This is the story of a house that never really was, but instead was the incubator that hatched the design concepts for some of the most influential buildings of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. The house was the collaboration of two idiosyncratic talents, a homeowner and an architect/designer, each engrossed in the pursuit of architectural perfection.
They began with the aim of simply renovating an existing house located on the outskirts of Cleveland, Ohio, but the creative partnership of the architect and the homeowner caused the project to expand and contract exponentially. The architect was none other than Frank O. Gehry, and the homeowner, Peter B. Lewis, chairman of an insurance company.
The story of the house is on view in “Frank O. Gehry: Design Process and the Lewis House” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through April 5.
The concept of the Lewis House renovation began after the homeowner attended a 1985 lecture by Gehry and was captivated by what he heard. He asked the architect if he would be interested in “remodeling” his old house, recently purchased and situated on the fringe of a golf course.
And so the project began, enduring a decade, without a hammer ever making contact with a single nail or a shovel ever being turned.
What is important about the nonexistent house is that it served as a living laboratory for Gehry, allowing him to develop and expand upon the formal and technological complexities that would later characterize his best-known work.
The Toronto, Canada-born American architect did not content himself with merely testing the limits of design for the Lewis House; he experimented structurally with a wide range of industrial, commercial and utilitarian materials, such as plywood, chain link, lead, corrugated metal, cast glass and corrugated cardboard. He used them in highly innovative and startling ways, also carrying them over into the design aspect of the buildings as he incorporated such zoomorphic elements as fish, a snake and a horse head.
His design elements became a moveable feast; the constant reevaluation of his compositions added an element here, only to subtract another feature there. He wasted nothing; designs discarded from one building reappeared in other construction projects.
Gehry pushed the edges of computer modeling as well, and was among the earliest architects to use computer-aided design and manufacturing. He adapted computer-aided three-dimensional interactive application software, a program created for the French aerospace industry, for his own use. The technology allowed him to create stunningly complex geometric constructions and free-form designs using ordinary building materials.
His constructions share the joyful qualities of the anthropomorphic houses illustrated in early childhood literature and Disney cartoons. Some might describe Gehry buildings as whimsical or unfinished, but that would be a serious underestimation of his talent. Every design is careful, very careful.
In Ohio, Lewis pushed for more and more innovative changes; in response Gehry made design after design. Over the decade, the projected costs, which began at Lewis’s budgeted “a million or two,” escalated to the neighborhood of $60 million. The house expanded from 18,000 square feet to 42,000 and back to 22,000. At one point, the house was demolished to make way for an entirely new edifice, also never constructed.
Kathryn B. Hiesinger, head of the department of European and decorative arts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and curator of the exhibition, says she was interested in the story of the Lewis House and the decorative arts it inspired. She organized the exhibit around the relationship between Gehry’s Lewis House and the decorative art objects that derived from it.
The Lewis House began as a series of structures of varying shapes and forms centered around a central court. It developed into a free flowing series of compositions of such fluidity that they seemed about to become airborne. Each structure was intended to accommodate a different residential function and included a kitchen, a dining room, a living room, an art gallery, bedrooms, a study, a conservatory, an interior lap pool, two guest houses, staff quarters and a five-car garage.
Other artists made contributions: Richard Serra created a snakelike fountain for the driveway that was ultimately installed at the Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. It was Serra who showed Gehry a way to cut a door into the sentinels, four monolithic draped structures that comprise the house.
Philip Johnson created a guest house; Frank Stella produced a gate house. None of these were built either, but their design elements were reincarnated in other projects.
Lewis called a halt to the project in 1995, but the collaboration between architect and client endured, as did their friendship. Lewis is known to be pleased that the design elements of his house manifested themselves in other Gehry buildings.
Gehry wrote (in the 1999 volume Gehry Talks: Architecture + Process ) that the Lewis House was the most important thing in his life, that it was the equivalent of a MacArthur grant. He has also described it as the foundation for his design work in Bilbao.
Gehry designed the Peter B. Lewis Building, which houses the school of management at Case Western University, and the Lewis Science Library at Princeton. At Lewis’s behest, Gehry also designed the downtown branch of the Guggenheim Museum in lower Manhattan, another of the architect’s designs that was never constructed.
“Frank O. Gehry: Design Process and the Lewis House” explicates the design aesthetic of the Lewis House and its manifestation in other Gehry structures and objects. In some ways, his structures are themselves decorative arts: form and function are so entwined that the distinctions are barely visible.
One of Gehry’s most frequent design elements is the piscine, the fish. He has attributed his lifelong fascination with fish to watching carp swim when his grandmother placed them in the bathtub prior to making the delicacy gefilte fish. The boy would hover over the tub to observe the fish, fascinated with the action of their scales as they moved through the water. Incorporating that movement in his work, the first fish-forms to appear in Gehry’s designs were created for the Lewis House. A large abstract whalelike pavilion was to appear at one end of the structure, while in another iteration, semitransparent fish seem to swim from the back of the house.
Gehry extended his piscine imagery to the flexible pieces of jewelry he developed for Tiffany & Co. between 2003 and 2006 and in a series of door handles for the Italian makers Valli and Valli. He expanded the fish metaphor to the marine; boats, sails and clouds began to appear in other work.
Hiesinger says much of Gehry’s work is “skins over structure.” They fit a building as easily as its skin fits the fish; the underlying structure is never far from the surface. Gehry’s silvery skins are sometimes scales and sometimes grids, and still others are deeply undulating folds that the architect relates to his interest in the Fifteenth Century Well of Moses.
Another recurring theme of Gehry’s is that of a horse head, the form of which was planned for the entry hall and gallery of the Lewis House. The horse designs were to be clad in titanium.
The horse head appears also in the DG Building in Berlin and in the 2007 Equus silver cuff made by Tiffany that is emblematic of Gehry’s use of a hard substance to express the fluid and abstract.
Gehry produced several editions of jewelry for Tiffany incorporating zoomorphic imagery. One compelling Gehry piece on view is the brooch that is a white gold, rose gold, quartz, onyx, Pernambuco and amaretto wood model of the Lewis House. The brooch was commissioned specially from Tiffany in 2006 and is lent by Peter B. Lewis.
Gehry’s landmark structures called for landmark furnishings and he obliged. His highly popular 1972 series of home furnishings, Easy Edges, included layered corrugated cardboard tables, chairs and rocking chairs, stools and bed frames that were exceptionally durable. They loop and curl, evoking ribbon candy.
The 1979 series Experimental Edges includes chairs and the Bubbles chaise lounge and other similar pieces with rough clunky edges that bespeak comfort and take their identity from classic upholstered armchairs.
Gehry’s Bentwood collection for Knoll, 1989, recalls the bushel basket, but much of it refers to his passion for ice hockey. He named the chairs for penalties: “High Sticking,” the “Cross Check,” “Icing” and “Power Play.” The chairs are made of bent and laminated strips that are woven to provide strength and support.
In a 2004 series of plastic resin furniture for Heller, the architect rotationally molded the three cubes that are a bench, a coffee table seating unit and a sofa. The process resulted in furniture of exceptional functional strength; additionally, it was used for wall surfaces and strong corners. Their form is simple and abstract, yet movement is suggested.
“Frank O. Gehry: Design Process and the Lewis House” comprises some 75 architectural models, drawings and photographs, along with furniture and decorative arts. It affords a compelling insight into the career and creativity of a highly gifted man.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For information, 215-763-8100 or www.philamuseum.org .
