FRANK GEHRY

Liquid architecture. It's like jazzyou improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you
make something, they make something. And I think it's a way offor me, it's a way of trying to
understand the city, and what might happen in the city. Frank Gehry.

SUBMITTED BY

SHUBHAM JUMDE
SECTION B B.ARCHITECTURE SEMESTER 6 A51204013072

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
SYNOPSIS
EARLY LIFE
ARCHITECTURAL CAREER
LATER LIFE
FACTS
NOTABLE WORKS
REFERENCES

FIGURE -1 CONCEPT OF KING STREET THEATER

DISTRICT, TORONTO

INTRODUCTION
Frank Gehry is a Canadian-American
architect known for postmodern
designs, including the Walt Disney
Concert Hall and the Guggenheim
Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

SYNOPSIS
Frank Gehry was born Frank Owen
Goldberg in Toronto, Canada on
February 28, 1929. He studied at the
University of Southern California and
Harvard University. Gehry, based in
Los Angeles since the 1960s, is
FIGURE -2 CONCEPT OF TURNING
TORSO, SWEDEN

among
the
most
acclaimed
architects of the 20th century, and is
known for his use of bold,
postmodern shapes and unusual
fabrications. Gehry's most famous
designs include the Walt Disney
Concert Hall in Lost Angeles and the
Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao,
Spain.

EARLY LIFE
Frank Gehry was born Frank Owen
Goldberg on February 28, 1929, in

FIGURE -3 CONCEPT OF GUGGENHEIM

MUSEUM, BILBAO

Toronto, Canada. The Goldberg

family was Polish and Jewish. Frank
was creative at a young age,
building imaginary homes and cities
from items found in his grandfather's
hardware store. This interest in
unconventional building materials
would come to characterize Gehry's
architectural work.
Gehry relocated to Los Angeles in
1949, holding a variety of jobs while
attending
college.
He
would
eventually
graduate
from
the
University of Southern California's
School of Architecture. It was during
his time that he changed his
Goldberg surname to Gehry, in an
effort to preclude anti-Semitism. In
1956,
Gehry
moved
to
Massachusetts with his wife, Anita
Snyder, to enroll at the Harvard
Graduate School of Design. He later
dropped out of Harvard and
divorced his wife, with whom he had
two daughters. In 1975, Gehry

married Berta Isabel Aguilera, and

had two more children.

ARCHITECTURAL CAREER
After leaving Harvard, Frank Gehry
returned to California, making a
name for himself with the launch of
his "Easy Edges" cardboard furniture
line. The Easy Edges pieces, crafted
from layers of corrugated cardboard
sold between 1969 and 1973.
Still primarily interested in building
rather than furniture design, Gehry
remodeled a home for his family in
Santa Monica with the money
earned from Easy Edges. The
remodel involved surrounding the
existing bungalow with corrugated
steel
and
chain-link
fence,
effectively splitting the house open
with an angled skylight. Gehry's
avant-garde design caught the
attention of the architectural world,
ultimately launching his career to
new heights. He began designing
homes in Southern California on a
regular basis in the 1980s.

FIGURE -4 CONCEPT OF WEISMAN MUSEUM,

MINNEAPOLIS

the Walt Disney Concert Hall in

downtown Los Angeles, the Dancing
House
in
Prague
and
the
Guggenheim Museum building in
Bilbao, Spain, have become tourist
attractions in their own right. In 2011,
Gehry returned to his roots as a
residential designer, unveiling his first
skyscraper, 8 Spruce Street in New
York City, and the Opus Hong Kong
tower in China.
The Santa Monica home, like much
of Gehry's work, is an example of the
Deconstructivist
stylea
poststructuralist aesthetic that challenges
accepted design paradigms of
architecture while breaking with the
modernist ideal of form following
function. Gehry was one of a
number of contemporary architects
pursuing this style, which, for years,
has been particularly visible in
California.

