Frank Owen Gehry was born in Toronto, Canada to parents who were Polish Jews. A creative child, he was encouraged by his grandmother, 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, but it was his mother who 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." In 1947 Gehry moved to California, got a job driving a delivery truck, and studied at Los Angeles City College. Eventually he graduated from the University of Southern California's School of Architecture. After a stint in the army, he studied city planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design for a year, leaving before completing the program. In 1952, still known by his birth name of Frank Goldberg, he married Anita Snyder, whom he claims convinced him to change his name. Much of Gehry's work falls within the style of Deconstructivism, a developing movement for architecture. Deconstructionists were moving away from the Modernist dictum that "form followed function," or that a building had to fit into its environment. Gehry's own Santa Monica residence is a commonly cited example of deconstructive architecture, as it was so drastically divorced from its original context, as to subvert its original spatial intention. Gehry is sometimes associated with what is known as the "Los Angeles School," or the "Santa Monica School" of architecture, because of the many like-minded architects working in Southern California. But like all innovators, his work is not without its detractors. Many critics find his buildings waste structural resources by creating functionless forms; they are apparently designed without accounting for the local climate; they often overwhelm their intended use, especially in the case of museums and arenas; and they do not seem to belong to their surroundings. And all this might be true, but what incredible, mind awakening creations they are.
This collection of fabrics is from our Transition 2010 issue of Vogue Fabrics By Mail, a color coordinated catalog of fashion fabric swatches for wardrobe building.
This collection of fabrics is from our Transition 2010 issue of Vogue Fabrics By Mail, a color coordinated catalog of fashion fabric swatches for wardrobe building.
