Frank Gehry

The move

Frank Gehry opens his own practice in Los Angeles in 1962. For the first 15 years it's mostly small commercial jobs. Shopping malls. The practical boxes post-war America wanted. He was respected. He wasn't Frank Gehry yet.

1978. He redoes his own house in Santa Monica with chain-link fencing, plywood and corrugated steel on the outside. The neighbours sue. Critics call it ugly. He keeps it. It's the first time he uses cheap industrial stuff as the main language of a building, and it becomes the starting point for everything after.

1991. The Basque government asks him to build a Guggenheim in Bilbao. An industrial port city not many tourists went to. Gehry designs a titanium-clad thing nobody could draw, nobody could cost and nobody could build with the tools they had. He had to invent the digital process to make it. It opens in 1997. The Bilbao Effect, a whole city changed by one building, becomes a phrase people still use.

Disney Concert Hall in 2003. The Louis Vuitton Foundation in 2014. MIT's Stata Center. The Marqués de Riscal hotel. Every one a building people said couldn't be built, until he built it. He is 95. He's still designing.

Why it was risky

Architects build careers on buildings that can actually get built. Gehry kept proposing ones the engineers said couldn't be done, the cost models couldn't handle and the planners would fight. He took the overruns, the lawsuits, the mockery, and decades of so-so work between the big ones. Bilbao alone took six years and engineering tools that didn't exist when he pitched it.

The numbers

From plywood and chain-link in Santa Monica to buildings that changed what an architect could make. Six decades of refusing the brief.

The lesson

The building wasn't the bet. Being a 49-year-old architect wrapping his own house in chain-link to start a new chapter was. Gehry kept making the unbuildable the brief, and lived through years of people thinking he'd lost it while the tools caught up. R.I.S.K. is for people ready to spend ten quiet years building the conditions for their breakthrough.