PROMINENT ALUMNI

Frank Gehry,
Architect

The heralded Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles is Frank Gehry’s most recent award winning design.

Gehry, born in Toronto, was raised in Los Angeles and spent most of his early career as a California architect. In 1962, he opened his own firm. His designs showed a penchant for the unconventional.

His first building to attract widespread attention was his own home in Santa Monica, CA. In the 1970s, collaborating with pop artist Claes Oldenburg, he designed a building for well-known advertising agency Chiat/Day which featured giant binoculars at the front. But it was his design of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain that would bring him international acclaim. Like the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the museum features undulating curved steel and sharp angles.

Gehry holds numerous national and international professional and academic honors including the 1989 Pritzker Architecture Prize, perhaps the premiere accolade of the field.