23685 Clover Trail, Calabasas, CA 91302

Frank Gehry :: The Benson House. Before Bilbao, Walt Disney Concert Hall and the landmark works that would define his global career, Frank Gehry was already challenging the conventions of domestic architecture on a hillside in the Calabasas Highlands. Completed in 1981, The Benson House belongs to a pivotal chapter in Gehry's early Los Angeles period, when his residential work became a laboratory for the ideas, materials and spatial experiments that would later transform contemporary architecture. Designed for law professor Robert "Bob" Benson, who famously told Gehry, "Whatever you want to do, we will go for," the house emerged from an extraordinary level of creative trust and became one of Gehry's favorite projects and most personal residential works. Set into a slope, the architecture separates from the hillside to create a moat-like negative space, allowing two distinct vertical volumes to emerge. A vertebrae-like wooden walkway connects the bedroom wing with the living and...