As Gehry achieved celebrity status,

his work took on a grander scale. His
high-concept buildings, including
FIGURE -5 ORGANIC FORMS WITH WIDE ARRAY
OF MATERIALS

Gehry is known for his choice of

unusual materials as well as his
architectural
philosophy.
His
selection of materials such as
corrugated metal lends some of
Gehry's designs an unfinished or
even crude aesthetic. This consistent
aesthetic has made Gehry one of
the most distinctive and easily
recognizable designers of the recent
past. Critics of Gehrys work have
charged, however, that his designs
are not thoughtful of contextual
concerns and frequently do not
make the best use of valuable urban
space.
Frank Gehry is known for his
professionalism and adherence to
budgets, despite his complex and
ambitious
designs.
A
notable
exception
to
this
successful
budgeting was the Walt Disney
Concert
Hall
project,
which
exceeded the budget by over a
hundred and seventy million dollars
and resulted in a costly lawsuit.

LATER LIFE
In recent years, Gehry has served as
a professor of architecture at
Columbia University, Yale and the
University of Southern California. He
has also served as a board member
at USC's School of Architecture, his
alma mater. Among his many official
honors, Gehry was the 1989 recipient
of the prestigious Pritzker Prizean
annual award honoring a living
architect
"whose
built
work
demonstrates 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."

Gehry has played himself on

television programs, including The
Simpsons, and has appeared in
advertisements for Apple. In 2005,
director Sydney Pollack made a
documentary film, Sketches of Frank
Gehry, focusing on the architect's
work and legacy.

FIGURE -6 QUANZHOU MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART CONCEPT DESIGN

Gehry's recent and ongoing projects

include a new Guggenheim facility
in Abu Dhabi, the new Facebook
headquarters in California and a
memorial to Dwight D. Eisenhower in
Washington, D.C., slated to be
constructed at the foot of Capitol
Hill. While plans were approved for
the $142 million Eisenhower memorial
in 2010, and construction was set to

family
members
remained
dissatisfied
with
the
level
of
sophistication
of
the
planned
monument, also citing new concerns
relating to costs and workmanship.
Exasperating
the
Eisenhower
memorial controversy, in March
2013, U.S. Representative Rob Bishop
introduced a bill that would initiate a

begin in
new design
FIGURE -7 FACEBOOK CAMPUS DESIGN, MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA
2012,
competitio
the project has stalled in recent
n for the project and eliminate a
months due to objections by the
large portion of its already-approved
Eisenhower family. Gehry's initial
funding.
design included a statue of
Gehry continues to be one of the
Eisenhower as a child, a focal point
world's
leading
contemporary
that, according to descendants of
architects, and due to his celebrity
the 34th president and others, failed
status, he has been referred to as a
to properly represent Eisenhower's
"starchitect"a label that Gehry
prominent achievements. Gehry
rejects. In a 2009 interview with the
subsequently revised his design to
British newspaper The Independent,
depict an older Eisenhower, among
he explained why he dislikes the
other small changes, but Eisenhower

term: "I am not a 'star-chitect', I am

an ar-chitect," he said. "There are
people who design buildings that
are not technically and financially
good, and there are those who do.
Two categories, simple."
Gehry's architectural firm is based in
Los Angeles.

FACTS
1. Gehry is plagued with self-doubt,
but has an ego to match.
Goldberger says. "I knew the basic
outline to his life, but where did his
odd combination of confidence and
insecurity come from? This is what
marks himthis determination to go
his own way and innovate in a
powerful way combined with an
openness about his own self-doubt.
That's a rare combination. Where all
that came from and how it came to
be was what motivated me most of
all."
2. His early life was filled with pain
and struggle.
The biography candidly speaks
about Gehrys poor behavior to his
first wife, Anita, and his children from
that
marriage
(he
withdrew
emotionally from his family and was
rarely around, and both he and
Anita had an extramarital affair);
and his difficult relationship with his
father, an itinerant man who

FIGURE -8 GANGZOUH OPERA HOUSE CONCEPT, CHINA

struggled to provide for his family.

Goldberger let Gehry review the
book for factual errors, but the
architect
couldnt
make
any
editorial changes.
3. Hes a team player.
Because his buildings are unusual,
he's widely misread as somebody
who creates these crazy shapes and
then basically crams them down
people's throats, take it or leave it
the whole prima donna thing. That's
absolutely the opposite of who he is.
He goes through multiple iterations
of every project and it's not only his
thinking but he's very, very eager for
feedback from clients and for dialog
with them. The one thing he asks
from a client is that they have a
fundamental respect for his work
and belief in his work.

