Gehry House, Santa Monica, California, 1977-8

Gehry is perhaps best known for his curvy, metalic wave-form museums in Bilbao, Seattle, Los Angeles and Minneapolis, but it all started with strange impulses applied to his own traditional little Santa Monica house in the late 1970s. 

Frank Gehry’s house in Santa Monica came before its time as a harbinger of the Deconstructivist movement. The first recognizedpublic Deconconstructivist architectural project came almost a decade later. Gehry took his seemingly ordinary house in Santa Monica and began changing things incredibly strange ways. He took a step beyond the playful reworkings of Postmodern architecture, where traditional design symbols were reinterpreted, and instead starting using materials and strategies few applied to architectural projects. 

Gehry started by tearing the drywall off of interior walls to expose structural studs buried in the old house, then subtracted and added architectural elements seemingly without a coherent plan throughout the building. He added chain link and plywood to the exterior. His iterative transformations were responses to various impulses and were allowed to coexist without a clear rhyme or reason, flying in the face of both Modernism and Postmodernism – designs from which were typically justified in terms of some kind of central concept.

      

Since this small house came into being, the idea of deconstructing traditional elements and reassembling them according to obscure and abstract comments has become the norm in the industry, particularly for major public buildings. Gehry’s subsequent work (shown above) took this to new levels each time. World architects like Daniel Libeskind, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Coop Himmelblau, and Bernard Tschumi have all created critical works in the subsequent decades that have been influenced by Gehry’s little house. There is considerable controversy surrounding his work and the current state of Deconstructivism, though the influence of Gehry’s approach to design is unquestionably felt throughout the practice of global architecture today. 

So in order to understand where deconstructivism begun, we have choosen GehryHouse in Santa Monica. We thought that identifying this building will be helpful for understanding deconstructivism movement. 

The story starts when his wife, Berta, bought a small pink bungalow in a bourgeois neighbourhood. Gehry decided to redesign what he considered "a dumb little house with charm", to build around it and try "to make it more important".  

While doing this Frank Gehry  keep the existing house in style not in traditional way. Dutch colonies left their ancient homes and built new houses around them.The old style houses are replaced with new modern ones in the process that the walls were robbed and holes were done with demolishing and removing.The neighbours did’t like it but this cannot change the fact that this new style is involved in and identified with architecture.

“Gehry’s design wrapped around three sides of the old house on the ground floor, extending the house towards the street and leaving the exterior of the existing home almost untouched. “ The steps leading to the front door as if they have been casually thrown on top of each other. 

(first and second floor plan)

Both two levels of the interior has changed a lot.In order to reveal the   framing,joistes and wood studs, some places of houses are stripped and with the appearance of the both old and new elements they are repaired.It was very significant in the house while passing through the rooms that from the old ancient doors originally staying, to the new ones which was designed and placed by Gehry.

Plywood walls crash with brute force into some “unfortunately” skewed  corrugated iron sheets. In order to peaking the building, a large glass cube pushes into the roof of the kitchen, penetrates the side facade which can be seen at the pictures. There isn’t any attempt  to connect the new shell of the house with its old internal core. Gehry House denied the harmony of a finished composition. It gives the impression that the house is under construction. 

“In 1991 due to the Gehry family’s growth which involved two boys, the house had to be expanded. Even though Gehry tried to maintain the same style of the house, allowing the original design to determine that of the addition, the house went through significant changes. The residence became much more “finished” which in turn stirred up the angry voices of those who felt strongly about the original raw deconstructivist aesthetics. Nonetheless the Gehry House is still a classic among California’s architectural works. ”

“I loved the idea of leaving the house intact… I came up with the idea of building the new house around it. We were told there were ghosts in the house… I decided they were ghosts of Cubism. The windows… I wanted to make them look like they were crawling out of this thing. At night, because this glass is tipped it mirrors the light in… So when you’re sitting at this table you see all these cars going by, you see the moon in the wrong place… the moon is over there but it reflects here… and you think it’s up there and you don’t know where the hell you are.” – Frank Gehry

(axonometric drawing)

(details of elevation from inside yard, 1977-8
pencil and colur pencil on tracing paper)

(upper-level plan,1977-8
pencil and colour pencil on tracing paper)

(sections and construction details,1977-8
pencil on tracing paper)

(kitchen skylight construction details 1977-8
pencil on tracing paper)

“In advanced societies, mass production means that we are surrounded by smoothly perfect and anonymus objects. Gehry makes a conscious effort to resist this perfection, with his improvised technique and rough handiwork with hammer, wood and wire. In this way, he succeeds in giving architecture a new meaning- even if it is only that near-failure, the imperfect. By smashing the finished whole, he gains room for play.”
     


REFERENCES


Klotz H.(1989). 20th Century Architecture drawings-models-furniture London, Academy Editions, pp 312-5
Friedman M., Lavin S.(2009).  Frank Gehry: the houses Rizzoli, pp 50
Isenberg B. (2009). Conversations with Frank Gehry.

http://www.archdaily.com/67321/gehry-residence-frank-gehry/

http://weburbanist.com/2008/02/03/the-house-that-shaped-an-architectural-generation-frank

gehrys-first-deconstructivist-building/