TIM-ZHAO-ARCH1390-2009: Gehry House Final Research

GEHRY HOUSE

FRANK GEHRY has remodeled his house, and some people are miserable about it. Young architects in Los Angeles, including several whose careers Mr. Gehry has helped to nurture, are having a hard time adjusting to the change. They grumble, mostly among themselves, that Mr. Gehry has smoothed away the rough edges that gave the house its character. To hear them talk, you might think that the house belonged to them. And it does. It belongs to everyone who believes that architecture is an art of living.

The house, in Santa Monica, just west of Los Angeles, has been a landmark for 15 years. The architectural vocabulary it introduced in 1978 -- a precise balance of fragment and whole, raw and refined, new and old -- has inspired a generation of designers. It helped to establish Los Angeles as America's most vibrant city for architectural innovation. And it widened the scope of Mr. Gehry's own practice from a regional to a global sphere.

If it is possible to view in historical terms a building that epitomizes contemporaneity, then this house already stands in the select group of architects' houses that includes Jefferson's Monticello in Virginia, Wright's Taliesin in Wisconsin and Taliesin West in Arizona and Philip Johnson's Glass House in Connecticut.

And even if it is foolhardy to advance such a claim, those earlier buildings help to clarify what makes the Gehry house important. Jefferson's, Wright's and Johnson's houses sit isolated in natural landscapes. Refugees from urban congestion, they dramatize their mastery of the environment by extending visual control over nature in vistas as far as the eye can see.

Mr. Gehry's house, too, 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.

Like an eruption of inner-city energy within the tranquil suburb, Mr. Gehry's chain link and rough asphalt suggested that earthquakes aren't the only source of instability in Southern California. The region is also subject to social shocks brought on by its own explosive growth and the competing pressures of its diverse population.

Social pressures also brought on the recent remodeling of the Gehry house, though in this case the pressures were domestic. Mr. Gehry and his wife, Berta, are the parents of two teen-age sons. The boys used to share a bedroom on the second floor, just outside the airy, treetop nest of a master bedroom. A few years ago, Alejo, the elder, moved into a spare bedroom downstairs. Then, in 1991, Sami, the younger son, decided that he, too, wanted more distance from the nest. His parents were willing, but the house was slightly too cramped to oblige. To give the brothers rooms of equal size, it would be necessary to extend the rear wall of the house a few feet into the backyard.

For Mr. Gehry, this was not destined to be a simple matter of calculating so many square feet. His architecture is an art of relationships. He could not easily change one part of the house without rethinking the whole. Extending the rear wall, for example, would dim the wall's lineup of five wood-framed glass doors, one of the most distinctive features.

Mr. Gehry decided to replace the doors with large picture windows, setting one of them within a sliding frame. But since the doors echoed the wooden framework of an exposed stud wall inside, that wall would also have to come down. And without the wall, the raised floor of the adjacent living room would have to be extended over a sunken "talk pit.

And so on and so on and so on: an esthetic chain-reaction that threatened to pitch the whole house completely out of whack. In 1978, for instance, Mr. Gehry was content to leave walls and ceilings looking raw and unfinished. The visual grit conveyed the exploratory nature of the design. But the remodeling is not a new departure. And Mr. Gehry's design vocabulary has evolved considerably since 1978. Retaining the raw surfaces of the house would have felt contrived, like using artificially weathered wood.

Thus, the main goal of the project was to meet the challenge of growth -- his own as well as his family's -- while remaining sympathetic to what was already there. As Mr. Gehry put it, "The job was to let the house change without stepping outside its own vernacular.

The basic layout of the house is much the same. The entrance, kitchen and dining area still occupy the narrow, U-shaped strip of space between the old pink house and the industrial-strength walls that Mr. Gehry wrapped around it in 1978. The kitchen's large, distinctive window and skylight remain intact within their tumbling wooden frames.

But surfaces throughout the house have gone from raw to cooked. Ceilings are fitted with neat wooden battens, covering up formerly exposed beams. The crude asphalt that once lined the kitchen floor has been replaced with square asphalt pavers. In place of plain plywood, there is varnished Douglas fir. These smooth surfaces have brightened the rooms, and now there is air-conditioning.

On the second floor, the boys' old room has become a study for Mrs. Gehry. The master bedroom now features a built-in, glass-topped table that doubles as a skylight for the living room below. Thick glass has also replaced the chain-link floor in an area leading from the bedroom to a balcony that wraps around the side of the house. A steep stair, more like a ship's ladder, ascends from the bedroom to a garret-lookout Mr. Gehry has set aside for reading. Here, plywood bookshelves and walls of exposed wooden slats recall the building's pre-renovation roughness, but the slats now frame small windows that are opened and closed by discreet electric motors.

The landscaping around the house is also more formally ordered. An ancient, towering cactus still commands the backyard, but the new paving that surrounds it has replaced the pulverized concrete that once gave the yard the appearance of a vacant city lot. A lap pool, lined with apple green tile, now stretches the width of the yard. On the far side of the pool, the pink-shingled garage has been enlarged by a metal facade. Remodeled for guest quarters, the garage has been requisitioned by the boys as a recreation room.

