Gehry famously placed the kitchen at the heart of the plan. In the late 1970s, kitchens were often relegated to the back of the house. Gehry, acknowledging the kitchen as the social hub of the family, positioned it centrally. The plan shows this space spilling out into the new additions, blurring the line between cooking, dining, and living. Michael Jackson Thriller Album Internet Archive - It. He Was
Completed in 1978 in Santa Monica, California, the Gehry Residence is widely considered the seminal work that launched Frank Gehry’s career as a deconstructivist architect. While the exterior—with its exposed studs, chain-link fences, and corrugated metal—shocks the viewer with its unfinished aesthetic, the floor plan is where the true architectural innovation lies. It represents a radical rethinking of how domestic space can be organized, merging the traditional "American Dream" home with an avant-garde industrial sensibility. The Strategy of Wrapping To understand the floor plan, one must understand the existing structure. Gehry did not build a house from scratch; he wrapped a modest, existing 1920s Dutch Colonial bungalow. The floor plan reveals a "house-within-a-house" concept. Fog Map Nova Scotia
The original bungalow remained largely intact in terms of footprint, but Gehry stripped away its siding to expose the framing. He then surrounded this core with angular volumes of glass, metal, and wire. On the floor plan, this creates a fascinating dichotomy between the "old" spaces (the traditional rooms of the original house) and the "new" spaces (the interstitial zones created by the outer shell). The layout of the Gehry Residence defies the open-plan modernism popularized by Mies van der Rohe. Instead, it offers a fragmented, complex circulation path.