Frank Gehry is the first in his field awarded the Harvard Arts Medal

Call Frank Gehry just an architect, and he just might correct you.

Some of the greatest architects in history were artists first, he likes to point out, including Italian masters such as Giotto, Michelangelo, and El Greco. Gehry himself took night classes in fine arts at the University of Southern California (USC) before turning his focus to building design. Even after his gaze shifted, many of his closest friends were, and remain, artists.

“Getting a medal from Harvard is special,” Frank Gehry said, “and calling it an arts medal is a big deal.”
“Getting a medal from Harvard is special,” Frank Gehry said, “and calling it an arts medal is a big deal.”

“I realized I was much closer to [artists],” said Gehry. “They were very hands-on. They were making things. It was very direct, not a lot of talk, not a lot of rhetoric. … It was emotional. It was feeling.”

An expressive hand is clearly behind the Pritzker Prize-winning architect’s extensive, creative body of work that includes the gleaming Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. For many, his experimentation with unconventional materials and bold forms renders his buildings true works of art.

In honor of his varied creative achievements, Gehry received the Harvard Arts Medal on Thursday at Farkas Hall. The afternoon ceremony marked the annual kickoff to Arts First, Harvard’s four-day celebration of student and faculty creativity organized by the Office for the Arts, now in its 24th year.

In her remarks, Harvard President Drew Faust said that Gehry, the first architect to receive the award, had “created for the next generation not only a new vocabulary of form, but, to quote one of our design School professors, ‘a new vocabulary for the art of architecture itself.’”