Gehry House

GEHRY HOUSE

Architect: Frank Gehry 
Location: Santa Monica, California
Date: 1978
Building Type: Architect’s House
Climate: Mild Temperature
Context: Suburban
Style: Deconstructivist Post-Modern

The Story of the House

     Before Frank Gehry acquired international prestige as the architect of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, he designed his own house in Santa Monica (1977 - 78). The story starts when his wife, Berta, bought a small pink bungalow in a bourgeois neighborhood. Gehry decided to redesign what he considered "a dumb little house with charm", to build around it and try "to make it more important". The result was so emotive among their neighbors that the new house was even shot at one night!
Gehry House Commentary

"Adhering to the spirit of ad-hocism... Frank Gehry's own house in Los Angeles is rather a collision of parts, built to stay but with a deliberately unfinished, ordinary builder like sensibility of parts. An existing and very pedestrian two-story gambrel-roofed clapboard residence had much of its interior removed and walls stripped back to their original two-by- four stud frame, beams, and rafters. It was then expanded by wrapping the old house with a metal slipcover creating a new set of spaces around its perimeter. The antirefinement type enclosure is built of the most mundane materials, corrugated aluminum metal siding, plywood, glass and chain-link fencing, and deliberately has randomly slanted lines and angled protrusions. Although the house retains a certain minimalist sense, the effort here is cluttered expressionistic and the sensibility is freely intended as artistically intuitive, of accident not resolved. The palette is anti-high-tech in preference for a visual presence that is off-the-shelf and ordinary 'cheap tech.' Gehry considers buildings as sculpture with the freedom from restraint that this might imply, hence it is not surprising that his work has an affinity to the collages of Robert Rauschenberg, especially in the artist's ripped cardboard assemblage period of the 1970s. (Gehry himself designed a line of corrugated cardboard furniture.)

     Mr. Gehry's house draws meaning from its context. But the landscape it occupies is the built-up continent of postwar urbanization. Instead of commanding an infinite expanse of fields, forests, desert or prairie, Mr. Gehry's house sits on a small lot, just a few blocks from the endless commercial strip of Wilshire Boulevard. Its vista is a land filled with millions of dream houses, a decentralized urban America where the desire to escape the city has produced a raucous congestion of its own.
Even Mr. Gehry's own suburban lot was already occupied. A two-story, pink-shingled "dumb little house with charm," as Mr. Gehry famously called it, poked its cute Dutch gambrel roof into the green suburban skyline. Instead of tearing it down, Mr. Gehry turned the old dwelling into the foundation for his own dream. He sliced through walls, extracted ceilings, pared away part of the roof and wove the partly dismembered remains into a new architectural framework: an industrial shell made of plywood, wire glass, galvanized metal and chain-link fence.
Though Mr. Gehry denied that he was trying to make a Big Statement, the house was soon widely recognized as a potent expression of contemporary American urbanism. It was as if the old house had begun to break apart under the pressure of proximity to the neighbors, and then began to exert its own pressure outward: pushing back against staid decorum, exposing suburbia's conflicting ideals of community and independence.
from Paul Heyer. American Architecture: Ideas and Ideologies in the Late Twentieth Century. p228-230.
from ERBERT MUSCHAMP The Gehry House: A Brash Landmark Grows Up
Published: October 07, 1993

The Stages of the House

     The Gehry House is a renovation, in three stages, of an existing suburban building. The original house is known embedded in several interlocking additions of conflicting structures. It has been severely distorted by those additions. But the force of the house comes from the sense that the additions were not imported to the site but emerged from the inside of the house. It is as if the house had always harbored these twisted shapes within it. 
In the first stage, forms twist their way out from the inside. A tilted cube, for example, made up of the timber framing of the original house, bursts through the structure, peeling back the layers of the house. As these forms push their way out, they lift off the skin of the building, exposing the structure; they create a second skin which wraps around the front and site of the new volume, but which peels right off the rear wall of the house to stand free, like stage scenery. Having broken through the structure, the forms strain against this second skin but in the end it stoops them from escaping. Consequently, the first stage operates in the gap between the original wall and its displaced skin. This gap is a zone of conflict in which stable distinctions, between inside and out, original and addition, structure and facade, are questioned. The original house become a strange artifact, trapped and distorted by forms that have emerged from within it.

The Sketches fot the Gehry House

                                                     

      In the second stage, the structure of the rear wall, which is unprotected by the skin, bursts and planks tumble out. The structure almost literally breaks down. N the third stage, the backyards fill up with forms that appear to have escape from the house through the breach in the rear wall, which then closes. These forms are then put under tension by being twisted relative to each other and to the house. The Gehry House becomes an extended essay o the convoluted relationship between the conflict within forms and the conflict between forms.

From Johnson P., Deconstructivist Architecture, 1988