Remembering Frank Gehry

He’ll always be more associated with metals like titanium but the famed architect has a long history working with wood.

Gehry died in December at age 96 and will forever be known for his signature Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, along with the dozens and dozens of projects that followed, most of which used exotic building materials shaped into fantastical shapes and sizes.

But the Canadian-born architect really burst on the global design stage with a project he did for himself, his own home in Santa Monica, CA. “In the late 1970s, Gehry bought a perfectly ordinary bungalow in Santa Monica, built in the 1920s, one of those that line a neighborhood where the most daring aesthetic statement is usually a hydrangea of questionable color,” the online design commentary website Elpais.com wrote. “And Gehry, instead of remodeling it with the restraint recommended by any mortgage survival manual, decided to subject it to an intervention so unusual that even today it’s difficult to describe without it sounding like performance art.”

Using basic building materials like plywood, exposed wood studs and even mesh, Gehry literally wrapped the little house in this process, inventing a building style that is now known as deconstructivism and has been embraced by the construction trade ever since.

This was followed by a famous Brentwood furniture collection for Knoll in 1992 using interwoven strips of maple wood, inspired by the strength of a bushel basket, creating lightweight, structurally integrated chairs. Other elements of his buildings have used wood and mass timber components, including the staircase in his Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Serpentine Art Gallery in London and the plywood interior of The Pershing Square Signature Center in New York City. And let’s remember that one of his earliest design concepts was a collection of furniture made from corrugated cardboard that endures until today.

Frank Gehry will always be most closely associated with titanium, but his use of wood was among the most extraordinary of any contemporary architect and helped set the stage for the renaissance of wood and the entire mass timber movement today.

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