The old gospel of St. Entenza and the Prophet Neutra was mostly a creation of magazines and historians, and it focused narrowly on the high art realm. It was always a highly selective interpretation of events. Now, after its long run, we need historians, curators, and critics to look freshly at the old images and fill in the large gaps. We need to rethink the definition of California design more broadly to include the innovative popular, commercial, and suburban architecture which has always been there, but was largely written out of the myth.
Only a new narrative—a fresh concept of what makes California a prolific generator of forms, types, and styles—will keep the state an inspiration for a new generation of architects.
Such an infusion of new ideas mined from history played a major role in the vitality of California design in the past. Good history books put lost ideas back into play—and reshape the landscape of California.
Today we would consider any California architectural history lacking Charles and Henry Greene’s 1908 Gamble house to be seriously flawed. Yet for fifty years—half the century—the Gamble house and the Greene brothers were largely ignored.
It wasn’t until the 1940s that historian Jean Murray Bangs noticed their work; she sought out the brothers in retirement (introducing them to her husband Harwell Hamilton Harris, who instantly responded to their work). It wasn’t until 1964 that Randell Makinson’s chapter on the brothers in Five California Architects firmly resurrected their reputation. Today, the Greene brothers are giants whose art helps to define the way we think of California design.
R. M. Schindler likewise was ignored in the latter years of his career and for a decade after his death in 1953. “The case of Schindler I do not profess to understand,” muttered the eminent but perplexed architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock in 1940, thereby quelling most examination of Schindler’s work for twenty-five years, until Esther McCoy brought her former employer to the attention of the world in Five California Architects. Today, Schindler is a Promethean figure, whose work has invigorated generations of architects.
Bernard Maybeck, Lloyd Wright, Albert Frey, John Lautner—this disturbing pattern of neglect and belated rediscovery has been too often repeated. Such lapses now seem inconceivable, but even Irving Gill had to wait until 2000 for a well-deserved monograph, Thomas S. Hines’s Irving Gill and the Architecture of Reform: a Study in Modernist Architectural Culture.
This pattern raises two questions: what caused us to overlook such talented designers for so long? And who are we now neglecting?
We still do not have a complete or accurate view of California architects, trends, and buildings of the twentieth century. As the Greenes’ and Schindler’s rediscovered work broadened a narrow, doctrinaire concept of Modernism in the 1960s, California’s yet-undiscovered treasures will broaden and strengthen our definition of California design.
We can start with the decades around 1900. Though there are histories of this seminal era (Richard Longstreth’s On the Edge of the World, Robert Winter’s Toward a Simpler Way of Life, biographies of Maybeck by Sally Woodbridge and Kenneth Cardwell, of Julia Morgan by Sara Boutelle) there have been no monographs on such major figures as Willis Polk or Ernest Coxhead. The tidal wave of Modernism swept them and their ideas away after 1930, but that overreaction should now be corrected. Their fluid, culturally sensitive view of modern technology and life should be an important part of any California architect’s image bank.
Jack Hillmer, Ludekins Residence, 1950, photo by Roy Flam, copyright Jack HIllmer.Polk and Coxhead’s generation was followed by a string of intriguing, inventive, but long neglected residential and institutional architects who have also been unjustly marginalized in the history texts. Their exploration of historical continuities, regional characteristics, or alternative modernism is today refreshing: Maynard Lyndon, Gardner Dailey, Ernest Kump, Clarence Tantau, Gordon Kaufmann, Robert Stanton, Edward Fickett, William Cody, and Jack Hillmer are only a few. Once we know more about these designers, our picture of the twentieth century will be rendered more complex, more varied, more colorful; diversity has always been a strength of California culture.
Equally significant (but even more difficult to grapple with) is the architecture of Imperial California: the post-World War II era when the state boomed, suburbs bloomed, and cultural centers and corporate headquarters blossomed alongside great shopping malls and housing tracts—often designed by the same architects. The major architects of that era—Welton Becket Associates, Pereira and Luckman, John Carl Warnecke, A.C. Martin, Victor Gruen Associates, and Edward Durell Stone (not a Californian, but a frequent contributor)—still sit uncomfortably on the margins of inquiry and discussion, cast out because of their sometimes bombastic, unrepentant Modernism and occasional lapses into gargantuan scale and corporativism. But their best work defined a state of profound innovation, energy, charisma, and influence. With self assurance, they addressed the critical issues of enormous scale, public space in a consumer society, and mass aesthetics that still confront us. Imperial California’s civic leaders rarely went out of state when selecting architects for major commissions.
