About this talk

Running time: 30 minutes

Frank Gehry has lived in California since 1947, and practises and teaches architecture in Los Angeles. He likes to be involved with designing the less expensive kind of American housing, particularly the "tract" house, i.e. "the two car single family plus swimming pool on its own 50 x 150 foot lot".

He approaches each work as a sculptural object, seeking to develop one aesthetic for the shell (or one building) and then making a counter-statement with another personal aesthetic - in other words, two personal styles in one building project. But the buildings must always fit into their neighbourhood.

Recently he has also been concerned with the total physical separation of the various rooms or areas of a building. All the posturing and classification that's going on now in architecture - Post Modern, Late Modern, etc. - infuriates him. "You can make gestures with anything" he says, and suits his work to his words.

Gehry also spoke to us in 1997 in Building Compound Shapes.

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