The Walt Disney Concert Hall could be likened to a space-age cubist sailing vessel that has run aground atop Bunker Hill. With its silver shiny sheets fully fluttered in the wind, the lower horizontal shapes poised like hulls, set to carry it across an angular ocean of asphalt, glass and stone. Aeronautic, hypnotic, and erotic, its metallic surface glowing with the light of day, it could also be dubbed ‘The Crown of Downtown’. The creative force behind this dynamo of form and flow is architect, Frank Owen Gehry.
Frank Gehry was born February 28th 1929 and raised in Toronto, Canada. In 1947, Frank and his family move to the US, settling in Santa Monica. Young Frank was unsure what to do with his life? Wracking his brain evokes childhood memories, time with his Grandmother, building imaginary cities with scraps of wood from his Grandfather’s hardware store. He decides to try architecture. Starting off at LA City College, he goes on to get a degree from USC, afterwards he enlists in the Army, then graduates from Harvard and returns to Santa Monica, ultimately opening a firm in 1962.
In the 1970s Venice was a city in decline, a deteriorating urban beach community that was gritty and funky. It was home to artists, surfers, hippies, writers, dropouts, and the like, all rubbing elbows. A vibrant, happening art scene blossomed there and Frank was right in the mix. In 1972, Frank creates ‘Easy Edges’, a groovy line of furniture made of curvilinear corrugated cardboard. This was a time when Post-Modern and Pop artists had long broke with convention, using form, color, texture for its own sake, basking in nontraditional materials, assemblage, and found objects. This scene gave Gehry the legs he needed for a bold leap forward. He asserts that he was “a former grid freak” and admired the freedom artists had with shape and form.
Then Gehry has a breakthrough with a new source of inspiration: the construction process itself. He finds that architecture is often visually more interesting, while it’s in progress, rather than when it’s finished. In 1978 he decides the family home, a Dutch Colonial on a quiet Santa Monica street would be the proper place to experiment. He cuts into the existing geometry with clashing angles and shapes, turning it outside in, with an asphalt-floored driveway kitchen. He renovates with cheap hardware store materials overlying the house with corrugated metal, chain link fence and unfinished plywood. His neighbors were not stoked. To them it was a slapped together eyesore, situated on a corner no less. But his peers took notice.
Throughout the 1980s Frank does a series of self-described ‘cheapskate houses’ evolving his innovative lo-fi high-art style. His large-scale projects were taking shape in similar fashion, grafting the visual rhythms of LA: strip malls, freeways, non-descript spaces, boxed-shaped forms, concrete, stucco, sunlight, into a fresh bold sculptural style. Architecture was catching a totally tubular “New Wave” with Gehry hanging ten. By 1989 Frank has been awarded the design for the Disney Concert Hall and receives the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
Construction on Disney Hall begins, but is soon halted. The idea is larger than the budget, and Gehry is sent back to the drawing board. Throughout the 1990s Frank continues to refine his ideas through a series of office buildings, museums, and homes, taking on more complex shapes, testing spatial boundaries and the limits of gravity, while experimenting with metal finishes.
Frank also collaborated often with his peers, Claes Oldenburg, Frank Stella, Richard Serra, are but a few. When Gehry is invited to design the Guggenheim Museum Bilboa, Spain he is given the freedom to indulge in his style, to let his process lead the way. According to Gehry it was at times more ‘intuitive’ than ‘conscience’. Symphonic forms and lines coalesce and harmonize like folds of titanium fabric, or a budding flower, manifesting a structure as expressive and beautiful as any of the art it would house. Bilboa is completed in1997 and becomes an international success, considered to be a masterpiece of form and function.
Key to Bilboa’s success was Gehry’s pioneering use of the computer, one of the first to incorporate 3D modeling software. Gehry’s concept sketches often resemble handfuls of spaghetti tossed across the page and his working models are of the crudest materials: ripped cardboard, crumpled paper, tape, wire, and the stacking of wood blocks, shape-shifting layouts, always adding and taking away. The software enables him to scan the drawings and models, mapping out all building and budget concerns, rendering his complex designs buildable. But Gehry heeds, the computer “is a tool – not a partner”.
The Disney Concert Hall is completed in 2003. Designed to be the home of the LA Philharmonic, it houses an acoustically cozy interior, with seating that wraps around the orchestra in, what Gehry hoped would become, “the city’s living room”. The sensuous exterior, an expression of movement, was to Gehry the wind hitting the sails of a ship. And with its sails full blown, of stainless steel, this ship will eternally chart its course towards the horizon.
On December 5th 2025 Frank Gehry passed from a respiratory condition at his home in Santa Monica at the age of 96. He received countless awards and honors for his work including the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And the building has continued to the present, the newly completed ‘The Grand by Gehry’ (2024) sits directly across the street from Disney Concert Hall. His legacy will always resonate, having pioneered a genuinely LA architectural aesthetic to international acclaim.
