Dumb Boxes and Entangled Objects
Seventh House at the Danziger Studio-Residence
I’d walked by it dozens of times. But I had never paid it any attention. To me, it was just a high-and-wide stucco wall that ran along Melrose Avenue on my way to pick up Indian food two doors down. There was no seeing in, past, or over it, so it didn’t register visually. And now I was inside, on the other side of that Melrose wall.
The Lou Danziger studio-residence was one of architect Frank Gehry’s first “famous” buildings, built in 1965 and occupied by the graphic designer and his family for 30 years. Academic hindsight credits 1960’s Los Angeles “bunker” style with the “hardening of the urban landscape” and “policing of social boundaries”. Says critic Mike Davis, specifically of the Danziger buildings: “Gehry was explicit in his search for a design that was ‘introverted and fortresslike,’ with the silent aura of a ‘dumb box’”.
Once inside the vigilant street perimeter, the 2-story studio “box” reveals another layer of retreat, for functional reasons—it was Lou Danziger’s darkroom, and is now the office of Seventh House. It feels like a low cabin nested within the spatially expansive double-height studio, transforming the hallway around it into an ample lane that pivots to the living block, acting “outside” on the inside. And, conversely, the outdoor garden gathers you protectively “inside”, to which it relates more than to the surrounding urban pavement. This building is both immediately comprehendible as masses and volumes (because the clarity of geometries) and completely mystifying in effect—partly because of its mixed use (even if not uncommon for artists), but mostly because of the traction of its location.
At the end of my visit, Trevor unravels his design affinities, “There are beautiful things on either end of mid-century.” Seventh House embraces that intelligent curiosity. And, I discover, there are also beautiful things on either end of Frank Gehry’s career. I’m taken with the dumb boxes.
