Biography of Frank O. Gehry

  He was born 28 February 1929 in Toronto, Canada
to Irving and Thelma Caplan Goldberg. His  mother
and maternal grandparents had the greatest impact
on his early development. Sam and Leah  Caplanski
had emigrated in 1908 with their  four  year  old
daughter Thelma and three year old son Kalman,
from Lodz, Poland where the talented, strong-willed
Leah had worked as a "foreman" in her father's iron
foundry. In Toronto, they simplified Caplanski to
Caplan and  slowl assimilated into their New World
environment. I certain crucial ways, however, they
retained Old world values, particularly religious
ones. Sam was president of his symagogue, a small,
remodeled houselike building, his grandson later
recalled, similar, in some ways, to the house in
Santa Monica that he himself, would remodel in the
1970s. "My house reminds me of that old building,"
Gehry confessed, "and I frequently think of it when
I'm  here.

  In 1952, he married Anita Snyder and her job made
it possible for her husband to go to college. Frank
had taken night courses at Los Angeles City College,
and then he drifted to U.S.C., first as a part time
and summer school student. His first mentor was Glen
Lukens, a proffesor of ceramics. Recognizing his
student's potential design talents, Lukens recommended
that he consider studying architecture and introduced
him to his friend, the architect Raphael Soriano. Frank
was subsequently admitted to be U.S.C. School of
Architecture, where he become friendly with Arnold
Schreier, a graduate student in th school. With Schreier,
he also design an addition to a house in the Hollywood
Hills, his first constructed work.

  In addition to formal school projects at U.S.C.,
Frank also drew illustration for art professor Keith
Crown's Cross-Cultural Magazine.One memorable composition
was a series of views of the school mascot Tommy Trojan,
bearing Christian, Jewisj and Islamic insignia. During
his last years in architechtur school, Frank worked
part time for Victor Gruen Associates, where he gained
valuable experience and made  important contact, most
notably with Gruen himself, who greatly influenced his
views on city pllaning. Upon graduatioon  from U.S.C.
in 1954 he began to work  full time for Gruen before
being drafte into the U.S. Army.

  The interest in urban planning engendered at U.S.C.
and his contact with Victor Gruen persuaded Gehry that
he should study planning on the graduate level.With the
help of former profesors, Eisner and Eckbo, he was
admitted in the fall of 1956 to the Harvard Graduate
School of Design, but he quickly discovere that "planning"
at Harvard was to abstract for his tastes and was grounded
too heavily in the  statistical social sciences. He,
therefore, abandonded th idea of a degree in planning and
became a special student,  auditing lectures throughout
the  university. He was particularly impressed by Arthur
Schlesinger Jr.,John Kenneth  Galbraith and Pitirim
Sorokin. The  intellectual riches at Harvard  stimulated
Gehry's penchant for  reading and his lifelong pursuit of
ne ideas. He took  courses with Joseph Hudnut and
particularly enjoyed the  philosophical  walking tours
with him  through the old Boston neighborhoods. Throug
him, Gehry  discovered the  European modernists,
particularly Le  Corbusier.

  Though he would largely continue for the next
decade to design within the prevailing modernist
canon, he would slowly begin in the 1970's to explore
more consciously the expressive possibilities of
historical references and the relationshipof
architechture to painting and sculpture. Though
from time to time he might slip into such cliches
as the lamentation over the " burden of culture,"
he would in such works as the Loyola Law School
demonstrate that th legacies of "culture" and "history"
need not be burdensome after all.

  In 1962, Gehry returned from Europe to set up his own
practice in Los Angeles.

  Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s the vissitudes
of life continued to shape and reflect the changing
contours of Gehry's work Of almost equal importance
in these years of personal and artistic ferment was
his friend, the psychologist, Milton Wexler, many of
whose patients were painters, sculptors writers,
actors, and other creative artists. " I first went
to Milton," Gehry recalled," because my world wasn't
functioning very well. He was the firs shrink to
engage me intelectually.".Through Wexler Gehry got
to know more artists who in turn introduced him to
their own friends and patrons. Through th 1970s and
1980s, he became conscious of the impact, both
personally and profesionally. Their way of making art
strongly  affected his way of makin architechture.

  Slowly he learned to sublimate the anger, pain and
fear of existing in a crazy, hostile world to
architectural statements about those tensions.
Frequently via irony and a sometimes dark humor,
there crept into his work elements of light and
hope. Reflecting his favored aesthetic os "buildings
under construction," his woould frequently suggest
"unfinished business" or the poignant incompleteness
of all human existence.

  Critics of the 1970s and 1980s would enjoy labeling
Gehry a " rule breaker ," yet, if he was breaking the
rules, they were rules of a different order from his
own, he obeyed his own rules, the rules he had forged
over a lifetime of experience.

  He has been honored with more than 80 international
awards for more than three decades of creative endeavor.
Perhaps the most important is the Hyatt Foundation's
"Pritzker Architecture Prize", internationally
considered the most significant architectural prize.
It was awarded to Gehry in 1979

  Gehry's models, drawings, sketches and furniture
designs have been collected in important museums
throughout the world and presented in numerou
exhibitions. The most important retrospective of
his work, "The Architecture of Frank O. Gehry"
was presented in 1986 by the Walker Art  Center.
It toure from Minneapolis to Atlanta, Houston,
Toronto, Los Angeles and New York at the Whitney
Museum of American Art. His works have also  been
presented in museum in Helsinki, Warsaw, Antwerp,
Utrecht, Stockholm, Madrid and Barcelona.

  Important publications like Newsweek, Time, Art in
America, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Le Monde,
L'Express, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Die Zeit
have devoted considerable space to an evaluation of his
work. The list of selected publications about Gehry
covers more than 700 titles. A Germa version of what
is probably the most informative book about Gehry, "The
Architecture of Frank Gehry", was  published by the
Wiese Verlag in Basel in 1989

  Since the early 1970s, Gehry has held guest
professorships at more than 20 universities and
has delivered more than 100 major addresses.



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