Frank Gehry!

For a man feted as the greatest living architect, Gehry's style is surprisingly one-note. Almost all of his buildings look like giant piles of crumpled tin foil. Their most interesting feature -- the interior spaces tend to be giant blank boxes -- is an exterior cladding of titanium sheets folded into wild, discombobulated shapes. These are supposedly works of "abstract sculpture," but in fact they are carefully designed to achieve a specific effect: not to look elegant or graceful, but to look jumbled, chaotic, nonsensical.

Gehry's proposed design looked very much like a fake wrecked building -- which the Guggenheim Foundation was proposing to build in a city so recently home to the real thing. This effect was highlighted by the fact that Gehry's New York Guggenheim was to be much taller than his other piles of twisted metal, looming 400 feet above the East River and looking like a crumpled skyscraper.

It is no excuse that Gehry's design was proposed and accepted prior to Sept. 11. After all, the Guggenheim Foundation did not cancel the project because they suddenly realized that it was in appallingly bad taste. They canceled it only because the economy is still sluggish and they cannot raise enough money. So the new museum may be dead, but the ideas behind it are alive and well.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, individual events do not, by themselves, cause people to abandon their cherished ideas and attitudes. If that were true, Sept. 11 would have seen the immediate end of pacifism and the "anti-war" movement. But people who are committed to irrational ideas tend to, well, irrationally cling to those ideas no matter how high the evidence mounts. The same goes for the philosophy of "deconstruction" and all of its intellectual roots and branches.

Deconstruction is the profoundly anti-intellectual notion -- promulgated, of course, by the intellectuals -- that every idea is just a smokescreen for some hidden agenda, that ideas must be "deconstructed," distorted and quarantined within an attitude of snide irony. Deconstruction is the philosophy of undermining every truth, every moral ideal, every intellectual or artistic standard, by turning it into a mean-spirited joke.

These intellectual jokes include, in architecture, houses with staircases that go nowhere, columns that seem to support a building but don't actually touch the ground, and a building named "Earthquake," whose floor slabs seem to be tilting precipitously and falling down on top of one another. This must have seemed quite a funny joke to architecture professors -- though not, one presumes, to those caught under the collapsed floor slabs of buildings destroyed in real earthquakes.

This new architectural fad produced structures that look crumpled, smashed, twisted, torn apart. "Deconstruction" is barely disguised art-world jargon for "destruction."

The architecture of destruction is part of a culture of nihilism that is the climax and end-product of the past century's trends in art -- from 1917, when Marcel Duchamp turned a urinal upside down and hung it on the wall of an art gallery -- to 1952, when John Cage passed off four minutes and 33 seconds of silence as a work of music -- to the end of 2001, when London's Tate Gallery awarded its prestigious Turner Prize to a room containing only a single light bulb that turned on and off at random intervals, a disconcerting effect used previously only in the torture chambers of Third World dictatorships.

This trend is wider than any particular school of art or any particular political ideology. It is about whether we take art, ideas and life seriously in the first place. What today's intellectual and artistic avant-garde wants is to break down any belief in ideas, morality and standards. In recent years, most Americans have begun to sense, more keenly than ever, that this is a prescription for suicide.

New York has narrowly escaped the creation of a new national symbol for modern nihilism. Now the city should focus on acquiring a symbol of an opposite outlook: a serious, tall, soaring skyscraper to replace the towers that America lost on Sept. 11.

Frank Gehry

I first became aware of Frank Gehry when I attended a dinner party at the home of Pamela Gates.

There, beside her piano stood an unusual bent wood chair. After studying this chair for a few minutes I decided to give it a try. To my delight, it was most comfortable!

So, here it is both beautiful and serviceable. I love it when form and function come together.

Frank Gehry Personal information

Nationality Canada

Residence United States

Birth date February 28, 1929 (1929-02-28) (age 78)

Birth place Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Frank Gehry Work

Practice name Gehry Partners, LLP

Significant buildings Guggenheim Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Gehry Residence, Weisman Art Museum,

Dancing House

Awards and prizes AIA Gold Medal

National Medal of Arts

Order of Canada

Pritzker Prize

Frank Owen Gehry (born Ephraim Owen Goldberg, February 28, 1929) is a Pritzker Prize winning architect based in Los Angeles, California.

