Printable Biography of Frank Gehry

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Raised in Toronto, Canada, Frank Gehry moved with his family to Los Angeles in 1947, at the age of eighteen. Mr. Gehry received his Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Southern California, and he studied City Planning at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Before establishing his own firm, Mr. Gehry apprenticed with architects Victor Gruen and Pereira & Luckman in Los Angeles, and with Andre Remondet in Paris.

In subsequent years, he built an architectural career that has spanned four decades and produced public and private buildings in America, Asia and Europe. In an article published in the New York Tines in November, 1989, architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote that Mr. Gehry’s “buildings are powerful essays in primal geometric form and ... materials, and from an aesthetic standpoint they are among the most profound and brilliant works of architecture of our time.”

Hallmarks of Mr. Gehry’s design process include a particular concern for the ways in which people move through, live, and work comfortably within the spaces he creates, and an insistence that his buildings address the context and culture of their sites.

Mr. Gehry was awarded the premiere accolade in the field of architecture, the Pritzker Architecture Prize, which honors “significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture,” in 1989. In the same year Mr. Gehry was named a trustee of the American Academy in Rome.

In 1992, Mr. Gehry received the Wolf Prize in Art (Architecture) from the Wolf Foundation, and the Praemium Imperiale Award in Architecture from the Japan Art Association.

In 1994, Mr. Gehry became the recipient of the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Award for lifetime contribution to the arts. Mr. Gehry was also named the recipient of the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize in Architecture by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

He was made a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1987 and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991.

He has received honorary doctoral degrees from the California College of Arts and Crafts, the Technical University of Nova Scotia, the Rhode Island School of Design, the California Institute of Arts, and the Otis Art Institute at the Parsons School of Design.

In 1982 and 1989, he held the Charlotte Davenport Professorship in Architecture at Yale University. In 1984, he held the Eliot Noyes Chair at Harvard University.

He was elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects (A.I.A.) in 1974, and he has received many national, regional, and local A.I.A. awards, including A.I.A. Los Angeles Chapter Gold Medal. He presently serves on the steering committee of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture.

Mr. Gehry’s work has been featured in major professional publications and national and international trade journals, as well as in Newsweek, Time Magazine, Art In America, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Le Monde, L’Express and Frankfurter Allgemeine.

His drawings and models, his designs for cardboard and bentwood furniture,-and his interpretations (in various forms and materials) of fish, have been exhibited in museums around the world.

A major retrospective exhibition of his work was organized by the Walker Art Center in October, 1986. Titled “The Architecture of Frank O. Gehry,” the exhibit traveled throughout North America from Minneapolis to Atlanta, Houston, Toronto and Los Angeles, ending at The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.