Gehry got an early start in architecture

Wednesday, March 2, 2005 | 11:03 a.m.

As a child, Frank Gehry used small scraps of wood that he found discarded in his grandfather's hardware store to build miniature cities.

Tiny wooden blocks gave way to tons of steel and concrete, and Gehry, who turned 76 on Monday, now is regarded as one of the world's premier architects.

In a 1989 New York Times story, Gehry's architectural designs were described as "powerful essays in primal geometric form."

The story's author, architecture critic Paul Goldberger, wrote that Gehry's designs "from an aesthetic standpoint ... are among the most profound and brilliant works of architecture of our time."

Wall Street Journal critic David Littlejohn, in 2003, wrote that Gehry is "more an artist or a sculptor than an architect. ... All of his buildings of the past 10 years began with Mr. Gehry's own ink-on-paper scribbles."

Time magazine, which has written extensively and glowingly of Gehry's work, wrote in 2004 that he "declared his independence from the angular, Euclidean design imperatives that had dominated architecture for thousands of years.

"He embarked on an adventurous architecture of sweeping, slopping, curvilinear forms that had no precedent. Much of the work was made possible by using innovative computer software originally developed for aerospace designers."

Born Frank Goldberg in 1929 in Toronto, Canada, Gehry moved to Los Angeles in 1947 and studied architecture at the University of Southern California, where he earned a Bachelor of Architecture degree in 1954.

About that time, he changed his name from Goldberg to Gehry, fearing that anti-Semitism would cost him potential jobs.

After attending Harvard's Graduate School of Design, Gehry toured Europe to be inspired by its architectural wonders.

He returned to California and, in 1962, founded Frank O. Gehry & Associates in Los Angeles. Initially, he designed retail outlets and office complexes.

In the 1970s, however, Gehry began drawing more offbeat designs. His work of that era includes a Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art facility in an old police garage. The finished product included a canopy of chain-link fencing.

In 1979, Gehry's firm became Gehry & Krueger, Inc. It is headquartered in Santa Monica, Calif.

From the 1980s to the present, Gehry has designed numerous acclaimed buildings in the United States and around the world. In 1997, he designed the structure that has made him famous outside the world of architectural design -- the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Bilbao, Spain.

Today Gehry's architectural firm has a staff of more than 135 people. Despite having several senior architects on his staff, Gehry still does the architectural designs for each project, his company said in a news release.

Gehry's numerous awards include honorary doctorates in fine arts, humanities and engineering from major universities, including Harvard, Yale and USC; the 1990 Pritzker Architecture Prize; and the 1999 American Institute of Architects Gold Medal.