Frank Gehry

Frank O. Gehry
makes generous
architecture.
More than the radical playfulness of
their organic forms or the sensual
erotics of their spatial flux,

what sets his buildings apart

from most of the architectural
landscape is their sheer
generosity, liberal, openhanded,
abundant, magnanimous.

EMR Fredrick R. Weisman Art Museum

c o v e r , top left at the University of Minnesota
Communication and Technology c o v e r , t o p r i g h t View of the
Center; View of main entrance. EMR main entrance looking west with downtown
was conceived during the same Minneapolis in the distance. The busy location
period as the Guggenheim Museum adjacent to a walkway connecting the campus
Bilbao (1991-97), and the building’s with the Washington Avenue Bridge further
more curvilinear forms were some of integrates the museum with the University.
the first developed by Gehry’s firm
using CATIA software

Gehry the Architect
These are not words that
fit most buildings, even great
buildings by great designers of the
past. But they describe Gehry’s
buildings. He makes architecture
that makes people feel like they’ve
been given an unexpected gift.
How he does it is worth
considering. Take the 1997
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, which
has been the object of such lavish
and universal praise. Before going
to Bilbao I’d read all the kudos
and analysis. I’d read about the
advanced computer technology
brought to bear on the construction
of evanescent sculptural forms,
which make for a phantasmagoria of
architectural space. I’d read that the
building offers rare hope to eternal
skeptics about the possibility for
significant architecture and planning
as catalysts for the spiritual revival
of neglected urban environments.
I’d read that, finally, here was a
building about which critics did
not have to say “yes, but;” they
could just say yes, without having
to qualify it. Not until I got there,
though, did I begin to understand
what makes this building so unusual.
Generosity has a lot to do with it.
The building is of course a
masterpiece of contextual urbanism,
billowing up from a bend in the river
to meet the gruff city and gentle
hills surrounding it. The famous
titanium cladding identifies the
spaces for contemporary art inside
the immense structure, separating
them out from other functions that
are housed in elegant limestone
boxes, and from administrative
spaces clad in stucco painted
bright, exuberant colors. Gehry’s
riff on Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous
1 • F ra n k G e h r y
ehry
rotunda for the Guggenheim’s parent
museum in New York is a marvel
of savvy design, at once respectful
of its origin yet determined to be
unique. The atrium explodes upward,
establishing a central vertical spine
around which the rest of the building
unfurls on several floors. This light-
filled tower of curved, shattered,
sometimes transparent planes
allows a visitor to continuously
orient himself wherever he goes
in the rambling building. The big
surprise of the vast Guggenheim
Bilbao is that, despite its gargantuan
complexity and unorthodox
appearance, you never feel lost or
confused inside. You always know
where you are. So you give yourself
over, willingly, to an exploratory
sense of architectural discovery.
It’s a building you can trust.
The generosity of Gehry’s
architecture can be traced to two
sources. One is his own home, the
famous Santa Monica bungalow
that the architect disassembled,
reassembled and wrapped inside
a second structure of chain link
and two-by-fours. The other
critical source is his drawing.
Gehry’s home remakes the
great Southern California domestic
tradition of indoor-outdoor living.
This tradition characterizes the
region’s vernacular architecture,
from courtyard haciendas to
suburban ranch houses, as well as
its unequaled legacy of household
masterworks by Wright, Irving Gill,
R.M. Schindler, Richard Neutra and
many other distinguished architects.
For example, the kitchen and dining
room of the Gehry house occupy
a former outdoor space, where
“Gehry’s sketches are distinctive.
They’re characterized by a
NationTale-Nedelanden Building
View of glass-clad tower.
a b o v e
r i g h t View of north façade. At its base,
the glass-clad tower provides a canopy
over the main entrance.
the driveway to the garage used
to be. The floor remains asphalt,
acknowledging that history, while
an interior wall is composed from
the exterior wall of clapboards of
the original living room next door,
which can be glimpsed through
an intact picture window. Sitting
“inside” the new house yet “outside”
the old one, you’re inside and
outside at the same time. Formally,
the indivisibility of inside/outside
space recalls the seamless flow
of a classic Donald Judd box, in
which the conventional distinction
between a sculpture’s inside and
its outside is erased. Bucking the
history of Western sculpture, a Judd
box is not a discrete mass occupying
space and with a hidden interior
realm. Neither is Gehry’s house.
Unlike a Judd box, though,
domestic space is not just formal.
Domestic space is emotionally
charged, incorporating a complex
psychological dimension that
changes over time. Even for a visitor
to Gehry’s house the experience
of being simultaneously inside
and outside is psychologically
disconcerting; the renovated
bungalow gives surprising physical
form to an instantly recognizable
quality of domestic estrangement
and alienation. The past century’s
architecture has been mostly
conceived in formal and social
terms, but central to Gehry’s
achievement has been this uncanny
articulation of psychological space.
The key is in his drawings.
A Gehry building begins with a
sketch, and Gehry’s sketches are
distinctive. They’re 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. The
Guggenheim Bilbao is a remarkable
turning point in Gehry’s work öand in
the history of architecture÷because
it manages to maintain in built
form the impromptu sketchiness of
his drawings. It’s a sketch in real
space, a sketch you can walk into.
Drawing is the medium most capable
of closely recording the evolution
of artistic thought÷from brain to
hand to pencil to paper and back
to brain. Walking through Gehry’s
sketchy building is like navigating a
projection of psychological space
that is continuously unfolding.
The result: Every visitor is always
located at its exact center, and
the center moves with you.
That’s generosity. All the
rapturous ink that has been spilled
in the wake of Bilbao turns out
to have been something other
than what it initially seemed. Not
just critical love letters, they’re
heartfelt thank you notes.
Frank Gehry considers the
Walt Disney Concert Hall to be his
first major project in his own home
town. No stranger to music, he has
a long association with the Los
Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra,
having worked to improve the
acoustics of the Hollywood Bowl.
He also designed the Concord
Amphitheatre in northern California,
and yet another much earlier in his
2
 sense of off-hand improvisation,
of intuitive spontaneit y”
career in Columbia, Maryland, the
Merriweather Post Pavilion of Music.
The Museum of Contemporary
Art selected him to convert an
old warehouse into its Temporary
Contemporary exhibition space while
the permanent museum was being
built. It has received high praise,
and remains in use today. On a
much smaller scale, but equally as
effective, Gehry remodeled what
was once an ice warehouse in Santa
Monica, adding some other buildings
to the site, into a combination art
museum/retail and office complex.
The belief that “architecture
is art” has been a part of Frank
Gehry’s being for as long as he
can remember. In fact, when asked
if he had any mentors or idols in
the history of architecture, his
reply was to pick up a Brancusi
photograph on his desk, saying,
“Actually, I tend to think more in
terms of artists like this. He has had
more influence on my work than
most architects. In fact, someone
suggested that my skyscraper
that won a New York competition
looked like a Brancusi sculpture.
I could name Alvar Aalto from the
architecture world as someone
for whom I have great respect,
and of course, Philip Johnson.”

