Architecture & Famous Architects
Clayton Way
Frank Gehry
Treating each new commission as "a scultural object, a spatial container, a space with light and air," Gehry was rewarded with commissions all over the world throughout the 1980s and '90s. These works possessed the deconstruted quality of his Santa Minica home but began to display a pristine granduer that suited his increasingly public projects. Notable structure from the period include the Vitra Furniture Museum and Factory (1987) in Weil am Rhein, Germany, the American Centre (1988-94) in Paris; and the Fredrick R. Weisman Art Museum (1990-93) at the University of Minnesota in Mineapolis.
Frank O. Gehry was born February 28th 1929, Toronto, Ontario, Canda. He is a Canadian architect and designer whose original, sculptural, often audacious work won him worldwide renown. Gehry's family immigrated to Los Angeles in 1947. He studied architecture at the University of Southern California (1949-51; 1954) and city planning at Harvard University (1956-57). After woking for several architectural firms, he established his own company, Frank O. Gehry & Associates, in 1962 and established a successor, Gehry Partners, in 2002.
Reacting, like many of his contemporaries, against the cold and often formulaic Modernist buildings that had begun to dot many cityscapes, Gehry began to experiment with unusual expressive devices and to search for a personal vocabulary. In his early work he built unique, quirky structures that emphasized human scale and contextual integrity. His early experiments are perhaps best embodied by the "renovations" he made to his own home (1978,1991-94) in Santa Monica, California. Gehry essentially stripped the two-story home down to its frame and the built a chain-link and corrugated-steel frame around it, complete with asymmetrical protrusionsof steel rod and glass. Gehry made the traditional bungalow - and the architectural norms it embodied - appear to have exploded wide open. He continued those design experiments in two popular lines of corrugated cardboard furniture, Easy Edges (1969-73) and Experimental Edges (1979-82). Gehry's ability to undermine the viewer's expectations of traditional materials and forms led him to be grouped with the deconstructivist movement in architecture, although his play upon architectural tradition also caused him to be linked to postmodernism.
Gehry's reputation soared in the late 1990s. By that time Gehry's trademark style had become buildings that resemble undulating free-form sculpture. This form arguably reached its zenith in his Guggenheim Museum (1991-97) in Bilbao, Spain. In that structure Gehry combined curvaceous titanium forms with interconnecting limestone masses to create a sculptural feat of engineering. He furthr explored those concerns in colourful sheet metal, the structure was, according to Gehry, modeled on the shape of a guitar - particularly, a smashed electric guitar.
As with the Guggenheim structure, he employed cutting-edge computer technology to uncover the engineering solutions that could bring his sculptural sketches to life. In his 2008 renovation of the Art Museum of Ontario in his hometown, Gehry retained the original building (1918) but removed an artistically unsuccessful entryway that had been added in the 1990s. Although the updated museum shows many characteristic Gehry touches, one critic called it "one of Gehry's most gentle and self-possessed designs."
Gehry became known for his work on music venues.The Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles was designed before
the Bilbao museum but was completed in 2003, to great acclaim. The Jay Pritzker Pavillion in Chicago's Millennium
Park was completed in 2004. Gehry also built a performing arts centre (1997-2003) for the Bard College in
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York City, and designed the New World centre (completed 2011) for the New World
Symphony orchestral academy in Miami Beach, Florida. As the 21st century continued, Gehry continued to receive
numerous large-scale commissions. Although critical opinion is sometimes divided over his radical structures, Gehry's workmade architecture popular and talked-about in a manner not seen in the United States since Frank Lloyd
Wright. Among Gehry's many awards are the Pritzker Architecture Prize (1989), the national Medal
of the Arts (1998), and the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal (1999).