FRANK OWEN GEHRY_

american DECADES

Background

Born in Toronto, Canada, Frank O. Gehry came to the forefront of architecture well before the 1990s. He studied at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles (1949-1951) and at Harvard University (1956—1957). The principal of Gehry and Associates, Los Angeles, since 1962, he received the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 1989. When he accepted the award, he spoke about establishing a link between art and architecture that would influence his work for the next decade: "I explored the process of new construction materials to try giving feeling and spirit to form. In trying to find the essence of my own expression, I fantasized that I was an artist standing before a white canvas deciding what the first move should be."

Cheapscape Architect

Frank Gehry's radical and unusual style is not easily defined, although he has long referred to the past, borrowing from both Eastern and Western architectural traditions, and is usually ranked as a postmodernist. His ties to minimalist and conceptual art are apparent, as well. He blends architecture with qualities of art and sculpture, creating playful homes and buildings that push the limits of design. He is especially known for his use of inexpensive and unusual building materials, coining his own term for this style: "cheapscape architecture." One of his goals is to create a look of incompletion. This unfinished, minimalist quality, coupled with materials such as metal panels, plywood, and chain-link fences, often gives his buildings the look of industrial structures rather than the homes and museums that they in fact are. Although Gehry works in an avant-garde, and even antiarchitectural manner, he has increasingly designed major public buildings and has received international recognition and respect. His steady work in the 1980s is reflected in his receipt of the prestigious international Pritzker Prize in 1987.

his BUSINESS 

Gehry established his own practice in 1962 in Santa Monica, California. His interest in industrial building materials began when he was a GI at Fort Benning, Georgia. There, assigned to put up temporary buildings, he became familiar with the materials he would use to create his distinct unfinished, industrial look. In the 1960s and 1970s his work appealed to the antiestablishment/antiarchitecture mood, but by the 1980s he was receiving commissions that indicated that he had been accepted by the mainstream. His inexpensive materials and focus on minimal construction may have appealed to people concerned with conservation, recycling, and other environmental trends of the decade.

Understanding Gehry

another sketch of GEHRY

The usual notions of beauty and design rarely apply to Gehry's buildings. As Gehry explained his style: "I prefer the sketch quality…the appearance of 'in progress' rather than the presumption of total resolution and finality." He also approaches each building "as a sculptural object," inviting the viewers' interpretations of and interaction with the work. Gehry made a statement about his seriousness and devotion to art as well as to cheapness when he refused to allow some of his cardboard furniture to be sold as expensive pop-art objects in upscale galleries.

1980s Work

LOYOLA LAW school

In the 1980s Gehry designed diverse types of buildings, including artists' studios, a bank office, homes, and an amphitheater, but his most popular buildings include the California Aerospace Hall (1984) and Loyola Law School (1984), both in Los Angeles. The Aerospace Hall arrests the viewer with an unexpected airplane—a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter—attached to an outside wall, angled as if in flight. Gehry's design consists of two parts: the larger is a seven-sided hangar covered with angling riveted sheet metal; the other is a more traditional museum building in white stucco, but the Starfighter breaks up this traditional look and gives the building a dramatic appearance. For the law school Gehry designed six buildings: three lecture halls, an administrative office building, a classroom building, and a bookstore. The style is typically Gehry, inventive yet unfinished looking, with exposed construction and the use of plywood. A greenhouse in the style of a Romanesque temple rests above the classrooms, with jagged stairs leading to it; thus, a historical reference appropriate to a site for legal education is integrated with Gehry's long-standing concern with the environment. Such innovative fusions made Gehry one of the most respected architects of the decade.

Architecture as Art

Gehry was a pioneer in the movement to return architecture to its standing as fine art. One example of his links to art is the Chiat/Day Main Street building, completed in 1991, in Venice, California. The façade of the building is an enormous pair of black binoculars designed by Gehry's friends Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Cars enter the structure by driving beneath the binoculars; small offices and conference rooms were built within the cylinders. Gehry's use of sculptural forms was also evident in his designs for the $100 million Guggenheim Museum, which opened in Bilbao, Spain, on 19 October 1997. The glass-and-titanium structure echoed the shipbuilding history of the city with its abstract design resembling a ship.

Museum Pieces

In the late 1990s Gehry undertook another museum project: the Experience Music Project (EMP) in Seattle, Washington. The $60 million complex "will use music to engage people in an entirely new way. The exhibits and building treat music as a living and evolving art form. I wanted the building design to evoke the energy of music," Gehry told Architectural Record in January 1997. His designs for the three-story, 110,000-square-foot complex called for an arrangement of six components, whose exterior surfaces and colors (bright orange, blue, and gold) were intended to evoke images of broken pieces of Stratocaster guitars. Looping overhead cables were meant to resemble busted guitar strings. A reporter for the Seattle Times wrote that the museum looks like "a space-ship that fell from the sky and got a little roughed up on landing." The museum opened to the public in June 2000.

Future Plans

In 1999 Gehry won an invitation-only competition to design an addition to the Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C. The $40 million project, which was slated to start in 2001, called for renovating the original Beaux-Arts building designed by Ernest Flagg in 1897.