Frank Gehry:

Arch. Ronel M. Descarga

Masters of Science in Architecture

Bicol University

Legazpi City

May 2021
Objective:

1. To discuss the life and works of Frank Gehry and his achievements in the field of Architecture.

2. To understand the HISTORY, THEORY and CONCEPTS behind the works of Frank Gehry.

3. To be able to relate the influence of Frank Gehry to the researcher.

Scope

This research primarily focuses on the life and notable works and achievement of the 1898 Pritzker

Prize Laureate Frank Gehry. This research will also discuss the history, theory, and design philosophy

behind Frank Gehry’s architectural masterpiece.

Early Life of Frank Gehry

Frank Gehry was born as Ephraim Owen Goldberg or Frank Owen Goldberg on February 28,

1929, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, to Sadie Thelma and Irving Goldberg. The Goldberg family was

Polish and Swedish. Gehry was very creative at a young age, constructing imaginary residences and cities

with objects he sees and discovered in his grandfather's hardware store. His grandmother encouraged this

creativity with whom Gehry would build little cities out of scraps of wood. This interest in

unconventional building materials would come to characterize Gehry’s use of corrugated steel, chain link

fencing, unpainted plywood, and other practical "day to day" materials. The Saturday morning in his

grandfather's hardware store would come to explain his architectural style.

Education

In 1947, Gehry and his family immigrated to the United States and settled in California. Gehry got a job

as a delivery truck driver while taking up night classes at the University of Southern California. Among

the courses he attended are woodworks, physics, chemistry, and he soon took up perspective classes that

led to him graduating with a degree in Architecture in the USC School of Architecture in 1954. During

this time, he changed his Goldberg surname to Gehry to preclude anti-Semitism (discrimination towards

the Jews). He began to work full-time with Victor Gruen Associates, where he had been apprenticing

part-time while still in school. In the same year, he enlisted himself in the U.S. Army and was introduced

to making furniture. He designed furniture for the enlisted soldiers. After a year in the army, he moved to

Cambridge and was admitted to Harvard Graduate School of Design to study urban planning. He looked

at city planning and later dropped out of Harvard, disheartened and underwhelmed because of his left-

wing ideas about socially responsible architecture being under-realized.

Early Career

In his return to Los Angeles, he worked for Victor Gruen and Associates, where he had been

apprenticing while he was still in college. In 1957, he was given a chance to design and construct his first

private residential project at the age of 28 with a friend. The said residence was built for his first wife's

family neighbor, the David Cabin. The over 2000 square feet mountain retreat has unique design features

with strong Asian influences.

In 1961, Gehry and his family moved to Paris, where he worked for the French Architect Andre

Remondet. His French education was a huge help during that year in Europe while studying LeCorbusier,

Neumann, and his fascination with French Roman churches. In 1962, he returned to Los Angeles to

establish a practice, which later became Frank Gehry and Associates in 1967; it became Gehry Partners in

2001.

Architectural Career

After leaving Harvard, when Frank Gehry returned to California, he started to make a name for

himself with the launch of his cardboard furniture line, the "Easy Edges," crafted from layers of

corrugated cardboard; it flourished in the market from 1969 to 1973.

Still primarily mesmerized with buildings rather than furniture design, he then remodeled a house for his

family in Santa Monica with the money he earned from his furniture line. This was one of his notable

works; the remodeling involved the existing bungalow with corrugated steel and chain link fence, which

split the housing structure open with an angled skylight. This Avant-grade design caught the eyes of the

architectural community around the world, boosting up his career to a newer height. He began designing

residential buildings in Southern California as regular work in the '80s.

 As he achieved celebrity status in the architectural community, he took his work to an even

grander scale. His extravagant concepts on buildings became a status in the architecture world. Buildings

such as the Walt Disney Concert Hall in the downtown of Los Angeles, the Dancing Housed in City of a

Hundred Spires – Prague, and the eye-catching Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao in Spain have all became

a tourist destination. In the entry of the 20th century, Gehry returned to his roots as a residential designer,

his first skyscraper raised in 2011 in 8 Spruce Street in New York City, and the Opus Hong Kong Tower

in China.

