FRANK GEHRY

Frank Owen Gehry was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, his parents were Polish Jews. A creative child, he was encouraged by his grandmother, Caplan, with whom he would build little cities out of scraps of wood.[2] His use of corrugated steel, chain link fencing, and other materials was partly inspired by spending Saturday mornings at his grandfather's hardware store. He would spend time drawing with his father and his mother introduced him to the world of art. "So the creative genes were there," Gehry says. "But my father thought I was a dreamer, I wasn't gonna amount to anything. It was my mother who thought I was just reticent to do things. She would push me."

Much of Gehry's work falls within the style of Deconstructivism. Deconstructivism, also known as DeCon Architecture, is often referred to as post-structuralist in nature for its ability to go beyond current modalities of structural definition. In architecture, its application tends to depart from modernism in its inherent criticism of culturally inherited givens such as societal goals and functional necessity. Because of this, unlike early modernist structures, DeCon structures are not required to reflect specific social or universal ideas, such as speed or universality of form, and they do not reflect a belief that form follows function. Gehry's own Santa Monica residence is a commonly cited example of deconstructivist architecture, as it was so drastically divorced from its original context, and, in such a manner, as to subvert its original spatial intention.