From the Ground Up is a series on Archinect focused on discovering the early stages & signs of history's most prolific architects. Starting from the beginning allows us to understand the long journey architecture takes in even the most formative of hands and the often, surprising shifts that occur on its journey. These early projects grant us a glimpse into the early, naive, ambitious—and at points, rough—edges of soon to be architectural masters.

Gravity-defying forms, sculptural virtuosity, context shifting interventions and pristine details; all these terms could be assigned to Frank Gehry as we see him today, but could not be further from the truth of his work back on day one of the Gehry timeline. The beginning for one of the most significant impactful voices of contemporary architecture started in the most normative of contexts and was, one could even argue, a polar opposite from his future trajectories and modes of operation.

The project positions itself as an image, at least of the time, of what a conventional project would be to Gehry. 

David Cabin, named after client Melvin David, came at a time when Gehry was beginning to shift directions, starting an evolution that would turn him into one of the defining architects of his time. He was just shy of his 30th birthday and had only recently found himself in the center of a creative explosion and expansion of architectural trajectories. 

He had just returned to Los Angeles from Harvard after studying city planning. Rarely mentioned in books or collections of Gehry's work, this project didn't have much of a lasting effect on his career. At the time, Gehry was starting to get more involved in the local art scene within Los Angeles, and as such, this project may have played more of role in representing Gehry without semblance of his upcoming dominance, a mere catfish for what he would become. The project positions itself as an image, at least of the time, of what a conventional project would be to Gehry. It presented Gehry a chance to produce architecture before he had even attempted to make it his own.  

...epitomizes what one would think would be the goal of the first project; producing something built.

The colors, materials, formal endeavors all play little if no connection to his later work and as a first project, truly epitomizes what one would think would be the goal of the first project: producing something built. At this same moment, as Gehry found himself engulfed with the art community and more and more entrenched in the movements of art and architecture collectively, it was only a short time until he would find his identifiable strokes of genius within the discipline, leaving any sign of the David Cabin in the distant ether.