The design of suburbia was a key contribution of this era, from shopping centers and ranch house tracts to roadside coffee shops and freeways. Suburbia was a radical urban concept rooted in progressive ideas of the early twentieth century, yet we know little of the architects who shaped it in practice. California’s inventive, artful, influential commercial culture was represented in the work of architects like Stiles O. Clements (prolific architect of elegant and innovative early shopping centers), Wayne McAllister (master architect of the Streamline drive-in and originator of the Las Vegas hotel), Armet and Davis (premier architects of the Googie coffee shop), Palmer and Krisel (who built thousands more modern tract homes than Joe Eichler), S. Charles Lee (architect of spectacular movie theaters), and John Hench (Walt Disney’s right-hand man designing Disneyland)— and these are only a few. These talented architects designed modern buildings superbly in tune with the spirit of their times, culture, and technology; their work largely shaped the California suburban metropolis as it is still experienced by millions. And they are mostly absent from the history books.
What causes someone to notice buildings hidden in plain view? Why did Jean Murray Bangs suddenly notice the Gamble house after driving the same streets of Pasadena for years? How does someone disperse the fog of fashion to see things clearly? How does one develop the fortitude to look at the awkward, inexplicable, or unfashionable?
Whatever it is, it’s a talent that a sophisticated, mature culture must cultivate at least as assiduously as it does its avant garde. We owe a debt to those writers who began to uncover some of these neglected riches; besides Bangs and McCoy, historian David Gebhard helped to re-establish Schindler in his essential 1971 book. He also explored the fairy tale homes of Walter Raymond Yelland and Hugh Comstock, the Moderne of Kem Weber, and the organic architecture of Lloyd Wright—subjects that would have been lost without his attention. Reyner Banham looked at the entire city of Los Angeles and discovered patterns and purposes few others suspected in the humdrum sprawl. John Beach had a universalist taste that allowed him to detect brilliance in the most unlikely corners of vernacular and high art design; he helped to relaunch the Art Moderne, unearthed lost Schindler houses, decoded Ernest Coxhead, and inspired California’s innovative preservation community.
So, fragments of the new picture are out there; the problem is that large gaps remain. Sally Woodbridge’s Bay Area Houses remains an excellent source, as does An Everyday Modernism: the Houses of William Wurster, edited by Marc Treib. Richard Longstreth’s illuminating histories, City Center to Miracle Mile and The Drive-in, the Supermarket and the Transformation of Commercial Space in Los Angeles, 1914-1941, bring out the urban history of the car metropolis and the contribution of architects like Morgan Walls and Clements. Greg Hise’s Magnetic Los Angeles does the same for housing developers such as Fritz Burns who helped shape the metropolis. Julius Shulman and Pierluigi Serraino’s Modernism Rediscovered only begins to scratch the surface of the richness of architectural design in the midcentury. The Los Angeles Conservancy has sponsored exhibits, tours, and talks to spread awareness to the general public. The San Jose Preservation Action Council has taken up the cause of early Silicon Valley campus architecture—a cornerstone of suburban planning.
Yet the picture is far from complete. We can no longer afford to leave this process of rediscovery to chance. We need a new narrative about a magnificently diverse culture generating innovative and varied design across society’s spectrum, from the high art avant garde to the thriving mass market—a culture which, in fact, often dissolves the artificial walls between the two. The golden California economy and culture of the 1950s that produced the wealthy and progressive clients who hired Koenig, Ellwood, Killingsworth, and Hensman also produced the mass market that encouraged the ground-breaking, entrepreneurial, and popular carwashes, tracts, and drive-in restaurants and movies of suburbia. They are all part of the same fabric.
Twentieth century California will ultimately reveal a greater landscape, beyond the Gregory Ain tracts of Mar Vista and the Joe Eichler tracts of Palo Alto, past the stylish canyon enclaves of Santa Monica, the arroyos of Pasadena, and the hills of Berkeley. Lautner, McAllister, Lyndon, Clements, Hench, Becket—place their considerable work in the picture alongside the Case Study architects and Frank Gehry and you have a very different—and more accurate—view of California architecture.
Author Alan Hess is architecture critic for the San Jose Mercury-News and the author of numerous books, including The Architecture of John Lautner; Rancho Deluxe: Rustic Dreams and Real Western Living; Palm Springs Weekend: the Architecture and Design of a Mid-century Oasis; Hyperwest: American Residential Architecture on the Edge; and Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture.
Originally published 1st quarter 2004 in arcCA 04.1, “Press Check.”
