JetSetModernist

Leland Y. Lee, an architectural photographer who overcame racial barriers and helped create iconic images of the American twentieth century built environment, died on February 27, 2016 in Lynwood, California. He was 97.

For four decades, Lee photographed the works of some of the era’s most important architects such as John Lautner, Pierre Koenig, A. Quincy Jones, Edward Fickett, Albert Frey and Buff & Hensman for such leading publications as Architectural Digest, House Beautiful, House & Garden, Good Housekeeping, House & Home, and the LA Times’ influential Home Magazine, among others.

Lee was born Lay Quonn Yuen (”Deep Spring”), the youngest of a family of four children in San Francisco’s Chinatown during the deadly influenza pandemic of 1918. The city was still rebuilding from the great fire of 1906 from which his parents and older siblings had narrowly escaped. His earliest memories are of a home lit by gas lamps and getting around town by horse drawn carriage. His father was a Chinese immigrant and tailor, specializing in brightly colored silk shirts popular with young men who frequented the entertainment district known as the Barbary Coast, home to jazz clubs, dance halls, vaudeville theaters and brothels. Soon after the young Lee could talk, he was translating for his mother who spoke only Cantonese, despite having been a native-born lifelong resident of San Francisco.

Orphaned at eight, Lee was sent to a boys’ camp where an art project of his was published in the San Francisco Call-Bulletin newspaper with the racially insensitive caption “Wong Does It Right”. This proved to be a seminal event and launched a lifelong career in art and photography.

The story in the Call-Bulletin caught the attention of a recruiter for the then-new Voorhis School for Boys, an experimental progressive school for underprivileged youth in San Dimas, California founded by Jerry Voorhis, scion of a wealthy political dynasty who would later serve in Congress. The ten year old Lee was given a scholarship and would become not only a protoge of Voorhis’, but a friend to the entire Voorhis family for the rest of his life. It was at the Voorhis school that Lee first studied photography and developed a love for the craft. The Voorhis school is now part of California State Polytechnic University (Cal Poly Pomona).

Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and after narrowly avoiding relocation to an internment camp for being mistaken as Japanese, Lee was drafted into the Army Air Corps in 1942 and spent the war years serving in Morocco, India, Nepal and China, achieving the rank of Master Sergeant. While in Shanghai, Lee connected with his father’s relatives who introduced him to the woman who would become his wife, Ye Lien, later Americanized to Gracelynn. They were married in Shanghai on June 1, 1946.

After the war, Lee found work in portrait studios and freelancing for commercial assignments before returning to school on the GI Bill to study photography, earning a Bachelor’s degree from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. It was there that he attended a lecture given by the world-renowned architectural photographer Julius Shulman. Shortly after, Lee answered a blind ad in the newspaper for a photographer’s assistant which turned out to be for Shulman. Lee worked as Shulman’s assistant for nearly a decade from 1952 to 1961.

The two worked together on many of Shulman’s most iconic photographs, often with Lee standing-in to provide scale. He is the man standing in a bathing suit by the pool in the 1954 photos of the Albert Frey House in Palm Springs. 

He is the man standing at the edge of a cliff under the cantilevered roof of the Stahl House in 1960, Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House #22. 

And he is seen riding in the funicular of John Lautner’s Chemosphere House in Shulman’s famous 1961 photo.

The formally-educated Lee had to be diplomatic when making suggestions to the self-taught Shulman and is responsible for introducing his boss to the use of infrared film which was famously used when photographing the Chapel of the Holy Cross in Sedona, Arizona in 1956, adding sharp contrasts, depth and drama to the images. At Julius Shulman’s memorial at the Getty Center in 2009, Shulman’s daughter, Judy McKee, credited Lee for his contributions to her father’s career.

In 1961, Lee struck out on his own. His first solo assignment, for architect John Rex of the Wyle House in California’s Madera County, vacation home to the owner of aerospace engineering firm Wyle Laboratories and parents to actor Noah Wyle, were published in Architectural Digest without attribution or payment, but word of the photographer quickly spread and led to other assignments from architects and editors.

He photographed a hillside house in Silverlake, California by architect Raul Garduno for the Los Angeles Times’ Home Magazine in 1962.

