Frank Gehry

Frank Gehry

About Frank Gehry

A Toronto native who moved to California at the age of 18, the Pritzker Prize winning architect burst onto the scene in 1972 with his innovative Easy Edges furniture designs that incorporated cardboard as a medium. Over his career, he has completed dozens of widely acclaimed high-profile buildings, many of which have become tourist attractions.

His best known works include the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Downtown Los Angeles; the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; Weisman Art House Museum in Minneapolis; Dancing House in Prague; Experience Music project in Seattle, and his 1978 residence in Santa Monica.

Gehry is currently working on more than 20 new designs, including the $2 billion Grand Avenue Project to revive Downtown Los Angeles and a new massive-scale Guggenheim art museum in the Persian Gulf.

Mr. Gehry received his Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Southern California in 1954, and he studied City Planning at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. In subsequent years, Mr. Gehry has built an architectural career that has spanned four decades and produced public and private buildings in America, Europe and Asia.

In an article published in The New York Times in November, 1989, noted architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote that Mr. Gehry’s "buildings are powerful essays in primal geometric form and ... materials, and from an aesthetic standpoint they are among the most profound and brilliant works of architecture of our time."

Hallmarks of Mr. Gehry’s work include a particular concern that people exist comfortably within the spaces that he creates, and an insistence that his buildings address the context and culture of their sites.

Mr. Gehry’s work has been featured in major architectural publications and in national and international trade journals, as well as in Newsweek, Time, Forbes, The Economist, Vanity Fair, Art in America, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Le Monde, L'Express, El Correo, and Frankfurter Allgemeine.

Mr. Gehry’s architectural drawings and models, as well as his designs for cardboard and bentwood furniture and his interpretations (in various forms and materials) of fish, have been exhibited in major museums throughout the world.

Mr. Gehry was elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects (A.I.A.) in 1974, and his buildings have received over 100 national and regional A.I.A. awards. His work has earned Mr. Gehry several of the most significant awards in the architectural field:

In 1977, Mr. Gehry was named recipient of the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In 1989, he was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize, perhaps the premiere accolade of the field, honoring "significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture." In 1992, he received the Wolf Prize in Art (Architecture) from the Wolf Foundation.
In the same year, he was named the recipient of the Praemium Imperiale Award by the Japan Art Association to "honor outstanding contributions to the development, popularization, and progress of the arts." In 1994, he became the first recipient of the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Award for lifetime contribution to the arts.
In 1998, Mr. Gehry received the National Medal of Arts, and he became the first recipient of the Friedrich Kiesler Prize.
In 1999, Mr. Gehry received the Lotos Medal of Merit from the Lotos Club, and he received the Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architects.
In 2000, Mr. Gehry received the Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects, and he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from Americans for the Arts.
In 2002, Mr. Gehry received the Gold Medal for Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Mr. Gehry was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1987, a trustee of the American Academy in Rome in 1989, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991.

In 1994, he was bestowed with the title of Academician by the National Academy of Design. In 1998, he was named an Honorary Academician by the Royal Academy of Arts. In 2002, Mr. Gehry was nominated as an Honorary Companion to the Order of Canada.

Considered a modern architectural icon, Mr.Gehry was featured in Apple's "Think Different" ad campaign; appeared in The Simpsons, parodying himself by suggesting his designs are derived by looking at crumpled paper; voiced himself in the children's show Arthur, helping kids design a tree house; and was the subject of an acclaimed 2005 documentary by filmmaker Sydney Pollack, a longtime friend.

Mr. Gehry has received honorary doctoral degrees from Occidental College, Whittier College, the California College of Arts and Crafts, the Technical University of Nova Scotia, the Rhode Island School of Design, the California Institute of Arts, the Southern California Institute of Architecture, the Otis Art Institute at the Parsons School of Design, the University of Toronto, the University of Southern California, Yale University, Harvard University, and the University of Edinburgh.

In 1982, 1985, and 1987-89, Mr. Gehry held the Charlotte Davenport Professorship in Architecture at Yale University. In 1984, he held the Eliot Noyes Chair at Harvard University. In 1996-97, he was a visiting scholar at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, Switzerland.

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