Home Sweet Home

In 1932, critic Pauline Gibling, R.M. Schindler’s estranged but admiring wife, wrote that the architect’s work was derived “from a life picture which is revolutionary.” Schindler, she asserted, “conceives of the architectural form as the space enclosed, rather than the flat surfaces of a wall which encase it.” His residences, she believed, are “intimately related to the earth. Meant for a life which flows naturally from the house out of doors, but which at the same time maintains an intense privacy, they are woven into their gardens, and the gardens themselves become rooms.”

Such claims are impressively documented by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in a retrospective exhibition and catalog curated and edited by Elizabeth A.T. Smith and Michael Darling. The MOCA show, which will travel to Washington, D.C. and Vienna, confirms the historic importance of an architect who has been long admired by international cognoscenti but who has never received the general appreciation his distinguished work deserves. In his refusal to give in to mimetic historicism, Schindler was a committed modernist. Yet while learning from his innovative mentors, he was also a maverick individualist who declined to follow a party line and produced a body of brilliantly original work.

Born into a cultivated, middle-class Viennese family in 1885, the birth year of his more famous Swiss contemporary, Le Corbusier, Rudolph Michael Schindler was richly educated in the progressive ambience of his city’s celebrated fin de siecle. He was trained at both the Technical Institute and the Academy of Fine Art, where he studied with the great early modernist, Otto Wagner. An even more trenchant, if noninstitutional, influence was the iconoclastic architect Adolf Loos, whose crusade against the “crime” of ornament differentiated his work from the School of Wagner. In contrast to his buildings’ plain facades, the complex spatial character of Loos’ interiors would have a large impact upon Schindler’s California buildings.

It was, in fact, the Americanophile Loos who encouraged his students to emigrate to what he considered the capital of progressive architecture: the Chicago of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, which Schindler did in early 1914, escaping the Great War that would embroil his modernist contemporaries Walter Gropius, Erich Mendelsohn and Richard Neutra. After an initial job in a conventional Chicago firm, Schindler joined Wright’s office in 1918, assisting the master on such demanding projects as the Imperial Hotel, Tokyo. In 1920, with his wife Pauline, he moved to Los Angeles to supervise construction of Wright’s Hollyhock House for Aline Barnsdall, a vast project for which Schindler designed numerous details and several collateral structures. He had initially intended to return to Vienna but, mesmerized by Wright and by the Los Angeles climate, he decided to settle in Southern California and to build a home studio on Kings Road in West Hollywood that would come to be seen as one of the key structures of 20th-century architecture.

Schindler designed the double house in 1921 for himself and Pauline as a socially experimental building to be shared with another couple: the engineer Clyde Chace, who helped him build it, and his wife Marian. Both couples admired the early modern architecture of Irving Gill, whose canonical Dodge House had been finished in 1916 a block up the street. In constructing their own house, they borrowed Gill’s method of “tilt-slab” construction, for which concrete slabs were poured to harden in molds on the ground, then tilted upright to form the building’s outside walls. The house’s central and commonly shared space was the kitchen, which connected the two main apartments with garages and a guest apartment in an interlocking arrangement of L-shaped wings. Rather than conventional designations of “living room” or “bedroom,” each of the residents had his or her “studios” labeled on the plan with the initials of each. It was a brilliantly original resolution of the conflicting desires for both privacy and community.

The chief building materials are concrete, redwood, glass and canvas. The concrete slabs form beautifully textured walls, while sliding glass and canvas door-walls open to patio gardens flush with the building’s concrete floor slab. Subtly positioned clerestory windows provide gentle and unexpected sources of light. Two small upstairs “sleeping baskets” reached by narrow stairs from the two main apartments greet each other across the flat roof planes. Defined chiefly by gradations in level and by hedges and canebrakes, the patios and gardens assume the character of outside rooms. Fireplaces warm not only each room but outside patios as well. Schindler averred that the house combined the character of cave, tent and pavilion. Its references were not so much to Wagner’s Vienna as to Wright’s Prairie School, the Southwest Indian pueblo, the modular Japanese vernacular and the inside-outside potential of California living. As such it became an instructive model for modernist architecture in California and beyond.

The house also became the site of an important cultural salon, which, over the years, welcomed socialist Upton Sinclair, photographer Edward Weston, dancer John Bovington, composer John Cage, art patrons Walter and Louise Arensberg and writers Max Eastman, Sadakichi Hartmann and Theodore Dreiser. After the Chaces left California in the mid-1920s, other famous names rented their apartment, including collector Galka Scheyer, who covered her walls with the “Blue Four” paintings of Kandinsky, Jawlensky, Klee and Feininger. Even more propitious tenants were Schindler’s Viennese friend, Richard Neutra, and his wife Dione. During the second half of the 1920s, Schindler and Neutra worked together in a loosely formed partnership, which produced a residence, an apartment house, several shops and a larger number of unrealized projects, including ambitious designs for the League of Nations building in Geneva. In the catalog essay, “Life at Kings Road,” Schindler House curator Robert Sweeney argues persuasively that it was chiefly Pauline who set the tone for the Schindler salon and who provided crucial support for her husband’s early architectural risk taking.

