Globally Renowned Architect Frank Gehry on His Inspirations
By Spectrum News Staff Los Angeles
PUBLISHED 1:10 PM ET Jul. 29, 2019
This week LA Stories with Giselle Fernandez profiles 90-year-old icon Frank Gehry — globally revered as the world’s most prolific living architect.
Gehry talks to LA Stories about the inspirations behind nearly seven decades of disrupting the meaning of design within architecture, and the creation of his visionary projects here in SoCal. His brightest star among them: L.A.’s Walt Disney Concert Hall.
Giselle discovers that Gehry’s most recently announced project, the World’s Jewish Museum in Israel, carries extraordinary personal meaning. His family lost well over 30 members to the Holocaust. His grandfather read to him lessons from the Talmud and taught him the importance of questioning and not accepting the status quo.
Gehry emotionally reveals the lifelong heartache stemming from being bullied as a child due to his Jewish faith. He shares that his experience as the target of anti-semitism continued into his years at USC, and his early career, when he was encouraged to change his last name to Gehry from Goldberg.
Gehry explains to Giselle how early on, the architecture world did not embrace his work. But he found home and inspiration with artists in the L.A. art scene, who embraced his unique perspectives. Even into his later years, Gehry says he has had clients who hated his work, including Lillian Disney.
He shares with Giselle the behind-the-scenes drama of getting Walt Disney Concert Hall completed and reveals how it almost caused him to move out of Los Angeles. In the end, Gehry tells Giselle he has found peace knowing that L.A.’s concert hall is today revered as a global masterpiece of architecture.