Architect:
Gehry Partners - Los Angeles.
The generosity of Gehry's architecture can be traced to two sources. One is his own home, the famous Santa Monica bungalow that the architect disassembled, reassembled and wrapped inside a second structure of chain link and two-by-fours. The other critical source is his drawing.
Gehry's home remakes the great Southern California domestic tradition of indoor-outdoor living. This tradition characterizes the region's vernacular architecture, from courtyard haciendas to suburban ranch houses, as well as its unequaled legacy of household masterworks by Wright, Irving Gill, R.M. Schindler, Richard Neutra and many other distinguished architects. For example, the kitchen and dining room of the Gehry house occupy a former outdoor space, where the driveway to the garage used to be. The floor remains asphalt, acknowledging that history, while an interior wall is composed from the exterior wall of clapboards of the original living room next door, which can be glimpsed through an intact picture window. Sitting "inside" the new house yet "outside" the old one, you're inside and outside at the same time. Formally, the indivisibility of inside/outside space recalls the seamless flow of a classic Donald Judd box, in which the conventional distinction between a sculpture's inside and its outside is erased. Bucking the history of Western sculpture, a Judd box is not a discrete mass occupying space and with a hidden interior realm. Neither is Gehry's house. [Christopher Knight]
[foto boven - Tim Street Porter]
