Frank Gehry was born in Toronto, Canada, in 1929 and grew
up playing with wood scraps from his grandfather’s hardware
store. He attended the architecture school at the University
of Southern California, graduating at the top of his class
in 1954. He has designed many different types of objects,
furniture, and buildings, including the Guggenheim Museum
in Bilbao, Spain. He currently lives in a house he designed
himself in Santa Monica, California.
Gehry first began making corrugated cardboard chairs in
the late 1960s. He had previously made cardboard furniture
for display purposes in department store windows, but they
were not used as real furniture.
- How
might you describe cardboard?
- Think
of some things made out of cardboard. What are they? Can
you think of some reasons why they might be made out of
cardboard?
- Why
do you think Gehry would decide to make a chair out of
cardboard?
By layering
the cardboard Gehry was able to create strength and durability
so his furniture could actually be used and was not just
for display. This cardboard furniture eventually was sold
in department stores, available to a broad range of people
at a low cost, from $35 to $100.
"My
intention was to design the ultimate inexpensive furniture,
something that could be sold cheaply and that would be acceptable
to a mass market." 1
The
idea of creating attractive, affordable, well-designed furniture
became a very popular and important concept for furniture
designers during World War II, because it was a time when
resources were hard to come by and people did not have much
money to spend on furniture.
- Do
you think furniture has to be expensive to be valuable?
What do you think about Gehry wanting to make chairs that
were unique but less expensive than other designers’ furniture?
- Martin
Fuller, Frank Gehry, Daniel Sachs, and Andrew Cogan,
Frank Gehry: New Bentwood Furniture Designs (Montreal:
The Montreal Museum of Decorative Arts, 1992), 100.
