Frank Gehry

The award-winning architect tells Fortune how he got started.

- Dinah Eng

Frank Owen Gehry, 89, has become one of the world’s leading architects, known for postmodern designs like the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris. His Los Angeles firm Gehry Partners has 160 employees, but he still personally oversees every project.

I WAS BORN Frank Owen Goldberg in Toronto, where VENTURE my family had a hardware store. My grandfather was president of a synagogue and used to read the Talmud to me. The 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.

When my father had a heart attack, he lost his business, and in 1947, we emigrated to California, following his brother to Los Angeles. My father ended up working in a liquor store, four blocks from where we lived in a two-room apartment in downtown L.A.