"every inhabitant of a house by Gehry becomes an artist . . ."

Since curating Frank Gehry's first major retrospective, an exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1986, Mildred Friedman has written extensively about the master architect. For her latest book, she has selected 21 of Gehry's most significant, mid-career residential buildings from the 1960s to the late 1980s. The houses predate Gehry's best-known works and, with a couple of exceptions, are free of computer-aided-design structures.

Friedman's choices underscore the organic nature of Gehry's early experimentation with form and materials, and they illustrate the creative spirit of the houses. As UCLA architecture professor Sylvia Lavin writes in the introduction, "every inhabitant of a house by Gehry becomes an artist as they are called on not merely to use its spaces but to perceive its architectures."