Gehry Residence Floor Plan [exclusive] Jun 2026
At the east end of the mezzanine, the floor plan opens up into two small bedrooms for the Gehry children. These are relatively conventional square boxes, but they are accessed by a bridge. This means to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, a child must walk across a glass bridge overlooking the living room. Privacy is subverted for spatial drama.
To fully grasp the , you must look at the property line. The house sits on a corner lot. The street wraps around it.
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Located in the original portion of the house, the master bedroom features exposed ceiling joists, making the room feel like an architectural skeleton.
For architects and design enthusiasts, searching for the "Gehry Residence floor plan" is not just about finding room dimensions. It is an archaeological dig into the origins of Deconstructivism. It is about understanding how Gehry took a conventional 1920s Dutch Colonial house and exploded its interior logic to create a manifesto. gehry residence floor 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
The Gehry Residence floor plan proved that architecture did not need to be pristine, symmetrical, or expensive to be revolutionary. By using cheap, everyday materials and manipulating an existing domestic layout, Gehry challenged the mid-century modern orthodoxy. The house remains a textbook example of how a floor plan can subvert expectations, turn a building inside out, and turn domestic tension into a work of art.
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.
A new perimeter made of inexpensive, industrial materials—corrugated metal, chain-link fencing, unpainted plywood, and glass—surrounds the old house on three sides. At the east end of the mezzanine, the
Find of the original 1978 floor plan blueprints.
The master bedroom maintains the general dimensions of the original 1920s layout. However, it opens up to raw plywood surfaces and unexpected angles where the new outer shell collides with the old roofline. 4. Key Spatial Dynamics of the Floor Plan
Frank Gehry’s transformation of his own home in Santa Monica, California, remains one of the most celebrated and analyzed projects in modern architecture. Purchased in 1977, the original 1920s Dutch Colonial-style house became the canvas for Gehry's radical experimentation. By wrapping the traditional structure in a new, avant-garde envelope, Gehry created a landmark of Deconstructivism.
Upstairs, the floor plan reveals a glass-enclosed master bedroom that protrudes out over the driveway. It acts as a transparent observatory. On paper, it looks vulnerable (glass walls on three sides), but in function, it offers a panoramic frame of the mundane suburban street—turning neighbors’ lawns into art. Privacy is subverted for spatial drama
The Gehry Residence (1978) in Santa Monica, California, is not merely a house but a manifesto. Its floor plan challenges the conventional separation of interior and exterior, old and new, public and private. Rather than following a linear sequence of rooms, the plan is best understood as a series of overlapping spatial conditions—an architectural collage shaped by the constraints of an existing Dutch Colonial bungalow and the radical addition of deconstructed geometries.
These are located in the new addition along the northwest frontage. Notably, the kitchen was built directly on the former asphalt driveway, which serves as its flooring.
The original entrance of the Dutch Colonial house was bypassed. Visitors enter through a new ground-floor perimeter zone. The ground floor plan wraps the north and west sides of the original house, primarily dedicated to a new kitchen and a spacious dining area.