Gehry Residence Floor Plan -

To emphasize this shift, Gehry used asphalt strip flooring in the kitchen, bringing the literal material of the street inside the house.

The Gehry Residence in Santa Monica, California, stands as one of the most influential designs in modern architectural history. Built in 1978, Frank Gehry’s personal home transformed a traditional 1920s Dutch Colonial house into an icon of Deconstructivism.

The 1978 Gehry Residence in Santa Monica is a foundational deconstructivist project featuring a house-within-a-house design, where a new, industrial structure wraps around a 1920s bungalow. The floor plan merges interior and exterior spaces across two levels, utilizing corrugated metal, chain-link fencing, and exposed framing to blur traditional architectural boundaries. Explore the detailed floor plans and architectural analysis at WikiArquitectura . Gehry House - Data, Photos & Plans - WikiArquitectura

And the floor plan itself? It never appeared in a glossy magazine as a neat, labeled diagram. Because you couldn’t read it. You had to . And once you did, you understood why Frank Gehry never built a right-angled house again.

The layout is a radical rejection of suburban norms, choosing "freshess" and visible construction over polished finishes. Gehry House - Archiweb gehry residence floor plan

The ground floor extension wraps around the north, west, and south sides of the original structure. This newly created perimeter houses the kitchen, dining area, and a sunlit vestry. The floors in this new section are made of asphalt, intentionally bringing the texture of the outside street into the interior living space. 2. The Kitchen and Dining Area

: The upper level houses the master bedroom and secondary bedrooms. The plan here is non-orthogonal, featuring diamond-shaped rooms and exposed ceiling joists that reveal the "ghosts" of the original structure.

: Over time, as his family grew, the upper level was further renovated to include more "finished" rooms, though it maintained the original's raw, deconstructivist spirit. Evolution of the Plan

The floor plan of the Gehry Residence in Santa Monica is not just a layout; it is a "disjunctive disassociation" of space that fundamentally challenges the concept of a "room". By wrapping a new, aggressive shell of industrial materials around a 1920s Dutch Colonial bungalow, Frank Gehry transformed a traditional domestic vessel into a collage of overlapping experiences. The Core and the Shell: Ground Floor To emphasize this shift, Gehry used asphalt strip

The Gehry Residence floor plan is essentially a collage. It layers the predictable logic of a 1920s suburban home with the chaotic, angular energy of industrial construction. It refuses to be a unified, harmonious whole—a hallmark of Deconstructivism. Instead, the plan creates a narrative of tension: between public and private, old and new, enclosure and exposure. It taught a generation of architects that a floor plan does not need to be efficient or perfectly symmetrical to be profoundly livable; it only needs to be honest to the materials and the lives of its inhabitants.

This is the primary circulation spine. It is narrow—barely 4 feet wide. One side is a glass balustrade looking down into the old living room. The other side is the original exterior siding of the house, now an interior wall.

His solution became the foundation of the . He decided to leave the old house intact and wrap a new, chaotic shell around it. Consequently, the floor plan reads as a palimpsest—a set of erasures and overwritings where traditional living spaces coexist with raw, industrial disruptions.

Gehry installed a steep, wooden that climbs from the original living room up to the new mezzanine. On the architectural drawing, this ladder looks like an afterthought. But in practice, it is the hinge. The 1978 Gehry Residence in Santa Monica is

The ground floor is where the tension between the old layout and the new additions is most explosive. It serves as the primary social and utilitarian hub of the home. 1. The Perimeter Wrap (The New Envelope)

The plan exposes structural elements like wood studs and joists, giving the impression that the house is perpetually under construction.

One of the most distinctive features of the Gehry Residence is its use of levels and spatial relationships. The house has multiple levels, with some areas sunken or raised, creating a sense of layering and visual interest.

The floor plan of the Gehry Residence is a physical manifesto of Deconstructivism. It proved that architecture did not need to be clean, unified, or harmonious to be functional and profoundly beautiful. By slicing open a mundane suburban home and wrapping it in a raw, industrial exoskeleton, Frank Gehry created a floor plan that is simultaneously fragmented and cohesive, chaotic and carefully ordered. It remains a masterclass in how to manipulate space, history, and materials within a domestic footprint.