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Frank Owen Gehry, CC (born Ephraim Owen Goldberg, February 28, 1929 in Toronto, Canada) is an architect known for his sculptural approach to building design. He is best known for building curvaceous structures, often covered with reflective metal. His most famous work, and the clearest expression of his style, is the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which is covered in titanium. __TOC__ Born in Toronto, Canada to a Jewish family, Gehry moved at age 17 to California, where he studied at Los Angeles City College before graduating from the University of Southern California School of Architecture. He then studied city planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is today a naturalized American citizen and lives in Los Angeles. He is Distinguished Professor of Architecture at Columbia University in New York City and has also taught at Yale University.

Gehry's style is derived from late modernism. The tortured, warped forms of his structures are considered expressions of the deconstructivist (DeCon) school of modernist architecture. The DeCon movement departs from modernism in its de-emphasis of societal goals and functional necessity. Unlike early modernist structures, DeCon structures are not required to reflect specific social ideas (such as speed or universality of form), and they do not reflect a belief that form follows function. DeCon, which Gehry has continued to refine, is also known as the Santa Monica school of architecture. This region of the United States has produced the greatest range of experimentation in the field of DeCon design and contains the largest concentration of the structures.

Some have also pointed to Le Corbusier's abstractly-sculptured Notre Dame du Haut as a precursor to Frank Gehry's style, as well as a possible source of his ideas.

Gehry is considered a modern architectural icon and celebrity. He came to the attention of the public in 1972 with his "Easy Edges" cardboard furniture. He has appeared in Apple's black and white "Think Different" pictorial ad campaign that associates offbeat but revered figures with Apple's design philosophy. He even once appeared as himself in an episode of "The Simpsons" in the episode The Seven-Beer Snitch. He also voiced himself on the TV show "Arthur", where he helped Arthur and his friends design a new treehouse. His buildings, including his private residence, have become tourist attractions. Many museums, firms, and cities seek Gehry's services as a badge of distinction, regardless of the product he delivers.

Seattle's EMP Music Museum represents this phenomenon at its most extreme. Microsoft's Paul Allen chose Gehry as the architect of the urban structure to house his public collection of music history artifacts. While the result was undeniably unique, critical reaction came in the form of withering attacks. The bizarre color choices, the total disregard for architectural harmony with the built and natural surroundings, and the mammoth scale led to accusations that Gehry had simply "got it wrong." Admirers of the building remind critics that similar attacks were levelled against the Eiffel Tower in the late 19th century, and that only historical perspective would allow a fair evaluation of the building's merits.

Recently, Gehry has been criticised by some to be repeating himself, critics claiming the disjointed metal panoply that has become Gehry's trademark is perhaps overused. Almost all of his recent work seems derivative of his landmark Bilbao Guggenheim. (It should be noted, however, that while the Guggenheim was completed before Disney Hall, the latter was designed first.) Moreover, before problematic surfaces were dulled, the concave curved metal forms of Disney Hall concentrated sunlight in a way that created extreme hot spots in the surrounding streets, sidewalks, and buildings.

His critics and admirers alike are watching with anticipation to see whether Gehry is able to produce equally compelling forms in a different idiom. He may be able to do so, with a small office complex on the West Side of Manhattan as well as other new projects taking his signature forms, but building them out of glass rather than metal.

Besides leaving a legacy of built work, Gehry created a new technology firm (Gehry Technologies) with the mission of disseminating the 3D CAD tools and processes to other architects and members of the construction industry.

Frank Gehry also designed a wrist watch, marketed by Fossil. Instead of it reading like a standard watch, if it was 1:54pm, it would read 6 til 2, or at 12:30am it would read half past midnight. Fossil product catalogue *

In 2005, Director Sydney Pollack made the documentary "Sketches of Frank Gehry." It is due to be released on DVD by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment on August 22, 2006.

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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Frank Gehry".

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