WHAT WE'RE READING: Los Angeles Modernism 1900-1970 by Thomas S Hines

Architecture of the Sun – Los Angeles Modernism 1900-1970, by Thomas S Hines

Reviewed by Matt Gibberd


Photos: The Modern House


The image of modern Los Angeles was defined by a single photograph: Julius Shulman’s iconic night-time shot of the Stahl House in West Hollywood. Projecting from the hillside is a rationalist glass box, inside which two nattily dressed ladies engage in relaxed conversation, seeming to float above the city. This, we think, must be the place where dreams are made.

As it happens, Shulman’s image was a happy accident, spontaneously fired off at the end of a day’s shoot after the light had faded. However, with its full-height windows, dramatically overhanging flat roof and decadent swimming pool, Pierre Koenig’s house conforms unerringly to the title of this book. Indeed, the Case Study programme embraced the LA climate: buildings were moved down to slab level to provide seamlessness between indoor and outdoor spaces, lashings of glass were used to blur the visual boundaries, and kitchens were turned around to enable meals to be served directly to the garden.

Shulman’s photograph appears in the book, which is as comprehensive a survey of the city’s architecture as you are likely to need, covering everything from the pleasingly elementary Eames House, whose structural frame was raised in just 16 hours (take that, Huf Haus), to John Lautner’s saucer-shaped “Chemosphere”, lurking in the hills like a demented alien spacecraft. It starts at the dawning of the 20th century with the work of Greene & Greene – whose bungalows bridged the gap between Arts & Crafts (a style that cowered from the sun) and the functional simplicity of Modernism – and concludes with the self-aggrandising corporate towers of the postwar city by the likes of Welton Becket and William Pereira.

Many of LA’s best buildings are open to the public, including Greene and Greene’s Gamble House in Pasadena, Frank Lloyd Wright’s now-crumbling Hollyhock House and Rudolf Schindler’s eponymous house in West Hollywood. This is America’s heritage, and they are rightly proud of it. Contrary to popular perception, one of the most satisfying ways to discover the city’s architecture is on foot (only Brits and down-and-outs walk the streets in Los Angeles). A casual perambulation around the Silver Lake area will throw up a staggering number of houses designed by Richard Neutra, all bundled together in a single block.

One evening recently I was lucky enough to visit the Stahl House, and stand in Julius Shulman’s distinguished footprints. As darkness descended, I observed that Koenig had specified spherical pendant lights in the sitting room which echoed the street lights twinkling in the city. And was it my imagination, or did the rectilinear steel frame of the house line up exactly with the grid system of boulevards below? Standing in the Hollywood Hills at night-time, the realisation occurs that this is not just architecture of the sun, but architecture of the moon as well.

This review was first published in The World of Interiors

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