4. Gehrys work is not "autocratic or

arbitrary architecture."
Gehry is misunderstood as an
architect who only cares about
form-making and Goldberger says
that this intersection of imagination
and problem-solving is the best way
to understand his work.
"Hes very, very concerned with
functionhe cares about where the
toilets go," Goldberger says. " It's an
architecture that has its own formal
language, but within that language
he's interested in solving problems,
not
just
making
shapes.
His
imagination is never in doubt
because everyone sees that when
they look at his workbut what's not
often enough understood is that he
wants to locate his work where the
line of imagination and the line of
problem solving cross.
9. Gehry isnt the architects original
surname.
Gehrys surname at birth was
Goldberg, but he changed it at the
request of his wife, Anita, much to his
chagrin. The letterforms mimic the
shape of "Goldberg"same first
letter, peaked in the middle, and
letter with a descender at the end.
"By making the name change into
an exercise in design, Frank made
the
whole
business
at
least
somewhat
more
palatable,"
Goldberger writes in the book.

FIGURE -9 CONCEPT SKETCHES BY FRANK GEHRY

FIGURE -10 YOUNG FRANK GEHRY

NOTABLE WORKS
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
FIGURE -11 VITRA DESIGN MUSEUM

Vitra Design Museum Weil am

Rhein, Germany

entrance to a parking garagea

collaboration between Gehry and
artists Claes Oldenburg and Coosje

Since the early 1980s, furniture

van Bruggen. Office structures

manufacturer Vitra has enlisted up-

resembling a ships prow and tree

and-coming architects to create

trunks flank the sculpture, which

buildings for its campus in Weil am

now welcomes 500 Google

Rhein. Among them is Gehry's Vitra

employees to work every day.

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.

FIGURE -12 DAY COMPLEX VENICE

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 Milunc.

FIGURE -13 WEISMAN ART MUSEUM

Weisman Art Museum Minneapolis

Completed in 1993, the Weisman
Art Museum is located on the
University of Minnesota campus. Its
western faade, featuring steelclad turrets and bays, peeks over
the bluffs of the Mississippi River.
Construction of a Gehry-designed
expansion concluded in 2011.

Dancing House Prague

The Prague offices of the Dutch
insurance company NationaleNederlanden is also known as Fred

FIGURE -14 DANCING HOUSE PRAGUE

Guggenheim Bilbao Spain

The Guggenheims satellite in Bilbao,
Spain, multiplied the museums

exhibition
space in
a
mountain of stone, glass, and
titanium that follows the contours of
the Nervin river. Design and
construction of the Guggenheim
Bilbao went largely unnoticed in the
press, so the buildings 1997
opening produced an
explosion of publicity,
securing Gehrys place as a
master among architects
and jolting the Bilbao
economy.

FIGURE -15 GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, BILBAO

Dusseldorf, Germanys 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.
EMP Museum Seattle
At the base of the Space Needle,
Gehry framed the EMP Museum
to look as if its steel-andaluminum skin is flapping in the
wake of Seattles famous
monorail. The EMP Museum is the
brainchild of Microsoft cofounder
Paul Allen, and, upon its completion
in 2000, was inaugurated as the
Experience Music Project. Gehrys
first model of the museum was built
from sliced-up guitars.

Neuer Zollhof Dusseldorf,

Germany
Gehrys Neuer Zollhof
complex spurred the
transformation of
FIGURE -16 EMP MUSEUM, SEATTLE

Walt Disney Concert Hall Los

Angeles
Gehry was shortlisted to devise a
new home for the Los Angeles
Philharmonic in 1988; the project,
the Walt Disney Concert Hall,
finally opened in 2003. Today
critics and the public agree that
the iconic building was worth the
wait. Reflecting Gehrys longtime
passion for sailing, the structures
exterior features expanses of
stainless steel that billow above
Grand Avenue, while inside, similarly
shaped panels of Douglas fir line the
auditorium.

FIGURE -17 WALT DISNEY CONCERT HALL, LA

REFERENCES

http://www.biography.com/people/frank-gehry-9308278
http://www.archdaily.com/tag/frank-gehry
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3053937/9-things-you-didnt-know-aboutfrank-gehry/6
http://www.architecturaldigest.com/gallery/best-of-frank-gehryslideshow/all