Frank O. Gehry

Frank O. Gehry (Frank O. Goldberg; born 1929) was an American architect whose sculptured designs and use of vernacular materials won him somewhat belated but widespread recognition.

Frank O. Gehry was born in 1929 in Toronto, Canada, and moved to Los Angeles in 1947 with his parents, Irving and Thelma Goldberg (he changed his name in the mid-1950s). He studied at the University of Southern California from 1949 to 1951. After receiving practical experience as a designer in a Los Angeles firm, he returned to USC to complete his Bachelor of Architecture degree in 1954. Gehry studied City Planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in Massachusetts, an important center for the dissemination of the International Style. Leaving Harvard in 1957, the architect returned to the West Coast to work for a variety of firms before opening his own practice, Frank O. Gehry and Associates, Inc., in Los Angeles in 1962.

In retrospect it seems understandable that Gehry would move quickly to establish himself as an independent because he was a highly individual designer and talent. Gehry's childhood idol was Frank Lloyd Wright, who created a number of homes in the Los Angeles area during the 1920s. The bold individuality of Wright's California dwellings had an impact on Gehry's attitude toward house design. Also as a result of living and working in California, Gehry was exposed to the so-called "California progressives". Prominent in this group were Bernard Maybeck, Irving Gill, and Charles and Henry Greene; these designers were interested in experimentation with structure, materials, or form. Yet any suggestion that Gehry is a direct descendant of the progressive movement in California radically underestimates his own unique nature.

Critics falter when attempting to label or categorize Frank Gehry's work and attitudes. While some have called his architecture "post-modern" (referring to a movement that rejects the International Style in favor of pre-modernist ideas and models), Gehry's attitude is neither modern nor post-modern. Others have labeled him a deconstructivist, pairing him with such contemporary figures as Peter Eisenman who dismember (or "deconstruct") traditional shapes and forms in an attempt to free architecture from its theoretical and historical past. In short, what makes Gehry difficult to classify is his freedom from the constraints of popular theories, both past and present.

While Gehry rejects the minimalism of International Style architecture, he does appreciate the movement's love of man-made materials. Gehry goes further than International Style designers in embracing corrugated metal, chain link, and plywood. He celebrates these 20th-century materials in what he calls "cheapscape architecture." Gehry used these materials in his "Santa Monica Place", a low-budget shopping mall and parking garage of 1979-1981, as well as in his own home, also in Santa Monica, of 1977-1979. Yet through the years these inexpensive materials have become common in his work and are even regarded by some as his "signature".

If some of Gehry's buildings, including his residence in Santa Monica, appear to display qualities of deconstructivist architecture, they are created without the intellectual baggage of that movement. In his house project, the architect purchased a quaint 1920s suburban home, and wrapped it in chain link, other metals, plywood, and glass, thus creating the effect of an old house carefully preserved inside a newer one. Here his impulse was anything but deconstructivist; the "old" house gave meaning to the "new," and vice versa.

Gehry's architecture is characterized by an inclusive approach. He designs his buildings with a concern for the way people move through them. They are able to live and work comfortably within the spaces that he has created. His buildings are created to address the culture and context of their sites. In 1995 Gehry designed a building for the Department of Art at the University of Toledo, Canada; the building's architectural form was intended to represent the students' creative energy. In 1997 Gehry worked with the Experience Music Project (EMP) to design a 110,000 square foot complex scheduled to open in 1999 and comprised of an interactive museum, education center, and restaurant/nightclub showcasing live music. In the spirit of capturing the nature of contemporary music, the design for the building calls for fractured forms that will resemble guitar bodies. Exhibition spaces will resemble industrial rooms with pull down doors - a tribute to contemporary bands' beginnings in warehouses and garages. "I share EMP's goal of creating a place where the exhibits and the building treat music as a living and evolving art form," Gehry said in an article in TCI, March 1997.

