Frank O. Gehry (Frank O. Goldberg; born 1929) was an American architect whose sculptured designs and use of vernacular materials won him somewhat belated but widespread recognition.

Frank O. Gehry was born in 1929 in Toronto, Canada, and moved to Los Angeles in 1947 with his parents, Irving and Thelma Goldberg (he changed his name in the mid-1950s). He studied at the University of Southern California from 1949 to 1951. After receiving practical experience as a designer in a Los Angeles firm, he returned to USC to complete his Bachelor of Architecture degree in 1954. Gehry studied City Planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in Massachusetts, an important center for the dissemination of the International Style. Leaving Harvard in 1957, the architect returned to the West Coast to work for a variety of firms before opening his own practice, Frank O. Gehry and Associates, Inc., in Los Angeles in 1962.

In retrospect it...