The Mating Dance of LA Arts and Architecture: 1900s-1950s
The Los Angeles arts were forged in this furnace at the beginning of the 20th century. A spectrum of artistic engagement grew up in the midst of upheavals throughout the century. Every strand of artistic engagement was implicated in some way with the string of crises and conflicts of this half-century era: The Mexican Revolution in 1910, the Great War; the Russian Revolution of 1917; the First Red Scare of 1919-23; the Boom of the 1920s; the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the Second World War. Each of these conflicts took a specific shape in Los Angeles, and Los Angeles shaped those global conflicts as a weighty contributing actor. By the end of this half-century, a mighty metropolis had emerged as a military-industrial suburban landscape, clothed in the aesthetic of Modernism, which had been tamed, commercialized, commodified, and corrupted. The new rebellion to this aesthetic power would arise at mid-century, which is the story of the following essay.
The "arts" in this period can be divided between dominant and oppositional: The most visible where the regime-supporting arts aligned with the massive investment in promoting the region for in-migration and real estate development. On the other side were a series of alternative, modernist, independent movements, what can be seen as an avant garde. The relationship between these two poles of right and left, of conservatism and radicalism, were complex and even symbiotic. The ruling class of any era and its artistic avant garde engage in an ironic "mating dance" (Tom Wolfe's memorable metaphor) in which the most innovative artists seek and depend on the patronage of the wealthy strata--those most invested in the status quo. Thus, many alternative, rebellious artistic movements are co-opted and tamed by the status quo, and this principle can be extended to the mass media, which has a voracious appetite for innovation.
The Bohemian Left in the 1920s
Pauline Schindler's first goal upon arriving in Los Angeles in 1921 was “hunting up Upton Sinclair,” the prolific novelist and socialist activist. Eventually, the Schindlers were invited to the Sinclairs for dinner, and Upton introduced them to Gaylord Wilshire, the “millionaire socialist” namesake of Wilshire Boulevard. Recounting their frenzied activities in June 1921, Pauline wrote:“We are so far and so deeply ‘in’ the radical movement these days that we never have an evening at home any more ... Committee meetings for the Worker’s Defence [sic] League, for the Walt Whitman School, -- conferences large and small, -- supping in odd places with folk who tell us news impossible to get except ‘from hand to mouth’, --lectures; meetings at which we stop only long enough to make an announcement before going on to the next...”[note]
The Schindlers were part of the small but very active bohemian world of pro-labor, feminist, gay, socialist and social democratic Angelenos, a circle that included Carey McWilliams, the Aristotle of Los Angeles’ public intellectuals, who would eventually face-down the second Red Scare as the courageous editor of The Nation. Their arrival in Los Angeles in the 1920s coincided with the widespread repression of leftists throughout the United States. California had enacted the 1919 Criminal Syndicalism Act, which targeted the International Workers of the World (IWW). In 1927 Pauline was still consumed with labor activism, especially through the Worker’s Defense League. “This movement completely consumes my energies...my mind is...too much concerned with the absurd details of mass-meetings, and the raising of funds to defend workingmen prosecuted for working class activities.”[note]
While the metropolis around them mushroomed in a frenzy of capitalist production and exploitation, this small band of intellectuals and artists won occasional commissions from eccentric investors to put their ideals into practice. Schindler and Neutra’s collaborative projects included a stunning 1926 entry in the international competition to design the League of Nations building in Geneva. Also in 1926, Schindler executed a brilliant beach house design for Philip Lovell, a wealthy physician who advocated natural cures.
That year—1927—in an attempt to win larger commissions, Schindler and Neutra formed the short-lived Architectural Group for Industry and Commerce (AGIC). As AGIC, Neutra and Schindler designed the Jardinette Apartments at the southeast corner of Marathon and Manhattan in Hollywood, for J.H. Miller, “an enigmatic developer” who “envisioned a veritable empire of luxurious Hollywood apartment houses ranging from five to fifteen stories.” Neutra, his wife Dione, along with Schindler and his wife Pauline, were all animated by the social reform possibilities of design embodied in the Jardinette Apartments. “Never before has the architect experienced such a flexibility of choice for expressing the modern conception of the home,” Pauline Schindler wrote in an anonymous review for the Christian Science Monitor. She asked the reader to imagine “seeing an entire city block built up with these garden apartments...These buildings would enclose a large community park area in the center of the block for the use of children and other apartment dwellers. Hours of time and labor would be saved by maintaining community laundries, day nurseries, complete garages and equipment, janitor services, and gardeners.” Miller, unfortunately, went bankrupt before the Jardinette was finished, skipped town to escape his creditors, and left AGIC with an unpaid commission.[note]
Offended by rumors that Schindler had been sleeping with his wife, Lovell gave his next commission to Neutra, who designed his 1929 masterpiece, the Lovell Health House. Consequently, friction developed between Schindler and Neutra, ending their friendship and partnership. In 1932 Philip Johnson and Henry Russell Hitchcock curated a major show at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, called “The International Style: Architecture since 1922” showcasing the work of Wright, Mies, Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Neutra.
