Frank Gehry is best remembered as an architect of grand style, known for his playful designs of some of the world's most famous buildings: the Vitra Museum in Germany, the Guggenheim in Spain, the Disney Hall in Los Angeles. Gehry, who died last week at the age of 96, pioneered a style in which floating shapes came together in ways that seemed impossible. He found inspiration in the curves of fish, broken guitars and the folds of human arms.
But amid all the glitz and fame, one early masterpiece is often forgotten: his own home in Santa Monica, California, a modest pink bungalow that he bought in 1977 and transformed into an early icon of deconstructionism. Starting with just $50,000, Gehry unexpectedly used chain-link fencing, plywood and cinder blocks – the kind of cheap materials he would have found as a boy at his grandfather's hardware store in Toronto.
“Before all the fame and glamorous projects, it was the things of everyday life that made him a truly groundbreaking architect,” said Brian Goldstein, an architectural historian at Swarthmore College outside Philadelphia and author of “The Roots of Urban Renaissance.”
In the late 1970s, Gehry and his new wife Berta Aguilera lived in an apartment in Santa Monica. When Aguilera became pregnant with their second child, they decided they needed a house and found a two-story bungalow on a corner lot for $160,000. It was built in the 1920s and had asbestos shingles. Gehry later called it both a “silly little house with charm” and a “cute little house that everyone in the neighborhood liked.”
He had the idea of “building a new house around the old house,” he told author Barbara Isenberg in her 2009 book “Conversations with Frank Gehry.”
The couple didn't have much money at the time, but Gehry got to work. He surrounded the structure with corrugated steel and added a chain-link fence that looked like it was growing from above. Glass stuck out at strange angles. A watercolored cinder block wall surrounded the lawn. Inside, the kitchen floor was asphalt.
The house within the house had two front doors; A person could be inside and outside at the same time. Architect Philip Johnson told The Times in 1982 that what makes the house great “is when you're in the new dining room and someone looks out the window of the old house and you say, 'Man, I thought I was in the house, but now I see I'm outside and this person is looking out the window at me.'”
He added: “It's not beauty or ugliness either, but a disturbing kind of satisfaction that you don't find in the rooms of anyone, not of any architect in the world.”
In the end the house looked like it came from a hardware store. No suburb had seen anything like it. “The neighbors were really upset,” Gehry said in an interview in 2021. One of them even tried to sue.
But for Gehry, the house meant creative freedom at a time when he didn't have unlimited resources. There was no customer to please, no deadlines to meet. He shrugged off his neighbors' complaints and carried on. “I can't stand the hypocrisy of a situation where every house on the street has an RV, a truck or a boat parked in front of it, but when a guy comes along and puts a chain link on it, all hell ensues,” he told The Times in 1982.
Whatever the neighborhood thought, the project and the confusion it caused cast Gehry on the scene as a mischievous, new-eyed talent. Architectural historian Beatriz Colomina called it “the house that Gehry built.” It was a rejection of conventional shapes and lines and revealed the non-conformist flair that would bring Gehry fame in the decades to come.
But the building wasn't just a statement. Gehry and his family lived there for decades, and as their home life evolved, he made no point in changing it as new needs arose.
“I wanted a window in the bathroom, so I took a hammer and used the hammer to knock a hole in the ceiling,” he told Ms. Isenberg in her 2009 book. “Then I glued a piece of glass to the outside roof with thick sealant to make it stick and not leak. That became the bathroom window. That's how it was done.”
In the 1990s, when he had more money, Gehry renovated the house again, adding a pool and updating the roof, lighting and electrical system. “A lot was done that destroyed the old house and I lost it,” he said in the book. “The house now has remnants of its old strength, but it's not as good a house. It's not as good a work of art, if you want to call it art, as it was the first time around.”
Gehry later moved to a new house in Santa Monica that he designed with his son Sam. But Gehry's distorted pink bungalow is still a crucial part of his oeuvre and an act of architectural rebellion.
“As much as it was a project that questioned the very nature of houseness,” Mr. Goldstein said, “it was also a project that questioned elitism and the idea that to create a great work you have to be above it.”