Frank O Gehry

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Frank Owen Gehry was born on 28 February in 1929 in Toronto, Canada, with the name Ephraim Goldberg, from a Jewish-Polish family. Later on, he moves to the USA and adopts the American Nationality.

In 1954 he receives the title of Architect, in the same year, due to pressures from his wife, changes his name, and starts to work in the Victor Gruen studio, in Los Angeles. During one year, he had to leave to dodge doing his military service. On his return he was admitted in the Harvard University Graduate School of Design to study Urbanism and when he returned to LA he went back to the Gruen office.

In 1961, he moved to Paris with his wife and two daughters, where he worked in André Rémonder´s studio. The French education he received in Canada was of great help to integrate in Paris. He was there for a year, in which he studied the works of Le Corbusier and French and European architects, such as Romanesque and French churches.

When he returned to LA he opened his own architectural office and started to develop a unique architectural style, gaining worldwide recognition.

Gehry is one of those who confuse architecture with art, compromising the buildings like sculptures, without abandoning the essential aspects of architecture, or functionality or the environmental integration of the buildings.

His works tend to create an impact, produced with unfinished materials, with volume games, utilising preferably metal, varying geometric forms in only one building.

Gehry has been distinguished in numeral occasion with the highest architectural awards of worldwide level, like the Pritzker Award (1989), the Gold Medal of American Institute of Architects (1999), or the Gold Medal for the Royal Institute of British Architects (2000).

He has various works in the all the world, of which the stand outs are the Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao, the Jay Pritzker Pavillion, in Chicago, or the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. In Barcelona, during the Olympic Games of 1992 and the rehabilitation of the Olympic Villa, he was in charge of the construction of the Pez (Fish) sculpture, on the coastal line.