Frank Gehry

At seventeen or eighteen, Frank Gehry had no direction. He later said his father had written him off as a dreamer and his mother compared him with friends’ sons who were doing well. “I never measured up,” he recalled. After the family moved from Toronto to Los Angeles in 1947, he drove a delivery truck by day and sampled night courses, trying to work out what he wanted to be.

That uncertainty had older roots. In Timmins, Ontario, Frank Goldberg was the only Jewish child in his grade school. Other children called him antisemitic names and beat him regularly. The discrimination was not a form of misfitting, and it did not produce his later work. It is part of the reason that his lasting shyness and insecurity should not be mistaken for a charming artist’s pose.

His closest childhood relationship was with his maternal grandmother. She brought home scraps from his grandfather’s hardware store, sat on the floor, and built houses and cities with him. Gehry remembered those hours when he was still struggling to choose a life: “It also gave me the idea that an adult could play.”

The rest of the family’s help was less tidy. His mother’s comparisons hurt, but she also took him to museums and concerts. His grandfather gave him work in the hardware store, where he learned to cut glass and thread pipe, and treated curiosity as something worth practicing. No one announced that these experiences pointed toward architecture. They kept materials, skilled adults, and serious questions near a child who did not yet have a name for what held him.

Los Angeles did not immediately supply the name. Gehry tried courses in several subjects at Los Angeles City College. While taking night classes, he failed a perspective course, returned the next term, and earned an A. Still driving a truck, he enrolled in a USC ceramics class taught by Glen Lukens. During the second year, Lukens made him an assistant, which allowed him to continue without paying tuition.

Lukens was having a house built by architect Raphael Soriano. He took Gehry to the construction site and watched him become absorbed as Soriano directed the placement of steel and other materials. Back at school, the teacher acted on what he had seen: he urged Gehry into a night course in architectural design.

The intervention was modest and precise. Lukens did not tell a directionless student that he could become anything. He gave him time in one craft, lowered the cost of continuing, brought him close to another kind of work, and used the student’s attention as evidence. Gehry did well in the night course and advanced directly into the architecture program’s second year. He later described it as the first time he had done well at anything.

Gehry completed his USC architecture degree in 1954 and opened his own practice in 1962. He received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1989; the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Walt Disney Concert Hall became two of his best-known buildings. That career did not make the beatings, family doubt, or financial strain necessary. Its useful beginning is quieter: adults kept making things with him, letting him make things beside them, and paying attention when one kind of work finally changed the way he looked.