During the 1930s and 1940s, Schinder, Neutra, Gregory Ain, Harwell H. Harris, and a gathering circle of modernist architects won a steady stream of commissions to design homes in the Edendale/Silverlake basin and more widely. When he and Dion moved out of the Schindler House, Neutra designed for themselves the “Research House” (1933) at 2300 E. Silver Lake Blvd, while Schindler designed the Oliver House (1933) high on the slope opposite the Silver Lake Reservoir. There followed, for Schindler, the Van Patten House (1934-5). Economic activity seems to have picked up in 1938, as Schindler completed three commissions: the Bubeshko Apartments (2036 Griffith Park Blvd) and the Wilson (290 Redcliff St) and Westby (1805 Maltman) Houses. Neutra left a concentrated stamp on Silverlake’s built fabric with a cluster of homes lining Silver Lake Blvd just south of his Research House, from 1948-1964: The Treweek and Sokal Houses (1948), the Reunion House (1949), the Yew House (1957), and the Ivandomi and Kambara Houses (1960).[note]
Enter Julius Shulman and John Entenza: Arts & Architecture in the 1930s-1940s
In 1936 Neutra met a brilliant young amateur photographer and college drop-put named Julius Shulman and the two of them began a partnership of a very different sort—a fateful collaboration between a master of making spaces and a master of making images of spaces. Possibly the greatest, and certainly the most influential architectural photographer of the 20th century, Julius Shulman (1910-2009) developed a very close association with each of the modernist architects active in Southern California: Richard Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, Charles and Ray Eames, Gregory Ain and John Lautner, and many others, mostly associated with John Entenza’s cutting-edge Arts & Architecture magazine. Shulman’s images, massively published in the burgeoning consumer magazine market of the post-World War II era, played a major role in shaping the image of the Los Angeles and Southern California “lifestyle” to the rest of the nation and world during the 1950s and 1960s. Shulman’s distinctive images are also responsible in large part for the reception and even the reputation of major modernist architects and architectural movements, such as the Case Study House program. Shulman developed an aesthetic vision that paralleled the rise of glamour photography in classic Hollywood, emphasizing strong contrast, rectilinear composition, and masterful control of highlight and shadow detail. These qualities were ideal for magazine reproduction and constituted a “look” that became the predominant visual theme for postwar Los Angeles. The Shulman archive is thus a “source” of Los Angeles history in two senses: as evidence of the city’s massive 20th-century growth, and as a source of its visual representation as a place.Another key element in the rise of Southern California Modernism was the arrival of John Entenza as editor of Arts & Architecture. Entenza was the son of a Michigan labor lawyer who had been an advocate for migrant workers. Schooled for the foreign service at the University of Virginia, the twisted paths of the Great Depression led him in 1932 instead to a job in the experimental film production unit of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The critic and future champion of modernist architecture, Esther McCoy, remembered meeting Entenza in that year, “at a time when Los Angeles was the wrong place to be. San Francisco was all right, but in 1932 L.A., even Santa Monica, was déclassé....We were trying to escape from Los Angeles.”[note] But Entenza was determined to change the place from a satellite to a center. He had a strong interest in architecture, and after he left M-G-M in 1936 he became an assistant editor of the staid, 32-year old magazine California Arts and Architecture. Imbibing the Popular Front liberalism of 1930s California, Entenza developed the conviction that modernist residential architecture, which shunned decoration and advocated cheap, durable industrial materials and simple designs, could play a major role in social reform and the opportunity for home ownership by the working classes.
In 1943 Entenza bought out his employers and changed the name of the magazine to Arts & Architecture. In the same year he formulated the Case Study House (CSH) program, in a competition titled “Design for Postwar Living.” The competition was for “the design of a small, modern, worker’s family house, sponsored by twenty-two materials manufacturers...” The three published winners were the firms of Sarinen and Lundquist, Pei and Duhart, and Raphael Soriano. Within a few years Entenza and his magazine had helped to solve the problem he and Esther McCoy had lamented back in 1932. Los Angeles would no longer be a backwater. On the contrary, Arts & Architecture would be a coveted forum for new talent in many fields, from architecture to graphic arts, sculpture and poetry.[note]
Entenza challenged architects to take advantage of the inexpensive, mass-produced, high-strength materials of steel, plywood, glass, cinder block and fiberglass to make affordable modernist designs available to the masses. Entenza and the contributors to Arts & Architecture modified an aesthetic movement that had begun decades earlier, in fin-de-siecle Vienna, Berlin, New York, and Chicago by fusing it with the Mediterranean landscape and climate of Southern California. They espoused the geometric minimalism of earlier modernism, and added the concept of a seamless transition between interior and exterior, modeling the patios and gardens and functional “rooms” integrated with the dwelling itself. The Case Study House program has become legendary in the history of architectural modernism. It produced a coherent body of exemplary structures that undoubtedly influenced both advanced and vernacular designs. The “look” of the Case Study houses is inseparable from Shulman’s photographic images of them. It is difficult to say how the Case Study houses appear apart from the Shulman archive.