The Santa Monica Home, like any other of Gehry’s work, is a complete representation of the

"Deconstructivist Style of Architectural Approach," a post-structuralism aesthetic that defies the norms of

accepted design paradigms of architecture while breaking with the modernist ideal of form following the

buildings intended function. Gehry was one of many contemporary architects pursuing this form of

architectural approach, which flourished for years in California. Gehry said of his Santa Monica

renovation, 'I bought an old house, and I put a new house around it. I got interested in the dialogue

between the old and the new and tried to create a new entity sculpturally, but that retained the new

qualities as independent of the old. I set myself goals like that when I started. I pulled it off. I also wanted

it to be seamless, that you couldn't tell where it began and where it stopped, and that was very successful,

and that was the power of it. Critics would come in and would look at a rain spot on the plaster and say, Is

that on purpose or not? They thought they were accusing me, and I thought that was just wonderful. That

was exactly what I wanted them to worry about.'

Frank Gehry has been known for his choice of unusual choice of building materials and his

architectural philosophy. His choice of material, such as corrugated metal, led to Gehry’s designs being

labeled as unfinished or even distinguished as simple aesthetic. His work is vastly more intelligent and

controlled than it sounds to the unversed, according to the New York Times; "He is an Architect of

immense gifts who dances on the line separating architecture from art but who manages never to let

himself fall.” Frank Gehry is known for his professionalism and adherence to budgets, despite his
complex and ambitious designs. A notable exception to this successful budgeting was the Walt Disney

Concert Hall project, which exceeded the budget by over a hundred and seventy million dollars and

resulted in a costly lawsuit.

Frank Gehry considers the recently commissioned Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles to

be his first major project in his hometown. No stranger to music, he has a long association with the Los

Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, having worked to improve the acoustics of the Hollywood Bowl. He

also designed the Concord Amphitheatre in Northern California and yet another much earlier in

Columbia, Maryland, the Merriweather Post Pavilion of Music.

The Museum of Contemporary Art selected him to convert an old warehouse into its Temporary

Contemporary (1983) exhibition space while the permanent museum was being built. It has received high

praise and remains in use today. On a much smaller scale but equally as practical, Gehry remodeled what

was once an ice warehouse in Santa Monica, adding some other buildings to the site into a combination

art museum/retail and office complex.

The belief that "architecture is art" has been a part of Frank Gehry's being for as long as he can remember.

When asked if he had any mentors or idols in the history of architecture, his reply was to pick up a

Brancusi photograph on his desk, saying, "Actually, I tend to think more in terms of artists like this. He

has had more influence on my work than most architects. Someone suggested that my skyscraper that

won a New York competition looked like a Brancusi sculpture. I could name Alvar Aalto from the

architecture world as someone for whom I have great respect, and of course, Philip Johnson."
Later Life

In recent years, Gehry has served as a professor of architecture at Columbia University, Yale, and

the University of Southern California. He has also served as a board member at USC's School of

Architecture, his alma mater. Among his many official honors, Gehry was the 1989 recipient of the

prestigious Pritzker Prize—an annual award honoring a living architect "whose built work demonstrates a

combination of those qualities of talent, vision, and commitment, which has produced consistent and

significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture."

Gehry has played himself on television programs, including The Simpsons, and has appeared in

advertisements for Apple. In 2005, director Sydney Pollack made a documentary film, Sketches of Frank

Gehry, focusing on the architect's work and legacy. Gehry's recent and ongoing projects include a new

Guggenheim facility in Abu Dhabi, the new Facebook headquarters in California, and a memorial to

Dwight D. Eisenhower in Washington, D.C., slated to be constructed at the foot of Capitol Hill.

Gehry continues to be one of the world's leading contemporary architects, and due to his celebrity

status, he has been referred to as a "starchitect"—a label that Gehry rejects. In a 2009 interview with the

British newspaper The Independent, he explained why he dislikes the term: "I am not a 'star-chitect,' I am

an ar-chitect," he said. "There are people who design buildings that are not technically and financially

good, and there are those who do. Two categories, simple."

