Frank Gehry Canadian / American, b. 1929

Frank Gehry was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1929. He studied at the University of Southern California and Harvard before he established his first practice in 1963. His deconstructed architectural style began to emerge in the late 1970s when Gehry, directed by a personal vision of architecture, created collage-like compositions out of found materials. Instead of creating buildings, Gehry creates ad-hoc pieces of functional sculpture. Gehry's architecture has undergone a marked evolution from the play wood and corrugated-metal vernacular of his early works to the distorted but pristine concrete of his later works. In his large-scale public commissions since he converted to a deconstructive aesthetic, Gehry has explored classical architecture themes. In these works, he melds formal compositions with an exploded aesthetic. Most recently, Gehry has combined curving forms with complex deconstructive massing, achieving significant new results. His most renowned buildings include the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and the Dancing House in Prague, Czech Republic.