3 • F ra n k G e h r y
4
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
The museum’s signature roofline is a
composition of twisting, curving forms that
unfold like a flower over the atrium.

l e f tIn a reversal of traditional architectural

strategies, a processional staircase plunges
from the street-level plaza down to the
main entry of the museum, simultaneously
straddling the sectional drop and making
possible the atrium’s soaring height which
would have otherwise overwhelmed the
nineteenth-century scale of the surrounding
neighborhood.

5 • F ra n k G e h r y

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
a b o v e l e f t The light-flooded atrium
reaches a height of 165 feet and provides
a central circulation space around which
the galleries are oriented. Although Gehry
originally conceived of it as a more rectilinear
space that would accommodate art on its
walls, he was persuaded by the client to
develop a more highly sculpted space in the
spirit of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum in New York.
a b o v e r i g h t Approach to the museum
from the south along Calle de Iparraguirre.
Walt Disney Concert hall
Walt Disney Concert Hall design sketch.
r i g h t
Early Life
Born in Canada in 1929, Gehry has
become a naturalized U.S. citizen.
In 1954, he graduated from USC
and began work full time with Victor
Gruen Associates, where he had
been apprenticing part-time while
still in school. After a year in the
army, he was admitted to Harvard
Graduate School of Design to study
urban planning. When he returned
to Los Angeles, he briefly worked for
Pereira and Luckman, then rejoined
Gruen where he stayed until 1960.
In 1961, Gehry and family, which
by now included two daughters,
moved to Paris where he worked
in the office of Andre Remondet.
His French education in Canada
was an enormous help. During
that year of living in Europe, he
studied works by LeCorbusier,
Balthasar Neumann, and was
attracted by the French Roman
churches. In 1962, he returned to
Los Angeles, setting up his own firm.
He has said on more than
one occasion, “Personally, I hate
chain link. I got involved with it
because it was inevitably being
used around my buildings. If
you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”
A project in 1979 illustrates his
use of chain-link fencing in the
construction of the Cabrillo Marine
Museum, a 20,000 square foot
compound of buildings which he
“laced together” with chain-link
fencing. These “shadow structures”
as Gehry calls them, bind together
the parts of the museum.
Santa Monica Place has one
outside wall, nearly 300 feet long
and six stories tall, hung with a
curtain of chain link, and then a
second layer over it in a different
color spells out the name of the mall.
For a time, Gehry’s work used
“unfinished” qualities as a part of
the design. As Paul Goldberger,
New York Times Architecture
Critic described it, “Mr. Gehry’s
architecture is known for its
reliance on harsh, unfinished
materials and its juxtaposition of
simple, almost primal, geometric
forms...(His) work is vastly more
intelligent and controlled than it
sounds to the uninitiated; he is an
architect of immense gifts who
dances on the line separating
architecture from art but who
manages never to let himself fall.”
One building that is part of
the touring Pritzker exhibition is
the Chiat/Day Office for Venice,
California. The proposed three story,
75,000 square foot building will sit
6
above three underground levels of
parking for 300 cars. The entry to the
building is through a pair of 45’ tall
binoculars designed by Oldenburg
and his wife Coosje van Bruggen.
The shafts of the binoculars will
contain an office and a library.
A guest house he designed
in 1983 for a home in Wayzata,
Minnesota that had been designed
by Philip Johnson in 1952 proved a
challenge that critics agree Gehry
met and conquered. The guest
house is actually a grouping of
one-room buildings that appear as
a collection of sculptural pieces.
He did a monument to mark
the centennial of the Sheet Metal
Workers’ International Association.
It was built by 600 volunteers from
the union in the cavernous central
hall of the National Building Museum
(formerly known as the Pension
Building) in Washington, D.C. The
65 foot high construction was
galvanized stainless steel, anodized
aluminum, brass and copper.
There is an interesting note
regarding a statement Gehry
prepared for the 1980 edition of
“Contemporary Architects,” Gehry
states, “I approach each building
as a sculptural object, a spatial
container, a space with light and
air, a response to context and
appropriateness of feeling and spirit.
To this container, this sculpture,
the user brings his baggage,
his program, and interacts with
it to accommodate his needs. If
he can’t do that, I’ve failed.”
In an artistic climate that too often
looks backward rather than toward
7 • F ra n k G e h r y
the future, where retrospectives
are more prevalent than risk-
taking, it is important to honor the
architecture of Frank O. Gehry.
His Work
Refreshingly original and totally
American, proceeding as it does
from his populist Southern California
perspective, Gehry’s work is
a highly refined, sophisticated
and adventurous aesthetic that
emphasizes the art of architecture.
His sometimes controversial,
but always arresting body of work,
has been variously described as
iconoclastic, rambunctious and
impermanent, but the jury, in making
this award, commends this restless
spirit that has made his buildings a
unique expression of contemporary
society and its ambivalent values.
Always open to experimentation,
he has as well a sureness and
maturity that resists, in the
same way that Picasso did,
being bound either by critical
acceptance or his successes.