His buildings, including his private residence, have become tourist attractions. Many museums, companies, and cities seek Gehry's services as a badge of distinction, beyond the product he delivers.

Czech Republic, and his private residence in Santa Monica, California, which jump-started his career, lifting it from the status of "paper architecture", a phenomenon which many famous architects have experienced in their formative decades through experimentation almost exclusively on paper before receiving their first major commission in later years.

Frank Gehry Personal life

Gehry was born into a Jewish family in Toronto, Ontario. A creative child, he was encouraged by his grandmother, with whom he would build little cities out of scraps of wood. Gehry's grandmother, Caplan, influenced him in other ways. As a child, he would observe his grandmother every Thursday putting a live carp in a bathtub full of water to later make gefilte fish. Frank would observe the movement and form of these fish, which later would be an enormous influence and underlying theme in much of his work.

In 1947 Gehry moved to California, got a job driving a delivery truck, and studied at Los Angeles City College, eventually to graduate from the University of Southern California's School of Architecture.

After graduation from USC in 1954, he spent time away from the field of architecture in numerous other jobs, including service in the U.S. Army. He studied city planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design for a year, leaving before completing the program.

Still known as Frank Goldberg, he married Anita Snyder, who he claims was the one who told him change his name, which he did, to Frank Gehry. Divorcing Snyder in the mid-1960s, he married Berta, his current wife, in the mid-1970s. He has two daughters from his first marriage, and two sons from his second marriage.

Having grown up in Canada, Gehry is a huge fan of hockey. He began a hockey league in his office, though he no longer plays with them. In 2004, he designed the trophy for the World Cup of Hockey.

He has been seeing the psychoanalyst Milton Wexler for over 35 years. Exceptionally, Gehry allows Wexler to give comments to the press about him. Gehry holds dual citizenship in the United States and Canada. He lives in Santa Monica, California, continuing to practice out of Los Angeles.

Frank Gehry Residence

The Gehry Residence is Frank Gehry's own house. It was originally an extension, designed by Gehry built around an existing house. It makes use of unconventional materials, such as chain link fence and corrugated steel. It is sometimes considered one of the earliest deconstructivist buildings, although Gehry himself denies that it was deconstructivism.

The Gehry Residence is located in Santa Monica, California. In 1977 Frank and Berta Gehry bought a pink dutch colonial that was originally built in 1920. Gehry wanted to explore with the materials he was already using: metal, plywood, chain link fencing, and wood framing. He chose to wrap the outside of the house with a new exterior while still leaving the old exterior visible. He hardly touched the rear and south facades and to the other sides of the house he wedged in titled glass cubes. Then, in the fall of 1991, they chose to remodel due to the needs of their growing family including two teenage boys.

Many of Gehry's neighbours were not happy at the unusual building being built in their neighbourhood. It's rumoured that one neighbour used to regularly bring his dog to defecate on Gehry's lawn, in protest.

Frank Gehry Architectural style

The warped forms of Frank Gehry's structures are classified sometimes as being of the deconstructivist, or "DeCon" school of postmodernist architecture, whether or not he consciously holds such inclinations. Gehry himself disavows any association with the movement and claims no formal alliance to any particular architectural movement in general.

The DeCon movement stems from a series of discussions between French philosopher Jaques Derrida and architect Peter Eisenman in which they question the utility of commonly accepted notions of structure alone in being able to define and communicate a meaning or truth about a creator's intended definition (a definition of space in architecture, for example), and counterposes our preconceived notions of structure with its undoing; the deconstruction of that very same preconception of space and structure. It is in this criticism or deconstruction of a given construct, in this case, a structure, that architecture finds its justification or its "place of presence".

In that sense, DeCon is often referred to as post-structuralist in nature for its ability to go beyond current modalities of structural definition. In architecture, its application tends to depart from modernism in its inherent criticism of culturally inherited givens such as societal goals and functional necessity. Because of this, unlike early modernist structures, DeCon structures are not required to reflect specific social or universal ideas, such as speed or universality of form, and they do not reflect a belief that form follows function. Gehry's own Santa Monica residence is a commonly cited example of deconstructivist architecture as it was so drastically divorced from its original context, and in such a manner, as to subvert its original spatial intention.

