1991 Frank Gehry on being at the right place at the right time

2019-11-22T16:09:00-05:00

I built a house around a house [using chain-link fence, corrugated metal, asphalt, and other common building materials]. It was the first completely free piece I did. I did it exactly the way I wanted. My client was me and my wife, and my wife egged me on. … I talked about the asphalt floor, and I was going to chicken out, and she said, “Come on, I want to see that.”

A recently published Los Angeles Review of Books interview conducted by Steven Jay Fogel and Mark Bruce Rosin with Frank Gehry in 1991 highlights a few fascinating tidbits of the architect's early life and his career pre-Bilbao.

In the wide-ranging interview, Gehry discusses, among other topics, his thoughts on success, his non-linear path to architecture, and his thinking on architecture as his career was just about to take off.

Gehry on early heroes

My grandmother had a big effect on me. She had run a foundry in Poland when she was a young girl, and she was very hands-on. She would take me to the woodshops where she’d pick up scraps for the wood stove she cooked on. She would bring home all the scraps, and we would play on the floor. She would make cities with me.

Interior photo from 2007 of the Santa Monica Place mall designed by Gehry in 1980. Image courtesy of Wikimedia user Bobak Ha'Eri.

Gehry on big professional turning points

It was when I was doing Santa Monica Place that ...

Gehry’s Santa Monica Residence Wins AIA Twenty-Five Year Award

2012-01-11T17:51:00-05:00

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has selected the Gehry Residence in Santa Monica, California for the 2012 AIA Twenty-five Year Award. [...] A seemingly ad hoc collection of raw, workmanlike materials wrapped around an unassuming two-story clapboard bungalow, Frank Gehry’s, FAIA, home for his wife, Berta, and two sons found a literal, but unexpected, answer to the question of neighborhood context, and used it to forever re-shape the formal and material boundaries of architecture.

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1991 Frank Gehry on being at the right place at the right time

Gehry’s Santa Monica Residence Wins AIA Twenty-Five Year Award