GEHRY, FRANK

born Feb. 28, 1929, Toronto, Ont., Can. in full Frank Owen Gehry American architect and designer whose original, distinctive, and often audacious work won him worldwide renown. He won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1989. Gehry's family immigrated to Los Angeles in 1947. He studied architecture at the University of Southern California (194951; 1954) and city planning at Harvard University (195657). After working for several architectural firms, he established his own company, Frank O. Gehry & Associates, in 1962. Reacting, like many of his contemporaries, against the cold and often formulaic modernist buildings that had begun to dot many cityscapes, Gehry began to experiment with unusual expressive devices and search for a personal vocabulary. He built unique, quirky structures that emphasized human scale and contextual integrity. In designing public buildings, he tended to avoid the monolithic, preferring to cluster small units within a larger space. The city buildings he designed also made reference to older architectural forms and to nearby structures. His seemingly sketchy approach coupled with his use of inexpensive materials (such as chain-link fencing, plywood, and corrugated steel) gave many of his structures an unfinished, whimsical air. Treating each new commission as a sculptural object, a spatial container, a space with light and air, Gehry was rewarded with commissions the world over. His critically acclaimed structures included the Cabrillo Marine Museum (1979), the Frank O. Gehry House (1979), Indiana Avenue Project (1980; three artists' studios), Los Angeles Aerospace Museum (1982), the Temporary Contemporary (1983; an adjunct to the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art), all in southern California; the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum (1989) at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis; Fishdance Restaurant (1986) in Kobe, Japan; Vitra Furniture Museum and Factory (1987), Weil am Rhein, Germany; the American Center and Euro-Disneyland Retail and Entertainment Center (both 1988) in Paris; and many houses for individualsnotably the Norton Simon House (1976). In addition to his architectural designs, Gehry originated two lines of corrugated cardboard furniture, Easy Edges (196973) and Experimental Edges (197982), crafted a line of Fish and Snake lamps (1984), completed several renovation projects, and designed a number of art exhibitions for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, Minn.), and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.