Gehry is sometimes associated with what is known as the "Los Angeles School", or the "Santa Monica School" of architecture. The appropriateness of this designation and the existence of such a school, however, remains controversial due to the lack of a unifying philosophy or theory. This designation stems from the Los Angeles area producing a group of the most influential postmodern architects, including such notable Gehry contemporaries as Eric Owen Moss and Pritzker Prize-winner Thom Mayne of Morphosis, as well as the famous schools of architecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (co-founded by Thom Mayne), UCLA, and the USC.

Frank Gehry Career

Gehry spent many years working in traditional architecture; he worked for the firms Pereira and Luckman, Victor Gruen Associates, and Andre Remondet. In 1967, he created his own firm, Frank O. Gehry and Associates.

According to the Gehry documentary, his work was primarily expressed in traditional architecture for many years. He experienced financial difficulties during much of his firm's early days. He expressed creativity in his own home, the Gehry Residence, which he used as a creative launch pad, playing with shapes and textures. Gehry had an epiphany when a guest at his house asked why he was so creative with his home, but so reserved and traditional in the execution of his work. Gehry decided to take his work in a new direction.

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao work is perceived to be Gehry's most iconic and representative work, and was a culmination of Gehry's new directions and experimentation with surfaces and shapes.

With the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Gehry gained a reputation for building on time and budget in a business where delays and cost overruns are common. Ironically, his Walt Disney Concert Hall is often regarded as a "copy" of Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, despite the fact that it was actually designed years before the Guggenheim Bilbao was. It was cost-delays and a lack of funding, not of Gehry's doing, that prevented Walt Disney Concert Hall from being completed on time. In an interview in Harvard Design Magazine, Gehry explained three things he does to keep his projects on time and budget.

First, he ensures that what he calls the "organization of the artist" will prevail during construction, in order to prevent political and business interests from interfering with design and thus achieve a result as close as possible to the original design drawings. Secondly, he makes sure he has a detailed and realistic cost estimate before proceeding with a building. Thirdly, he maintains a close relationship with area builders to ensure projected costs are met.

His privately-developed Gehry Technologies adapts and employs CATIA, a parametric modelling and analysis software originally designed for the aerospace and auto industries by Dassault Systems of France. CATIA streamlines not only the engineering aspects of architecture, but also broader project management to drastically reduce the costs associated with the traditional top-down organizational approach, while enabling the architect to create heretofore physically unconceivable structural frameworks, such as those of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Guggenheim Bilbao, or the Dancing House project in Prague.

Frank Gehry also designed a wrist watch, marketed by Fossil. Instead of a standard clock face, Gehry's watch displays a digital text of the way a person might speak the time aloud. For instance, if the time were 1:54 P.M., it would read "6 'til 2"; or at 12:30 A.M., it would read "half-past midnight". In 2004, Gehry designed a bottle for Wyborowa Vodka.

He has also designed jewelry for Tiffany & Co, signifying his unique departure from mainstream architectural practice in his willingness to participate in other artistic endeavours as well.

Gehry has, in recent works, made an attempt to move away from titanium surfaces, and admirers and critics alike are waiting to see whether Gehry is able to produce equally compelling forms in a different idiom. Gehry is working with different textures and lighting, incorporating these into the framework of his usual approach. He is incorporating these ideas in new projects, including a small office complex on the West Side of Manhattan.

Gehry is currently working on the Barclays Center, the new NBA arena for the New Jersey Nets. Located in Brooklyn, New York, it is planned to open by 2010. It will seat about 18,000 people.

