Architect Frank Gehry:

Born: February 28, 1929 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada

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.
Education:

Graduated from the University of Southern California's School of Architecture.

After graduation from USC in 1954, he spent time away from the field of architecture in
numerous other jobs, including service in the United States Army.

He studied city planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design for a year, leaving before
completing the program

He lives in Santa Monica, California, and continues to practice out of Los Angeles.

Award.

Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council

In 1989, Gehry was the recipient of the Pritzker Prize for architecture.

In 1994, Gehry was the recipient of The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize.

In 1995, Gehry was the recipient of the Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate Award.

In 1998, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

In 1999, he was awarded the AIA Gold Medal.

In 2000, Gehry was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Cooper-Hewitt
National Design Museum.

In 2004, on November 3, Gehry was awarded the prestigious Woodrow Wilson Award for
public service by the Woodrow Wilson Center of the Smithsonian Institution in New York City.

In 2006 on December 6, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria
Shriver inducted Frank Gehry into the California Hall of Fame located at The California Museum
for History, Women, and the Arts.

2008 Medal of the Order of Charlemagne, Principality of Andorra (declined honor)

He has received honorary doctoral degrees from Occidental College, Whittier College, the
Southern California Institute of Architecture, the University of Toronto, the California College of Arts
and Crafts, the Technical University of Nova Scotia, the Rhode Island School of Design, the California
Institute of the Arts, and the Otis Art Institute at the Parsons School of Design.

Architectural style:

Gehry's work falls within the style of Deconstructivism (departing from modernism).
Deconstructivist structures are not required to reflect specific social or universal ideas, i.e.
universality of form, do not reflect a belief that form follows function.

Ex:Gehry's own 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 sometimes remains controversial due to the lack of a unifying philosophy or theory.

Gehrys style at times seems unfinished or even crude, but his work is consistent with the
California "funk" art movement in the 1960s and early 1970s, which featured the use of
inexpensive found objects and nontraditional media such as clay corrugated steel, chain link
fencing, unpainted plywood and other utilitarian or "everyday" materials to make serious art

A retrospective exhibit at New York's Whitney Museum in 1988 revealed that he is also a
sophisticated classical artist, who knows European art history and contemporary sculpture and
painting.

Gehry building begins with a sketch, and Gehrys sketches are distinctive. Theyre
characterized by a sense of off-hand 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.

Frank Gehry began to redirect his architecture by fusing the Japanese and vernacular
elements in his early work with the influence of painters and sculptors in a sophisticated
manipulation of prospectively distorted shapes, sculptural masses molded by light, and buildings
that reveal their structures
Gehry explored a fascination with the process of construction and the use of mass produced
and affordable materials.
By exposing wood frame construction, by using plywood, corrugated metal, and chain link metal
fence as sheathing or screens, and by breaking volumes Into incomplete geometries and partial
objects, Frank Gehry revealed the structure of the physical and architectural context in which and
out of which Frank Gehry was building.
He came to international prominence with works which exploded the geometry of traditional
architecture to create a dramatic new form of expression.
He deployed cutting-edge computer technology to realize shapes and forms of hitherto
unimaginable complexity, such as the startling irregularities of his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao,
Spain, or the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. In these monumental buildings, the
uninhibited whimsy of his pencil sketches took shape in powerful structures of gleaming titanium.
Gehry is very much inspired by fish. Not only do they appear in his buildings, he created a line
of jewelry, household items, and sculptures based on this motif

GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM BILBAO

Established in October 18, 1997

The monument in the design stage was split into separate volumes.

Location : Abando , Bilbao , Spain

Type : art museum

Designed by Canadian-American Architect Frank Gehry

Concepts used by the architect

He has worked with multiple concepts with each volumes.

Eg: Cruise liner, A metal flower with petals and A fish with its head and tail chopped off.

Fish and their movements have always been a part of my architectural vocabulary. I think it goes back to my childhood
days
The architect was successful in relating the design to the site surroundings.

To the south the dialogue with the city, stone ,the use of right angles, windows aligned, strict geometry.
To the north is the river Angilations, fluid shape etc. is used.
Process of design. He started with sketches sketching in a subconscious mind to get random forms
The image of the FISH appears right away in the very first sketches of the building.
Frank Gehry Combined his subconsciously drawn sketches with the requirements of the building. To get a correctly
functioning design He interpreted his designs into a variety of volumes. And he worked like a sculpist standing before a
clay.

After achieving a beautiful object computer software's were used to get the practical feasibility of the building. The
American architect made a beautiful object as well as a correctly functioning building.

