Frank Gehry Designed His Own Home, and What It Teaches About Creative Risk

Few professionals tend to live as long, or mature as slowly, as architects. Frank Gehry died late last year at the formidable age of 96, with several projects still under construction. But he’d only really been Frank Gehry for the past half-century or so: not in the sense of having changed his name from Frank Goldberg (a choice he made in his twenties and later came to regret), but in having planted his first recognizable flag in the built environment. The environment was a quiet middle-class residential neighborhood in Santa Monica; the flag was his own home, a modest Dutch Colonial fixer-upper originally built in 1920, and transformed by Gehry into what resembled a highly controlled industrial disaster.

“He fortified parts of the pastel-painted, shingled exterior with corrugated steel, wrapped layers of chain-link fencing over other portions in angular planes not seen since Russian Constructivism, and slammed a tilted cubic skylight, which looked as if it had fallen from outer space, into the kitchen,” writes New York Review of Books architecture critic Martin Filler in his remembrance of the architect.

“In the interior he exposed walls down to the wooden studs and treated vestigial white plaster patches as though they were Robert Ryman paintings. Paradoxically, this messy mash-up also exuded a cozy domesticity,” a quality on display in Beyond Utopia: Changing Attitudes in American Architecture, a 1983 documentary co-written by Filler that includes an interview with Gehry in the house’s kitchen.

About fifteen years before the Guggenheim Bilbao, and two decades before Disney Concert Hall, the starchitect-to-be sits in the kitchen of his radically renovated home with his two young sons. “I like that when you look through the top you can see down here in the kitchen,” says one of them. Now, here to speak more expansively on the project’s virtues, and how they fit into the longer arc of Gehry’s career, is architect and star of Architectural Design’s Youtube channel star Michael Wyetzner, with a new video called “What Frank Gehry’s Personal Home Teaches Us About Creative Risk.” And indeed, such risk-taking stood out in his own generation, most of whose major architects adhered one way or another to modernist or postmodernist trends. As his home renovation signaled, Gehry decided to go his own way.

At a glance, the jagged, almost aggressive look of the Gehry residence may hardly bring to mind the gleaming metallic curves, almost invariably described as “undulating,” of the Guggenheim Bilbao and Disney Hall. But Wyetzner finds deeper resonances with various elements of the aesthetic sensibility that Gehry cultivated in his work from his middle-age self-reinvention through his nonagenarian eminence, not least emphasizing the impression of movement and the “noisy versus quiet” visual dynamic. Contrast is power, as all artists understand on one level or another — and, perhaps, as Frank Gehry came to understand that while hanging out with Los Angeles artists before he made his name. Though he never exactly joined their ranks, it is as an “artist-architect,” in Wyetzner’s words, that he will be remembered.

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Visit the Homes That Great Architects Designed for Themselves: Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius & Frank Gehry

On the Importance of the Creative Brief: Frank Gehry, Maira Kalman & Others Explain its Essential Role

Take an Online Course on Design & Architecture with Frank Gehry

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.