 
Notable Work and History of the Building

The Gugenheim Museum, Bilbao is a museum of modern and contemporary style designed by

Frank Gehry, built by Ferrovial, inspired by Brancusi and located in Bilbao, Basque Country, Spain.

The museum is situated in a parcel of land within the Bilbao’s port area, along the river of Nervión.

Perhaps Gehry’s most celebrated design, the museum combines elements typical of Deconstructivist

Architecture with Organic and Fluid Architecture. The museum’s spaces are arranged around a central

point, the central atrium with a sort of futuristic cavern filled with natural lights entering from an array of

large openings and skylights. With its 3 levels, the museum has 20 exhibition galleries which are

interconnected by several bridges, corridors, walkways, stairs and elevators.

While designing the museum, Gehry used the idea of Constantin Brancusi’s studio as an inspiration.

Brancusi was a Romanian sculptor, painter and photographer who made a career in France. Brancusi

considered the relationship between sculptures and the space they occupied to be of crucial importance.

The Atelier Brancusi was where it all began, as a metaphor for creating a dense correlation of forms and

textures of the museum’s central atrium. Gehry thought of visitors having to experience the feeling of

entering an informal studio space where the different materials and dimensional form shows a lively

urban environment.

The building exterior, atrium and some galleries are characterized by complex geometrical figures,

curvilinear forms and most of the galleries are rather simple and more traditional “white boxes” with no

openings or views outside. The exterior is boldly cladded with sheets of shiny titanium, with the interior

making use of cardboard partitions; such contrast makes the building a stunning view when seen from the

outside of the central atrium, it sometimes resembles a giant theatrical set more than a solid structure.
The Architectural Style

The Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao is a museum of modern and contemporary art and

architecture, with its free flowing design showcasing no boundaries. With its signature roof line of

twisting, curving form, the museum became an object for lavish and universal praise. The building is a

masterpiece of contemporary and liquid architecture, making the Gugenheim Museum for Bilbao an

international cultural icon.

The structure is often described as a “free-form” or curvy-form, for Bilbao, the Gugenheim

Museum has become an international icon. The architectural uniqueness of this sculptural structure made

every city to like to have such iconic architectural structure. According to Arie Dirk Cornelis Pronk on his

Ph.D. research, the word free-form is misleading, therefore the term fluid or liquid architecture is more

appropriate for Gehry’s architectural style, with its unique characteristics of curved surfaces. The

highlight of this style in the past 20 years clearly shows that there is a line between idea and technique;

that there is not only beauty of the design, but it can also be complex in many ways such as in the

construction method.

Aside from being a modern and contemporary structure, the Guggenheim of Bilbao is popularly known

as an example of Deconstructivist architecture, hailed as one of the most spectacular structure exhibiting

the Deconstructivist style in the 20 th century. Deconstruction is known as the continuation of an earlier

form of architecture known as postmodernism. It addresses austerity, formality and lack of variety in

terms of the building elements. This was again present in the museum with its undulating skins of

titanium which changes its color depending on how it is struck by the light coming from the sun.

Even being a popular example of Deconstructivist architecture, Frank Gehry refused to accept that he is

the proponent of such architectural style.

Gehry’s work gives architecture a step forward as if evolving, challenging norms of construction without

forgetting the value of art and creativity.

“The best advice I’ve received is to be yourself. The best artist do that-Frank Gehry”
Source

Frank Gehry: Life and Work

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodern_architecture

https://www.ierek.com/news/index.php/2014/11/04/deconstructivism-architecture/

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/gallery/best-of-frank-gehry-slideshow

https://www.archdaily.com/tag/frank-gehry

https://achievement.org/achiever/frank-gehry/

https://www.pritzkerprize.com/laureates/1989

youtube.com/ Frank Gehry Interview: Jump Into the Unknown

https://www.archdaily.com/910668/frank-gehry-take-the-chance-to-jump-off-into-the-unknown

https://www.world-architects.com/en/architecture-news/film/jump-into-the-unknown-with-frank-gehry