His buildings are juxtaposed
collages of spaces and materials
that make users appreciative of
both the theatre and the back-
stage, simultaneously revealed.
Although the prize is for a
lifetime of achievement, the jury
hopes Mr. Gehry will view it as
encouragement for continuing an
extraordinary “work in progress,
“as well as for his significant
contributions thus far to the
architecture of the twentieth century.
For Frank Gehry, like most
architects, the art of building is a
serious and searching business.
He pursues his muse with love
and frustration, with a sense of
discovery in each undertaking, and
an exceptional set of skills. At a time
when retro reigns, he follows the
modernist route of an original vision
that postmodern traditionalists have
tried so hard to give a bad name.
He takes chances; he works close
to the edge; he pushes boundaries
beyond previous limits. There are
times when he misses the mark,
and times when the breakthrough
achieved alters everyone else’s
vision as well. And he believes, as
most architects do, that it is always
the next project that will realize
his aims and ideals his own.
For those that work this way
— exploring levels of philosophy
and practice thaat renew both the
spirit and meaning of an ancient
art — there is a quiet, but genuine
joy that is the architect’s secret
elixir. Delight breaks through
constantly; there are no gloomy
Gehry buildings. One cannot think
of anything he has done that does
nt make one smile. There are the
fish, as pure sculpture or useful
objects, ornamental or occupied,
luminous or glistening, a piscine
preoccupation that has led to lamps,
anthromorphic (anthropofishic?)
restaurants and skyscraper
towers. There is the furniture of
corrugated cardboard, a welcom old
shoebox presence, ingratiatingly
paper-pompous and comfortably
user-friendly. There is wit, but no
fashionable in-jokes or one-liners;
these are light and lively designs
and buildings that lift the spirit with
revelations of how the seemingly
ordinary can become extraordinary
by acts of imagination that turn
the known into new configurations
that engage the mind and eye, that
explore unexpected definitions of
use and style. For Frank Gehry,
these explorations characteristically
take place at the point where
architecture and sculpture meet in
anxious and uneasy confrontation;
this is the difficult, dangerous and
uncharted area that he has made
his own. That he has reconciled
art and utility in a handsome,
workable and intensely personal
synthesis of form and function is
his singnlar achievement. Gehry’s
work takes architecture a significant
step farther as an evolving,
challenging and creative art.
But there is more to Gehry’s
work than an adventurous spirit
and original imagery. He combines
building elements on a site in a way
that is not only intrigningly sculptural
but also innovatively contextual,
whether it is the small gem of a law
school at Loyola University in Los
Angeles, an ambitious Amencan
cultural center in Paris, or a
commercial complex that suddenly
sparks a humdrum block. What may
look like arbitrary, and to some,
offputting, abstract geometry outside
reveals itself inside as a series of
unusual and inviting relationships
achieved through a thoughtful
analysis of the program in terms
of a multidimensional concept of
sensuously orchestrated space.
If there are many facets to
Gehry’s work, there are also several
8
 that characterizes the 1990’s.
Walt Disney Concert Hall
Gehrys. There is the media Gehry as
He builds on the liberated “box” Design process model, scale 1/8”=1’.
defined and promoted by the press: l e f t
Gehry considered a combination of limestone
the casual, laid-back Californian that Frank Lloyd Wright broke and steel sheathing for the exterior.
whose work is touted as fashionably open forever, and the liberates
“pop” or “punk,” who uses funny spaces that Le Corbusier raised b e l o w Final design model, scale ¼”= 1’, with
materials - chain link, exposed pipe, to luminous heights. (“Ronchamps view of main entrance at corner of First Street
corrugated aluminum, utility-grade humbles us all,” he says.) Gehry and South Grand Avenue.
construction board - in a funky, easy, continues and personalizes the
West Coast way. The image is part 20th century tradition. This is a
of the media-chic of Venice and the kind of architecture utltimately
seductive charms of Santa Monica, made possible and logical only by
the places he has made his habitat; modern technologies and lifestyles.
this is nouveau California at the He pushes the modern miracle
cutting-edge of style. It is the fashion of radically redefined structure
to admire his ofibeat spirit but to and space into sudden bursts of
wonder how well the work will travel. “pure” form — a surprising exterior
An then there is the real Frank stair, a skylit room that offers as
Gehry, who is all and none of much abstract art as illumination
this: an admirer of the quirky, the
accidental and the absurd, tuned
in to the transient nature of much
contemporary culture, while he is
deeply involved, personally and
professionally, with the world of
serious art and artists. There is a
closet elitist, if elitism is equated
with a fierce admiration for the
great works of art, architecture
and urbanism. Above all, he is an
obsessive perfectionist engaged
in a ceaseless and demanding
investigation of ways to unite
expressive form and utilitarian
function. He practices architecture in
the most timeless and sophisticated
sense, but with a very special spin.
The spin is that Gehry’s work
goes to the heart of the art of our
time, carrying the conceptual and
technological achievements of
modernism (as real and instructive
as its much better-publicized failures)
to the spectaularly enriched vision

