Frank O. Gehry: The Complete Works

For readers who truly want to know about Gehry, The Complete Works is indispensable. It documents 250 works, even early ones that other architects might conveniently omit, and the material is well illustrated on 614 oversized pages. Insightful essays by two eminent architectural scholars set the stage for this massive and unrivaled traversal of Gehry's designs. --John Pastier

This monograph is one of the most complete and visually attractive publications on world-renowned architect Frank Gehry, presenting 243 of his buildings and projects. Gehry's provocative works of architecture are constructed through a unique process of improvisation and display extreme creative freedom, which allows him to work without preconceptions, and with an extraordinarily open mind. This volume traces Gehry's career and creative development and includes all of his most significant works, from his senior thesis at the University of Southern California (1954) to a projected skyscraper in New York City (1997). Included are such high-profile projects as the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Loyola Law School, and the California Aerospace Museum in Los Angeles; the Nationale-Nederlanden office building in Prague; and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

Beach Houses are the first survey of the glamorous beachfront lifestyle and distinctive architecture and design for which Southern California is so famous. The houses featured in this book are located on the coast between Malibu and Laguna and range from common generic types-- New England, Mediterranean and ranch designs-- to high-style homes by well-known architects such as John Lautner, Richard Meier, Frank Gehry, and others.

Beaches and beach houses have played an important part in the historical and cultural development of Southern California, beginning in the 1880s when land speculators wanted to attract home-buyers, and especially during the 1920s when the motion picture community and other nouveau riche built lavish houses and clubs on the shore.

Architectural writer Elizabeth McMillian has selected a stunning array of Southern California beach residences that receive high marks for appearance, comfort, and sensitivity to the environment. Every beach house designer faces similar constraints and challenges: small lots, low-key street facades, enclosed sidewalls, narrow paths to the ocean, and glass-walled and terraced oceanfronts. If a beach house is designed with sensitivity, living on the beach can be an experience that is close to perfection.

Photographer Melba Levick has dramatically captured the California beach house in its enviable seaside context and has focused on interiors that bring the sights and sounds of the ocean into the home by way of glass walls, open courtyards, terraces, and towers.

Interviews with the architects, interior designers, and owners of these fabulous California houses reveal the inspirational dimension embodied in this special architecture.

"A beach house is often the fulfillment of a dream, as well as a quest for the sensual varieties of site, sound, and touch-- the opportunity to feel gentle sea breezes, warm to the reassuring rays of the sun, and hear the lulling, rhythmic sound of wind and waves," explains McMillian.

With the completion of the celebrated Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, architect Frank O. Gehry has entered the pantheon of twentieth-century masters. In this wholly unique new book, Gehry himself offers extensive and illuminating commentary on various aspects of the proceses involved in developing his revolutionary designs, including his influences, clients, use of materials, and new technologies.

Gehry Talks: Architecture + Process documents all of his new work of this decade, tracing his evolution from a southern California architect known for his idiosyncratic use of materials and collaboration with local artists, to an international figure whose fluid, hitherto undreamt-of forms surge beyond the aesthetic and technical constraints of the twentieth century. From the titanium-wrapped curves of the Guggenheim Bilbao to the binocular facade of the Chiat-Day Headquarters in California, his innovative structural ideas evoke a sense of freedom and spontaneity while, at the same time, displaying the utmot control. Unbound by guidelines of symmetry or the grid's delineation, his structures spring forth, engaged in a seemingly limitless play of ideas--ever-changing in both the multitudinous combinations of shapes suggested by the form and the depth of the conceptual associations implied by the design. Fish and snake motifs birl upon his buildings' rippling surfaces, while light follows the asymmetrical trajectories of their metallic folds. Though controversial and daring, his works always possess an elegance that lends warmth and humane scope to each project, regardless of the level of innovation--as evinced in contexts as varying as the complicated, and unrealized, plan of the Lewis House in Lyndhurst, Ohio or the clarity of the idea behind the Üstra office building in Hannover, Germany.

This generously illustrated presentation features thirty-three projects, including the Chiat-Day Headquarters in Venice, California; the Team Disneyland Administration Building in Anaheim, California; the Vitra Furniture Museum and Factory in Weil am Rhein, Germany; the Entertainment Center at Euro-Disney (now called Disneyland Paris); the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, California; and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. Editor Mildred Friedman and architecture critic Michael Sorkin provide insightful essays.

Essays by noted museum curators and architectural historians explore his iconoclastic spirit and trace his melding of unconventional materials and forms. Photographs, drawings, plans, and scale models communicate the breadth and complexity of Gehry's work and show how, in his view of architecture as sculptural space, Gehry has opened up a world of new possibilities for architecture.

Since the day of the NPR commentary, I have been seeking photos of the Bilbao museum. The best photos I found are within the pages of Gehry's THE GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM BILBAO. I think the illustrations are absolutely wonderful! The text explains why the Museum was built in Bilbao - the most important feature of the text.

A couple of years later on another NPR program, I learned of the many changes that occurred in Bilbao as a result of the Museum. Bilbao has world class restaurants that rival New York and Paris. Interesting... that a creative design of a single building can have such a profound effect on a local economy.