After completing his own house, Schindler continued throughout the ‘20s to design spatially innovative buildings, including the concrete multiple-unit Pueblo Ribera Courts in La Jolla (1923), the wood-and-concrete How House in Silver Lake (1924), the multilayered cliff-hanging Wolfe House on Catalina Island (1928) and the obliquely angled Braxton Gallery in Los Angeles (1929). Yet, after his own double house, the most famous building of Schindler’s whole career was his Lovell Beach House in Newport Beach (1926), which he designed for Philip and Leah Lovell, arguably two of the most important patrons in the history of modern architecture. Leah was a disciple of the liberal educator Angelo Patri and ran a progressive kindergarten with Pauline Schindler. Philip was a practicing naturopath, an anti-drug physician who advocated natural methods of healing and preventive health care with an emphasis on exercise, massage, heat and water cures, open-air sleeping, nude sunbathing and reliance on a fresh-food vegetarian diet. Proud of his fitness and virility, an advocate of free and uninhibited sexual expression, he wrote a widely read column in the Los Angeles Times called “Care of the Body,” to which Schindler contributed as a guest writer on health-related architectural issues. Lovell also owned a bodybuilding gymnasium in downtown Los Angeles, designed by Neutra.

To ensure better views as well as privacy from the public beach, Schindler lifted the main floor a story above ground on reinforced concrete piers, allowing the beach environment to filter beneath the house. Neutra did the minimal landscaping. Interior balconies around the large double-story living room led to open sleeping porches, later enclosed as bedrooms. The specially equipped kitchen and bathrooms were designed to meet Lovell’s dietary and therapeutic needs. The patterning of the windows recalls the aesthetics of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Earlier, Schindler had designed for Lovell a desert cottage, which was later destroyed by fire, and a mountain cabin which had collapsed under the weight of the winter snow. The two men had also talked informally of future plans for a large city house, but in 1927, when Lovell awarded the commission, it went to Neutra. Over the years--in what would become one of the major controversies in the history of modern architecture--there emerged a Neutra version, a Schindler version and various Lovell versions explaining this decision. All seemed to agree, however, that by the time the beach house was finished, some degree of tension had developed between Schindler and Lovell. Schindler had supervised construction of the buildings, and Lovell was vexed over structural deficiencies that had caused the roof of the cabin to collapse and the sleeping porches of the beach house to flood when it rained.

Lovell was also puzzled by Schindler’s casual business habits and ad hoc design methods that allowed him to proceed without detailed working drawings and to alter the structure as construction progressed. Lovell felt he could hardly afford such risks for the larger, more expensive house he wanted built on a sloping site in the city. He later maintained that because the men were partners, he assumed they would both work on the design but that he wanted Neutra to be in charge. Observing the stalemate and convinced that Lovell would go to another architect, Galka Scheyer intervened and persuaded Neutra to take it, which he did with spectacular results, producing in the so-called Lovell Health House (1927-29) a radically innovative building that would quickly become internationally famous--a fact that apparently embittered Schindler and ultimately contributed to the waning of their friendship. Matters were made worse in 1932 by Neutra’s inclusion in, and Schindler’s exclusion from, the Museum of Modern Art’s epochal “Modern Architecture” exhibition that gave the International Style its name.

Just as Schindler’s work of the ‘20s was a creative synthesis of Loos’ Vienna, Wright’s Chicago and various regional California imperatives, his work of the ‘30s achieved a distinctive, if less conscious, synthesis of those factors and the International Style, from which Schindler later strove to distance himself. Perhaps, indeed, through a kind of osmosis, Neutra’s five-year presence in the adjoining studio had something to do with this. Whereas Schindler’s buildings of the 1920s had frequently used textured surfaces of natural wood and unpainted concrete, those of the 1930s favored larger areas of undivided plate glass with adjoining surfaces of white or pastel concrete or stucco. Throughout the ‘30s, Schindler would continue his penchant for interaction with the garden, for complex layering and for mixing built-in with free-standing furniture. This was particularly the case in such masterworks as the Oliver House in Silver Lake (1934), the Buck House in Los Angeles (1934), the McAlmon House in Silver Lake (1935), the Rodakiewicz House in Beverly Hills (1937) and the Wilson House in Silver Lake (1938).

Distinguished historian Richard Guy Wilson grew up in the Wilson House and in his catalog essay, combines personal experience with historical analysis. Schindler’s architecture, he asserts, “lacks the geometrical clarity, the air of fine-tuned, machine-honed rationalism sought by many modernists of the first half of the 20th century.” Instead, his work “stands apart from the general stampede to accept the machine. Modern architecture to Schindler involved not a search for a new style, but a higher goal: architecture born of a new consciousness of space. He acknowledged the potential of the machine in achieving a space architecture but was wary of its becoming an end in itself and offering little room for human expression. Rather his architecture was oriented toward using space as a medium, recognizing that comfort should be a goal and not a by-product.” Wilson acknowledges, however, that though Schindler designed several unbuilt housing prototypes, his penchant for individualist expression precluded his producing an architecture that was replicable on a larger, more democratic, social scale, as Neutra would do so effectively.

