In the 1960s, Gehry established a lasting relationship with developer James Rouse, who was behind a series of innovative urban projects. He built several buildings in the new city of Columbia, Maryland, before working for five years on the design of the Santa Monica Place shopping center, conceived as an authentic urban ensemble. This major project enabled him to continue the research he had begun on the Magnin stores in Costa Mesa and San José.
In the second half of the 1970s, after completing Ron Davis's studio house, Gehry began to design increasingly bold housing projects, exploiting the resources of timber framing and breaking buildings down into autonomous or flexibly articulated fragments. He also abandons the cladding materials used in Southern California to work with prosaic textures of raw plywood, corrugated iron and wire mesh. By "tearing up", as it were, his own house in Santa Monica, he managed to acquire a notoriety that spread beyond North America.
