GEHRY, Frank

(1929- )

   Frank Gehry, the Los Angeles-based architect known for working in the Deconstructivist style, is best known for organic buildings that appear to question traditional aesthetic sensibilities and forms. His first architectural experiment consisted of the renovation of his private home in Santa Monica, California, purchased in 1977. Here he experimented by juxtaposing "unorthodox" building materials with the traditional materials of the original house. After receiving the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1989, he designed the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, California, in 1991, and it opened in 2003. Built with a stainless steel exterior skin, this complex organic shape contradicts entirely any preconceived notions of building design and shape. Although derided for its unusual style, the concert hall itself is considered to have superior acoustics.

   Gehry's design for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, built in 1993-1997, is considered one of the most expressive buildings of the 20th century. It was designed to recall both a living creature and a giant ship. The building is a complex steel skeleton covered with a thin layer of titanium that shimmers either of golden or silver color, depending on the quality of the sunlight and the time of the day. Inside, a huge atrium recalls the sweeping forms of New York City's Guggenheim Museum, built in the 1950s by Frank Lloyd Wright. Standing as giant monuments to architecture, Frank Gehry's buildings have been criticized for neglecting pedestrians, for ignoring the surrounding urban context of the building, and for creating hazardous slopes and sliding roofs that do not work well in extreme weather. Nonetheless, Gehry's buildings set a new architectural standard, rising up and sweeping across in increasingly more complex feats of engineering upon which he overlays a highly expressive framework of architectural sculpture.

   See also EXPRESSIONISM.