For the next four decades, Lee photographed the homes of the rich and famous from Sonny & Cher, Kirk Douglas and Dinah Shore to Mary Tyler Moore, Ike & Tina Turner, and Ronald & Nancy Reagan. Lee’s most notable assignment came in 1968 when he photographed architect John Lautner’s then latest project, a house for interior designer Arthur Elrod in Palm Springs for House & Garden magazine. Lee was struck by the house’s monumentality with its spiraling circus tent-like concrete roof, indoor-outdoor infinity-edge swimming pool, and natural rock outcroppings that jutted up through the floors or formed walls throughout the interior of the house. Lee had to order out for more film and a boom crane to fully capture the house’s drama. Lee’s photographs led to the house’s use as the villain’s lair in the 1971 James Bond film “Diamonds Are Forever” where two bikini-clad bodyguards wrestle James Bond into the pool.

Twin tragedies struck Lee at the turn of the millennium with the death of his beloved Lyn to breast cancer in 2001, followed by a house fire in 2002 caused by his freshly-serviced car smoldering in the garage, destroying most of his film archive. Lee retired but would remain active attending and participating in art events, lectures, museum and gallery openings including exhibitions of what survived of his own work. He traveled alone on a seven month around-the-world photo safari visiting remote areas of Africa, South America, and the Galapagos as well as the northern reaches of China.

Lee would return to the Elrod House in 2012 at the age of 93 for special celebrations and exhibitions of his photographs as part of that year’s Palm Springs Modernism Show. He was interviewed for publications including Palm Springs Life, Modernism Magazine and Los Angeles Magazine as well as several coffee-table books by Taschen recollecting Lee’s and Shulman’s iconic photographs. Lee remained active and traveled frequently visiting family and friends until late 2015, attributing his longevity and youthful energy to surrounding himself with “young people”.

Lee’s work continues to resurface, discovered in the vaults of defunct magazines, in the backrooms of long-closed galleries, or in the store-rooms of shuttered architectural offices. As with the work of his contemporaries Julius Shulman, Ezra Stoller, and Art Center classmate Pedro Guerrero, Lee’s work serves as a valuable record of a unique time in America’s built environment, when architects reinvented the profession and houses broke all the rules of convention.

What survives or continues to turn up of Lee’s work will be archived at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

Lee is survived by his sons Miles and Alexander of Los Angeles; grandsons Erick and wife Stacy of Stevenson Ranch, and Patrick and wife Kelli of San Antonio, Texas; niece Lyena Griffith and husband Jay of Arcadia, California; niece Jeanette (Lawrence) Wong of Chicago, Illinois; nephews Tony Tam of Pasadena and Will Leong of Sacramento and five great-grandchildren, Samantha, Evan, Ava, Katherine and Isabella, and grand-niece Asia.

More about Lee’s photographs of the Elrod House here: http://www.artcrafthomesla.com/ModernismSummer2012-LelandLeecomp.pdf

EMERSON COLLEGE Los Angeles                            Morphosis Architects 2014

Los Angeles has a new architectural icon, thanks to Pritzker Prize-winning starchitect Thom Mayne and his prolific Morphosis Architects.

But no great building would be possible without a visionary client with a checkbook.

Emerson College is a small liberal-arts college in Boston with an emphasis on communications and the performing arts. A key part of their curriculum has long been a senior-year semester spent working and studying in Los Angeles, interning for one of the many entertainment companies located there. Emerson ran this program out of the seedy Oakwood Apartments in Burbank, home to child actors and pushy stage parents, and infamous for where actor Corey Haim died.

In 2010, Emerson got approval for their own building on a stretch of Sunset Boulevard populated by recording studios, fast food restaurants and liquor stores and, after a 1 year delay for a high-profile lawsuit brought by the adjacent East West Studios over construction-related noise and vibration concerns which was dismissed in 2011, construction began in 2012 with completion two years and $110 million later.

With the opening of the new campus, Emerson is able to consolidate its student housing, administrative offices, classrooms, performance studios, screening rooms, audio and computer labs and auditoriums within a single structure.

