Frank Gehry (1929- ) was born Frank Owen Goldberg in Toronto, Canada. A naturalized citizen of the United States, he graduated from the University of Southern California's School of Architecture in 1954 and began his career in Los Angeles with Victor Gruen Associates. He also attended the Harvard Graduate School of Design to study urban planning. When he returned to Los Angeles, he worked briefly for Pereira and Luckman before rejoining Gruen, where he stayed until 1960.
In 1961 he and his family moved to Paris, and he worked in the office of Andre Remondet. While living in Europe for a year, he studied the work of LeCorbusier and Balthasar Neumann. In 1962, Gehry moved with his family back to Los Angeles and opened his own firm.
Gehry's most famous postmodern designs include the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. In addition to his career in architecture, Gehry designed furniture. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he produced the
Easy Edge series of chairs, made of corrugated cardboard. Fearing that his reputation as an architect might be affected by his furniture design, he took the chairs off the market after only a few years.
In the 1980s he returned to furniture design, creating
Experimental Edges furniture, and in the 1990s he designed a collection of bentwood chairs for Knoll, and in 2004 he designed the
Superlight chair for Emeco.
Gehry has received many prestigious awards, including the Pritzker Prize in 1989.
From pritzkerprize.com, getty.edu, biography.com and dwr.com
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Walt Disney Concert Hall
mkalty.org |
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Guggenheim Museum - Bilbao, Spain
guggenheim-bilbao.org |
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Wiggle side chair
design-museum.de |
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Contour chair
metmuseum.org |
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Carumba chair
sfmoma.org |
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Superlight chair
sfmoma.org |