Gehry stated once that "I approach each building as a sculptural object." In keeping with his sensitivity to sculpture and painting, Gehry enjoyed working with other artists in creating multimedia pieces. Perhaps the most famous of these projects was his collaboration with Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen in an outdoor theater spectacular in Venice in the mid-1980s. The architect has said that the irreverent Oldenburg was a continuing source of inspiration. Gehry also worked with the sculptor Richard Serra. An outgrowth of their contact was a furniture series in which Gehry created a number of lamps that resembled coiled fish. Other official contacts with the arts community have included the designing of homes for artists, as in Gehry's 1972 Malibu studio for the painter Ron Davis.

Partly because of his irreverent approach to design, Gehry belatedly received recognition from the official world of art and architecture. An important showing of his work at the Whitney Museum of Art in 1988 signaled the beginning of this new attitude of respect and appreciation. The following year he received the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the profession's top international award. In 1991 Gehry won two awards from the American Institute of Architects for a "spunky and provocative" nine-story warehouse in Boston and a "village-like" sequence of low buildings for a furniture maker in Rocklin, California. In 1992 Gehry was awarded the Wolf Prize in Art, as well as the Imperiale Award in Architecture given by the Japan Art Association. In October 1994, Gehry became the first recipient of the Lillian Gish Award for lifetime contribution to the arts.

Gehry's models, drawings, sketches and furniture designs have been collected in important museums all over the world and presented in numerous exhibitions. One of the most important exhibitions was presented in 1986 by the Walker Art Museum in Minnesota. The exhibit toured throughout the U.S. and Canada.

Further Reading

To learn more about the architecture of Gehry and his peers— and see excellent illustrations of their works—consult Post-modern Visions, edited by Heinrich Klotz (1985) and The Language of Post-Modern Architecture by Charles Jencks (1987). Two fine collections of writings on contemporary architecture that feature chapters on Gehry's house in Santa Monica are The Secret Life of Buildings (1985) by Gavin Macrae-Gibson and The Critical Edge (1985) by Tod Marder. Two monographs devoted to the life and works of Gehry are The Architecture of Frank Gehry (1988) and Frank Gehry: Buildings and Projects (1986), edited by Peter Arnell and Ted Bickford. Paul Goldberger has written several interesting articles on the architect, including "Studied Slapdash" in the New York Times Magazine (January 18, 1976). A perceptive appraisal of Gehry's place in the contemporary architectural scene is Janet Nairn's "Frank Gehry: the Search for a 'No Rules' Architecture" in Architectural Record (June 1976).

For autobiographical works see: Gehry, Frank O., Individual Imagination and Cultural Conservatism, Volume I, Academy Editions, 1995. For biographical resources about Frank Gehry see: Eisennan, Peter and Gehry, Frank, Peter Eisennan and Frank Gehry, Rizolli International Publications, 1991 and Steele, James, Schnabel House: Frank Gehry (Architecture in Detail), Phaidon Chronicle Books, 1993.

For periodical articles about Frank Gehry see: Architectural Record, July 1993; May 1994; and TCI, March 1997.

For on-line resources about Frank Geertz see: http://www.bm30.es/proyectos/guggeuk.html, http://www.cf.ac.uk/uwcc/archi/jonesmd/la/index.html, http://www.cf.ac.uk/uwcc/archi/jonesmd/la/surf/chiat.html, http://hudson.acad.umn.edu/Frankbio.html, http://ted.com/ghery.html, and http://www.x-com.de/busstops/gehry.bio.html. □

GEHRY, FRANK O. 1929-

Architect

Cheapscape Architect

Frank Gehry's radical and unusual style is not easily defined, although he has long referred to the past, borrowing from both Eastern and Western architectural traditions, and is usually ranked as a postmodernist. His ties to minimalist and conceptual art are apparent, as well. He blends architecture with qualities of art and sculpture, creating playful homes and buildings that push the limits of design. He is especially known for his use of inexpensive and unusual building materials, coining his own term for this style: "cheapscape architecture." One of his goals is to create a look of incompletion. This unfinished, minimalist quality, coupled with materials such as metal panels, plywood, and chain-link fences, often gives his buildings the look of industrial structures rather than the homes and museums that they in fact are. Although Gehry works in an avant-garde, and even antiarchitectural manner, he has increasingly designed major public buildings and has received international recognition and respect. His steady work in the 1980s is reflected in his receipt of the prestigious international Pritzker Prize in 1987.

