Tim Vreeland
Frank Gehry was born Ephraim Goldberg in 1929 in Toronto, Canada. His father, a former boxer, sold slot machines and took young Ephraim on his sales calls. By contrast, his mother took him to concerts and introduced him to art. He remembers building imaginary cities on the floor with his grandmother out of wood scraps and shavings from the kindling box next to the stove. When his father suffered a heart attack in 1947, the entire family moved to Los Angeles for a change of scenery.
“Our first place in Los Angeles was a two-room apartment with ragged carpets and a pull-down bed,” Gehry remembers, “My sister and I traded off between the bed and the couch . . . . When we had a night off, we’d drive up the Sunset Strip and watch movie stars . . . . I’ve seen people do that now, when I’m coming out of Spago or a party. I realize that when I was eighteen years old, I was that kid standing there, looking . . . . L.A., when I got there, was brash, raucous, frontier. Carny business. The movies. The development was vast and rampant.”
When Frank graduated from high school, he took a job as a truck driver to pay for the night art school classes he wanted to attend. One of his instructors took him to visit a construction site. He liked what he saw there and enrolled in architecture school at the University of Southern California. In 1952 he married his first wife, Anita, a stenographer who helped put him through school. It was she who persuaded him to change his name to Frank Gehry before his first child was born, an action he says he later regretted. They had two daughters together, Brina and Leslie.
Upon graduating, he did a two-year stint in the U.S. Army, after which he enrolled in the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he elected to study City Planning. He discovered quickly that this was not for him, so he withdrew and used his remaining enrollment time to audit courses. He sat in on courses by anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict; he attended lectures by physicist Robert Oppenheimer; and heard socialist Norman Thomas debate author Howard Fast. The dean of the school, Jose Luis Sert, introduced him to the architecture of the famous Swiss modernist, Le Corbusier, who was just completing Notre Dame du Haut, a chapel in Ronchamp in France with curves and swoops surprising for architecture of that period. Gehry fell in love with the building and began making annual “pilgrimages” to it. “Corbu” became his lifetime hero.
“Our first place in Los Angeles was a two-room apartment with ragged carpets and a pull-down bed,” Gehry remembers, “My sister and I traded off between the bed and the couch . . . . When we had a night off, we’d drive up the Sunset Strip and watch movie stars . . . . I’ve seen people do that now, when I’m coming out of Spago or a party. I realize that when I was eighteen years old, I was that kid standing there, looking . . . . L.A., when I got there, was brash, raucous, frontier. Carny business. The movies. The development was vast and rampant.”
When Frank graduated from high school, he took a job as a truck driver to pay for the night art school classes he wanted to attend. One of his instructors took him to visit a construction site. He liked what he saw there and enrolled in architecture school at the University of Southern California. In 1952 he married his first wife, Anita, a stenographer who helped put him through school. It was she who persuaded him to change his name to Frank Gehry before his first child was born, an action he says he later regretted. They had two daughters together, Brina and Leslie.
Upon graduating, he did a two-year stint in the U.S. Army, after which he enrolled in the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he elected to study City Planning. He discovered quickly that this was not for him, so he withdrew and used his remaining enrollment time to audit courses. He sat in on courses by anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict; he attended lectures by physicist Robert Oppenheimer; and heard socialist Norman Thomas debate author Howard Fast. The dean of the school, Jose Luis Sert, introduced him to the architecture of the famous Swiss modernist, Le Corbusier, who was just completing Notre Dame du Haut, a chapel in Ronchamp in France with curves and swoops surprising for architecture of that period. Gehry fell in love with the building and began making annual “pilgrimages” to it. “Corbu” became his lifetime hero.