Frank Gehry
Gehry began with cheap materials such as corrugated metal and chain-link fencing in his own house in Santa Monica. With the help of computers he developed the free forms of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.
Frank Gehry was born Frank Owen Goldberg in 1929 in Toronto, Canada, into a Jewish family. As a child he built cities out of scraps of wood with his grandmother, a story he often returned to. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1947, where he worked as a truck driver and studied at the University of Southern California, graduating in architecture in 1954. He also studied city planning briefly at Harvard. After working for Victor Gruen, known for his shopping centres, he opened his own office in Los Angeles in 1962. He spent much time with artists in California, and their work with everyday materials and free forms shaped his development more than other architects did.
Gehry’s own house in Santa Monica, remodelled in 1977–1978, wrapped an ordinary house in corrugated metal, chain-link fencing and plywood at skewed angles and became a manifesto for a new, unfinished aesthetic. He also designed furniture in corrugated cardboard. The Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein and the Dancing House in Prague showed his dynamic forms, and with the software CATIA, developed for the aerospace industry, his office was able to calculate and build complex curves. The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, opened in 1997 and clad in titanium, became a worldwide sensation. The Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris followed. His formal language is associated with deconstructivism.
Gehry received the Pritzker Prize in 1989 and is regarded as one of the best-known architects of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The success of the Guggenheim Museum gave rise to the term “Bilbao effect”, the idea that a spectacular building can transform a city’s economy and reputation, and many cities, including in the Nordic countries, have since tried to build landmarks with the same aim. Critics have argued that his buildings are sometimes more sculpture than architecture and that they are expensive to build. At the same time his work with digital tools has transformed the entire construction industry and shown how computers can be used to design and fabricate complex forms.