His Business

Gehry established his own practice in 1962 in Santa Monica, California. His interest in industrial building materials began when he was a GI at Fort Benning, Georgia. There, assigned to put up temporary buildings, he became familiar with the materials he would use to create his distinct unfinished, industrial look. In the 1960s and 1970s his work appealed to the antiestablishment/antiarchitecture mood, but by the 1980s he was receiving commissions that indicated that he had been accepted by the mainstream. His inexpensive materials and focus on minimal construction may have appealed to people concerned with conservation, recycling, and other environmental trends of the decade.

Understanding Gehry

The usual notions of beauty and design rarely apply to Gehry's buildings. As Gehry explained his style: "I prefer the sketch quality…the appearance of 'in progress' rather than the presumption of total resolution and finality." He also approaches each building "as a sculptural object," inviting the viewers' interpretations of and interaction with the work. Gehry made a statement about his seriousness and devotion to art as well as to cheapness when he refused to allow some of his cardboard furniture to be sold as expensive pop-art objects in upscale galleries.

1980s Work

In the 1980s Gehry designed diverse types of buildings, including artists' studios, a bank office, homes, and an amphitheater, but his most popular buildings include the California Aerospace Hall (1984) and Loyola Law School (1984), both in Los Angeles. The Aerospace Hall arrests the viewer with an unexpected airplane—a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter—attached to an outside wall, angled as if in flight. Gehry's design consists of two parts: the larger is a seven-sided hangar covered with angling riveted sheet metal; the other is a more traditional museum building in white stucco, but the Starfighter breaks up this traditional look and gives the building a dramatic appearance. For the law school Gehry designed six buildings: three lecture halls, an administrative office building, a classroom building, and a bookstore. The style is typically Gehry, inventive yet unfinished looking, with exposed construction and the use of plywood. A greenhouse in the style of a Romanesque temple rests above the classrooms, with jagged stairs leading to it; thus, a historical reference appropriate to a site for legal education is integrated with Gehry's long-standing concern with the environment. Such innovative fusions made Gehry one of the most respected architects of the decade.

Sources:

Beverly Russell, Architecture and Design 1970-1990: New Ideas in America (New York: Abrams, 1989), pp. 72-74;

Stamm Shapiro, "A Minimalist Architecture of Allusion: Current Projects of Frank Gehry," Architectural Record, 171 (June 1983): 114-125.

Frank Owen Gehry , 1929–, American architect, b. Toronto, Ont., as Frank Owen Goldberg. He is widely considered one of the finest and most artful of contemporary architects. In 1947, Gehry's family moved to Los Angeles, where he attended the Univ. of Southern California; he later studied at Harvard. He has been acclaimed for his original, sophisticated, adventurous, and very American buildings. Extremely varied and lively, his structures contrast space and materials; often jutting, unusual shapes are juxtaposed with simple geometric forms. In his earlier work these forms are expressed in a wide range of usual and unusual architectural materials (e.g., raw plywood, corrugated aluminum, and exposed pipe) that sometimes give these buildings a deliberately unfinished quality. Among his many important commissions are the Loyola Law School (1981–84), and the Team Disneyland Building (1995), Los Angeles; "Gehry's Fish" (1992), Barcelona; the Weisman Museum of Art (1993), Minneapolis, the first of his all metal-clad buildings; and the Cinémathèque Français (the former American Center. 1994), Paris.

