Raised in Toronto, Canada, Frank O. Gehry moved with his family to
Los Angeles in 1947. Mr. Gehry received his Bachelor of Architecture degree
from the University of Southern California in 1954, and he studied City
Planning at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
In subsequent years, Mr. Gehry has built an architectural career that has
spanned four decades and produced public and private buildings in America,
Europe and Asia. In an article published in The New York Times
in November, 1989, noted 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.”
His work has earned Mr. Gehry several of the most significant awards
in the architectural field, including the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize
in Architecture, the Pritzker Prize, the Wolf Prize in Art (Architecture),
the Praemium Imperiale Award, the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Award,
the National Medal of Arts, the Friedrich Kiesler Prize,
the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal
and the Royal Institute of British Architects Gold Medal.
Recent and current projects include:
the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, California;
the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Bilbao, Spain;
the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College in
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York;
the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago, Illinois
and the the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University
of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
In this case, I worked the same way as I always do. I thought about the problem and I started sketching to work through some of the issues. Based on the sketches we made a series of models in wood so that we could test our ideas. The models were really important, we were able to touch and feel the door handles, we were able to refine our initial ideas. Using the models we made sure that the door handles worked properly, we made sure that they looked good, we made sure that they felt good in the hand when grasped and turned.
Frank Gehry
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