Page 70 - Fortune-November 01, 2018

FOCUS

Frank Gehry in 2018 at
Gehry Partners,
Los Angeles.

I WAS BORN Frank Owen Goldberg in Toronto, where
FRANKGEHRY president of a synagogue and used to read the Talmud to me. The
VENTURE
my family had a hardware store. My grandfather was
Talmud is all about curiosity. It starts with the word “why.” I used
to listen to the men sit and talk, challenging beliefs and ideas.
The award-winning architect tells Fortune
how he got started. When my father had a heart attack, he lost his business, and in
1947, we emigrated to California, following his brother to Los An-
Interview by Dinah Eng
geles. My father ended up working in a liquor store, four blocks
from where we lived in a two-room apartment in downtown L.A.
Frank Owen Gehry, 89, has become one of the We were poor, and at 17, I got a job as a truck driver and took
world’s leading architects, known for postmodern night classes at Los Angeles City College. I loved woodworking,
designs like the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los and after taking a class in architectural drawing, I was hooked
Angeles, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and enrolled at the University of Southern California. Back in
and the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris. His Los the ’50s, anti-Semitism was in the air. USC was filled with it.
Angeles firm Gehry Partners has 160 employees, Teachers said I should change my name if I wanted to succeed.
but he still personally oversees every project. In 1954, when my then wife, Anita, got pregnant with our

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PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL LEWIS FO R T U N E. CO M // N O V. 1 . 1 8