of form and geometry to create aesthetically stunning buildings. His designs are structured around the way people live, work, and interact with the space.

Gehry spent his childhood in Toronto and moved to L.A. at the age of eighteen to pursue a B.A. in Architecture from the University of Southern California. After graduation, Gehry apprenticed with architects, Victor Gruen Associates and Pereira and Luckman. He subsequently studied City Planning at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and worked with André Rémondet in Paris. The year 1962 brought the establishment of his own firm, Frank O. Gehry and Associates, in Santa Monica. His is earlier work reflects the influence of Modernist architects like Frank Lloyd Wright and Harwell Hamilton Harris. Through his career, Gehry has been commissioned to design not only buildings but also exhibitions, furniture, jewelry, and beyond. His work departed from Modernism to align more with Deconstructivist style as his career progressed, challenging established norms for physical structures and discarding the tenet that form follows function.

In 1986, the Walker Art Center curated a retrospective exhibit of Gehry's work, entitled “The Architecture of Frank O. Gehry.” The exhibit traveled throughout North America from Minneapolis to Atlanta, Houston, Toronto and Los Angeles, ending at The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. He was awarded the prestigious Pritzker Prize in Architecture in 1989 for "significant contributions to humanity and built environment thorugh architecture." Since 1989 Gehry's firm has been pioneered the use of proprietary modeling software to create algorithmically engineered structures and unprecedented construction capabilities, including the seemingly impossible lines of the Dancing House building (inspired by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) in Prague, Czech Republic, the Walt Disney Concert House in Los Angeles, and the titanium-shelled Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

Frank Gehry on the architecture of the L.A. Walt Disney Concert Hall:

Watch a video on Gehry's design of the Art Gallery of Toronto:

(read less)