Frank Gehry
If you think of buildings as boxes where all walls are straight, and all corners meet at right angles, then you owe it to yourself to have your horizons broadened by the work of Frank Gehry. Born Ephraim Owen Goldberg in Canada in 1929, his childhood was indelibly marked by playing with his grandmother to make little toy cities out of wood scraps. After his family moved to Los Angeles in 1947, Frank Gehry took night classes at City College, and subsequently got his degree in architecture from USC in 1954. After working for a number of other firms, including a year with Andre Remondet in Paris, Gehry returned to LA, where he set up his own firm in 1962. Frank Gehry's architecture is more strongly influenced by artists than by other fellow architects - Brancusi's sculptures are among his cited influences. The resulting buildings look like no other architect's work, invoking savagely curved surfaces, and uses of metal sheeting in both finished and unfinished forms. Signature buildings include the 1997 Bilbao Guggenheim, the 2003 Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA, and the 2004 Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago's Millennium Park. Frequently controversial, his work has nonetheless not gone unrecognized by his peers in the architectural world: he was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1989.