Solomon Guggenheim thought that the next museum should be built on the industrial waste land
adjacent to the river and called upon Frank Gehry
Built within the context of Bilbao Ria 2000 Plan to revitalize some industrial areas of the city of
Bilbao,
The Basque Governments brief was to have one of the most significant 20th century buildings, and
finally it was.
This masterpiece is a kind of urban sculpture that gives people the impression of being a ship in
the Nervin River, or even a metallic flower, from an aerial view.
It is set between two levels: the river level and the city level, 16 meters higher.
Plot is crossed by the Puente de la Salve bridge, embraced by a sculptural tower that makes it
part of the compound.
It has wide stairs that connect again the two different levels at the other side of the bridge.
This sculptural building is composed by different volumes with different uses apart from the
exhibition rooms: an auditorium, a library, offices, a caf and a restaurant.
The curves on the exterior of the building were intended to appear random; the architect said
that "the randomness of the curves is designed to catch the light".
The interior "is designed around a large, light-filled atrium with views of Bilbao's estuary and the
surrounding hills of the Basque country."

The atrium, which Gehry nicknamed The Flower because of its shape, serves as the organizing
center of the museum.
With a total 256,000 square feet, it had more exhibition space than the three Guggenheim
collections in New York and Venice combined at that time.
Eleven thousand square meters of exhibition space are distributed over nineteen galleries, ten of
which follow a classic orthogonal plan that can be identified from the exterior by their stone
finishes.
The remaining nine galleries are irregularly shaped and can be identified from the outside by
their swirling organic forms and titanium cladding. The largest gallery, measures 30 meters wide
and 130 meters long.
Gehry uses blocks of limestone, half-millimeter-thick titanium panels, glass curtains and a water
surface at the rear.
Limestone represents the tradition (Deusto University, on the other side of the river, is made of
sandstone) and titanium panels give the building a futurist image (reminiscent of fish scales).
The walls and surfaces of the atrium are curved, bowed and twisted to generate a sense of
movement.
On the inside, exhibition rooms are large enough to show Modern Art, that includes great scale
works.
The building was constructed on time and budget, which is rare for architecture of this type.
He used computer visualizations and collaborated closely with the individual building trades to
control costs during construction.

Computer simulations of the building's structure made it feasible to build shapes that
architects of earlier eras would have found nearly impossible to construct.
An artificial pond has been created to give a feeling the museum is built on the water.

CALIFORNIA AEROSPACE MUSEUM:

Completed in 1984, the Aerospace Museum in California is one of Frank Gehrys early museum commissions.

Architect: Ar. Frank O Gehry

Location: California, LA, USA
Context: Urban
Style: Post modern
Climate: Temperate
Material: Glass, Steel and Sheet metal.

Completed in 1984, the Aerospace Museum in California is one of Frank Gehrys early museum
commissions.
Together with other structures (including a DC-8 jetliner), they constitute the California Science
Center complex in Los Angeles.
Gehry's work incorporated the distinctive style he adapted from previous residential projects,
creating geometric shafts and irregular angular forms which break from the spacial bounding of
the base structure.
During this time, Gehry was more famous for the eccentric, out-of-the-box designs he did for
various Californian residences, and this he carried over into the Aerospace Museum.
The technological program is further suggested through the industrial materials, including
glass, steel, and sheet metal, covering the buildings abstract forms, whose irregularity and
arrangement mimic its urban context.
The structure is segmented, comprising of a union of differentiated pieces brought together in
a special collage of artistic style and architectural form.
The Museum's exterior has the signature sculptural style that permeates Gehry's work, with the
facade of the building an arrangement of intricate stylistic components: a large metal-skinned
polygon, a glass wall with a windowed prism above it, and a stucco cube with a hangar door.
Above this aircraft hangar door is an F-104 Lockheed Model G Star fighter Jet poised in midflight, jutting out from the structure as both artistic statement and the purpose of the structure is
reinforced through these materials, with the building itself as an abstraction of aircraft and their
environment.
The main entrance to the museum is ironically placed at the rear, facing the entrance of its
neighbor structure, the Armory. This was done to supposedly integrate the new museum with the
institution beside it.
From the long, sweeping ramp, the entrance leads to a main viewing platform inside where
museum-goers could stare in awe at the suspended life-size aircraft exhibits.
Flanking stairs leading in opposite directions from the viewing platform, allows visitors to
select a sequence in which to go through the museum, once they have oriented themselves.
The museum was meant to be more interior. Aside from the obvious vastness of the interior
space highlighted by multiple skylights, Frank Gehry made use of the museums Come Touch
Tomorrow theme literally by strategically placing stairs and platforms where visitors can be
around the suspended aircraft on display
The use of skylights is a necessity for the illumination of the interior spaces; however Gehry
again takes a unique approach to these elements, incorporating them into walls, angling and
rotating them to become architectural elements within themselves, rather than simply utilities.