Frank Gehry: The Evolution of a Master

Anyone noticing a modern house being built in Bel-Air back in 1959 was witnessing the modest debut of Southern California’s now most famous architect, Frank O. Gehry.

Perched on the edge of a bluff overlooking the Sepulveda Pass, the Steeves family home was the first major independent commission in which Gehry was free to strut his stuff. But that early stuff bears little resemblance to the eccentric style that has carried the architect to the heights of acclaim. In the 20 years between the Steeves house and the radical home Gehry designed for himself in Santa Monica in 1978, a revolution has occurred in Gehry’s mind--a revolution that has shaken the ideas of designers and laymen alike.

A comparison of the Steeves and Gehry houses, which seem to have come from totally different designers, illuminates the extraordinary journey the architect has made on the road to fame.

The Steeves house is crisp, clear and free of any hint of quirks. Its spaces, indoors and out, are airy and uncomplicated. The details of the sliding doors, wooden fascias and stucco panels are clean, well-finished and unfussy.

The house embodies what Gehry described as “my (early) preoccupation with hierarchical spaces and formal planning organization.”

Translated from “archibabble,” this means that the architect wanted to achieve a logical plan for the house, then to express this logic in a straightforward manner.

Twenty years later, Gehry stood his early design logic on its head.

The simple pleasures of clarity were supplanted by the subtler delights of ambiguity. Comprehension was replaced by provocation. Gehry found his form.

In Santa Monica, Gehry enclosed a pink suburban house in a skewed shell of corrugated metal, glass and exposed timber framing. Nets of Gehry’s trademark chain-link fencing and a tilted skylight over the kitchen add to the ambiguity of the design. All the lines between old and new, horizontal and vertical, roof and wall are blurred into oblivion.

Internally, the Gehry house is a deliberately schizoid fusion of the ordinary and the incongruous. The spacious sunny kitchen is floored with black asphalt, like pavement. The original living room windows now overlook the kitchen. It’s like a live-in hall of mirrors where the reflections are alternately expected and extraordinary.

When it was unveiled in 1978, the Gehry house was greeted by a mixed cocktail of cheers and jeers. “It’s a dirty thing to do in somebody else’s front yard,” one neighbor complained. Others dubbed the design “a monstrosity” and an “eyesore,” but the mayor of Santa Monica, summoned to inspect the house by a distressed resident, declared: “It’s a masterpiece. I love it.”

Professional critics were no less divided. While one lauded its “sophisticated beauty,” another characterized it as “a lumberyard vandalized by a rampaging teen-ager.”

Gehry, typically, expressed his evolution from conventional modernist to radical Pop-Modernist in down-home terms. “In the Steeves house, I was still trying for the perfect detail. Since perfection was impossible, I gave it up and started doing this rough stuff.”

More seriously, Gehry said: “What people often don’t see is that I don’t destroy order, I reinvent it. I break down the obvious, churn it about, hold it upside down, shake it and bake it and fry its assumptions. In this way I free a fresh order of forms out of the ashes of the old.”

Gehry says his urge to reinvent order was born in the back room of his grandfather’s hardware store in downtown Toronto. There he tinkered with dismembered clocks and toasters, and the pathos of dismantled gears, springs and wires infected him with a tenderness for mechanisms that spill their guts for all the world to see.

Gehry’s sister, Doreen Nelson, suggested shrewdly that “when Frank bought that pink house, he did a transformation not only on the house but on himself. He put all this stuff around it to present himself as a new person, but an old new person who’s still connected to where he came from and who he was.”

A New Life

The old-new unconventional Gehry was transformed through a series of professional and personal changes that occurred in the late 1960s. On a personal level, his first marriage broke up in 1966, and 10 years later, he started a new life with Berta Aguilera, with whom he now has two sons.

Another major personal influence was the noted psychologist Milton Wexler, whose long analysis helped the architect through his life change.

“I first went to Milton because my world wasn’t functioning very well,” Gehry told architectural historian Thomas Hines in 1986. “He was the first shrink to engage me intellectually.”

Through Wexler, Gehry met many artists, including Ed Ruscha, Ed Moses, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg. Hines wrote that “their way of making art strongly affected (Gehry’s) way of making architecture. . . . Slowly he learned to sublimate the anger, pain and fear of existing in a crazy, hostile world to architectural statements about those tensions. His work would frequently suggest ‘unfinished business’ or the poignant incompleteness of all human existence.”

Gehry’s design for painter Ron Davis’ Malibu house, completed in 1972, was his first powerful move towards a personal style. A deliberately skewed trapezoid clad in corrugated iron, the Davis house opened the Pandora’s box of Gehry’s imagination in search of a freer form of expression.

“That building unlocked a whole lot of possibilities,” he recalled. “I spent a lot of time out there, sitting and looking, watching where the shadows and the sunlight fell. I began to play with those reflections, exploring their visual and emotional potentials.”

Over the next 17 years, Gehry explored the visual and emotional potentials of his highly individual eye in such landmark designs as the Loyola Law School campus, the Exposition Park Aerospace Museum and the Santa Monica Edgemar complex.

In these quirky projects, he refined his feeling that architecture in a time of rapid change will always have something of the look of “unfinished business.”

The fate of the Steeves house provides an ironic postscript to Gehry’s self-reinvention.

In 1981, the house’s new owners, Robert and Joanne Smith, asked Gehry to add a new wing.

Gehry’s addition, designed in his radical post-transformation manner as a cluster of mini-pavilions clad in sheet metal, raw plywood and chain link, was rejected by his clients and by the Bel-Air Fine Arts Commission.

“This is not a house,” the commission declared. “It’s too broken up.”

The Smiths, who accuse Gehry of developing a “totally unsuitable and wildly expensive scheme,” refused to allow the house to be photographed with the addition subsequently designed by architects Frank Mutlow and John Dimster in a style similar to Gehry’s original.

Eight years later, the Smiths are still so angry with Gehry that, after expressing these opinions on the telephone, they canceled a scheduled interview with the flat statement that they “wanted nothing more to do with the man and his works.”

Gehry lays the blame for this sad outcome at the feet of Joanne Smith.

“Her fancy tennis club, interior decorator pals told her my design would make her look silly,” he said. “I guess back then conventional taste still had a ways to catch up with me.”