Frank Gehry

Frank Gehry (born February 28, 1929, Toronto, Ontario, Canada) is a Canadian American architect and designer whose original, sculptural, often audacious work won him worldwide renown.

He then studied architecture at the University of Southern California (1949–51; 1954) and city planning at Harvard University (1956–57). After working for several architectural firms, including those of Victor Gruen in Los Angeles and André Remondet in Paris, he established his own company, Frank O. Gehry & Associates, in 1962 and its successor, Gehry Partners, in 2002.

In his early work he built unique, quirky structures that emphasized human scale and contextual integrity. These experiments are perhaps best embodied by the “renovations” he made to his own home (1978 and 1994) in Santa Monica, California. Gehry essentially stripped the two-story home down to its frame and then built a chain-link and corrugated-steel frame around it, complete with asymmetrical protrusions of steel rod and glass. He made the traditional bungalow—and the architectural norms it embodied—appear to have exploded wide open. His ability to undermine the viewer’s expectations of traditional materials and forms led him to be grouped with the deconstructivist movement in architecture, although his play upon architectural tradition also caused him to be linked to postmodernism.