9 • F ra n k G e h r y
1 0
inits crowning construction.
In every case, the building is
painstakingly programmed, and the
program is the generator, or at least,
the co-generator, of the solution.
Sometimes the parts are broken
down into the “single room” elements
that Gehry favors for their plastic
possibilities. But the choices are
never arbitrary; he does not seek
novelty or superficial effect. He does
not make sculpture and stuff it with
after-the-fact uses. Nor does he
sheathe his unconventional forms
and spaces in trompe l’oeil masonry
to suggest a weight and solidity
of construction that are not there.
They are wrapped in skins of metal,
plywood, composition board or glass
for flexibility and appropriateness
of scale, for transparency, opacity
or reflection, for changes of color,
climate and light. As an alchemist of
1 1 • F ra n k G e h r y
sorts, constantly changing dross into
something less than gold but much
more than common aluminum, Gehry
professes to be unsure of what
is ugly and what is beautiful. It is
irrelevant; he uses the everyday and
ever present stuff of the expedient
and low-cost construction of our
immediate environment for surprising
aesthetic revelations and unexpected
elegance. The cultural references of
these materials are as strong as the
structural and aesthetic rationale.
One of Gehry’s benign, mock-
monumental cardboard furniture
lines is called Easy Edges; even the
name has a comfortable, laid-back
sound. But his is not easy art; the
more relaxed it seems, the more
rigorous the creative effort that
underlies it. Add wit, as Gehry does,
and the deception is greater still; art
mocks earnestness as life mocks
Walt Disney Concert Hall
l e f t, t o p Plan of third level:
(1) Entry (2) Lobby (3) Concession
(4) Pre-concert room (5) Founder’s room
(6) Concert hall (7) Antechamber
(8) Organ (9) Mechanical Room
l e f t , b o t t o m l e f t Final design
model, scale ¼=1’, with view of main
entrance.
l e f t , b o t t o m r i g h t View of the
interior model, scale unknown.
View of interior model showing
a b o v e
lobby along South Grand Avenue side of
building. Gehry has located circulation
areas, small rooms, a café, and retail
space in the pockets between the outer
building façade and the auditorium
structure.
Fredrick R. Weisman Art Museum at
the University of Minnesota
l e f tThe dynamic stainless steel façade
completely masks the rectangular structure of the
museum when the building is seen from the west;
an entirely different impression of the form is
gained when it is viewed from inside the campus.