Frank Gehry Criticism

The Experience Music Project in SeattleGehry's work has its detractors as the architecture values and its accompanying aspects within modern architecture vary, both between different schools of thought and among practising architects. Among the criticisms:

The buildings waste structural resources by creating functionless forms

The buildings are apparently designed without researching the local climate

The spectacle of a building often overwhelms its intended use (especially in the case of museums and arenas)

The buildings do not seem to belong in their surroundings "organically"

Seattle's EMP Museum represents this phenomenon at its most extreme. Microsoft's Paul Allen chose Gehry as the architect of the urban structure to house his public collection of music history artifacts. While the result is undeniably unique, critical reaction came in the form of withering attacks. The bizarre color choices, the total disregard for architectural harmony with built and natural surroundings, and the mammoth scale led to accusations that Gehry had simply "got it wrong." Admirers of the building remind critics that similar attacks were levelled against the Eiffel Tower in the late 19th century, and that only historical perspective would allow a fair evaluation of the building's merits.

Gehry's works have also raised concerns about possible environmental hazards. According to the Los Angeles Times, The Disney Center in downtown Los Angeles has "roasted the sidewalk to 140 degrees Fahrenheit, enough to melt plastic and cause serious sunburn to people standing on the street".

According to CNN, Case Western Reserve University "takes precautions with Gehry's sloping roof":

The shiny, swirling US$62 million building that houses the business school at Case Western Reserve University is a marvel to behold. But it is sometimes best admired from afar.

In its first winter, snow and ice have been sliding off the long, sloping, stainless-steel roof, bombarding the sidewalk below. And in bright sun, the glint off the steel tiles is so powerful that standing next to the building is like lying on a beach with a tanning mirror.

Recent criticism of Gehry suggests he is repeating himself. Critics claim the use of disjointed metal panoply (often titanium) that has become Gehry's trademark is overused. Almost all of his recent work seems derivative of his landmark Bilbao Guggenheim. A slightly more charitable opinion is that Gehry would find it difficult not to rehash Bilbao or Disney even if he wanted not to, because his "signature style" is so widely recognized that potential clients approach him expecting it.

Another criticism extends from the notion that Gehry's buildings ignore good urban design practice by turning their back on pedestrians (citing stark, limestone streetwalls of Disney Hall), and do not adequately respond to their physical context. Interestingly, Gehry is currently developing the urban design for a neighborhood in downtown Los Angeles. Given the criticism he has faced regarding his lack of consideration for good urban design, it remains to be seen how he will approach this design. The Walt Disney Concert Hall, in particular, opened to local newspaper criticism, one of which Gehry blasted with an angry expletive.

Academically, one of Gehry's most consistent critics is Hal Foster, an art critic who has taught art and art history at Princeton University and Cornell University. Foster feels that much of Gehry's acclaim has been the result of attention and spectacle surrounding the buildings, rather than from an objective view.

Frank Gehry Other notable aspects of his career

Frank Gehry Academia

Gehry is a Distinguished Professor of Architecture at Columbia University in New York City and also teaches at Yale University.

Frank Gehry Celebrity status

Gehry is considered a modern architectural icon and celebrity, a major "Starchitect" a neologism describing the phenomenon of architects attaining a sort of celebrity status. The term usually refers to architects known for dramatic, impactful designs which often achieve fame and notoriety through their shock value. Other notable celebrity architects include Zaha Hadid, Thom Mayne, Rem Koolhaas, and Norman Foster, all of whose works tend toward the edgy and subversive. Gehry came to the attention of the public in 1972 with his "Easy Edges" cardboard furniture. He has appeared in Apple's black and white "Think Different" pictorial ad campaign that associates offbeat but revered figures with Apple's design philosophy. He even once appeared as himself in The Simpsons in the episode "The Seven-Beer Snitch," where he parodied himself by intimating that his ideas are derived by looking at a crumpled paper ball. He also voiced himself on the TV show Arthur, where he helped Arthur and his friends design a new treehouse. Steve Sample, President of the University of Southern California, told Gehry that, "...After George Lucas, you are our most prominent graduate."

Frank Gehry Documentary

In 2005, veteran film director Sydney Pollack, a friend of Gehry's, made the documentary Sketches of Frank Gehry. It was released on DVD by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment on August 22, 2006, together with an interview of Sydney Pollack.

Frank Gehry Works

Frank Gehry Completed

Easy Edges furniture series 1972.

