ARCHITECTURE : Love It or Hate It, Gehry House Shows an Original Mind at Work

The house architect Frank Gehry designed in 1978 for himself and his family wears its heart on its corrugated metal, plywood and chain-link fence sleeve. The shipwreck of a house, washed up on the corner of Washington and 22nd streets in Santa Monica, is an exhibitionist treasure trove of materials and forms Gehry has used for the last two decades to create his idiosyncratic, but by now world-famous, architecture. The neighbors hate it, architects love it, and Gehry happily uses his home as a place of experimentation.

Ironically, the reason the house looks so strange is because it is made out of the shapes and textures that surround us every day as we navigate through the urban landscape of Los Angeles. Every day, we pass plywood, fences and cut-off forms. They are fragments left over from previous uses, the emblems of security and control that fence in our yards, and unadorned walls over which complicated shapes peek, hinting at domestic richness beyond. Despite their richness, we never notice the many images these unintended compositions create. All Gehry has done is to scavenge the city in which he lives, collect some of its most typical elements, and compose them with an artist’s eye in his house.

The composition began when the architect surrounded a two-story Cape Cod-style home already on the site with a corrugated metal wall that gives him a shield of privacy from the street. Hidden between the original house and the new wall is an expansive dining room, kitchen and back porch. Gehry left the original asphalt driveway as the new kitchen floor. “Easy to mop,” he points out. The corner of the wall seems to have been ripped out, only to be replaced by a prow of glass sailing off into the street. From the outside, this form combined with a fanciful crown of chain-link fence adorning the main entrance (it keeps the kids from falling off the outdoor play area on the roof), creates a light-hearted counterpoint to the heavy forms of the walls. In the new spaces behind those walls, the room opens up to the sky.

The architecture of this house keeps careening between urban archeology and original forms. The kitchen window is a rotated cube, a piece of constructed perfection crashed into the domestic scene, while the wall of the master bedroom above has been stripped and replaced with glass to reveal the studs and chimney that make it into an emblem of home. Inside, the studs that hold up the walls stand naked against the big windows, telling you where the house came from and where it’s going.

Most people still think the house is a mess. They want a house to look like a house, which in this neighborhood seems to mean a faceless bungalow hiding behind a big garage and banana plants. In the years since the house was built, larger houses--French chateaus and modernist castles--have filled the street, out of scale and out of place, but clothing themselves in the polite dress of suburbia. The Gehry house, perpetually unfinished, forces us to look at what really are the familiar forms of the home and the true face of the city. After 12 years, that look in the mirror is still upsetting and revealing.

* Gehry residence: Washington and 22nd streets, Santa Monica

* Architect: Frank Gehry

* The house is not open to the public.