No design competition was held and little in the way of a design brief was provided. Morphosis was awarded the project following interviews with a short list of architectural firms. After a visit to Boston where the Morphosis team toured the campus and interviewed students and faculty, five vision points were identified:

  1) Combine live/work/study in a single structure;

  2) Incorporate state-of-the-art technology to give students every advantage in their professional careers;

  3) Facilitate community outreach with a building that engages neighboring studios, artists, the surrounding community and Los Angeles’ large pool of alumni (known as the “Emerson Mafia”);

  4) Facilitate distance learning, connecting Los Angeles to the Boston and Netherlands campuses as seamlessly as possible;

  5) Create an icon for the city of Los Angeles with a building that makes a bold statement.

Morphosis founder Thom Mayne was quoted as saying in a meeting with Emerson officials, “Any architectural firm can build Emerson a building. Only Morphosis can make a statement.” 

The project is unique for clustering both high and low-rise buildings in a mixed use structure (residential, commercial, educational), and incorporates many outdoor conditions that posed unusual challenges to entitlements, permitting and inspections with the City of Los Angeles.

 The building is comprised of a series of interlocking elements beginning with three levels of underground parking plus additional street-level parking for 256 cars and 6,400 square feet of  retail space. This is topped by classrooms and academic facilities in a multi-story free-form structure of glass-fronted spaces overhanging Sunset Boulevard. This sculptural academic building merges with open-air terraces or “grand staircase” that doubles as outdoor amphitheater and central plaza. The “academic village” is then wrapped in an open cube-like structure consisting of two eight story residential towers bridged by a truss system supporting a helistop, a requirement of the Fire Department.

The end result is a “city within a city” where students can live, work and study while feeling engaged with the surrounding community thanks to siting that frames dramatic views of Sunset Boulevard and the Hollywood sign to the north, and the studios and residential neighborhoods to the south.

Over two hundred students live in co-ed clusters of five single and double occupancy suites sharing common bathrooms in two towers of eight stories each, connected by a series of indoor-outdoor bridges. The LEED-certified gold-rated tower buildings have no air conditioning. Sunlight and solar heat gain is moderated by automated louvers cladding the east and west facades computer-controlled by a roof-mounted weather station. The open north and south ends of the building admit cooling breezes with shade provided by the canopy truss. Suites are climate-controlled by a passive valence system, or “chilled beams” circulating hot or cold water, there is no forced-air heating or cooling. A communal kitchen, outdoor barbecue area, laundry facilities and fitness center bring students together on the terraced plaza, promoting a sense of community not previously possible in the Oakwood apartments.

The north and south tower facades are clad in Kynar-coated aluminum panels in a stack pattern framing the open ends of the cube. East and west tower facades are glazed curtain walls behind horizontal louvers that control solar heat gain while admitting light to the residential facilities. The interior of the cube is clad in a scrim of folded Kynar-coated aluminum panels in 16 different repeating patterns creating a dramatic, undulating sculptural effect which has become one of the signature features of the building. The uniformly metallic-gray surfaces of various textures highlight the changing light and play of shadow as the sun interacts with the folded panels, the louvers, and the flat reflective panels. According to Project Designer Shanna Yates, in addition to the ever-changing light, color is introduced by the building’s occupants as they move throughout the sculpture-like spaces against the monochromatic backdrop.

The resulting effect of a hollowed-out cube of monumental proportions containing a jumble of contrasting shapes is reminiscent of Hollywood’s architectural heritage of large, boxy studio buildings containing fantastical sets of complex shapes within, except this time those sets are visible to the outside world. The shapes protruding from the Sunset Boulevard façade, breaking the plane of the cube, have been compared to the aliens bursting from the chests of astronauts in the “Alien” films. The grand arch effect also reminds some of the monumental sets for D.W. Griffith’s 1916 epic “Intolerance” which stood a few blocks away and are now replicated in the nearby Hollywood & Highland retail complex.

BAUHAUS 1919-1933

We've all heard of the Bauhaus, but how much do any of us really know about it? I've always been amazed by how influential this tiny German art school was and continues to be after only 14 years of existence 100 years ago.

In reaction to the horrors of WWI, it churned out radical ideas and designs for modern living and created objects as everyday, but never mundane, as desk lamps, typewriters, coffee makers and chairs, many of which we continue to see in retailers from Ikea to Target to DWR today. Every one of us have objects in our home that came directly from or were influenced by the Bauhaus. It invented the International Style architecture that evolved into the Mid-Century Modern architecture (and California Modernism) we so revere to this day, and it pioneered the polychrome building-block "faux-village" architectural style we see sprouting up all over our cities today in massive mixed-use developments (like L.A.'s La Brea Boulevard.)

