Gehry, Frank O. 1929-

Frank O. Gehry
1929-

Architect

Background

Born in Toronto, Canada, Frank O. Gehry came to the forefront of architecture well before the 1990s. He studied at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles (1949-1951) and at Harvard University (1956—1957). The principal of Gehry and Associates, Los Angeles, since 1962, he received the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 1989. When he accepted the award, he spoke about establishing a link between art and architecture that would influence his work for the next decade: "I explored the process of new construction materials to try giving feeling and spirit to form. In trying to find the essence of my own expression, I fantasized that I was an artist standing before a white canvas deciding what the first move should be."

Architecture as Art

Gehry was a pioneer in the movement to return architecture to its standing as fine art. One example of his links to art is the Chiat/Day Main Street building, completed in 1991, in Venice, California. The façade of the building is an enormous pair of black binoculars designed by Gehry's friends Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Cars enter the structure by driving beneath the binoculars; small offices and conference rooms were built within the cylinders. Gehry's use of sculptural forms was also evident in his designs for the $100 million Guggenheim Museum, which opened in Bilbao, Spain, on 19 October 1997. The glass-and-titanium structure echoed the shipbuilding history of the city with its abstract design resembling a ship.

Museum Pieces

In the late 1990s Gehry undertook another museum project: the Experience Music Project (EMP) in Seattle, Washington. The $60 million complex "will use music to engage people in an entirely new way. The exhibits and building treat music as a living and evolving art form. I wanted the building design to evoke the energy of music," Gehry told Architectural Record in January 1997. His designs for the three-story, 110,000-square-foot complex called for an arrangement of six components, whose exterior surfaces and colors (bright orange, blue, and gold) were intended to evoke images of broken pieces of Stratocaster guitars. Looping overhead cables were meant to resemble busted guitar strings. A reporter for the Seattle Times wrote that the museum looks like "a space-ship that fell from the sky and got a little roughed up on landing." The museum opened to the public in June 2000.

Future Plans

In 1999 Gehry won an invitation-only competition to design an addition to the Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C. The $40 million project, which was slated to start in 2001, called for renovating the original Beaux-Arts building designed by Ernest Flagg in 1897.

Sources:

Charles Gandee, "Conquest," Vogue, 187 (October 1997): 370-373, 434.

"Gehry Designs 'Far Out' Interactive Music Museum," Architectural Record, 185 (January 1997): 45.

Robert Hughes, "Bravo! Bravo!" Time, 150 (3 November 1997): 98-105.

Philip Jodidio, New Forms: Architecture in the 1990s (Köln &. New York: Taschen, 1997), pp. 9, 44,158-159, 228.

Ellen Palmer Sands, "Gehry Throws Another Curve with Extension to Corcoran Gallery," Architectural Record, 187 (August 1999): 60.