Indeed, in the last major period of his work, from the late ‘30s to the early ‘50s, Schindler’s brilliantly original “one-off” architecture would assume a wilder, more Expressionist character as it reprised certain effects from the ‘20s and moved into a new period of canted walls and oblique angles, of “distorted” shapes and creative collisions and of highly mannered roofing configurations. If there continued to be few replicable prototypes, there were once again enduring masterworks: the Falk Apartments in Silver Lake (1939), the Van Dekker House in Canoga Park (1940), the Bethlehem Baptist Church in Watts (1944) and the Kallis House in Studio City (1946-48). To say, however, that such inventive, and deliciously quirky, buildings produced no prototypical solutions is not to say that they sired no children. It should come as no surprise that in the 1950s, as an architecture student at USC, Frank Gehry would decide that his favorite architect was Schindler, whose cheeky materials, artful collisions and tacked-on annexations profoundly shaped Gehry and his “deconstructivist” progeny.

What must it have been like to encounter a Schindler building on a landscape covered with such derivative styles as English Tutor or French chateau? What would it have been like, in such an atmosphere, to commission and live in a Schindler building? In 1953, shortly before Schindler’s death, an early client, Rose Marie Packard, answered both questions in a letter to her architect. When she and her husband commissioned their South Pasadena house in 1924, she was a Montessori school teacher and he was a socially progressive lawyer. Both were founders of the American Civil Liberties Union. Because neighborhood building codes prohibited flat roofs, Schindler cleverly skirted the ordinance by merging and conflating an exaggeratedly steep roof with the structure’s outside walls. “The design of this house, in the center of a pie-shaped acre lot, caused much excitement and curiosity at the time it was built,” she wrote, “People were not used to extreme changes, especially in their way of living. As the young mother of two children and usually caring for two or three others, my main interest was in a practical home for children.”

As she thought back over her 29 years of living in the house, she recalled its most satisfying functional and aesthetic features: “We have the maximum of privacy, yet the house can be thrown open to large groups for entertaining. Adaptability is the word that describes it. Both daylight and moonlight pour into every room. The solid slab floor all on one level has given the children much pleasure. The closets with sliding doors forming partitions were unknown to most people at that time. The rooms opening out into the garden making the two related is now generally accepted as ‘California Living.’ ” She recalled the comment of a friend that the house had “more interest and imagination than any I have ever known.” Packard particularly treasured the memory of a visiting Japanese architect: “Bowing in his polite manner, he said, ‘It is stimulating. You are courageous and I admire you.’ ”

The curators of this exhibition and the writers of the catalog essays have performed a valuable service that transcends certain regrettable problems. Elizabeth Smith’s introductory essay is the best survey to date of Schindler’s entire career. But the catalog lacks a biographical chronology. There is no mention anywhere of Schindler’s birth and death dates and only passing reference to certain important milestones in his life. In 1953, for example--in an incident of almost incredible synchronicity--Richard Neutra was hospitalized to recover from a heart attack and, after several days in intensive care, was moved to another room for continued recuperation. When he insisted that he did not need a private room, he was assigned to a large double room where, in the other bed, lay Rudolph Schindler. Recovering from cancer surgery and unaware at the time that his illness was terminal, Schindler was as stunned as Neutra at the fateful reunion. They had hardly met or spoken for some 20 years, but they warmed to the tragi-comic potential of the event and slowly reestablished their once-intense friendship. Members of both families visiting the room recalled spirited conversations--mostly of Vienna and of times and places past.

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While omitting such personal material, there is also in the catalog a virtual absence of probing criticism, an absence that patronizes an artist of Schindler’s stature. There were, throughout his work, serious problems of construction, weather-proofing and arbitrary detailing, issues which could have been usefully explored. There might also have been an attempt to explain why, in a creatively fecund 35-year career, Schindler realized slightly fewer than 100 built structures and about the same number of remodelings but with the staggeringly large number of more than 300 unbuilt projects. The catalog’s list of works makes no distinction between standing and demolished buildings and offers no comment on the condition of existing ones. For example, although the Kings Road House, How, Buck and Tischler houses have been sensitively restored and maintained, the great Wolfe and Van Dekker residences are falling into ruin. And most cruelly, while this show was being prepared, Schindler’s innovative Packard House in South Pasadena was being demolished. It was the first of Schindler’s buildings to gain the attention of a major European architecture journal.

In a fitting tribute to Schindler, Lorraine Wild and Amanda Washburn have designed a handsome and spatially sensitive book, complementing the equally appropriate installation design by Annie Chu and Rick Gooding. MOCA’s Schindler celebration makes a valuable contribution to the understanding of a great, and hitherto under-valued, achievement in the international history of architecture and design--an achievement realized in Southern California.