Sadly, like any great progressive movement, it was fiercely opposed by conservative social forces and classicists who feared change and it was eventually shut down by the uber-nationalist Nazis who considered it to be "degenerate". It's creators fled to America as refugees and here they created some of our greatest and most treasured "American" landmarks and artworks.

If it weren't for the Bauhaus and its contemporary (and sometimes rival, sometimes collaborative) schools including Amsterdam's De Stijl and the Zurich-New York DaDa movement, the world would be a much duller place today.

"I have an Adrian Wilson home"

A reader writes: "I would like to know more about my house aside from the 1955 popular mechanics article I found on it and more about Adrian Wilson. My home was built in 1954 and is made of concrete, steel and glass."

Response: I’d like to know more about it myself. Sadly, your email address was lost in Tumblr’s editing process. If you could drop me another line through this blog, I’ll send you an email address where we can correspond more easily. In the meantime, I'll post excerpts from the 1955 article for the enjoyment of my readers.

Of course regular readers will recognize Adrian Wilson as one of the architects of the 1936 "Ship of the Desert" house in Palm Springs that was covered earlier in this blog. Read about it here.

From Popular Mechanics, January 1955:

I Chose a Steel-Frame House by Charles E. Stimson, Jr

I'm just completing a new house that is a mechanical masterpiece. It was designed for comfort and easy maintenance and was built through a new construction system. It contains striking innovations for efficient living.

The house has a steel frame like an office building. To a large extent it was put together with a welding torch instead of hammer and nails. It has built-in sound insulation and is considered proof against fire, earthquake, windstorm, insects and extremes in temperature. Yet it cost no more than standard high-quality construction. It should last for a couple of centuries.

About the only addition it may require in the next 50 years or so would be a solar battery to provide all light, heat and power. When perfected, this battery could be placed on the roof adjacent to the space reserved for the future heliport.

I can open or close the aluminum garage door from my car from as far as 100 feet away, using a new magnetic-inmpulse transmitter that is keyed to my garage door alone. From a master panel in the bedroom I can control prowler lights outside the house as well as the principal lights inside. One button on the panel turns on the coffeemaker in the kitchen. Also, from the bedroom, I can talk over a built-in intercom system to the kitchen or to visitors at the front door.

The steel-frame construction system that I used is the invention of Eugene Memmler of Glendale, Calif. ... He evolved a new technique using steel, concrete, asbestos-cement panels and wood. ... His system works so well that I used it, with his help and that of MackIntosh and MackIntosh, engineers, and architect Adrian Wilson, A.I.A.

Other features of the house include clothes hampers that are built into the walls... gas stove and oven-broiler units that are built right into the kitchen cabinets with an automatic timer for the oven, sliding wardrobe doors that extend all the way up to the ceiling and a front-door peephole with a swivel eyepiece so that all parts of the front entrance can be viewed. ... Another attraction is a rotating platform in the cabinets alongside the fireplace. A table-top television set on this platform can be turned so it can be seen from the living room, from out-of-doors or from the dining area.

The house has some 2250 square feet of heated living area. ...the house cost $14 per square foot to build.

THE WORLD TRADE CENTER New York, NY        Minoru Yamasaki 1966-2001

September 11 2011  As tragic as the loss of these remarkable buildings was, it pales in comparison to the horrific loss of life. Given the power great buildings can convey, I can't think of any other building that is as powerful a symbol as these buildings are, even ten years after their destruction. May they and the day never be forgotten.

BELL LABS Holmdel NJ                                              Eero Saarinen 1959

In my former life as a corporate tool, I had the unique pleasure of working on a consulting project with Lucent, then headquartered in a remarkable corporate campus at what had previously been known as the Bell Laboratories division of the Bell Telephone Company, then AT&T, and most recently as Alcatel-Lucent. Whatever it was called, it served for forty-four years as a state-of-the-art research laboratory spawning several Nobel Prize winners and countless advances in telecommunications.

