Developed over a two-and-a-half-year period in a workshop adjacent to his architectural office established by the manufacturer Knoll (not unlike its arrangement with Harry Bertoia four decades earlier), Frank O. Gehry’s bentwood furniture is structurally expressive and highly decorative. His plans forwoven-wood furniture date back to 1984, when the German furniture manufacturer Vitra asked him to create a chair that would be comparable to Gio PONTI’S light, best-selling Superleggera design of 1957 but then rejected his proposal, which was based on the structure of the bushel basket. In 1989 Gehry returned to this concept for his Knoll commission, working closely with the firm’s technicians, who created as many as 120 full-scale bentwood prototypes to test successive schemes as Gehry conceived them. (more…)

Frank Owen Goldberg was born in Toronto in 1929.He grew up playing in the back of his grandfather’s hardware store, fashioning miniature cities from scrap pieces of lumber and wood shavings. After moving to Los Angeles in the 1940s, the young Gehry drove a truck while he attended art classes at night school. He eventually enrolled in the architecture program at the University of Southern California and changed his name to Gehry, thinking that his Jewish surname might hurt his career prospects. (more…)

Gehry began working on designs for a new home for the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the 1980s, but political and funding issues sidelined it for years. The building opened in the fall of 2003, to wide acclaim. Within the structure’s slip-sliding-away exterior, Gehry created a warm, symmetrical interior in cozy Douglas fir, with gentle curves reminiscent of the work of Finnish architect Alvar Aalto; the floor is covered with a sizzling floral-pattern carpet that is a nod to Lillian Disney, Walt Disney’s widow, whose $50 million gift sparked the project. (more…)

Chicago, the most powerful metropolis of the American Middle West, was one of the eminent birthplaces of the modern movement. It was here that Louis Sullivan declared that ‘form follow function,’ a notion that became the guiding concept of modern architecture. And when Mies van der Rohe emigrated here in 1933, the city became home to perhaps the most influential advocate of modernism, whose paradigm ‘less is more’ was based on the theoretical foundations laid by Sullivan. (more…)

Built to accommodate some of the world’s most noted scientists, Gehry’s design for this university building at the prominent MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, celebrates the ‘joy of invention’ while inspiring its denizens to even higher achievement. (more…)

Maggie Keswick Jencks, the wife of noted architectural historian Charles Jencks, fostered the idea of building small cancer care centre across the UK before her death from breast cancer in 1995. All of the various centres are designed by noted and celebrated architects and are guided by the conviction that buildings can play a major role in supporting cancer patients. (more…)