Facebook campus frank gehry biography

There are a couple of ways to explain how Frank Gehry came to design a very large but surprisingly plain-spoken building for Facebook in Silicon Valley. The first is that the 86-year-old Gehry and Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s 31-year-old founder, bonded over a shared appreciation of informal, unpretentious design.

The tech magnate whose hooded sweatshirts have become a personal brand found common ground with the architect who won early recognition for making furniture out of cardboard. After visiting Gehry’s warehouse-like offices on Beatrice Street on the Westside of Los Angeles, Zuckerberg told the architect he wanted essentially the same thing, if at a far bigger scale, for Facebook.

The second has less to do with design taste and more with, well, a social network.

According to Gehry, his good friend Bobby Shriver – nephew of John F. Kennedy and brother-in-law of Arnold Schwarzenegger – suggested to his friend, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, that the architect and the tech c