Built between 1959 and 1962, it was one of the last projects by the revolutionary architect of his day, Eero Saarinen (1910-1961), an early Gehry, Hadid or Calatrava better known for his remarkable TWA Terminal at New York's JFK Airport and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis among other timeless masterpieces.

I can tell you from first-hand experience, arriving at the Holmdel campus was an experience I looked forward to on every visit. One entered the 472 acre complex on a country-like road winding through acres of manicured lawns before straightening out, preparing one for the surreal sight ahead. There, on the horizon, like a mirage as you approached, rose a monolith of a building more massive than you could ever imagine. Its perfect symmetry surrounded by impeccably maintained grounds with reflecting pools and fountains reminded me of a modernist Versailles as re-imagined by Mies Van der Rohe. Its black mirrored curtain-wall exterior seemed to go on forever in both directions with little detail to provide a sense of scale. And just when you thought you were imagining it to be larger than it could have been, you entered a space so much larger it took your breath away.

I must say that as awe-struck as I was by the building at every visit, the enormous spaces and endless vistas - whether of the grounds outside or of the endless atriums indoors - did have the odd effect of reducing one to feeling like an insignificant spec - a cog in a corporate machine. In odd contrast to the "form-follows-function" mantra of modernism, employees in this design-first edifice were bound by a rigid set of rules that forbade moving chairs from one room to another for fear they might upset the balance and orderliness of the perfect design. We inhabitants were reduced to cowering to this building's overwhelming power.

WEST LOS ANGELES COURTHOUSE SQUARE Los Angeles CA    Albert Criz 1960

Anyone unfortunate enough to have to visit the West Los Angeles courthouse, as I recently did to resolve a small matter involving a backlog of unpaid parking tickets, can at least look forward to taking care of their business, no matter how unpleasant, in the groovy environs of the West Los Angeles Courthouse Square, built in 1960 and designed by little-known (if remembered at all) architect Albert Criz.

A quick search of the AIA archives reveals that this unsung genius was born in 1907 in the American architectural mecca of Chicago and hung out his shingle in 1946 at 9806 Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. His spartan biography does include among his principle works the Atascadero State Hospital in collaboration with star architect Paul R. Williams, and a vague reference to a "city administration building" - perhaps referring to this one. His passing was recorded in 1995.

US BANK BUILDING Sherman Oaks CA                                 Unknown

I don't know anything about this building and an online search of the address only reveals that it contains the offices of rapper and Black Eyed Peas leader will.i.am's company, among its smattering of generic law and medical offices, which adds quite a bit of 'cool' quotient to its pedigree. But every time I exit the 101 Freeway at Woodman and head north, my heart skips a beat when I see it looming over the corner at 13701 Riverside Drive in Sherman Oaks, bristling in all its midcentury glory, as proud as the day it was built. Thank goodness its owners, whoever they may be, haven't knocked it down for something bigger, blander, and probably more profitable. May it continue to stand well into the next century.

ROBINSONS-MAY Beverly Hills CA                     Luckman & Pereira 1950       

It is often said that every black cloud has a silver lining. And there have been fewer black clouds than the current worldwide economic recession. But if there is a silver lining today, it is the survival of the remarkable Robinsons-May department store in Beverly Hills, California.

During the post-war suburban expansion of Los Angeles westward from downtown in the early 1950s, the Robinson's department store decided to open an outpost in Beverly Hills. They enlisted the best design talents from the worlds of architecture and movie-set design -- lead architects were the prolific team of Charles Luckman and William Pereira (New York City's Lever House, LAX Theme Building, CBS Television City, LA County Museum of Art, San Franciso's Transamerica Tower and more) with interiors by Raymond Loewy (Shell, Nabisco and Lucky Strike logos, Studebakers, locomotives, the Greyhound Bus and more) and landscaping by "Gone With The Wind" set designers Florence Yoch and Lucile Council.

Opening in 1952, Robinsons' 200,000 square feet of marble and glass on 8 acres at the intersection of Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards was immediately lauded by the press as a monument to "striking architecture and sophisticated smartness" and it thrived, largely unchanged, for the next 50 years modifying only its name after merging with the May department store chain.

