Gehry’s Most Personal Masterpiece

                                                                photo by Chris Zielin

   In 1978, before he was generally acknowledged as the world’s most influential architect, Frank Gehry bought what he called “a dumb little house with charm” in the east end of Santa Monica, and transformed it. Going against the prevailing trend, he did not make the small pink asbestos shingled house fancier or sleeker or grandiose or pretentious, he simply made it, in his words, “more important.”
   He said, “I wasn’t trying to make a big or precious statement about architecture or trying to do an important work, I was trying to build a lot of ideas.”
   To that end, he wrapped a shell around three sides of the house, turning it into an object in the larger new house. While the exterior of the old house remains intact, the interior has been “edited.”
   Gehry said, “I wanted to blur the edge between the old finish and the new finishes, between real and surreal.”
   The exterior shell and additions are made of a variety of materials – glazed glass, wire glass, chain link screens and corrugated metal panels – set asymmetrically, and at unexpected angles.
   The overall effect is a work in progress, or in motion.
   In the intervening years, some changes and additions have been made, including retaining walls, gates, more planting, a fountain and a lap pool, and the trees and plants around its perimeter have grown taller and denser, blurring the whole a little.
   Even in Gehry’s canon, this house remains unique. There is nothing quite like it anywhere, but, for all that, it is pensive not outrageous – a kind of meditation on materials, forms and light, an extraordinary doodle.
   In it, one can see intimations of elements Gehry used in later buildings, but it stands on its own as a masterwork, because it is so unabashedly original – in conception and execution.
   The line between this house and Gehry’s Disney Hall that is rising now like an enormous flower on Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles is anything but straight, but it is very clear.
   Ed. note: The quotations from Gehry appeared in “Frank Gehry Buildings and Projects,” compiled and edited by Peter Arnell and Ted Bickford (Rizzoli, 1985).