Remembering Frank O. Gehry

"Be yourself, and care about what you do and care deeply, because if you don’t care, nobody else will, and that care will come out in your work. And that’s all you need to do". It is perhaps the most precious lesson from Frank O. Gehry, the one that closes the interview conducted in 2010 by Nicola Leonardi, co-founder of THE PLAN, with the visionary designer of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, who passed away on December 5 at the age of 96.

>>> Read the full interview with Frank O. Gehry, published as the editorial of THE PLAN 045, featuring a special cover created from a collage of some of his most important works

Naturalized American but born in Canada, Frank Owen Gehry came into the world as Ephraim Owen Goldberg in Toronto in 1929. In 1947 he moved with his family to Los Angeles, where in 1954 he graduated in Architecture from the University of Southern California. In the years that followed, he worked for Welton Becket & Associates and later for Victor Gruen Associates. After mandatory military service in the U.S. Army, he entered the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he studied Urban Planning.

In 1961, he spent a year in Paris after relocating there with his wife and two children. During this time, he worked in André Remondet’s studio and studied the works of Le Corbusier and Balthasar Neumann. Upon returning to Los Angeles, in 1962 he opened his own design practice, Frank O. Gehry and Associates, headquartered in Santa Monica. In 1972 he was appointed assistant professor at the University of Southern California, and in 1974 he became a member of the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architecture. Between the 1970s and 1980s he served as a visiting critic in various American universities, and in 1988 he joined the faculty at Yale University.

In 1980, Gehry was among the architects invited by Paolo Portoghesi to participate—alongside other masters such as Rem Koolhaas, Charles Moore, Hans Hollein and Franco Purini—in the central installation of the Venice Biennale exhibition, Strada Novissima, destined to become the manifesto of the Postmodern Movement. In 1987 he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in Rome, and in 1989 he received the Pritzker Prize, sealing his international renown.

Among Gehry’s works—he is considered one of the leading exponents of Deconstructivism—are the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (1997), universally recognized as his masterpiece; the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles—completed only in the early 2000s, despite Gehry's design dating back to 1989; and the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota (1990), effectively his first major project completed in the United States.

Between the late 1980s and early 1990s, he also created the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany (1989), and the Binoculars Building in Venice, California, which houses the West Coast headquarters of the Chiat/Day advertising agency. The building is so named because its entrance is shaped like a gigantic pair of binoculars, designed by sculptors Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.

From the 2000s date the Hotel Marqués de Riscal in Elciego, Spain; the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas; and the Beekman Tower in New York, a residential skyscraper in Lower Manhattan known for its rippling stainless-steel façade. Gehry is also responsible for the Jay Pritzker Pavilion and the BP Pedestrian Bridge in Chicago’s Millennium Park; the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris—imagined as a transparent cloud in the Jardin d’Acclimatation at the Bois de Boulogne; and the Luma Foundation in Arles, also in France.

>>> Also read the article “Constantly Advancing: the Creative Process of Gehry Partners” by Michael Webb, also published in THE PLAN 045