Frank O. Gehry

Frank O. Gehry, one of the first “punk-style” famous architects, whose curious, irreverent buildings have been described as “functional sculpture” and Deconstructivist architecture. Although he was born in Canada, Gehry has become synonymous with the American West Coast where he works.

He studied at the universities of Southern California and Harvard. His first practice, Frank O. Gehry and Associates, was founded in 1963 and was succeeded in 1979 by the firm Gehry & Krueger Inc. Gehry has held a long fascination for painting and sculpture and first won public acclaim for his chunky corrugated cardboard furniture in 1972.

His distinctive exploded-then-reconstructed architectural style began to emerge in the late 1970s, when the design for his home at Santa Monica used corrugated metal, an exposed wooden frame and shields of chain-link fencing. He justifies his unusual use of materials saying “If Jasper Johns and Donald Judd can make beauty with junk materials, then why can’t that transfer into architecture?”

His off-beat style continued at the Mid-Atlantic Toyota Distributorship Offices, Santa Monica, which contained a maze of odd-shaped offices painted in different colours. The Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, was again idiosyncratic, with its aluminium portico and Romanesque-style chapel made from plywood and glass.

Gehry’s strangest work is a fish-shaped restaurant in Japan, called “Fishdance”, and his most sophisticated is the Vitra Design Museum, Wein am Rhein. The jumble of plain white geometric shapes of the latter resembles a Russian Constructivist sculpture. Inside the museum is a calm top-lit space with galleries linked by bold curving ramps. His work was exhibited as part of the “Deconstructivist Architecture” show at MOMA, New York in 1988.

List of Gehry’s  major works

  • Gehry House, Santa Monica, 1978.9.
  • Mid-Atlantic Toyota Distributorship Offices, Santa Monica, 1978.
  • Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, 1981-4.
  • California Aerospace Museum, Los Angeles, 1982-4.
  • Fishdance Restaurant, Kobe, Japan, 1985.
  • Vitra Design Museum, Wein am Rhein, 1989.

Bibliography

  • Olivier Roissière, Gehry, SITE. Tigerman, trois portraits de l’artiste en architecture, Paris, 1981.
  • Luciano Rubino,Il Bovindo/5 Frank O. Gehry Special, Rome, 1984.

20th Century Famous Architects

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