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Charles Moore explained his attraction to Los Angeles as the home of two architectural landmarks: the Gamble House and Disneyland. Although neither of these is within the boundaries of the City of Los Angeles, they both belong to Los Angeles and describe the range of fantasy and possibility discovered there in the 20th century. In a place known for suburban sprawl, it is impossible to discuss the city except as Greater Los Angeles, whose boundaries are the San Gabriel and San Fernando Valleys on the north, Orange County and Long Beach to the south, Pomona on the east, and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It is a horizontal city, interrupted by pockets of skyscrapers, a sprawling megalopolis sweeping everything in its path to the sea. It abuts or surrounds and includes several other incorporated cities, including Pasadena, Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, Glendale, and Santa Monica. East Los Angeles conjures up a vastly different image than West Los Angeles or South Central.
Several themes run throughout the architectural development of this time and place. They include the concept of experimentation, verging on radical at times; the incorporation of the landscape, whether it was bringing the outdoors in, the indoors out, or more often, the ambiguity of the difference between the two; the unquestioned dependence on private transportation; the veneration of cheap building materials and building techniques; and a search for a usable and meaningful history, in a city known for being new and for selling the illusion of being somewhere else.
In the 20th century, Los Angeles became the city of cutting-edge architecture in the United States. It replaced Chicago, although it never developed an eponymous school. Rather, the freedom of the place encouraged several styles that shared an attitude of conscious newness.
By 1900, the City of Los Angeles was 120 years old and had been part of the United States for half a century. Its Native American and Mexican history was exchanged for a myth, the dream of a Spanish Eden as depicted by boosters, Hollywood, and health-seekers. The "Port of Iowa," as it was sometimes called, drew newcomers, including clients, architects, and sometimes developers, who were willing to take risks and experiment with new ways of living. The newly created movie industry brought people to Los Angeles who understood the creation of place and who had money to spend.
Climate was no obstacle. There were 360 days of sunshine every year. Earthquakes, fires, and mudslides challenged the benign environment, but fueled the modernist urge to bulldoze and rebuild. The vegetation was mostly all imported, but easily adapted to the environment, shaping it and giving it an exotic look. The image of the palm tree became an instantly recognizable symbol of the place. The land embraced the American assumption of the single-family home and private transportation. The backyard was perfected here, and there were more automobiles than children. It is no accident that most architectural landmarks here were residential. Public images, whether early postcards or contemporary picture books, are likely to portray streets lined with houses or an individual house with a rose garden more often than a public building or shot of downtown. Living focused on the outdoors; houses accommodated sleeping porches, outdoor dining rooms, swimming pools and backyard grills, and the beach, which was a shared backyard.
The California Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition sold both the image and the dream of California. Each facade represented a different mission, and inside were displays luring tourists. Hostesses distributed fresh oranges and pamphlets that declared "Oranges for health; California for wealth." The building initiated a passion for the Mission Revival style depicting a romantic and somewhat sanitized view of history. The building itself was copied in Julia Morgan's Los Angeles Herald-Examiner Building in 1912. Parapets, bell towers, arcades, white stucco walls resembling adobe, red-tiled roofs, and arches appeared in railroad stations, schools, shops, Protestant churches, and private houses throughout the Southland and found their way across the country in the two decades preceding World War I.
Visiting that World's Fair, but more interested in the Japanese Pavilion were Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles and Henry Greene, the latter brothers on their way to California. Irving Gill worked in Louis Sullivan's Chicago office while the fair was being planned, before coming to southern California. All were intrigued by the pavilion and its flexible walls that screened space rather than enclosed it. The ethereal building was reflected in the work of all these architects when they came to Los Angeles.
Influenced by the quality of the light and the original mission buildings, Irving Gill abstracted the architectural traditions of the Spanish-Indian missions into a universal geometry. His architecture was based on four principles found in nature: the straight line of the horizon; the arch from the dome of the sky; the circle seen when a stone touches the water; and the square, symbol of power, justice, honesty and firmness. These elements translated into grand homes, women's clubs, schools, and workers' housing that all used the same principles at different scales. He experimented with new construction techniques, such as tilt-slab construction, in which the concrete walls were poured in place horizontally, cured, and lifted into place. Gill rejected traditional moldings, chair and plate rails, and gabled roofs, opting for a clean look that focused on the geometry of the space. He designed shelves with rounded corners so they would not collect dust, saving labor, especially for women. His rooms looked clean and were clean because they practically cleaned themselves through built-in vacuum cleaners and concrete floors. The houses were arranged on the site to maximize small yards, minimize maintenance, and encourage privacy, instead of centering the house in the middle of the lot with the rooms mirroring the neighbors.
Mission Revival gave way to simplicity in the Craftsman houses designed by Charles and Henry Greene. In style from the turn of the century until the 1920s, the Craftsman style emphasized nature. The Greenes opened up the interior spaces and the exterior walls with an emphasis on the landscape, natural colors, Native American fabrics, colors, and the light of the Southwest. Influenced by Shingle-style materials, Prairie-style horizontality, and Japanese flexibility and clarity of space, Greene and Greene developed the reformist ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement into an art. They attracted wealthy clients who could afford handmade houses and were willing to sleep outdoors in the winter.
