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Among these masterpieces are the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and the “Dancing House” in Prague. These and other structures are hailed as iconic by chroniclers of modern culture.
While it may seem somewhat surreal, despite his advanced age, Frank Gehry continues to create his complex buildings.
His studio resembles a laboratory where the Pritzker Prize-winning architect plays with shapes and materials, dissecting meanings. His work serves as an architectural response to Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction, which captivated intellectuals in the latter half of the 20th century. His buildings are akin to dynamic narratives with carefully crafted compositions and tumultuous plots.
Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, photo – Piotr Musiol/unsplash.com
So who is this Frank Gehry—an explorer, a philosopher, or a storyteller?
Explorer
Frank Gehry’s architectural experiments began long before his adult pursuits.
Frank Owen Gehry, born in 1929 in Toronto to an immigrant family of Polish Jews, later moved to the United States with his family. He considered his grandmother, who had no connection to the profession, to be his first architecture teacher. Together, they built strange structures from whatever materials they could find. Fortunately, Frank’s grandfather owned a hardware store where they could gather all sorts of odds and ends for these experiments.
After earning his bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern California, he followed his heart and eventually found himself at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. There, he studied urban planning and learned to tame the unreal forms that emerged in his mind.
Philosopher
Frank Gehry’s ideas felt constrained within the walls of universities and a few architectural firms in the U.S. and France, where he found himself in the late 1950s.
This period was marked by a search for philosophical grounding. The 20th century was alluring with its variety of intellectual schools. Amid such a colorful array of movements, eager beginners could easily slip into eclectic or kitschy creations.
Thus, Frank Gehry faced a challenging path of self-definition. However, he navigated this trial with ease, even though his first noteworthy project was fundamentally different from everything he would create later.
The David Cabin, California, 1957, photo – Mmenorris/wikipedia.org
The David Cabin, built in California in 1957, reflected the young architect’s fascination with traditional Japanese culture. This stone and wood structure featured minimalist design and resembled a meditation retreat.
Meanwhile, postmodernism, which rapidly blossomed in art, design, and literature, also made its mark on architecture. By the 1960s, Frank Gehry was ready to launch his own practice and had defined the direction of his creativity. Deconstructionism became the philosophical concept that aligned with the architect’s formalist aspirations. In 1962, he opened his firm, Frank O. Gehry & Associates, in Los Angeles (its successor, Gehry Partners, was founded in 2002). Here, the complex, whimsical, and bold forms that intrigued Gehry began to take shape into harmonious structures.
Storyteller
Since then, he has tirelessly amazed the world with various stories embodied in his fantastical buildings, furniture made from pressed cardboard, and bent wood. Each of these objects, despite their functionality, was perceived as a work of art. One of Gehry’s first deconstructivist stories came to life in the 1970s with a house he designed for his family in Santa Monica. Neighbors called this family nest ugly, while professionals regarded it as one of the iconic structures of its time.
Frank Gehry’s house in Santa Monica
Nevertheless, no criticism shook Frank Gehry’s confidence that he was doing everything right and would ultimately succeed.
Indeed, each new story he crafted became a star. In 1989, Gehry received the Pritzker Prize in Architecture, after which prestigious awards and accolades found him with almost annual regularity.
Global fame did not lead the architect to become arrogant or rest on his laurels. Interestingly, after receiving the highest honors, Frank Gehry worked with even greater fervor, producing one dramatic architectural story after another. Few people on Earth have not seen at least one of these works by the master: the Marqués de Riscal hotel in Elciego, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology building, the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, the new customs house in Düsseldorf, the Brain Health Center in Cleveland, the pedestrian bridge in Chicago, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, and the Museum of Music in Seattle.
Click on any image to enter the gallery of Frank Gehry’s whimsical buildings.
