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Frank Gehry

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Ephraim Owen Goldberg (Frank Gehry)
The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain
BornFebruary 28, 1929
Toronto, Ontario
NationalityCanadian
OccupationArchitect
AwardsPritzker Prize, National Medal of Arts, AIA Gold Medal, Order of Canada
BuildingsGuggenheim Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Gehry Residence, Weisman Art Museum, Dancing House

Frank Owen Gehry, (born Ephraim Owen Goldberg in Toronto, Ontario on 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, regardless of the product he delivers.

His best known works include the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which is covered in titanium, Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, Dancing House in Prague, Czech Republic, and his private residence in Santa Monica, California, the latter of which jump-started his substantive career and lifted it from the stature of "paper architecture", a phenomenon in which many famous architects are observed to have experienced their formative decades experimenting almost exclusively on paper before receiving their first major commission in their later years.

Personal life

Gehry was born into a Jewish family in Toronto. He was a creative child, encouraged by his grandmother, with whom he would build "little cities" out of scraps of wood.[1]

In 1947, at age 17, his family changed its name from Goldberg to Gehry and moved to California. Gehry got a job driving a delivery truck, and studied at Los Angeles City College before graduating 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.

Gehry was married to a woman named Anita Snyder, who he claims was the one who made him change his name. They divorced some time in the mid 60's, and he married his current wife Berta in the mid 70's. He has 2 daughters from his first marriage, and 2 sons, Alejandro and Samuel, from his second.

Having grown up in Canada, Gehry is a large fan of hockey. He began a hockey league in his office, though he no longer plays in the games with them. In 2004, he designed the trophy for the World Cup of Hockey.[2]

He has been seeing the psychoanalyst Milton Wexler for over 35 years. Unusually, Gehry allows Wexler to give comments to the press about him.

Gehry hold dual citizenship of the United States and Canada. He lives in Santa Monica, California and continues to practice out of Los Angeles.

Architectural style

The tortured, warped forms of Frank Gehry's structures are sometimes considered to fall under the deconstructivist, also known as the "DeCon" school of postmodernist architecture, although Gehry himself disavows any association with the movement and claims no formal association to any particular architectural movement in general. Some historians nonetheless continue to classify Gehry's architecture as deconstructivist, whether or not he may have been consciously aware of its inclinations.

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 insomuch as it was drastically deconstructed and altered from its original context in such a manner so as to be subversive to its originally existing spatial intent.

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. The designation stems from the fact that the Los Angeles region has produced a grouping of the most influential postmodern architects of its time, including notable Gehry contemporaries 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 (which was co-founded by Thom Mayne), UCLA, and USC.

Accomplishments

The Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago's Millennium Park

Frank Gehry studied city planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design for a year, leaving before completing the program.

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.[3]

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.[4]

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,[5] Gehry explained the 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 to arrive at a result that is as close as possible to the original design drawings. Second, he makes sure he has a detailed and realistic cost estimate before proceeding with a building. Thirdly, he utilizes a close relationship with area builders to ensure that projected costs are met on budget.

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, to streamline not only the engineering aspects of architecture, but also the broader project management platform to drastically reduce the costs associated with traditional top-down organizational approach of practice, while enabling the architect to manifest heretofore physically unconceivable structural frameworks such as those of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Guggenheim Bilbao, or the Dancing Horse project in Prague.

Frank Gehry also designed a wrist watch, marketed by Fossil. Instead of a standard clock face, Gehry's watch displayed a digital read of the way a person would speak the time aloud. For instance, if the time was 1:54 P.M., it would read "6 'til 2"; or at 12:30 A.M., it would read "half-past midnight".[6] In 2004, Gehry designed a bottle for Wyborowa Vodka.[7] He has also designed jewelry for Tiffany & Co, signifying his unique departure from mainstream architectural practice in his willingness to participate in artistic endeavours as well as architecture.

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. Gehry is implementing these ideas into new projects, including a small office complex on the West Side of Manhattan.

