D AT E OF BIR T H

February 28, 1929

Frank Gehry was born Ephraim Owen Goldberg in Toronto, Canada. He moved with his family
to Los Angeles as a teenager in 1947 and later became a naturalized U.S. citizen. His father
changed the family’s name to Gehry when the family immigrated. Ephraim adopted the first
name Frank in his 20s; since then he has signed his name Frank O. Gehry.

A young Ephraim Owen Goldberg with his parents, Irving and Thelma, at their home in Toronto, Canada.

Uncertain of his career direction, the teenage Gehry drove a delivery truck to support himself while
taking a variety of courses at Los Angeles City College. He took his first architecture courses on a hunch,
and became enthralled with the possibilities of the art, although at first he found himself hampered by
his relative lack of skill as a draftsman. Sympathetic teachers and an early encounter with modernist
architect Raphael Soriano confirmed his career choice. He won scholarships to the University of
Southern California and graduated in 1954 with a degree in architecture.

Frank as a young teenager. He moved to Los Angeles in 1947 and soon thereafter took his first
architectural class.

Los Angeles was in the middle of a post-war housing boom, and the work of pioneering modernists like
Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler were an exciting part of the city’s architectural scene. Gehry went
to work full-time for the notable Los Angeles firm of Victor Gruen Associates, where he had apprenticed
as a student, but his work at Gruen was soon interrupted by compulsory military service. After serving
for a year in the United States Army, Gehry entered the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he
studied city planning, but he returned to Los Angeles without completing a graduate degree. He briefly
joined the firm of Pereira and Luckman before returning to Victor Gruen. Gruen Associates were highly
successful practitioners of the severe utilitarian style of the period, but Gehry was restless. He took his
wife and two children to Paris, where he spent a year working in the office of the French architect Andre
Remondet and studied firsthand the work of the pioneer modernist Le Corbusier.

Gehry and his family returned to Los Angeles in 1962, and he established his own firm, Gehry Associates,
now known as Gehry Partners, LLP. For a number of years, he continued to work in the established
International Style, initiated by Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus, but he was increasingly drawn to the
avant-garde arts scene growing up around the beach communities of Venice and Santa Monica. He
spent more of his time in the company of sculptors and painters like Ed Kienholz, Bob Irwin, Ed Moses
and Ed Ruscha, who were finding new uses for the overlooked by-products of industrial civilization.
Frank Gehry began to look for an opportunity to express a more personal vision in his own work.
Frank Gehry, Fish Lamp, metal wire, ColorCore formica, silicone, and wooden base. The first Fish Lamps,
which were shown in Frank Gehry: Unique Lamps in 1984 at Gagosian Los Angeles, employed wire
armatures molded into fish shapes, onto which shards of ColorCore are individually glued, creating clear
allusions to the morphic attributes of real fish. Since the creation of the first lamp in 1984, Gehry’s Fish
Lamps have been exhibited in London, Paris, Hong Kong, and Rome. The fish has become a recurrent
motif in Gehry’s work, as much for its “good design” as for its iconographical and natural attributes. Its
quicksilver appeal informs the undulating, curvilinear forms of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain
(1997); the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago (2004); and the Marqués de Riscal Vineyard Hotel in Elciego,
Spain (2006), as well as the Barcelona Fish sculpture at Vila Olímpica in Barcelona (1989–92) and
Standing Glass Fish for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden (1986). In 2012, Gehry decided to revisit his
earlier ideas, and began working on an entirely new group of Fish Lamps. The resulting works range in
scale from life-size to outsize, and the use of ColorCore is bolder, incorporating larger and more jagged
elements. The softly glowing Fish Lamps are full of whimsy and vigor. Curling and flexing in attitudes of
simulated motion, these artificial creatures emit a warm, incandescent light. This intimation of life,
underscored by the almost organic textures of the nuanced surfaces, presents a spirited symbiosis of
material, form, and function.

He had his first brush with national attention when some furniture he had built from industrial
corrugated cardboard experienced a sudden popularity. The line of furniture, called Easy Edges, was
featured in national magazine spreads, and the Los Angeles architect experienced an unexpected
notoriety. Although Gehry built imaginative houses for a number of artist friends, including Ruscha, in
the 1970s, for most of the decade his larger works were distinguished but relatively conventional
buildings such as the Rouse Company headquarters in Columbia, Maryland, and the Santa Monica Place
shopping mall.

