Frank Owen Gehry, born Ephraim Owen Goldberg on February 28, 1929, in Toronto, is a world-known Canadian American architect and designer. In 1947, Gehry’s family immigrated to Los Angeles. Gehry was educated at the University of Southern California (architecture) and Harvard University(city planning).
Gehry responded to Modernist architecture that was imminent at those times, by testing with extraordinary expressive devices and quest for a personal style. In his initial work, he constructed exceptional, eccentric forms that stressed human magnitude and relative veracity. His early researches are possibly best symbolized by the “transformations” he yielded to his own Santa Monica, residence. Where he shed the two-story house down to its framework and then assembled a chain-link and grooved steel frame all around it, completed with distorted projections of metal and glass.Gehry’s skill to destabilize the observer’s prospects of conventional items and structures headed him to be categorized with the deconstructivist method in architecture.
After being employed by numerous architectural companies, he founded his own firm, Frank O. Gehry & Associates, in 1962 and Gehry Partners, in 2002.
Gehry viewed each new work as “a sculptural object, a spatial container, a space with light and air.” He was donned with works throughout the 1980s and ’90s. These commissions had the deconstructed characteristic of his Santa Monica residence but started to exhibit a perfect splendor that matched his progressively more open ventures.
Prominent constructions from the era consist of the Vitra Furniture Museum and Factory (1987) in Weil am Rhein, Germany; the American Center (1988–94) in Paris. Gehry’s prominence skyrocketed in the late 1990s.
His hallmark signature was the structures that look like rippling free-form monuments. This style perhaps climaxed in his Guggenheim Museum (1991–97) in Bilbao, Spain. Where he merged titanium forms with interlocking limestone multitudes to establish a sculpturesque accomplishment. Additionally in the Experience Music Project (1995–2000; renamed the Museum of Pop Culture in 2016) in Seattle. He used modern technology.
Gehry’s notable works include The Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, The Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago. Even though people have different opinions about his revolutionary structures, Gehry made architecture prevalent.
Frank Gehry received numerous awards such as: Pritzker Architecture Prize (1989), Praemium Imperiale prize for architecture (1992), the National Medal of the Arts (1998), the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal (1999), , and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2016).
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