Gregory Ain's "Greene Residence." burned down in 2018, rebuilt 2018-2021. los angeles. august 2023

Samuel and Harriet Freeman House, 1962 Glencoe Way, Hollywood, California,

The house was constructed with more than 12,000 cast concrete blocks used both inside and out, and features a salon-style layout with a central hearth, partially open kitchen and several outdoor spaces. 

For a number of reasons the work of Gregory Ain never gained the same amount of publicity and fame as that of other great California modern architects: first, Ain, just like Rudolph Schindler, disliked self-promotion. Second, his progressive, leftist politics as well as his like-minded clients made him suspicious in McCarthy era America. Nevertheless Ain with precisely these clients realized a number of remarkable projects that were infused with the shared convictions and offered novel solutions, especially in the case of his multifamily projects. Having worked with both Schindler and Richard Neutra Ain not only was familiar with two of the most progressive forces of Californian architecture but also transposed features like the folding walls of Neutra or the innovative kitchen/living room connection experienced in Schindler’s work into his own. Regrettably the progressiveness of Ain’s designs resulted in continued conflicts with the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) which couldn’t follow his ideas and thus only after long discussions and alterations granted permit for public funding. This conflict ultimately escalated during the Community Homes project in 1946, a highly progressive cooperative housing development: designed together with his partners Alfred W. Day and Joseph Johnson as well as landscape architect Garret Eckbo it was revolutionary in its preference of public over private space. But since the projects’ initiators, members of the cartoonists’ union, refused to include racially segregated areas the FHA, after years of struggling, declined to insure loans for the projects and it was cancelled in 1949.