Frank Owen Gehry was born in Toronto, Canada in 1929. He studied architecture at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles until 1954 before attending the Harvard Graduate School of Design for a year.
Frank O. Gehry worked for several architecture practices in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Boston, and Paris as both an architect and urban planner. In 1962 he established the architecture office Frank O. Gehry & Associates in Los Angeles.
Frank O. Gehry likes to use unusual materials for both his architecture and furniture.
He became famous in 1972 for the "Easy Edges" line in furniture, consisting of fourteen different pieces designed to be low-cost and made of corrugated cardboard.
As an architect Frank O. Gehry soon achieved international recognition for the Mid-Atlantic Toyota office building in Glen Burnie (1978), and the California Aerospace Museum (1983/84). Other important Frank O. Gehry buildings are the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein (1989), the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (1997), and the Neuer Zollhof in Düsseldorf (2000). Frank O. Gehry's buildings are on the cusp between Postmodernism and Deconstructivism.
In the 1980s Frank O. Gehry returned to furniture design, linking up with his early experimental designs in corrugated cardboard. The Gehry seat furniture "Experimental Edges" (1980) was now made in a limited edition by Vitra. These are extremely expressive art furnishings, which are aesthetically satisfying just because the material has been left in the raw state. In 1992 Vitra reissued an edition of four "Easy Edges" models. For Knoll International, he created the "Powerplay" chair series (1992), made of interwoven strips of bentwood, a design which was honored with an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York even before it was launched on the market.
In 1994 Frank O. Gehry won the Pritzker architecture prize awarded by the Hyatt-Foundation.
Germany
