California Dreaming: Modern Architecture in Los Angeles

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California Dreaming: Modern Architecture in Los Angeles


July 29, 2010

Bob Duggan



Read More: http://bigthink.com/ideas/21592

Los Angeles often feels like another planet to non-natives, from the confluence of cultures to the often unearthly architecture. In Architecture of the Sun: Los Angeles Modernism 1900-1970, Thomas S. Hines serves as our ambassador to this brave new world on the left coast that served as the perfect environment for international architectural styles to find room to grow in the United States. Hines, Professor Emeritus of History and Architecture at UCLA, where he teaches cultural, urban, and architectural history, sees L.A. as a prime “consumer and translator of modernist architectures developed elsewhere,” and, thus, “presents a seductive case study of the effect upon modernism of regional patterns and imperatives—and vice versa.” California dreaming in steel, glass, and stone thus continues the dreams of European modernists while simultaneously engaging the local flavors of the City of Angels. Hines’ voyage of discovery through the manmade landscape of Los Angeles is a strange, and stirring, trip.

“[I]n the edenic Los Angeles of the early twentieth century, one of the effects of architectural modernity was to enliven and urbanize a serene, but sleepy, paradise,” Hines writes. The mellow hustle and flow we now associate with Los Angeles, Hines argues, stems from the look and feel of the architecture that surrounded its inhabitants. The garden of Eden that was once pristine Los Angeles bears little resemblance to today’s version. But that challenging environment both pushed as well as comforted the populace. “[M]odernist Los Angeles architecture would continue throughout the century,” Hines writes of the earliest stages of new wave building in L.A., “as the best architecture has always done, to serve as a shelter from the woes of the world and as a stage for confronting and enjoying life.” Modernism and regionalism thus worked hand-in-hand to create exactly what the people in that place and time needed in their lives both at work and at home.

Hines devotes chapters to all of the significant figures in the architectural history of L.A., many of whom, such as Irving Gill, he has already written about extensively in other books. The central figure in the L.A. pantheon, as perhaps in the pantheon of all American architecture, is Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright’s shadow looms over everything done in L.A. during his lifetime and stretches posthumously through his disciples, formal and informal. “[A]lthough [Wright] spent relatively little actual time in L.A.,” Hines explains, “in the modernist architectural genealogy of Los Angeles, nearly all of the central figures and their followers were touched by him.” Lloyd Wright, Frank’s biological son, continued to preach his gospel on the L.A. landscape as much as Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, Frank’s ideological “sons,” did.