Gehry is currently working on The Barclays Center, which is the new NBA arena for the New Jersey Nets. It is located in Brooklyn, New York, and is planned to be opened later this decade. It will seat about 18,000 people.[1]

Criticism

File:Seattle EMP.jpg
The Experience Music Project in Seattle

Gehry's work has detractors and critics. Among the criticism:

  • That the buildings waste structural resources by creating functionless forms
  • That the buildings are apparently designed without researching the local climate
  • That the spectacle of a building often overwhelms its intended use (especially in the case of museums and arenas)
  • The buildings do not seem to "organically" belong in their surroundings

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 was undeniably unique, critical reaction came in the form of withering attacks. The bizarre color choices, the total disregard for architectural harmony with the 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":

CLEVELAND, Ohio (AP)—The shiny, swirling $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.

— [8]

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 perhaps 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 to because his "signature style" is so widely recognized that his potential clients approach him expecting it.

Another criticism often 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 and given the criticism he has faced in the past regarding his lack of consideration for good urban design, it remains to be seen how he will approach the design. The Walt Disney Concert Hall, in particular, opened to local newspaper criticism, to 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 as the result of attention and spectacle surrounding the buildings, rather than from an objective view. [2]

Other notable aspects of career

Academia

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

Celebrity status

Gehry is considered a modern architectural icon and celebrity, and is now considered a major "Starchitect" - a neologism describing the phenomenon where architects attain a sort of celebrity status. The term usually refers to architects who are known for their 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 an episode of "The Simpsons" in the episode The Seven-Beer Snitch. 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."

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 with Sydney Pollack.

Works

Completed

The Gehry Tower in Hanover.

[3]

Dancing House in Prague

In progress

[25]

Awards

Chiat/Day Building, in Venice, California. Designed with help from Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. It is said that the designers were using a model while trying to decide how to treat the entrance to the building when Oldenburg placed his binoculars in the model. Everyone liked the effect, so it was incorporated into the design. The building continues to the left.

Honorary doctorates

  • Of Visual Arts; California Institute of the Arts (Valencia, California - 1987)
  • Of Fine Arts; Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, Rhode Island - 1987)
  • Of Engineering; Technical University of Nova Scotia (Halifax, Nova Scotia - 1989)
  • Of Fine Arts; Otis Arts Institute (Los Angeles, California - 1989)
  • Of Humanities; Occidental College (Los Angeles, California - 1993)
  • Whittier College (Whittier, California - 1995)
  • Of Architecture; Southern California Insitute of Architecture (Los Angeles, California - 1997)
  • Of Laws; University of Toronto (Toronto, Ontario - 1998)
  • University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, Scotland - 2000)
  • University of Southern California (Los Angeles, California - 2000)
  • Yale University (New Haven, Connecticut - 2000)
  • Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts - 2000)
  • The School of The Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, Illinois - 2004)

Additional images

The following are additional images of Gehry's works.

References

  1. ^ Templer, Karen (1999-10-05). "Frank Gehry". Salon. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameters: |quotes=, |coauthors=, and |month= (help)
  2. ^ Picarello, Robert (2004). "World Cup of Hockey 2004". {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameters: |quotes=, |coauthors=, and |month= (help); Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  3. ^ "Frank Gehry: Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate, 1989".
  4. ^ Weisberg, Jacob (1998-12-06). "Give that man another Guggenheim! How Frank Gehry became our greatest architect". Slate. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameters: |quotes=, |coauthors=, and |month= (help)
  5. ^ Flyvbjerg, Bent (2005). "Design by Deception: The Politics of Megaproject Approval" (PDF). Harvard Design Magazine: 50–59. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |year= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameters: |quotes= and |coauthors= (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)CS1 maint: year (link)
  6. ^ "Fossil product catalogue".
  7. ^ "New York Magazine, Best Bets".
  8. ^ Associated Press (2003-03-01). "Ice, $62M building imperil sidewalks". CNN. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)

Sketches of Frank Gehry Documentary Frank Gehry Architect - Guggenheim Publications 2001

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Frank Gehry.

Template:Pritzker Prize Winners 1979-2000

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