Architect Gehry Named Pritzker Prize Laureate

Architect Frank O. Gehry of Santa Monica, who has earned a worldwide reputation for his idiosyncratic designs, has been selected as this year’s Pritzker Prize Laureate. Announcement of Gehry’s selection will be made today.

The international prize consisting of a $100,000 grant and other perks is considered architecture’s most prestigious honor. It is funded by the Hyatt Foundation and awarded annually by an independent jury to a living architect.

Gehry is the sixth American to receive the prize, which was founded in 1979 as the equivalent to the Nobel Prize. Among the other winners have been Philip Johnson, in 1979, I. M. Pei, in 1983, and Richard Meier, in 1984, who at present is designing the Getty Cultural Center planned for Brentwood.

Cited in the award are a variety of projects the 60-year-old Gehry has designed in Los Angeles. These include his own home in Santa Monica, the Aerospace Museum in Exposition Park, the Temporary Contemporary in Little Tokyo, the Frances Howard Goldwyn Library in Hollywood, and the Loyola Law School near downtown.

After an intense international competition, Gehry was recently given the commission to design the Walt Disney Concert Hall for the Music Center. Gehry believes that the hall, with a projected cost in excess of $100 million, will be a hallmark in his career, which he describes as at a critical midpoint.

The jury’s formal citation said: “Refreshingly original and totally American, proceeding as it does from his populist Southern California perspective, Gehry work is a highly refined, sophisticated and adventurous aesthetic that emphasizes the art of architecture.”

The jury noted that “his sometimes controversial, but always arresting body of work, has been variously described as iconoclastic, rambunctious and impermanent.” It is “this restless spirit that has made his buildings a unique expression of contemporary society and its ambivalent values,” the jury added.

Gehry has often said in interviews that his odd-angled, sculpted buildings featuring such materials as chain link, plywood and sheet metal were metaphors of Los Angeles, a reflection of the city’s fractured context.

“If it is ugly it is because the city is ugly,” Gehry said recently. But he has softened the remark on occasion by stating that if given a proper budget he could be elegant. “I just try to make the best with the reality of things.”

Gehry said in an interview that he saw the award as a sort of recognition of architecture’s need to continue to look toward the future and take risks.

“In that respect, we in Los Angeles are quite well located, sitting as we do between the old east (the East Coast and Europe) and its classical sense of order, and the new west (Japan and Asia) and its very different sense of order.” He suggested that his architecture reflects the collision of those orders.

The jury is headed by J. Carter Brown, director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and includes industrialist Giovanni Agnelli, chairman of Fiat, author and critic Ada Louise Huxtable, architects Ricardo Legorreta and Kevin Roche and investor Jacob Roths-child of Britain.

The Loyola Law School, a collage of engagingly raw structures cited in the award, is located in the Pico-Union neighborhood southwest of downtown, where Gehry lived with his family after they moved from his native Toronto in 1947. He attended the School of Architecture at nearby USC, graduating in 1954. He also attended the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1956, and at various times worked for the local firms of Victor Guren, and Pereira and Luckman, before setting up his own practice in 1962.

“Having won the Pritzker no doubt will be helpful to me in the design decisions that still have to be made concerning the Disney, and in other projects I will be involved in,” said Gehry, with a smile.

Gehry says he tends to think like an artist, having been influenced by such local artists as Billy Al Bengston and Ed Moses, and approaches each building “as a sculptural object, a spatial container, a space with light and air, a response to context and appropriateness of feeling and spirit.”

Gehry said he is also very much the pragmatist, concerning himself with the specific needs of the client. In particular, he takes exception to the charge that his buildings are different for the sake of being different. “I try to make my buildings humanistic, not repetitious, fit budgets and please the clients.” Gehry said.

The resulting singular designs of projects by Gehry over the years have defied easy categorization. His buildings have been labeled Modernist, Post-Modernist, Deconstructivist and Punk, blurring as they do the traditional lines between art, architecture and kitsch. “If you have to give me a label, make it optimist ,” said Gehry.

Since 1967 Gehry has won more than 25 local, state and national awards from the American Institute of Architects, along with a host of other awards and professional honors.

Gehry will be presented the prize, along with a medallion, in ceremonies later this month in Nara, Japan, at the Todai-Ji Buddhist Temple, which was originally constructed in the 8th Century.