But the evolution of retailing and the demise of the big department store is well chronicled, and Robinson's-May finally shuttered its doors in 2006. In the overheated real estate market of the times, the site had sold previously to New Pacific Realty for $33.5 million who flipped it three years later for a cool $500 million to the London-based real estate development firm of Candy & Candy with financing from the Kaupthing HF Bank of Iceland (who was heavily invested in U.S. default swaps).

The Candy brothers, with the aid of visionary architect Richard Meier (L.A.'s Getty Research Institute, countless museums and Malibu beach mansions), somehow came to the conclusion that what Beverly Hills really needed two blocks away from the overdeveloped Wilshire Corridor, where luxury condos sold at steep discounts even in the best of times, was yet another cluster of high-rise towers in yet another over-sized mixed-use development shoe-horned into one of the world's most congested parcels where traffic moves at a snail's pace through one of the world's busiest intersections, if it moves at all.

The site was barricaded with murals depicting a modern-day Garden of Eden (or Tower of Babel, depending on your point of view) and demolition equipment was hauled to the site. But then, as if by divine miracle, the crash of 2008 hit, the real estate market collapsed (taking the Icelandic economy and Kaupthing with it), and work stopped before it ever began. In 2010, Candy & Candy defaulted on their loans and lost the property in a foreclosure auction for $148 million to a Hong Kong private equity firm with ties to the Beverly Hills Hotel. They announced plans to proceed with the Meier plan, but 18 months later, nary a brick has been disturbed. 

It is hoped that the new owners will come to their senses and with vision, taste, and good sense, will redevelop the property in a way that preserves the existing structure. I can envision a tower - or even two - on the adjacent parking lot or even piercing and rising from the low-slung building turning it into a pedestal base. But to lose this groovy modernist gem in the center of town would be a tragedy.

Is Classicism the New Modernism?                                             1980s-2000s

This is a blog about modernism because, well, I like modernism. But that's not to the exclusion of other architectural styles. To be a fan of any one style, you have to have some knowledge of other styles and their history in order to appreciate their context.

Ultimately, I'm a fan of whatever is appropriate for the site - be it traditional, modern or something else. The Louvre is perfect for Paris. The Taj Mahal is magnificent in India. And nothing could beat the Forbidden City in Beijing. But would you build Versailles in Topeka? How about Beverly Hills? 

Modernism certainly isn't for everyone. It is an acquired taste that, well, requires a rather refined, more sophisticated design sensibility -- as any reader of this blog would undoubtedly (and humbly!) agree.

But in the early 20th century, modernism was an emerging, radical new style that was embraced by a few and roundly rejected by the many. As modernism spread from Europe to the west coast of America, it was adapted, modified, and evolved into a sub-style all its own dubbed "California Modernism".

We now may be witnessing the birth of a new style - one that, like modernism, originated overseas and was transmogrified by its practitioners half a world away. Like modernism, it is not without controversy. And like modernism, its detractors far outnumber its fans. But passionate fans exist and it would not be proliferating and thriving without vibrant demand.

Like any new trend, it raises an interesting question -- who defines 'good taste'? Some would argue that it is established by the test of time - but that argument is not without its flaws as many would agree that not everything old is necessarily good. Others would argue that taste is set by the masses - by what people want - by what the market demands. If this is the case, then what we're seeing today is an entirely new style that may someday be another benchmark of 'good taste'.

As with every new design and architectural style, there is a bit of geopolitics involved in its inception. Modernism emerged from the ashes of two world wars and was carried forward by economic conditions and materials shortages unique to its time. Likewise, the downfall of the Shah in the 1970s sparked a mass exodus of wealthy Iranians to the United States. One community in particular where they settled was Beverly Hills. And this moneyed class bought or built new homes upon which they exercised their personal style - a style no less authentic or legitimate than any other.

Iran has a long and proud history with a distinctive architecture that is a blend of home-grown ancient Persia with a mix of eighteenth-century France, a period of history that captured the imagination of a developing Iran. This resulted in columns influenced by Persopoles together with ornate decorations and iron-work reminiscent of Versailles. The end result is an architectural style unique to Iran that also influenced architecture in neighboring Iraq and, to some extent, throughout the middle east.

But when this Iranian diaspora blended their style with that of the United States and, more specifically, Beverly Hills, they invented something not seen anywhere else in the world - Iran included. For lack of a better term, it has been dubbed the "Persian Palace" - a term at first considered derogatory but which has now been embraced by the Iranian community of Beverly Hills and even promoted by a Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine cover story.