In front of the house, the landscape designer Nancy Power has arranged a sumptuous oasis of desert flora around a bubbling fountain: water tumbles into a basin from stainless-steel faucets, the kind you remember from chemistry class. Overhead, nasturtiums have begun to soften the cantilevered chain-link screens into bucolic trellises. But the real "landscaping" of this house is the fractured panorama of multiple perspectives that unfolds as you look out its windows. As you ascend through the house, your angle of vision pivots downward, directed by openings that frame sky, then treetops, then the motley Santa Monica cityscape in a low-flying bird's-eye view.

>Electric windows? A lap pool? A fountain? It is this emphasis on luxury, along with the high level of finish throughout the house, that leaves some people feeling dispossessed. They see the renovation as a reflection of Mr. Gehry's worldly success, with all the risks that success holds for the romantic imagination. Or perhaps they fear that the remodeling marks the passing of their own youth, along with the carefree spontaneity that the house long embodied. "He's given the house a face-lift," said Frank Israel, an admiring Los Angeles architect, whose clients include Hollywood stars.

Mr. Gehry himself is not completely satisfied with the remodeling even after two years' work, and he is still tinkering with designs for the lighting fixtures downstairs. "It was tougher before," he said. "And it was harder to grasp what was going on." Before, he continued, it was harder to tell where the old building stopped and his additions began. There was a tighter mesh between the exposed innards of the old and the rough materials of the new. Now, there is a visible sense of separation.

But the remodeling has reaffirmed, not betrayed, the governing idea of this house. It was always a place of growth. Like all of Mr. Gehry's work, the house enlarged the opportunity for individuals and ideas to develop according to their nature, within the social ecology of a city where millions of others are struggling to do the same. Yes, Mr. Gehry concedes, the house is comfortable now. He found it comfortable before the remodeling, too. And his sons evidently feel quite at home. They have plastered hockey posters all over his handiwork.

In short, social as well as spatial factors drove this redesign, and its social dimension goes beyond the rearrangement of domestic affairs. While the remodeling of the house was going forward, Mr. Gehry started work on a design for an addition to the Children's Museum in Boston, a project that might inspire some architects with escapist fantasies of Edenic bliss. For Mr. Gehry, the museum project has been an occasion for some fairly grim reflections: what kind of world has his generation created for the next?

His own city has been convulsed by social and racial unrest. What can a building say to children at such a time? How can it allow the possibility of hope but prevent it from becoming yet another burden on the future? How can architecture encourage playfulness as a spur to creativity, but discourage it from becoming an evasion of responsibility for the present?

Such far-reaching speculations jostle with the intimacies of daily living. On a Saturday morning, Mr. Gehry will rise at 5:30 to join his sons for a day of ice hockey. The skates now lie in colorful disarray in the backyard. And the collision of these images -- urban and domestic; cosmic and mundane -- is one way to visualize the mental mechanism at work when Mr. Gehry stands over a table in his office, concentrating on a project, adjusting the elements of a model.

He designs with faith that even small adjustments of form -- the placement of a lap pool, the entrance to a museum -- can alter the conditions of social reality. They represent a concrete, pragmatic means of bringing disconnected realms into coherent cultural relationship. The Gehry house, for example, is indeed a comfortable nest. It is miles from the harsh conditions of South-Central Los Angeles torn by rioting last year. But here, at the long table in the Gehrys' sun-splashed dining area, Mr. Gehry has sat down with the new Mayor of Los Angeles, Richard Riordan, to discuss how architects and planners can effectively address the city's agonizing social tensions.

The house itself has much to contribute to that conversation. It says that architecture does not just enclose life, but emerges from within it. Buildings need not stand above things, aloof atop a plinth. They can derive their forms from the fray. The tensions of cities, like the tensions of families, can give rise to violence. They also produce moments of joy. 'Dumb Little House With Charm,' First Remake.

The elements of Mr. Gehry's style as seen in his original remodeling of an existing suburban "dumb little house with charm," front (top) and rear (bottom) views: cheap industrial materials like corrugated metal, chain-link and raw plywood; asymmetrical composition; overlapping planes, as in the entrance stair; the diagonal thrust of the hurricane fencing above the entrance; standard commercial glass doors and windows, and a spirit of spontaneity throughout.

Photos: In place of pulverized concrete, a smooth terrace covers the backyard of Frank Gehry's newly remodeled house. Metal walls replace raw plywood at the rear of the house. Mr. Gehry, at right, takes in the view. (Photographs by Grant Mudford for The New York Times) (pg. C1); A garage has been turned into a plywood-lined guest suite. A skylighted loft overlooks a study area and adjoining bath.; A new (top) (Grant Mudford for The New York Times) and old (bottom) view of the master bedroom. (Tim Street-Porter/Esto) In the remodeling, Mr. Gehry has removed an exposed wooden stud wall and added a built-in table with a glass top that looks down into the living room.; In dining area, neat wooden battens cover the formerly exposed-beam ceiling.