As so often in twentieth-century architecture, a small domestic exercise - a little house for guests - ends up being a splendid example. An extension for children and grandchildren, a doll's house, added to an exact rectangle: Philip Johnson's original villa, on the other side of the garden.

This program results in one of Frank Gehry's most balanced compositions. Unlike the rest of his work, there is no recourse to overhang here. The house is configured as a composition of elements quietly seated on the lawn plane. If the initial villa by Johnson (who refused to add this pavilion himself) is a Cartesian prism, the pavilion is like a still life by Morandi. Indeed, the pieces of the pavilion have a formal analogy with the bottles and boxes of the Italian painter's friend of the metaphysical...[+]