Frank Owen Gehry, CC (born Ephraim Owen Goldberg, February 28, 1929 in Toronto, Canada) is an architect known for his sculptural approach to building design. He is best known for building curvaceous structures, often covered with reflective metal. His most famous work, and the clearest expression of his style, is the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which is covered in titanium. __TOC__ Born in Toronto, Canada to a Jewish family, Gehry moved at age 17 to California, where he studied at Los Angeles City College before graduating from the University of Southern California School of Architecture. He then studied city planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is today a naturalized American citizen and lives in Los Angeles. He is Distinguished Professor of Architecture at Columbia University in New York City and has also taught at Yale University.

Gehry's style is derived from late modernism. The tortured, warped forms of his structures are considered expressions of the deconstructivist (DeCon) school of modernist architecture. The DeCon movement departs from modernism in its de-emphasis of societal goals and functional necessity. Unlike early modernist structures, DeCon structures are not required to reflect specific social ideas (such as speed or universality of form), and they do not reflect a belief that form follows function. DeCon, which Gehry has continued to refine, is also known as the Santa Monica school of architecture. This region of the United States has produced the greatest range of experimentation in the field of DeCon design and contains the largest concentration of the structures.

Some have also pointed to Le Corbusier's abstractly-sculptured Notre Dame du Haut as a precursor to Frank Gehry's style, as well as a possible source of his ideas.

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