1 2
r i g h t The metallic surface of the west
façade takes on dramatically different
appearances depending on the time of
day and weather conditions.
b o t t o m The two-level Washington
Avenue Bridge conducts both pedestrian
and vehicular traffic to the museum and
campus. The museum’s dramatic façade
acts as a greeting to approaching visitors

art. But art and life are inseparable, 1929 born

whether the relationship is one
1947 moves with family to Los Angeles
of imitation, as earlier centuries
believed, or observations on a world 1954 graduated from University of Southern California
outrageously out of control, as is so
worked for Victor Gruen Associates
often the case today. Architecture
does more than comment; buildings 1962 founded Gehry Partners LLC, located in Santa Monica
define and accommodate attitudes,
1968 designed The O’Neill Hay Barn, located in Capistrano
customs and style. This has made
the art of architecture an unending 1972 introduced his Easy Edges Furniture series
series of sublime surprises. Whether
1978 built The Loyola Law School
it is the revolutionary vision of the
Renaissance or the Baroque, the 1979 designed Cabrillo Marine Museum, located in San Peddro
dramatic disruptions of classical
designed Spiller Residence, located in Venice, California
convention of Schinkel and Soane,
or the 20th century’s intoxicated 1980 designed The Santa Monica Palace
Gehry’s Life and Work

pursuit of the future, nothing goes

1985 built The Chiat/Day Building
back to the way it was before. In
every case, architecture has been 1989 built The Weisman Art Museum
vitalized and opened up, with new
Pritzker Archetecture Prize Laureate
directions charted that had not
previously existed and that affect 1994 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Award
everything that follows. Today
1995 built The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
there are those who understand
history so little that they would 1997 Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize in Architecture
cut off all avenues of discovery
1998 built The DZ Bank Building
in favor of reworked revivals.
And so debate will continue 1999 built Healthcare Center, located in Cincinnati
about Frank Gehry’s work. It is hard
2000 built Condé Nast Cafeteria
o imagine a “finished” Gehry look,
except among his imitators, who built The Experience Music Project
are legion, or an oeuvre that will
2001 built Gehry Tower
not continue to evolve. There has
been much that was tentative or 2003 built Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts
unresolved in his earlier projects,
built Maggie’s Centre
as he set the mot difficult problems
of the union of art and architecture 2004 designed Trophy for the World Cup of Hockey
as his highest task. Today his
built Jay Pritzker Pavilion
ever-larger and increasingly
international commissions 2007 built Weatherhead School of Management
are marked by an impressive,
2008 built The Art Gallery of Ontario
hard-won clarity and order.

1 3 • F ra n k G e h r y
 Frank Gehry Exhibit
10 January 2011 – 10 April 2011
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
151 Third Street (between Mission + Howard)
San Francisco, CA 94103
415.357.4000
Experience Music Project
c o v e r , b o t t o m l e f t A corridor
runs through the building from the plaza-level
ticket lobby to a second entrance along Fifth
Avenue. The only interior space of the EMP
designed by Gehry, it includes various public
amenities, such as a restaurant and bookstore.
Frank Gehry Exhibit is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and
the Norton Museum of Art. Generous support for the exhibition is provided by the Koret
Foundation. Additional support is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.
The San Francisco presentation is made possible by generous support from Doris and
Donald Fisher, the Mimi and Peter Haas Fund, and Nancy and Steven H. Oliver. Additional
support is provided by the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation.
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
c o v e r , b o t t o m r i g h t
(1991-1997)
Experience Music Project
b a c k c o v e r Seattle (1995-2000).