SALK INSTITUTE La Jolla CA                                     Louis Kahn 1959-1965 

Philip Johnson famously said “architecture is not about words, but about tears”. Anyone questioning the meaning of that statement need only find themselves in the courtyard of Louis Kahn’s bewitching and breathtaking Salk Institute on the coast of La Jolla, California, as I recently did. 

Approaching on foot, walking through a typical campus-like environment, turning the corner and finding oneself in an expansive space of perfectly symmetrical, hulking, rhythmic structures enshrouded in the morning coastal fog typical of the area is an experience like no other. The relationship between structures and the viewer is never stronger – a moving and truly interactive experience akin to audience-participation theatre. The interplay of sculpturally formed concrete and teak create a tactile quality that tempts every visitor to reach out and caress the walls. A sense of community in the broad, sunny plaza is a sharp contrast to the solitude found in one of the many sheltered nooks. 

The Salk Institute is one of the finest examples of Kahn’s mastery of merging modernism with monumentalism, two concepts previously considered diametrically opposed.  

Kahn was a poster-child for late-bloomers. He started his architectural career in the 1930’s designing in the beaux-arts style, eventually embracing the international style in which he broke no new ground. But during two years at the American Academy in Rome when he was 50 years old, he eschewed the usual tour of classical and beaux-arts cliches for the fortresses, medieval castles and ancient monumental ruins throughout Europe which gave him an epiphany. Upon returning to the United States in 1959, he single-handedly created an entirely new architectural language and catapulted to global fame, becoming Dean of the Yale School of Architecture. The second half of his career bore no resemblance to the first and was spent creating some of the world’s most important, most breathtaking, most enduring masterpieces from La Jolla to Bangladesh and everywhere in between. Nearly forty years after his death, Kahn is considered one of the most important American architects on par, if not surpassing, Frank Lloyd Wright. 

JOSEF VAN DER KAR  1906-2002

Communists and Conservatives don’t usually factor into discussions of architecture. But there’s probably no other architect whose client roster so closely mirrored the FBI’s watch-list, while also including some of the government’s most influential military thinkers, than the late, great, but purposefully little-known architect Josef Van der Kar.

The thought of today’s Tea Party conservatives and liberal progressives finding any common ground seems as unimaginable as Glenn Beck and Michael Moore getting gay-married on the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall. But once upon a time, during the dark days of the Cold War, the McCarthy hearings, Caribbean nuclear stand-offs, marches for Civil Rights and workers’ strikes, intellectuals from both ends of the ideological spectrum gathered over highballs and late-night dinners in the cocktail-cool elegance of their Van der Kar-designed homes, tucked discreetly away deep in the canyons of the Hollywood Hills, far from nosy neighbors and prying eyes. From inside Van der Kar’s homes came policies that guided our government’s handling of Fidel Castro and Reagan’s Star Wars defense initiative, as well as the hatching of Communist plots to empower the working class and topple Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. 

Most notable among Van der Kar’s clients were Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter, a husband-wife team of foreign policy and nuclear arms strategists who were instrumental players in the early days of the Rand Corporation, among other things. Albert, often referred to as a “mad genius” by his admirers, is said to have been the inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove”. He is recognized as the godfather of the neoconservative movement that spawned the presidency of George W. Bush - his most famous protoges being Bush’s Iraq War architects Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. He counted among his friends a veritable who’s-who of the Cold War era including McGeorge Bundy, Dean Acheson, Henry Kissinger, 1970s CIA Director George H.W. Bush, and a young Dick Cheney in President Ford’s administration.

As a national security advisor to presidents from Eisenhower to Reagan, both Republican and Democrat, the Wohlstetter’s Van der Kar-designed home had a special nook with a ‘hot-line’ telephone direct to the Oval Office. Both Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan in 1985.

The Wohlstetters commissioned their house from Van der Kar after Albert served as Vice President of Walter Gropius’ General Panel Corporation in the 1940s for whom Van der Kar designed early experiments in pre-fabricated housing. The Wohlstetters built their home right next door to Van der Kar’s own house on Woodstock Road which he designed six years earlier in 1947. The Wohlstetters and the Van der Kars became the closest of friends whose children carved a well-worn path between the two houses that remains today. The two houses occupy a secluded compound of homes behind unmarked gates that’s since attracted a handful of A-list celebrities for its privacy.

