The weird house': How Frank Gehry revolutionized a neighborhood with his own home

"On December 5, Frank Gehry, one of the most influential and most joyfully undisciplined architects of our time, passed away. And while collective imagination will remember him for oceanic museums, titanium auditoriums, and cultural centers that resemble migratory birds mid-evolution, the truth is that it all began, like so many architectural genealogies we love because they seem humble (and later turn out not to be) with a house."

"In the late 1970s, Gehry bought a perfectly ordinary bungalow in Santa Monica, built in the 1920s, one of those that line a neighborhood where the most daring aesthetic statement is usually a hydrangea of questionable color. And Gehry, instead of remodeling it with the restraint recommended by any mortgage survival manual, decided to subject it to an intervention so unusual that even today it's difficult to describe without it sounding like performance art."

"What's truly fascinating the master stroke that sets him apart from the rest of us mortals who think that renovating is just moving a partition wall and praying it's not structural is that he didn't rebuild the house, but rather wrapped it. Literally. As if the traditional bungalow a small Dutch-American house with a pleasing geometry had grown, almost parasitically, a shell made of corrugated metal, construction mesh, plywood, and glass positioned in a way that defied any academic textbook."

Frank Gehry purchased a modest 1920s bungalow in Santa Monica in the late 1970s and subjected it to an unorthodox architectural intervention. He wrapped the original house in an outer shell of corrugated metal, construction mesh, plywood, and glass rather than demolishing or conventionally rebuilding it. The outer layer functions as a chaotic, parasitic skin while the inner bungalow continues to operate as a normal home, creating a double-object or contemporary matryoshka. The intervention subverted typical renovation practices, blurred boundaries between performance and architecture, and established an early, recognizable gesture that prefigured later monumental projects.

Read at english.elpais.com