From Pulitzer Prize–winning architectural critic Paul Goldberger: an engaging, nuanced exploration of the life and work of Frank Gehry, undoubtedly the most famous architect of our time. This first full-fledged critical biography presents and evaluates the work of a man who has almost single-handedly transformed contemporary architecture in his innovative use of materials, design, and form, and who is among the very few architects in history to be both respected by critics as a creative, cutting-edge force and embraced by the general public as a popular figure.Building Art shows the full range of Gehry’s work, from early houses constructed of plywood and chain-link fencing to lamps made in the shape of fish to the triumphant success of such late projects as the spectacular art museum of glass in Paris. It tells the story behind Gehry’s own house, which upset his neighbors and excited the world with its mix of the traditional and the extraordinary, and recounts how Gehry came to design the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, his remarkable structure of swirling titanium that changed a declining city into a destination spot. Building Art also explains Gehry’s sixteen-year quest to complete Walt Disney Concert Hall, the beautiful, acoustically brilliant home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Hardcover: 528 pages
Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (September 15, 2015)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0307701530
ISBN-13: 978-0307701534
Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 1.6 x 9.5 inches
has revolutionized the use of materials in design and redefined how architects use computers as a design tool to advance form-making as we know it. He has achieved worldwide fame for such large-scale public projects as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, California, but it was in private houses that Gehry first explored and interrogated the principles of modern architecture. In these houses—most notably his own, in Santa Monica, California—Gehry distorted, expanded, and collapsed the modernist box, exploring everyday materials (corrugated metal, unfinished plywood, and chain link), experimenting with color, and challenging accepted notions about geometry and structure.
one of the world’s most influential architects. Drawing on the most candid, revealing, and entertaining conversations she has had with Gehry over the last twenty years, Barbara Isenberg provides new and fascinating insights into the man and his work.
, 
, (born FrankOwen Goldberg; February 28, 1929) is a Canadian-American Pritzker Prize-winning architect based in Los Angeles, California.
, Spain;
in Cambridge, Massachusetts; 
in downtown Los Angeles; Experience Music Project in Seattle; 
in Minneapolis; Dancing House in Prague; the 
and MARTa Museum in Germany; and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. 