Gehry's later work displays a curving complexity made possible by computer programs and other innovative design tools. While these metal-clad buildings have distinct similarities, they differ significantly in shape, proportion, materials, and relation to the sites they occupy. His most important and acclaimed building to date is the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain (1997), a large structure of voluptuous, swooping, organic forms covered in gleaming titanium steel. Gehry also used curving metal-covered walls in his Experience Music Project rock music museum in Seattle (2000). His design for the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts (2003) at Bard College combines the characteristic billowing steel shapes at its facade with the unadorned concrete that forms the rear of the building. The Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (2003) has a matte-finish stainless steel facade comprised of several large upward-curving elements punctuated by a hinged glass-panel entry, and an interior clad in Douglas fir.

The architect returned to geometric forms in the Stata Center (2004) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—a colorful, tilting conglomeration of shapes and materials whose open interior spaces were designed to promote encounters among its scientist inhabitants. Gehry's first completed New York City project, the InterActiveCorp headquarters in Manhattan (2006–7), is characterized by a façade of billowing white glass that glows with inner light. His New World Center (2011), a symphony hall in Miami Beach, has a shoebox-shaped white stucco exterior with a wall-of-windows façade; inside, irregular stacked forms a video-enhanced concert hall and rehearsal studios. His second New York City building, 8 Spruce St. (2011), is a residential skyscraper wrapped in stainless steel that is rippled on three of its four sides.Gehry also designs furniture and other utilitarian objects as well as watches and jewelry. Prominent among his many professional honors are the Pritzker Prize (1989) and the first Gish Award (1994).

Bibliography: See K. W. Forster, Frank O. Gehry/Kurt W. Forster and M. Friedman, ed., Gehry Talks: Architecture + Process (both: 1999) and B. Isenberg, Conversations with Frank Gehry (2009); studies by R. H. Bletter et al. (1986), F. Dal Co et al. (1998), L. B. Chollet (2001), and E. da C. Meyer (2008); Sketches of Frank Gehry (documentary film, dir. by S. Pollack, 2006).

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.

Gehry, Frank Owen (1929– ). Canadian-born American architect-(originally Goldberg). He settled in California, where he built several single-family houses from which most traditional forms were expunged. Examples are the Wosk House, Beverly Hills (1982–4), and the Gehry House, Santa Monica (1978–88): in the latter the rectangular form of the house is distorted, a tilted cube emerges from the façade, and layers of the house are peeled away to reveal the structure. He has specialized in using ordinary materials in an unusual way, in destroying structural logic, in playing down the problems caused by weather, and in disdaining gravity as a determinant of form. Other works include the California Aerospace Museum, Santa Monica (1982–4), the Iowa Laser Laboratory, Iowa City (1987), the Schnabel House, Brentwood (1990), the University of Toledo Art Building, Toledo, OH (1990–2), the EMR Offices, Hanover, Germany (1992), the Vitra Headquarters, Basle, Switzerland (1988–94), the American Center, Paris (1988), the Weisman Center, Venice, CA (1988), the University of Minnesota Art Museum, Minneapolis (1989–90), the Minden-Ravensberg Electric Company Offices, Bad Oeynhausen, Germany (1991–5), and the fragmented Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain (1991–7—where several volumes project from a central mass, and cladding includes titanium (for the gallery spaces), sandstone (public spaces), blue rendered walls (administration), and glass. More recently, his firm has completed the steel-clad Performing Arts Center, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2000–2), the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, CA (1989–2003—giving the impression of a partly-melted building), the Rasin (Fred and Ginger) Building, Prague (1989—2002—also resembling a partly-melted structure), and the Maggie Cancer Centre, Dundee, Scotland (2000–3—a small building in which, nevertheless, the geometries are as complicated as in his larger projects (perhaps overly so) ). His The Experience Music project, Seattle, has been considered as one example of Blobismus too many. In 2004 he unveiled plans for an Art Gallery, Toronto, Canada, near Alsop's Ontario College of Art and Design. Gehry has been identified with Deconstructivism.

Bibliography

Dal Co & and K. Forster (1998);
Diamonstein (ed.) (1980, 1985);
Jencks 1995a); 2002);
Rahgeb (ed.)2001);
Salingaros et al. 2004);
Steele (ed.)1995);
Stungo 1999);
van Vynckt (ed.)1993);