Another Van der Kar friend and client - at the opposite end of the political spectrum from the Wohlstetters - was Henry Shire, a member of the Communist-sympathizing Carpenter’s Union in Hollywood, and a card-carrying Communist  - along with Van der Kar. Shire once ran afoul of his own union for promoting the preposterous notion of equal pay for black union members. When Shire and his union were blacklisted during the McCarthy era, Van der Kar kept him and his comrades busy working on houses. Shire worked on the construction of his own Van der Kar house in the Elysian Park region of Los Angeles, known at the time as “Red Gulch” for its popularity with Communists, artists, homosexuals and other “subversives”. 

During a recent Los Angeles gathering celebrating Van der Kar’s work, both Van der Kar’s and Shire’s now-grown children - along with other adult children of Van der Kar’s friends and clients, compared stories of FBI agents in dark suits and fedoras lurking in the bushes or knocking on doors, quizzing the children on their parents’ whereabouts and activities. The children gave well-rehearsed answers and led the agents on inspections through the houses while their parents tip-toed around the opposite side of Van der Kar’s signature moving walls, as if in a funhouse hall of mirrors. The FBI visits to the Van der Kar house in Laurel Canyon continued for years after the Van der Kars sold the house to 1960s folk singer Glenn Yarbrough and his wife Annie, as they believed any friend of the Van der Kars to be of particular interest to the FBI.

Van der Kar was a second-generation modernist architect of the international school who adhered to a distinctive style that’s seldom mistaken for anyone else’s. His houses are variations of flat-roofed post-and-beam construction with enormous sliding glass panels that roll away to open the houses to the outside. Interior walls swing or slide away, changing the configuration of rooms and creating multi-purpose spaces. Exposed brick fireplace walls serve as room dividers and exterior walls that aren’t all-glass have ribbons of clerestory windows admitting filtered light at the ceiling level. He mastered light and color, painting accent walls in vivid hues of orange, yellow, red or chartreuse. Believing that the vegetation outside guided the light inside the house, he collaborated with landscape designer Garrett Eckbo on all his projects, refusing a commission if Eckbo wasn’t available to join him. 

The end result are homes with an unmatched sophistication, a cool, insouciant elegance, like the set of Playboy After Dark, whether they be as grand as the Wohlstetter’s or as modest as the Shire’s.

Van der Kar did not suffer fools. He accepted only those clients whose political views he agreed with, or at least respected, rejecting far more than he accepted. The lucky few who were admitted into his famously tight circle of friends were like family, the children growing up together like cousins, the parents sharing cooking and chauffeuring duties. Van der Kar’s closest friends and neighbors, in addition to the Wohlstetters, included the Gregory Ainses, the Garrett Eckbos, the Rudolph Schindlers and the Julius Shulmans who lived right around the corner. The Shulman archive contains a rich treasure trove of Van der Kar’s work that Van der Kar never allowed to be published, so he and his houses could never become famous. 

Van der Kar’s best-known houses remain the Wohlstetter House (also known as “The House that Hangs in the Sky” as dubbed by the Los Angeles Herald Examiner), immaculately restored in 2001 by fashion photographer Clifford Watts; the landmarked Rootenberg-Markham house across the street from the Schindler house on Kings Road in West Hollywood; the Garrett Eckbo House in Laurel Canyon that was later home to California Governor Jerry Brown; the Shire House; the Rowen and Harper houses; and the Van der Kar residences in Laurel Canyon, Malibu and State College, Pennsylvania. And of course there is the remarkable office building for the Sy Art Construction Company, photographed by Julius Shulman in 1964. Since he always gave the plans to his clients, no archive of Van der Kar’s body of work remains.

The exceptional caliber, loyalty, and longevity of Van der Kar’s clients - many of whom died in their homes well into their 90s, most of which are still either in the original family or with only the second owner - raises an interesting question. Is there something about the Van der Kar design aesthetic that stimulates the intellect, preserves good health, and creates lifelong ties to a house? Or are intellectuals with good genes and deep roots naturally attracted to Van der Kar’s work? Nature? Or nurture?