Thursday, February 24, 2011

Frank Gehry

                        “Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.”



I know this wasn't on my To Do List of posts, but I watched an animated show called Arthur.(Yes I still watch it. If you know what it is, DON'T JUDGE ME!) For those who do not know what it is, it's basically about an aardvark 3rd grader who has great and funny adventures. Sometimes they have guest appearances and this time they had a man named 'Frank Gehry' .  Read on if you wish to learn more.


Frank Owen Gehry, CC (born Frank Owen Goldberg; February 28, 1929) is a Canadian American Pritzker Prize-winning architect based in Los Angeles, California. His buildings, including his own house, have become tourist attractions.

He was born in Toronto, Ontario. His parents were Polish Jews. A creative child, he was encouraged by his grandmother, Mrs. Caplan, with whom he would build little cities out of scraps of wood. His use of corrugated steel, chain link fencing, and other materials was partly inspired by spending Saturday mornings at his grandfather's hardware store. He would spend time drawing with his father and his mother introduced him to the world of art. "So the creative genes were there," Gehry says. "But my father thought I was a dreamer, I wasn't gonna amount to anything." It was my mother who thought I was just reticent to do things. She would push me."  

Much of Gehry's work falls within the style of Deconstructivism. Deconstructivism - an architectural movement or style influenced by deconstruction that encourages radical freedom of form and the open manifestation of complexity in a building rather than strict attention to functional concerns and conventional design elements (as right angles or grids). Looking at the pictures makes it easier to understand. 


8 Spruce Street, Gehry's titanium and glass tower in New York's lower Manhattan, opening February 2011Gehry is sometimes associated with what is known as the "Los Angeles School," or the "Santa Monica School" of architecture. The appropriateness of this designation and the existence of such a school, however, remains controversial due to the lack of a unifying philosophy or theory. This designation stems from the Los Angeles area's producing a group of the most influential postmodern architects, including such notable Gehry contemporaries as Eric Owen Moss and Pritzker Prize-winner Thom Mayne of Morphosis, as well as the famous schools of architecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (co-founded by Mayne), UCLA, and USC where Gehry is a member of the Board of Directors.



Gehry’s style at times seems unfinished or even crude, but his work is consistent with the California ‘funk’ art movement in the 1960s and early 1970s, which featured the use of inexpensive found objects and non-traditional media such as clay to make serious art. Gehry has been called "the apostle of chain-link fencing and corrugated metal siding". However, a retrospective exhibit at New York's Whitney Museum in 1988 revealed that he is also a sophisticated classical artist, who knows European art history and contemporary sculpture and painting






Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Gehry
 
 
 






 

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