Frank Gehry, in full Frank Owen Gehry, original name Ephraim Owen Goldberg, also called Frank O. Gehry, (born February 28, 1929, Toronto, Ontario, Canada), Canadian American 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 working for several architectural firms, he established his own company, Frank O. Gehry & Associates, in 1962 and established its 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 then built a chain-link and corrugated-steel frame around it, complete with asymmetrical protrusions of 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.
Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain
