From Amazon
Ever since his wildly dramatic Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, opened in 1997, Frank Gehry has been widely and justifiably considered the leading architect of our time. Although this ascension occurred seemingly overnight, it actually took more than half a century, counting architecture school and work in eight other offices before he opened his own firm in 1962. Since then, Gehry's designs have become increasingly freer and more inventive. He first explored existing design approaches such as Frank Lloyd Wright's, Southern California vernacular, minimalist modernism, and Miesian structuralism before blazing his own trail. This included corrugated cardboard furniture, chain-link fencing, unfinished metal siding, exposed wood studs, and other "cheapskate" materials; skewed geometries; and a recurring preoccupation with fishlike building forms. He learned to fragment buildings into discrete components (often making each room a structure unto itself), experiment with color, create forced perspectives, and, above all, bring natural light indoors masterfully. His recent designs tend to be baroque and romantic in ways never before seen, often resembling sails or abstracted flowers. Gehry's architecture is an art that involves great risk taking, and while not every design succeeds fully, his courage is exemplary and his batting average is surprisingly high.
For readers who truly want to know about Gehry, The Complete Works is indispensable. It documents 250 works, even early ones that other architects might conveniently omit, and the material is well illustrated on 614 oversized pages. Insightful essays by two eminent architectural scholars set the stage for this massive and unrivaled traversal of Gehry's designs. --John Pastier
Book Description
One of the world's great architects, Frank O. Gehry has produced an astonishing body of work over the past forty years. This pioneering designer continues to receive worldwide praise from both peers and critics as the most talented and influential architect working today. With the artistry of a sculptor and the brilliant articulation of an engineer, Gehry creates complex yet sensual buildings that are lyrical constructions defying categorization. Assembled by Francesco Dal Co and Kurt Forster, two of architecture's most important writers and historians, in collaboration with Gehry, this comprehensive, critical documentation -- the first major monograph ever published -- surveys his visionary architecture, from his early houses to his powerful recent works.
Bursting onto the scene in Southern California in the early 1960s, Gehry's revolutionary remodeling of his own house in 1978 -- the transformation of a suburban Dutch colonial into an architectural collage juxtaposing chain-link fence, plywood, exposed joists, and corrugated iron -- brought him international notoriety. His most important building to date, the recently completed Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain -- nearly twice the size of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris -- is a monumental 256,000-square-foot curvilinear masterpiece made of shimmering titanium, glass, and Spanish limestone.
This eagerly awaited and unprecedented publication -- with over three hundred projects and a thousand illustrations -- includes, among others, the controversial American Center in Paris; Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis; Nationale-Nedelanden Building (Fred and Ginger Building) in Prague; Vitra Headquarters in Weil am Rhein, Germany; California Aerospace Museum; Loyola Law School in Los Angeles; Chiat Day Mojo Building in Venice, California; and Boston Children's Museum. Also shown are his provocative designs for houses -- many of them in California -- as well as his installations, exhibitions, and ingenious corrugated cardboard furniture. Also presented is Gehry's largest U.S. commission to date, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, a cultural landmark and civic monument for his hometown of Los Angeles, which promises to change the concept of "public space" for generations to come.