November 22, 2016: President Barack Obama presents Frank O. Gehry with the Presidential Medal of
Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, during an inspiring ceremony in the East Room of the
White House in Washington.

In 2016, Frank Gehry’s accomplishments were honored by President Barack Obama with the nation’s
highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The presidential awards citation, read in part,
“never limited by conventional materials, styles, or processes, Frank Gehry’s bold and thoughtful
structures demonstrate architecture’s power to induce wonder and revitalize communities. From his
pioneering use of technology to the dozens of awe-inspiring sights that bear his signature style, to his
public service as a citizen artist through his work with Turnaround Arts, Frank Gehry has proven himself
an exemplar of American innovation.”
Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, California
Gehry was shortlisted to devise a new home for the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1988; the project,
the Walt Disney Concert Hall, finally opened in 2003. Today critics and the public agree that the
iconic building was worth the wait. Reflecting Gehry’s longtime passion for sailing, the structure’s
exterior features expanses of stainless steel that billow above Grand Avenue, while inside, similarly
shaped panels of Douglas fir line the auditorium.

Neuer Zollhof, Dusseldorf, Germany

Gehry’s Neuer Zollhof complex spurred the transformation of Dusseldorf, Germany’s waterfront into
what is now called the Media Harbour in 1999. The popularity of the trio of office buildings yielded
nearby commissions for other prominent architects like Fumihiko Maki and Murphy/Jahn, and earned
the three towers a spot in the Germand edition of Monopoly.

Gehry House, Santa Monica, California

Gehry’s first significant brush with fame came with the 1978 construction of a Santa Monica
residence he designed for himself and his family. The project wrapped an existing bungalow in
angular volumes clad in a riot of everyday suburban materials like plywood and chain link. As
opinionated as it was sculptural, the house earned both cheers and jeers in short order. In 2012 it won
the American Institute of Architects’ prestigious Twenty-Five Year Award.

Olympic Fish Pavilion, Barcelona, Spain

The monumental golden steel-mesh fish sculpture Gehry created for the 1992 Olympic Village in
Barcelona represented a technological breakthrough for the architect’s studio, which used three -
dimensional aeronautical-design software to realize the concept.

Dancing House, Prague, Czech Republic

The Prague offices of the Dutch insurance company Nationale-Nederlanden is also known as Fred and
Ginger, thanks to its signature pair of towers, which seem to resemble a couple dancing. The 1996
building, comprising a cinched volume of metal mesh and glass and a concrete cylinder, was a
collaboration between Gehry and local architect Vlado Miluníc.

Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France

Commissioned by LVMH chief Bernard Arnault and completed in 2014, Frank Gehry’s Fondation
Louis Vuitton is set in Paris’s Bois de Boulogne park. The shiplike exterior includes 12 glass “sails,”
which cover the concrete-clad gallery spaces.

Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain

The Guggenheim’s satellite in Bilbao, Spain, multiplied the museum’s exhibition space in a mountain
of stone, glass, and titanium that follows the contours of the Nervión river. Design and construction of
the Guggenheim Bilbao went largely unnoticed in the press, so the building’s 1997 opening produced
an explosion of publicity, securing Gehry’s place as a master among architects and jolting the Bilbao
economy.
Frank Gehry’s Santa Monica residence. A breakthrough in his work, it was initially resisted by Gehry’s neighbors.

Gehry found a creative outlet in rebuilding his own home, converting what he called “a dumb little house with charm” into a
showplace for a radically new style of domestic building. He took common, unlovely elements of American homebuilding, such
as chain link fencing, corrugated aluminum and unfinished plywood, and used them as flamboyant expressive elements, while
stripping the interior walls of the house to reveal the structural elements. His Santa Monica neighbors were scandalized, but
Gehry’s house attracted serious critical attention, and he began to employ more imaginative elements in his commercial work.
A series of public structures in and around Los Angeles marked his evolution away from orthodox modernist practice, including
the Frances Goldwyn Branch Library in Hollywood, the California Aerospace Museum and the Loyola University Law School. A
number of his works in this period featured the unusual decorative motif of a Formica fish, and he designed a number of lamps
and other objects in the form of snakes and fishes.