Exhibit Center, Merriweather Post Pavilion, and Rouse Company Headquarters, Columbia, Maryland, USA (1974)

Harper House, Baltimore, Maryland, USA (1977)

Gehry Residence, 1978

Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, California, USA (various buildings, 1978-2002)

Santa Monica Place, Santa Monica, California, USA (1980)

California Aerospace Museum, Los Angeles, California, USA (1982-1984)

Edgemar Retail Complex, Santa Monica, California, USA (1984)

Chiat/Day Building, Venice, California, USA (1985-1991)

Vitra Design Museum, Vitra premises, Weil am Rhein, Germany (1989)

Frederick Weisman Museum of Art, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA (1993)

Iowa Advanced Technology Laboratories, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, USA (1987-1992)

Disney Village, Disneyland Resort Paris, Paris, France (1992)

Center for the Visual Arts, University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio, USA (1993)

American Center, Paris, France (1994) (currently Cinémathèque Française)

Dancing House ("Fred and Ginger"), Prague, Czech Republic (1995) Photo 1, Photo 2, Photo 3

Anaheim ICE (formerly Disney ICE), Anaheim, California (1995)

Team Disney Anaheim, Anaheim, California (1995)

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Bilbao, Spain (1997)

Der Neue Zollhof, Düsseldorf, Germany (1999)

Vontz Center for Molecular Studies, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA (1999)

Condé Nast Cafeteria, fourth floor of the Condé Nast Publishing Headquarters at Four Times Square in New York City (2000)

DG Bank building, Pariser Platz 3, Berlin, Germany (2000)

Experience Music Project, Seattle, Washington, USA (2000)

Issey Miyake, Flagship Store, New York, New York, USA (2001)

Peter B. Lewis Building, Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA (2002)

Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, USA (2003)

Maggie's centre, Ninewells Hospital, Dundee, Scotland (2003)

Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, California, USA (2003)

Ray and Maria Stata Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA (2004)

Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park, Chicago, Illinois, USA (2004)

MARTa, Herford, Germany (2005)

IAC/InterActiveCorp West Coast Headquarters, Sunset Strip, West Hollywood, California, USA (2005)

Brian Transeau's house, Los Angeles, California, USA

Marqués de Riscal Winery, Elciego (Rioja (wine) region), Spain (2006).

IAC/InterActiveCorp Headquarters New York City

Frank Gehry Works in progress

Atlantic Yards, New York City

Performing arts complex at the World Trade Center site, New York City

Beekman Tower, New York City

Grand Avenue Project, Los Angeles, California

Art Gallery of Ontario renovation, Toronto, Ontario, Canada (2004)

Museum of Tolerance, Jerusalem, Israel (expected completion in 2008)

Science library, Princeton University

Ohr-O'Keefe Museum, Biloxi, Mississippi, USA (open 2005; all buildings expected to be complete by 2007)

Panama: Bridge of Life Museum of Biodiversity, Panama City, Panama

Guggenheim Abu Dhabi (GAD), Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (expected completion in 2011).

Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia Pennsylvania (Announced October 19 2006)

Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation, Paris, France (Announced October 2006)

Untitled Five Star Hotel & Event Center Lehi, Utah (Announced January 19 2007)

Le Clos Jordan Winery, Lincoln, Ontario, Canada

Luxury Hotel, apartments and Offices, Sønderborg, Denmark

Frank Gehry Visitor Center at Hall Napa Valley, Saint Helena, California Napa (Announced July 1 2007)

King Alfred Development Hove (Permission granted March 2007)

Suna Kiraç Cultural Center, Istanbul, Turkey

Frank Gehry In popular culture

He appeared in the 16th season of The Simpsons, in the episode "The Seven-Beer Snitch."

He voiced himself in the television series Arthur episode, "Castles in the Sky."

Frank Gehry is also the name of a song by Peter Gabriel

He is name-checked as "Frank Guh-ree" by Clark Duke in the internet series Clark and Michael.

Frank Gehry Awards

On December 6, 2006, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver inducted Frank Gehry into the California Hall of Fame located at The California Museum for History, Women, and the Arts.