Architect Frank Gehry celebrates his ninetieth birthday

Washington/Prague - The buildings of architect Frank Gehry are enticing tourist attractions. The undulating structures, often resembling sculptures, are among the gems of world architecture. Gehry's signature is also seen in the Prague Dancing House on Rašínovo nabřeží, where the architects drew loose inspiration from the facades of surrounding houses, mostly Art Nouveau with towers. They created a glass tower and narrowed it in the middle, making it resemble a woman's body. Gehry, who will celebrate his 90th birthday on February 28, won the prestigious Pritzker Prize for architecture in 1989. He lives in Santa Monica, California, and holds Canadian and American citizenship.

"I try to design buildings as a response to human feelings," the guru of world architecture once explained. He cited sources of inspiration as varied as Indian sculptures of the god Shiva or his grandmother's stuffed carp before kitchen preparation.

Among his most famous works is the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, which towers in the city center like a gigantic iron flower, displaying exposed metal beams, screws, and pipes, stone stairs, and light wood. After its opening in October 2003, it became a symbol of the city, although its appearance has been likened by several critics to a cone of fries. However, the residents of Los Angeles fell in love with the building, and artists and audiences appreciate its acoustics.

The famous Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, completed in 1997, resembles a spacecraft. The limestone, glass, and metal structure covered with titanium panels defies all traditional forms. The apparent external chaos of curves, arches, waves, and spirals transforms inside into absolute order.

Gehry's Experience Music Project in Seattle looks like a strangely shaped gelatin dessert, with blue, red, silver, and shiny walls that undulate like curtains in the wind and eschew right angles. The Louis Vuitton Foundation building in Paris, resembling a cluster of sailboats from a distance, houses a collection of contemporary art. Built in 2014, it consists of more than 3,500 glass panels and features 11 exhibition halls inside.

In recent years, he has designed the new modern headquarters for Facebook in Menlo Park, California, a seven-story headquarters for the same company in London's West End, and the colorful Biomuseum in Panama.

Gehry was born on February 28, 1929, in Toronto, Canada, as Ephraim Owen Goldberg in a poor family of second-generation Polish Jews (his grandfather left Łódź in 1908). As a young man in his grandfather's hardware store in Toronto, he examined the insides of broken toasters and clocks, building fairy-tale cities from spare parts. His father's businesses struggled, so they moved to Los Angeles.

In Los Angeles, where he changed his name in 1956, Gehry spent his days installing prefab dining nooks in homes and studied architecture at the University of Southern California in the evenings. He graduated in 1951 and then studied urban planning at Harvard University from 1956 to 1957.

In 1962, he founded his own firm in Los Angeles, initially working on shopping centers and similar commercial projects. In the late 1970s, he first remodeled his simple house in Santa Monica, using wire fencing, corrugated metal barriers, and bare wooden beams. The house disgusted the neighbors, and they hated the construction - one even let his dog relieve itself on it. "It wasn't any provocation; I simply had little money for the renovation," Gehry insisted. "Then it occurred to me that it was aesthetically interesting. So why not turn low costs into an advantage?”

Once a passionate hockey player and admirer of Jaromír Jágr, he also worked in paper design, naming his corrugated cardboard chairs things like Krosček, Vysoká hůl, or Power Play. After hitting the market, his furniture became a sensation and continues to be studied by design students. He capped off the cardboard idea epidemic in the 1980s with the legendary Little Beaver chair.

Gehry, who has also tried his hand at set design, has created jewelry and various trophies, is married for the second time, and has four children.