1992: One of the first public projects of Gehry is the Barcelona Fish — a huge fish sculpture placed on Barcelona’s waterfront
for the 1992 Olympics. The monumental fish sculpture functions as a landmark in the Olympic Village, anchoring a retail
complex designed by Gehry Partners. This fish sculpture was also a landmark in the history of Frank O. Gehry & Associates,
inaugurating the firm’s use of computer-aided design and manufacturing. The project’s financial and scheduling constraints
prompted James M. Glymph, a partner in the firm, to search for a computer program that would facilitate the design and
construction process, leading to the adoption of CATIA (computer-aided three-dimensional interactive application). The
sculpture was modeled in 3D and delivered to the fabricators as a 3D model. The fish is a frequently recurring motif in Gehry’s
work, serving as an inspiration.

By the mid-’80s, his work had attracted international attention, and he was commissioned to build the Vitra furniture factory in
Basel, Switzerland, as well as the Vitra Design Museum in Weil-am-Rhein, Germany. These projects established him as a major
presence on the international architecture scene. His buildings displayed a penchant for whimsy and playfulness previously
unknown in serious architecture. Most distinctive of all was his ability to explode familiar geometric volumes and reassemble
them in original new forms of unprecedented complexity, a practice the critics dubbed “deconstructivism.” His international
reputation was confirmed when he received the 1989 Pritzker Prize, the world’s most prestigious architecture award.

The Rasin Building, also known as the Dancing House or the Fred and Ginger Building, in Prague, Czech Republic.

Although he originally completed his design for the proposed Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles in 1989,
funding shortages and political infighting delayed construction of the project for many years. The Weisman Art Museum at the
University of Minnesota, completed in 1990, was to be Gehry’s first monumental work in his own country, a billowing fantasy in
brick and stainless steel. Meanwhile, his interest in collaboration with other artists was expressed in the fanciful design for the
West Coast headquarters of the advertising firm Chiat Day, in Venice, California. The entrance to the building took the form of a
pair of giant binoculars, created by the sculptors Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.

Frank Gehry’s masterpiece, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. The museum has been voted as
the most important piece of architecture created since 1980 and heralded as a “signal moment in
architectural culture.”

Gehry’s most spectacular design of the 1990s was that of the new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao,
Spain, completed in 1997. Gehry first envisioned its form, like all his works, through a simple freestyle
hand sketch, but breakthroughs in computer software had enabled him to build in increasingly eccentric
shapes, sweeping irregular curves that were the antithesis of the severely rectilinear International Style.
Traditional modernists criticized the work as arbitrary, or gratuitously eccentric, but distinguished
former exponents of the International Style, such as the late Philip Johnson, championed his work, and
Gehry became the most visible of an elite cohort of highly publicized “starchitects.” He drew fire again
with his design for the Experience Music Project Museum in Seattle, but in his adopted hometown of Los
Angeles, a long-delayed project was reaching fruition.

Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall opened in 2004 in downtown Los Angeles, California. (John
O’Neill)

Over the years, Gehry has lent his imaginative designs to a number of products outside the field of
architecture, including the Wyborovka Vodka bottle, a wristwatch for Fossil, jewelry for Tiffany & Co.
and the World Cup of Hockey trophy. In 2006, the architect and his work were the subject of a feature-
length documentary film, Sketches of Frank Gehry, by director Sydney Pollack

Frank Gehry’s Fondation Louis Vuitton in the Bois de Boulogne. (© Christopher Peterson/Splash
News/Corbis)

In 2014, the architect, age 85, completed one of his most dramatic structures yet: the billowing glass
and steel Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, France. The project was built as a center for contemporary art
and culture, and to house the rapidly growing art collection of the charitable arm of the French luxury-
goods company LVMH Moët Hennessy-Louis Vuitton. The 126,000-square-foot, 2.5-story building is sunk
slightly below ground level to comply with the height limits of Paris’s main park, the Bois de Boulogne.
The building’s glass and steel exterior framework, which Gehry calls the Verrière, was inspired in part by
photographs of a greenhouse that had formerly stood on the site. The interior, which Gehry terms “the
iceberg,” is formed by an array of white concrete cubes, supplying ample neutral space for the
exhibition of art. The interior employs water in the form of a moat and a waterfall to reflect the ample
light that floods all connecting areas of the structure. Located among the fields and trees of the Jardin
d’Acclimatation, the historic children’s playground of the Bois de Boulogne, the Fondation Louis Vuitton
may soon become the newest beloved landmark of the City of Light.