Gehry Residence Analysis

Studio project at The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), instructor Ramiro Diaz-Granados, 2015

This series of drawings provides an analysis of the Gehry Residence, largely focused on formal aspects of the project's integration onto an existing structure. The implementation of casual materiality and the emergence of a whimsical form language are studied as a series of interjections onto the extant condition of the site.

What can be read as a series of plays on the cube interject themselves along the warped façade, destabilizing the legibility of the existing house's primitive forms.

These produce a tumbling of space legible through primitive geometries. Such manipulation of form continues throughout Gehry's work from the late 1970s on, eventually conjuring the nascent sensibilities which would feed the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Disney Concert Hall.

By exposing studs and interjecting overlapping layers of chain-linked fencing, the building gains an entirely unexpected porosity that challenges the typological conventions of its rudimentary residential variety.

Programmatically, Gehry's use of materials extends beyond their immediate phenomenological properties to create novel varieties of space.

Taken together, these spatial manipulations amount to a radical transfiguration of the house typology. Materiality and programming further this, allowing the distorted box forms to act as interstitial spaces between a newly created private space (around the existing structure's ground perimeter) and the public exterior.