The Gamble House (1908, Greene and Greene) in Pasadena is three stories tall, but appears to hug the ground because of its horizontality, overhanging roofs, and shady patios. It grows from the landscape out of the arroyo stone found there naturally, gradually mixing with clinker bricks to form a mansion disguised as a cottage. Bedrooms and the informal dining room are outdoors where the suggestion of walls and a dominant roof provide the symbolic shelter of a tree house.
The Craftsman style was democratized into thousands of middle-class homes. The bungalows among the orange groves drew inspiration and form from many sources. They were one or one-and-a-half story houses with informal and open plans, multipurpose rooms, a prominent hearth, and a variety of exterior stylings that ranged from the practical to the exotic. Built-in bookshelves and buffets saved space and lumber, and the houses featured mass-produced Mission furniture and simple stained glass.
"Bungalow fever," as it was referred to in the press, was highly contagious and quickly spread throughout the United States. Annual bungalow books were used like pattern books of earlier generations, so buyers could mix and match according to budget and taste. The houses even came prepackaged in do-it-yourself kits available from the Los Angeles–based Pacific Readi-Cut Homes, as well as dozens of other companies.
The quintessential Los Angeles home of early 20th century was period colonial revival: English Tudor, French, Moorish, and especially Spanish. Spanish colonial revival was made fashionable by the 1915 Panama-California Exposition held in San Diego to celebrate completion of the Panama Canal. These white houses decorated with red-tiled roofs and ironwork became symbols of the sun-filled lifestyle available in Los Angeles.
Spanish-Italian-Moorish buildings came to be called Mediterranean by realtors, and the name not only solved the problem of categorizing a hybrid style, but also a lifestyle to go with it, evoking blue skies and white cottages on the hillside, where one could wander barefoot and breathe fresh air. The white "adobe"-looking plaster walls shimmered in the sunlight, framed by palm trees, and front lawns, creating an exotic but familiar pattern. The front porch became a colorful tiled courtyard. Rows of two-storied white, Mexican-tiled duplexes with arched entries soon laced the city.
Frank Lloyd Wright, no fan of period revival, completed the Barnsdall House in 1921, followed by the Millard, Storer, Ennis, and Freeman Houses, in which he pursued a new system of do-it-yourself low-cost housing. All had a vaguely Mayan theme. Working with his son Lloyd Wright (who had studied landscape design with Frederick Law Olmsted and architecture with Irving Gill), Wright experimented with the common concrete block. The blocks were formed in situ using sand from the site in the aggregate. Each house had its own design for patterned blocks, which were then woven together with plain and pierced-patterned blocks to create a variety of shapes, designs, and sizes. Each block had a semicircular edge, that when placed next to the adjacent block created a full circle. As the block walls were erected, steel rods and concrete were inserted into the horizontal and vertical shafts, thus knitting together a steel-reinforced concrete wall. Any family could design, create, and build their own house at a minimal cost of both material and labor. Lloyd Wright continued to pursue this technique in the following decades, combining the patterned blocks with expanses of smooth concrete to create unique and picturesque settings. He later produced one of the most perfect of transparent organic buildings in the Wayfarer's Chapel of 1949.
Frank Lloyd Wright employed Rudolf Schindler to supervise construction of the concrete-block houses. Schindler had been born in Vienna and studied under Otto Wagner, but remained in Los Angeles for the rest of his career where he developed an oeuvre that he termed "space architecture." Encouraged by Wright that the reality of architecture is the interior space, not the exterior wall, Schindler continued his mentor's dematerialization of the wall to define space. Schindler's own house (King's Road House, 1922) included experiments in alternative living arrangements. The plan incorporated a pinwheel design for two or more families to share, with a common kitchen at the center. Each adult had his or her own studio/living space with both an indoor and an outdoor room. The roofed interior had a blank wall for privacy and a wood and glass wall overlooking the roofless exterior room edged by shrubs and different levels of plantings. The families shared labor and respected each person's alternating needs for creative space, privacy, and community.
Sharing the house with the Schindlers for a brief period were the Neutras. Richard Neutra, also born in Vienna and brought to Los Angeles by Frank Lloyd Wright, made Los Angeles his permanent home. Neutra's Lovell Health House (1927–29) epitomized and advanced the International Style along California lines. The house, built over a ravine, comprised a steel cage suspended from the roof with the open skeleton articulated on the finished exterior. Because of the mass-producible steel frame, the house could be erected quickly to Miesian precision. It was built for Dr. Philip Lovell to give form to his health principles and evidenced Neutra's own thoughts about health and survival through space. Ford headlights on the stairwell echoed the machine metaphor. Neutra continued to dematerialize walls and roofs in his unique versions of steel and glass space containers scattered throughout the city.
