Architect Frank Gehry Frank Gehry Canadian American

Architect Frank Gehry

Frank Gehry Canadian American architect and designer whose original, sculptural, often audacious work won him world wide renown

Biography • Born in Toronto, Canada in 1929 • Bachelor of Architecture from University of Southern California • Graduate work in City Planning at Harvard University

• He became famous in the 1970 s for creating his style of furniture • Frank O. Gehry is one of the most sought-after international furniture designers • Frank Gehry uses everyday materials such as corrugated iron, plaster and wickerwork to produce his furniture designs

Architectural style • Much of Gehry's work falls within the style of Deconstructivism • Santa Monica residence is a commonly cited example of deconstructivist architecture, as it was so drastically divorced from its original context, and, in such a manner, as to subvert its original spatial intention. • Gehry’s style at times seems unfinished or even crude • featured the use of inexpensive found objects and nontraditional media such as clay to make serious art. • Gehry has been called the apostle of chain-link fencing and corrugated metal siding • he is also a sophisticated classical artist, who knows European art history and contemporary sculpture and painting.

Works Include… • Art Gallery of Ontario Chiat/Day Building Dancing House (Prague) Gehry Residence Gehry Tower (Hanover) Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao Fish Dance Restaurant, Kobe Walt Disney Concert Hall Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art

A Gehry building begins with a sketch, and Gehry’s sketches are distinctive. They’re characterized by a sense of offhand improvisation, of intuitive spontaneity. The fine line is invariably fluid, impulsive. The drawings convey no architectural mass or weight, only loose directions and shifting spatial relationships. "As soon as I understand the scale of the building and the relationship to the site and the relationship to the client, as it becomes more and more clear to me, I start doing sketches". -GEHRY

Walt Disney Concert Hall, New York (2003) Initial idea in sketch Completed building

Walt Disney Concert Hall, New York (2003) Completed building

Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (1997) Initial idea in sketch

Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (1997) Completed building

The Architecture of Frank Gehry • Early work showed signs of becoming unconventional • The Steeves House is the first project he did in Southern California • Completed in 1959

• As time passed Gehry’s work became more interesting • Benson House designed in 1979 • Some other projects designed in the ’ 80’s • Gehry’s fractured geometry, and sculptural buildings have made him Benson House designed in 1979 one of the most sought after, cutting edge Architects of today

Frank Gehry's private home, Santa Monica, California • began with a traditional tract home with clapboard siding and a gambrel roof • Gehry gutted the interior and reinvented the house as a work of deconstructionist architecture • After stripping the interior down to the beams and rafters, Gehry wrapped the exterior with what appears to be scraps and rubbish: plywood, corrugated metal, glass, and chain link • As a result, the old house still exists inside the envelope of the new house. The Gehry House was completed in 1978.

Comparison of Steeves and Gehry houses • The Steeves house is crisp, clear and free of any hint of quirks. Its spaces, indoors and out, are airy and uncomplicated. The details of the sliding doors, wooden fascias and stucco panels are clean, wellfinished and unfussy. • "my (early) preoccupation with hierarchical spaces and formal planning organization. " • Translated from "archibabble, " this means that the architect wanted to achieve a logical plan for the house, then to express this logic in a straightforward manner.

Comparison of Steeves and Gehry houses • The simple pleasures of clarity were supplanted by the subtler delights of ambiguity • Nets of Gehry's trademark chain-link fencing and a tilted skylight over the kitchen add to the ambiguity of the design. • All the lines between old and new, horizontal and vertical, roof and wall are blurred into oblivion. • Internally, the Gehry house is a deliberately schizoid fusion of the ordinary and the incongruous. It's like a live-in hall of mirrors where the reflections are alternately expected and extraordinary

The Architecture of Frank Gehry • Gehry begins to reject the Box and his architecture becomes more sculptural

Fish Dance Restaurant, Kobe ‘”I guess the work has become a kind of sculpture as architecture. It started with the Barcelona fish. And again that was intuitive. . I started drawing fish. And then they started to have a life of their own. . though I’ m a strict modernist in the sense of believing in purity , that you shouldn’t decorate. And yet buildings need decoration because they need scaling elements. They cant just be faceless things”

MAJOR PROJECT: Frank Gehry • Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, 2004

Frank Gehry • When he gets an idea, he sketches it • Can you guess what this will look like?

Ta Da! Walt Disney Concert Hall

Don’t worry! • He does know how to draw; that was just a gesture thumbnail. • This is more like what architectural designs look like

Disney Concert Hall Lillian Disney made an initial gift in 1987 to build a performance venue as a gift to the people of Los Angeles and a tribute to Walt Disney's devotion to the arts and to the city The walls and ceiling of the hall are finished with Douglas-fir while the floor is finished with oak

Disney Concert Hall • designed to be one of the most acoustically sophisticated concert halls in the world, providing both visual and aural intimacy for an unparalleled musical experience • From the stainless steel curves of its striking exterior to the state-ofthe-art acoustics of the hardwoodpaneled main auditorium, the 3. 6 acre complex embodies the unique energy and creative spirit of the city of Los Angeles and its orchestra.

Reflection problems the Founders Room and Children's Amphitheater were • • • designed with highly polished mirror-like panels The reflective qualities of the surface were amplified by the concave sections of the Founders Room walls. Some residents of the neighboring condominiums suffered glare caused by sunlight that was reflected off these surfaces and concentrated in a manner similar to a parabolic mirror The resulting heat made some rooms of nearby condominiums unbearably warm, caused the airconditioning costs of these residents to skyrocket After complaints from neighboring buildings and residents, the owners asked Gehry Partners to come up with a solution these were dulled by lightly sanding the panels to eliminate unwanted glare

Awards • Gehry was elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 1974, and he has received many national, regional, and local AIA awards • Gehry was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize at the Tōdai-ji Buddhist Temple in 1989. to honor a living architect whose built work demonstrates a combination of those qualities of talent, vision, and commitment, which has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture. • In 1999, he was awarded the AIA Gold Medal "in recognition of a significant body of work of lasting influence on theory and practice of architecture. "

Criticism • Gehry's work has its detractors. Some have said: • The buildings waste structural resources by creating functionless forms. • The buildings are apparently designed without accounting for the local climate. • The spectacle of a building often overwhelms its intended use, especially in the case of museums and arenas. • The buildings do not seem to belong in their surroundings.

The architects thoughts on his work “It seems to me that when you are doing architecture, you’re building something out of nothing. There are social issues, there’s the context and there’s how do you make the enclosure and what do you make it with? I try things on, like I used to when I was a kid. I do it all the time…I get to know it. I assimilate it, and then it comes out some other way. . translated…. ”

Frank Gehry He’s so famous that he was even in “The Simpson's” and “Arthur”, where he played himself.

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