Gehry Residence Floor Plan -
Deconstructing the Blueprint: A Deep Dive into the Gehry Residence Floor Plan When discussing the pantheon of modern architectural marvels, few homes have generated as much controversy, adoration, and academic study as the Gehry Residence in Santa Monica, California. Completed in 1978, this project was the unlikely birthplace of what we now call Deconstructivism. Before Frank Gehry became the starchitect behind the titanium waves of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, he was a rebellious experimentalist living in a modest Dutch Colonial Revival bungalow. The story of the Gehry Residence floor plan is not just about rooms and corridors; it is about the violent collision of suburban normalcy with industrial avant-garde. For architects, students, and design enthusiasts searching for the Gehry Residence floor plan , you will find that traditional labels like "first floor" and "second floor" betray the spatial chaos within. Here is the definitive breakdown of its layout, geometry, and living logic. The Context: The Pink Bungalow vs. The Chain-Link Monster To understand the floor plan, one must understand the split identity of the structure. Gehry did not build from scratch. He purchased a 1920s pink bungalow for himself and his wife, Berta. The original Gehry Residence floor plan for the bungalow was perfectly ordinary: living room, dining, kitchen, two bedrooms upstairs. Gehry’s genius (or madness) was to wrap the existing house in a new shell. He removed the old siding, exposed the wooden studs, and then built a fragmented, angular addition around the core. Consequently, the final floor plan reads as a palimpsest—layers of old domesticity bleeding into new, aggressive geometry. Exterior vs. Interior Circulation (The "Angular Zone") Most floor plans available in architectural archives (such as those from MoMA or the Getty Research Institute) show a chaotic clash of angles. The Existing Core (The "Old" Plan):
Axis: Orthogonal (90-degree angles). Materials: Plaster, wood floors, pitched roof. Rooms: Traditional bedroom, bathroom, living room.
The Wrap (The "New" Addition):
Axis: 45-degree and 30-degree skewed lines. Materials: Plywood, chain-link fencing, corrugated metal, glass. Rooms: Kitchen extension, dining nook, studio, entrance vestibule. gehry residence floor plan
The most striking feature of the Gehry Residence floor plan is how the entry sequence works. You do not enter a "front door" in the traditional sense. The plan forces you through a narrow, low-ceilinged corridor (made of plywood and glass) that skirts the original house before exploding into the main living space. Room-by-Room Breakdown of the Floor Plan Because standard architectural labeling fails here, we will navigate the plan by experiential zones. 1. The "Lawn" Entry (Exterior Room) On the north side of the plan, facing the street, there is a paved courtyard. In many CAD drawings, this is labeled simply as "Patio." However, Gehry treated this as a room with three walls (the house, a fence, and a chain-link barrier) and a floor of asphalt. This "room" leads to a glass pivot door. 2. The Gallery Corridor (The Compression Zone) Upon entering, the floor plan reveals a startlingly narrow hallway—roughly 3 feet wide. To the left is the massive stud wall of the original bungalow (exposed). To the right is a glass wall looking into the "Alley." The plan here is linear and claustrophobic, a deliberate psychological trap before the release. 3. The Main Living Space (The Deconstructed Cube) At the rear of the plan, the corridor opens into a double-height space. This is where the floor plan loses its mind.
The Kitchen: Placed on a 45-degree angle to the original house. It juts out like a geometric prow. The counters are not parallel to the walls. The Dining Area: Occupying the intersection of the old roofline and the new glass roof. The table sits directly under a skylight created by the gap between the original roof and the new one. The "Chain-Link" Envelope: Unlike a normal plan that uses walls, Gehry used chain-link fencing as a "wall" here to define the boundary of the living room while allowing the wind and light to penetrate.
4. The Studio (The Artist’s Cave) Accessed via a small set of stairs (or sometimes a ladder in early iterations), the plan shows a second-floor studio space wrapped in chain-link. This is technically part of the "new" construction, hovering over the dining pit. The floor plan here is fragmented; you cannot walk in a straight line. 5. The Private Realm (The Dutch Colonial Core) Upstairs in the original bungalow portion, the floor plan reverts to pure convention: Deconstructing the Blueprint: A Deep Dive into the
Master Bedroom: Rectangular, quiet, separate from the noise below. Berta’s Bedroom: Accessed via a small bridge in later renovations. Bathroom: Tiny, unremarkable, historically preserved.
This stark contrast is the thesis of the building. The Gehry Residence floor plan is literally a diagram of schizophrenia: a quiet suburban sleeping box wrapped in a noisy, angular, public machine. Why the Floor Plan is Difficult to Read If you download a PDF of the Gehry Residence floor plan from university databases, you will notice something odd: Layer confusion . Gehry famously used unorthodox construction materials. In the floor plan, there are walls that are not structural—they are just plywood screens. There are "voids" that are actually windows. There is a walkway made of concrete blocks laid directly on dirt. Furthermore, the original 1978 floor plan has changed dramatically. After Gehry sold the house, a major renovation in the 1990s (overseen by the new owners) enclosed the kitchen and modified the "ruin" aesthetic. A 2015 restoration attempted to revert to the 1978 plan, but modern building codes required railings on the chain-link bridges—altering the pure visual flow. The "Chain-Link" Question on the Plan One of the most frequently asked questions regarding the Gehry Residence floor plan is: Where are the walls? The answer is that there are none in the conventional sense. The plan uses "lines" that represent different things:
Solid line: Existing drywall or plywood. Dotted line: Chain-link fencing. (These fences serve as the "guardrail" for the upstairs studio and the entrance corridor). Dash-dot line: Exposed wood studs (no drywall). Thick solid: The concrete curb. The story of the Gehry Residence floor plan
Because of this, a novice looking at the plan might assume the house has 30 rooms, when in reality it is largely one continuous open space divided by visual screens. Lessons from the Gehry Residence Floor Plan For architecture students studying this plan for thesis or precedent analysis, here are the key takeaways:
The Inversion of Privacy: Traditional floor plans put public spaces (kitchen/living) on the ground floor and private spaces upstairs. Gehry flips this partially. The ground floor is open to the street (glass walls, chain-link), making the living room a public spectacle. The private bedrooms are buried inside the old bungalow, looking inward. Radical Adjacencies: The kitchen is next to the entrance. The bathroom is next to the studio. These are not errors; they are deconstructions of the suburban norm. The Unfinished Aesthetic: The floor plan includes "unfinished" roof areas. In section (which cuts vertically through the plan), you see that the new roof does not meet the old roof. That "gap" is intentional—letting rain and light into the dining room.