64
In his book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four
Ecologies, Reyner Banham expressed in 1971 his
view of Gehry’s Danziger studio, considering:
“what is important and striking is the way in which
this elegantly simple envelope not only reaffirms
the continuing validity of the stucco box as
Angeleno architecture, but does so in a manner
that can stand up to international scrutiny. The
cycle initiated by Schindler comes round again
with deft authority.”^1 Banham was probably
thinking here of Schindler’s Pueblo Ribera, built
by the Viennese émigré in 1924 in La Jolla, or his
Bethlehem Baptist Church of 1944 in the Los
Angeles neighbourhood of Central-Alameda.
The building that triggered this first index of
Gehry’s international recognition also played a
decisive role in consolidating his presence on the
Los Angeles stage. The successful graphic designer
Lou Danziger, whose innovative designs were
popular in the museum world as well as in
advertising, knew of Gehry’s work as he was on
the board of the Faith Plating Company, for which
he had designed a new building in 1963-1964.
Together with his wife Dorothy, Danziger had
initially commissioned his colleague and friend
Frederick A. Usher, a “very charismatic guy”, with
whom Gehry had worked at Victor Gruen’s office,
according to Greg Walsh, Gehry partner of many
years., Usher asked him to take over the design.
Lou Danziger claimed credit in retrospect for
the initial concept: “I sat down and worked out a
floor plan and made a little wooden model of my
project, essentially the basic concept with the
two offset cubes. I brought the model to Frank and
said, ‘Frank, can we do this for $30,000 in three
months?’ Frank looked at it and said yes. Those
were the days! I had given him the basic scheme,
but then he did wonderful things with it.”^3 But
Gehry recalls: “So I met with Louis and Greg Walsh
was with me and we worked on a studio. He wanted
to live there and then have a studio. He was going
to hire an assistant – he was expanding his office.
He wanted a library.”^4
On a busy corner of Melrose Avenue, in a
neighbourhood where printers and other
businesses of the graphic trades abounded,
Danziger’s idea was thus to build a 1,000-square-
foot studio along with the 1,600-square-foot
townhouse, contained in a single building. The
first sketches reflect this unitary principle. Walsh
affirms that “the big epiphany for me was when
we pulled the two elements apart. For the first
time we had two pieces on a single site.”^5 From
the beginning, the pressure of traffic in this area
of Hollywood led to enclosed volumes, with a
minimal number of windows opening directly
onto the roads. The narrative written in 1970 by
the office to support the application to an AIAAward is explicit: “The dirty, noisy and totally
public nature of the surroundings necessitated
completely introverting and screening the building
from the street. The solution was a fortress-like
structure, recessed from the street, with the
residence portion sequestered behind a high wall.”^6
The early versions feature skylights with pitched
roofs, generating a linguistic contrast with the
main volumes which is comparable to Gehry’s
Hillcrest apartment building of 1962. Then, stepby step, a cubistic approach takes over, with many
articulations of the programme being explored,
and ultimately leading to the creation of two
separate but adjacent entities, connected only at
ground level. At some point, towers appear, in which
the air-conditioning ducts and plumbing are
located. In certain cases, the volumetric assemblies
recall Irving Gill’s 1915 Horatio Court West in Santa
Monica, which had been published by Esther McCoy
in her 1960 book Five California Architects.^7 The
almost endless search for convincing clusters of
volumes reveals the interest Gehry already had
“in the idea of connection, of putting pieces
together”. In 1984, he considered this attitude as
being “in a way very similar to what I am still doing,
20 years later. I suppose we have only one idea in
our lives.”^8 A vast number of versions were thrown
on paper, and some more rendered perspectives
were drawn by the gifted Carlos Diniz, who also
happened to be a friend of Danziger. As built, the
double scheme features a living room at the corner
of Melrose and Sycamore, a studio on the west, and
a garage occupying the ground floor on the east
side, beneath the master bedroom.I suppose we
have only one idea
in our livesJean-Louis Cohen’s research into
the archival materials of Frank
Gehry’s work will be brought
together in the publication Frank
Gehry, Catalogue Raisonné of the
Drawings / Complete Works,
8 volumes with approximately 500
pages, in slipcases specially
designed by Frank Gehry. Edited and
with contributions by Jean-Louis
Cohen. Publisher Staffan Ahrenberg.
Éditions Cahiers d’Art, Paris. The first
volume will be issued in 2018.64
(^1) Reyner Banham, Los Angeles, The
Architecture of the Four Ecologies,
Harper and Row, New York 1971,
p. 198.
(^2) Gregory Walsh, in Mildred
Friedman, Frank Gehry: the Houses,
Rizzoli, New York 2009, p. 116.
(^3) Lou Danziger, ibid., p. 115.
(^4) Frank Gehry, interview with
Barbara Isenberg, Tape 14, 27
December 2005, Gehry Partners
Archives.
(^5) Gregory Walsh, in Mildred
Friedman, p. 119.
(^6) AIA Honor Awards Program.
Descriptive Data. 1970, Gehry
Partners Archives.
(^7) Esther McCoy, Five California
Architects, Reinhold Pub. Corp,
New York 1960, p. 96.
(^8) Frank Gehry, 1984, quoted in
Francesco Dal Co and Kurt W. Forster,
Frank O. Gehry: the Complete
Wo rk s, Monacelli Press, New York
1998, p. 80.
9 AIA Honor Awards Program, 1970.
(^10) Frank Gehry, interview with
Barbara Isenberg, Tape 14.
Gehry remembers
the idea that he would
never have to paint the
building was important