Gehry Residence Floor | Plan [best]
The original house was surrounded by a strip of ground that Gehry converted into a new, wrap-around ground-floor extension. This new perimeter contains the kitchen and dining areas.
Gehry treated the floor plan like a section cut through a model airplane kit: you see the glue marks, the tape, and the structural skeleton. He did not hide the bones.
Unlike the rigid right angles of the original Dutch Colonial, the new additions introduce skewed angles. The floor plan of the addition features non-orthogonal walls that push outward into the backyard. This breaks the rigid box of the traditional home, allowing sightlines to extend diagonally across the property, creating a sense of expansion on a relatively small urban lot.
To truly understand this architectural masterpiece, one must look past the chaotic exterior facades and analyze the Gehry Residence floor plan. The layout is a brilliant exercise in spatial tension, layering, and the blurring of interior and exterior boundaries. The Core Concept: A House Within a House
The floor plan upstairs is heavily dictated by the placement of massive, distorted glass cubes that break through the roof. These skylights are tilted at odd angles, slicing into the ceiling plane to flood the private rooms and the lower public spaces with shifting daylight. Key Characteristics of the Layout 1. Stripped Substructures gehry residence floor plan
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.
The core, revolutionary design described above.
Standard residential floor plans categorize rooms by function (Kitchen, Bed, Bath). The categorizes them by temperature and finish .
Before Gehry, residential floor plans were designed for comfort, predictability, and the "hearth." The Gehry Residence floor plan is designed for event . It is uncomfortable. The angles are wrong. The exposed studs collect dust. The chain-link rusts. The original house was surrounded by a strip
Inside the Deconstructed Spaces: A Detailed Guide to the Gehry Residence Floor Plan
A floor plan of the Gehry Residence cannot be fully understood without considering the section (the vertical cut). The plan appears dense, yet the house feels airy. This is because Gehry inserted skylights into the gaps between the old roof and the new ceiling.
A second bedroom and a bathroom are also on this level.
The wrapper contains the new, avant-garde public spaces. He did not hide the bones
The original house remains almost fully intact in the center, acting as a core while the new additions form an outer shell.
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.
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
As you move from the bright, glass-ceilinged kitchen into the living room, the ceiling height drops, and the environment becomes darker and more intimate.