Frank Owen Gehry was born on Feb. 28, 1929, in Toronto and earned a bachelor's degree in architecture from the University of Southern California in 1954. He established his own firm in Los Angeles in 1962. Many of his earlier buildings were in the Los Angeles and Southern California area. In the 1970s and 1980s he began to develop a reputation for combining low-budget materials with original designs. In 1978 he gained recognition for the Mid-Atlantic Toyota Distributorship in Glen Burnie, Md. Gehry turned what could have been a standard, box-shaped warehouse and office space into a visual delight by designing colorful partitions of varying heights and widths and an unusual roof. His interest in sculpture is obvious in this work. The Loyola Marymount University Law School (1981–84) in Los Angeles is a mini-campus designed as a “village” focused around a central courtyard enlivened by bright stucco.

In 1978–79 Gehry caused a sensation by remodeling his own home in Santa Monica, Calif. Using materials such as chain-link fences, cinder block, exposed wood, and corrugated metal, he turned an ordinary suburban house into a statement of his artistic philosophy and an example of his playful, almost surreal style. Although hailed by critics for its originality, the house angered many neighbors who did not like its unfinished look.

Gehry's reputation was well-established by the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the scope of his work became more international. His work from this period includes the Vitra Museum of Design in Weil, Germany (1989) a 180-foot- (55-meter- ) long, 115-foot- (35-meter- ) high fish sculpture in the Olympic Village in Barcelona, Spain (1992), the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota (1993) , and an office building in the historic district of Prague (1994). In his renowned American Center in Paris (1994) he blended the traditional with the avant-garde. The enormous complex, designed to promote cultural relations between France and America, houses a cinema, a theater, art galleries, and apartments for visiting artists. The irregular cluster of tilting, curvilinear buildings is trademark Gehry, but he makes allusions to more traditional French architecture with mansard roofs and limestone facades.

In 1996 Gehry completed the Goldstein Housing Project in Frankfurt, Germany, an innovative public housing complex that rejected the notion that public housing must consist of ugly, uniform blocks. The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain (1997) was hailed by some critics as Gehry's masterpiece. The 256,000-square-foot (24,000-square-meter) structure in an industrial port city resembles an enormous sculpture and is constructed of steel, titanium, yellowish limestone, glass, and metal. The exterior of the building boasts steel towers, a 92-foot- (28-meter- ) high metal canopy, and a series of asymmetrical, curving metal panels that have called attention to Gehry's Cubist influences. There is a funnel-shaped stairway that leads down into a grand atrium from which galleries of different sizes and shapes extend. One of the galleries is 433 feet (132 meters) long and has been termed “the boat.” The building has also become politically symbolic of the struggles of Basque Spain to obtain independence and recognition.

Gehry won many awards, including the Arnold W. Brunner Prize by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983 and the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1989. In 1994 he received the first Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for architecture.