"We live in chaos, which is probably the product of democracy. And we don't look at it positively." So states Frank O. Gehry, in summing up the ethos of an architectural career that has stretched over five decades and nearly as many continents. In designing what now stand as among the most visionary architectural achievements of the century, Gehry has sought to harness that chaos, fusing populist appeal with avant-garde forms, finding unity in seemingly disjunctive parts, and employing cutting-edge technology to expand the boundaries of the possible.

In 1978 the completion of his Santa Monica house marked the emergence of a powerfully idiosyncratic architectural language. In 1997 the completion of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, restored the power of contemporary architecture to both challenge and delight the public. Both projects serve as examples of Gehry's masterful balance between buildings that are sensitive to their context and buildings that transcend their context.

Gehry, who won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1989 and a National Medal of Arts in 1998, was also awarded the American Institute of Architects' Gold Medal. Gehry's other projects include the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, an expansion of Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art, a vaporetto terminal for the airport in Venice, Italy, and a research building at MIT to replace the site of the Manhattan Project. In a fitting twist, he also revisited furniture design with the "FOG" chair for Knoll.

Frank Gehry seems intent on continuing to probe geometry and form, and with the Bilbao Guggenheim as a possible referent, he says: "I dream of brick melting into metal, a kind of alchemy that will lead to something totally unanticipated."