PUTTING MATERIALS TOGETHER— FRANK’S HOUSE TOGETHER

Short writing in response to the Graham Foundation’s Pidgeon Audio Visual: Architects Speak for Themselves, curated by Florencia Alvarez Pacheco on show October 29, 2022 - February 25, 2023. Spring 2023.

“Because that’s what architecture is; putting materials together.”
-Frank Gehry
Artist Houses (Slide 16), 1981 Venice, Los Angeles, California

Frank Gehry is an architect concerned with building. For all the radical formal manipulations, the work is grounded in an aggregation of commonplace units of material that define Gehry’s figural architecture. In the Artist Houses, a single lot is divided into three distinct housing units— each embodying a different standardized material: one as asphalt shingles, one as plywood sheets, and one clad with stucco. In doing this, the architecture ‘puts together’ a compositional whole through the act of deliberately isolating each individual apartment. Often a theme used by Gehry, dismantling a single project into an assemblage, the deconstruction builds density on the site while maintaining a formal and architectonic part to whole relationship. Diversity of being is represented as a diversity of architecture, Gehry’s way of “giving back to the folk.” After all, he is an architect that builds.