Gehry, Frank

Frank Gehry: The architect Frank O. Gehry was born in 1927 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Gehry has had his own office in Los Angeles (Frank O. Gehry Associates) since 1962. In the late 1970s, Gehry built a series of houses with open-plan volumes and prefabricated elements. Examples include the Spiller Residence in Venice, California (1979) and his own house in Santa Monica, whose exterior walls consisted of pink asbestos sheeting, corrugated iron, and iron fencing. This was intended to give the impression that the house was self-made, unfinished, and unstable. See deconstructivism. His most important buildings of any size are in Los Angeles, for example, the Loyola Law School (1981), the California Aerospace Museum (1983), the Francis Howard Goldwyn Regional Branch Library (1986), and the Vitra Design Museum (1986). He recently built the American Center in Paris (1988) in a more austere design, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (1989), and the Nationale Nederlanden building in Prague (1992). His Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain (1991) is controversial; it is being built on a former harbor site near the old city center, and the scale and texture of the museum have been adapted to this design. Striking features of this design are the use of advanced computer programs and the sculptural metal roof. See more at http://www.digischool.nl/ckv1/architectuur/gehri1.htm 1999 – http://web.mit.edu/buildings/statacenter/ Frank Gehry designed a new building of approximately 30,000 m2 for the ‘Computer, Information, and Intelligence Sciences’ faculty, also known as the ‘Ray & Maria Stata Center’ of the Massachusetts Institute for Technology [MIT] near Boston in the USA. The building consists of several rectangular towers interspersed with a series of lower building elements in Gehry’s familiar metal shapes. Gehry also designed furniture, including cardboard chairs and, in the 1990s, following the example of Michael Thonet, chairs made of bent wooden slats.