Californian Cliff May built on native traditions, modernizing them to merge the romance of the past with the glamour of the present in contemporary ranch houses without the ranch. They were based on the aesthetic and the plan of the early rancho and hacienda surrounding a courtyard. The house was one room deep to capture the breezes, and each room was accessed by an outdoor hallway. Having no formal training, May used what he knew worked and repeated this vernacular building thousands of times, reintroducing Los Angeles to its architectural roots. The California ranch house was exported all across the United States, including places where neither the climate nor tradition supported it.
Art moderne, specifically Art Deco, adorned Los Angeles's public face. The skyscrapers of 1920s in Los Angeles were typically encased in a hybrid of billboard neon and Cubist Modern architecture. Art Deco utilized new materials or found novel uses for traditional materials, such as glass, chrome, steel, terra-cotta, patent leather, cork, Bakelite, and Formica. Ornament, banned from European modernism as overly decadent in the early part of the century, found expression in moderne in the form of colorful chevrons, spirals, sunbursts, and abstracted and stylized animal and human forms. Los Angeles had some of the most exciting Art Deco buildings in the country, including Morgan Walls, and Clements's 1928–29 Atlantic Richfield Building; Bullocks Wilshire by Parkinson and Parkinson in 1928; and Claude Beelman's 1929 Eastern Columbia Building. They sparkled like jewels in green, blue, turquoise, and gold with beacons lighting the tops like light reflecting off diamonds.
Other buildings, such as Los Angeles's Central Library, designed by Bertram Goodhue and Carleton Winslow in 1922–26, melded Deco, Egyptian, Spanish, and Italian Renaissance to create one of the landmarks of downtown. The City Hall by John C. Austin with John and Donald Parkinson in 1926–28 mixes Deco setbacks with a Byzantine rotunda, topped by a copy of the ancient Mausoleum of Hallicarnassus. Parkinson and Parkinson's Union Station (1939) combined Art Deco with Spanish in a unique environment that bridged the two halves of the century. It was the last great railroad station built in the United States, superseded after the war by the success of air traffic. Each of these buildings has an air of set design about it. In fact, they have often been used as movie sets to represent a variety of building types.
The other half of art moderne was Streamline Moderne, also strong in the Los Angeles tradition. Streamline style popularized the horizontal speed of new modes of transportation in the 1930s, with its imagery suggested movement. The shape of that movement reflected modern transports: dirigibles, streamlined locomotives; ships, and teardrop-shaped cars. Movie theaters, such as S. Charles Lee's 1939 Academy Theatre, competed with medical offices, shops, small offices, and post offices to attract attention through swirling patterns, horizontal speed-lines, round windows, and undulating chrome railings. The best examples were the twin fleets of Wurdeman and Becker's 1938 Pan Pacific Auditorium and Robert Derrah's Coca-Cola Bottling Plant, completed in 1937. The latter resembles a ship sailing down Central Avenue with porthole windows, raised doorways, simulated rivets in the white stucco, and a captain's bridge.
After World War II, Los Angeles was again the center of postwar modernism and innovation. John Entenza, editor of Arts and Architecture magazine sponsored the Case Study House program to promote California architects, raise the aesthetic standards of postwar housing, and show the public that people could live in glass houses. Richard Neutra, Eero Saarinen, Charles and Ray Eames, A. Quincy Jones, Rafael Soriano, Craig Elwood, and Pierre Koenig, among others, were commissioned to build real houses for a variety of real clients that showcased the California lifestyle. Between 1945 and 1962, 24 completed projects demonstrated the possibilities for living fostered by the Los Angeles climate. All dealt with the landscape and encouraged outdoor living. Roofless dining rooms contained outdoor cooking ranges, and kitchens had interchangeable color panels made of Formica. Most had invisible room dividers, pass-throughs to the kitchen, Eames- and Saarinen-designed furnishings, and glass walls facing the backyards. The houses were typically better known by number than by name, but they were far from impersonal. Case Study House #22 by Pierre Koenig (1959), cantilevered from the hillside, was the most dramatic. With neither neighbors nor ground visible from the house, it appeared to be a glass box floating over the city.
The future was still evident in houses like Lautner's 1960 Chemosphere House, which rose up out of the canyon on a central pole, or Bruce Goff's 1984 Struckus House, a cylinder of wood and glass with overlapping op art illusions and protruding fisheye lens windows.
In the last two decades of the century, Frank Gehry dominated the city and the world with his unusual buildings of cheap materials and radically new perspectives, beginning with his own house in Santa Monica (1978). His work dealt with collisions of space, color, and form, as well as time, materials, and sometimes the neighbors. He has inspired other Los Angeles architects, including Eric Owen Moss, Steve Ehrlich, Frederick Fisher, and Morphosis, whose work can be seen throughout the area from Venice to Culver City.
Ending the century were two projects that reflected the range of 20th-century modernism: Richard Meier's sprawling Getty Center, simultaneously overlooking the Santa Monica Freeway and the Pacific Ocean, and Gehry's Disney Concert Hall downtown. Both buildings survived public discussion, protest, and success, setting precedents for the next century.
MAGGIE VALENTINE
Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.2 (G-O). Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005. |
