Frank Gehry

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Biography Frank Gehry was born at Toronto in 1929 and raised in the mining town of Timmins, Ontario. His father was a pinball and slot machine supplier and also an artist who won numerous awards for window displays. Always considered a dreamer by his father, Frank wasn't expected to amount to anything important. At 16, Gehry's father died and his family moved to L.A in 1947. His mother contributed to Gehry's creative genes also. She worked for a L.A department store as the head of the drapery department. Gehry was educated at the University of Southern California where he received his architect degree, and later attended Harvard's Graduate School of Design.

In the 1950's, Gehry returned home to pursue his career in architecture. He stared his own firm in 1962, but slowly became more interested in painting and sculpture. Gehry became friends with local abstract expressionists and liked their work.

He began to realize that if they could take raw materials and make it art, he could do the same and make it architecture. These L.A artists supported his newfound abstract ideas of architecture and he built many of their homes and studios. Gehry felt he was much closer with the artists in L.A than any of the architects.

In 1978, Gehry transformed his small Santa Monica home into his first masterpiece. He used architecture as a medium and collaged corrugated metal, chainlink fence and other abstract materials in the form of a house. His house stuck out like a sore thumb in his Santa Monica neighbourhood and his neighbours were furious. It was viewed as garbage to them yet as an icon to all the critics. He was one of the firsts to use architecture as medium, and became instantly notorious. From that point on, Frank Gehry followed his...