Fundamental to the CSH program was a symbiosis between the building materials industry, the magazine, and the architects. The premise of the program had been to demonstrate that modernist designs were not only superior functionally and aesthetically, but also more affordable for the ordinary postwar family, because they would be built from cheap and yet strong industrial products. Entenza made this clear from the outset. The steel, glass, cement block, plywood, and many other industries were enthusiastic to show the world the utility of their products, especially because so many of these manufacturers had been forced to reconvert to civilian manufacture at the end of the war. Arts & Architecture served as the broker, then, in the industry-architect-client triangle. For the promise of publicity, the manufacturers were happy to donate their materials. This made the houses very affordable indeed, but artificially so. The architects gained direct access to the most advanced materials, as well as excellent technical support during the design and construction phases. At the end of the day, however, the Case Study homes, loaded with the latest materials and furnishings, were mainly showcases for the wares of the postwar American corporations—distinctly unaffordable housing for longer-term practical planning.
The pages of Arts & Architecture are stuffed with advertisements for every kind of product. Packard-Bell placed a full-page ad n the February 1947 issue, titled “Planning for Pleasure,” showing the new occupants partying with the latest hi fidelity radio-phonographs. “How fitting that Packard-Bell PhonOcord and radios should be chosen to help glorify the interiors,” the ad copy modestly observes. “And both Case Study House No. 16 and PackardBell symbolize luxury, comfort, and happier living.”[note] Each issue of Arts & Architecture featuring a new Case Study House also ran an immense list called “Merit Specified,” of all the suppliers. Rodney A. Walker’s CSH #16 lists hundreds of firms, from local to international, that supplied everything from the Aluminum Umbrella (Kool-Vent Aluminum Umbrella Corporation); to Flourescent Tubes (Westinghouse Corporation); Plexiglass Screen (Rohm & Haas); down to the Weather-tight Door Saddle (Columbia Mills Supply Company). The lists also include the hundreds of material culture props for the magazine photographs, from Beer (Papst) to Toiletries and Cosmetics (Sara Cooley Cosmetics).[note]
Arts & Architecture was the public stage for the "Mating Dance: where cutting-edge artists served as the lab frontier for new styles and products: Despite its avant-garde pretension, it had become the consummate pro-industry consumer cornucopia. While its community saw itself as cutting-edge, it was only the cutting-edge of a nuclear-powered Cold War weapons economy. It may not be insignificant that the visual culture of Southern California modernists fused so seamlessly with Abstract Expressionism, the ultimate flight from ideology and social commitment of any kind.
By the early 1950s Entenza’s Arts & Architecture was widely recognized as a leading forum for the modernist movement across the arts. The Case Study House program, and modernist architecture in general, anchored the steady stream of features about Abstract Expressionism, “modern jewelry,” poetry, music, and politics.[note] The January 1951 numbers lead with a review by Margo Sorzano of the “17 Modern American Painters” show at the Frank Perls Gallery in Beverly Hills, featuring William Bazoites, Willem de Kooning, Lee Gatch, Adolph Gottlieb, Jackson Pollock, Pousette Dart, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Theodoros Stamos, Hedda Sterne, Clyfford Still, Mark Tobey, and Bradley Walker Tomlin. A loyalist, Sorzano praises the work in its own expressivist terms against critics who find it remote from the “real world,” but she is also quick to refute the charge by associating the artists with architecture, and hence the real world. “A natural link exists between painting and architecture,” Sorzano explains, and names “Motherwell and other artists working with architects to incorporate painting and sculpture in the design of specific dwellings.”[note] This association was no accident. The artists, architects, sculptors, and jewelry designers were joined in a common movement, made real by their joint appearances in Arts & Architecture and other venues. For unknowns, a feature in Arts & Architecture could launch a career. For the established, it reinforced the movement.
John Entenza seems to have been completely oblivious to the contradictions between his circle’s avant garde aesthetics, his own left-liberal politics of social reform (expressed in nearly every issue through his “Notes in Passing” column), and the corporate consumer capitalism for which the magazine was a major vehicle. In the January 1951 issue Entenza filled his “Notes in Passing” column with a speech on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by M. Jaime Torres Bodet, Director-General of UNESCO. “The domain of Human Rights is indivisible. It is the whole problem of the improvement of the lot of human beings that calls us to action,” Torres Bodet proclaims, between advertisements for doorbells and fiberglass chairs: “No one can live outside history; and the history of our time is the crisis of mankind in the throes of achieving its material and moral unity...”[note]
The same issue of Arts & Architecture is dominated by a massive, 26-page advertisement by Kwikset Locks Incorporated, of Anaheim.[note] Adolph Schoepe and Karl Reinhard, who founded this giant door hardware manufacturer in 1945, were also leading Right-wing Orange County political activists. With Knott’s Berry Farm founder Walter Knott (1889–1981), they funded the California Free Enterprise Association, which “circulated 20,000 pamphlets per month through employee’s pay envelopes, reading racks, educators, and ministers,” promoting the anti-Communist, Christian fundamentalist movement that sprang up in the fertile suburban soil of the region south of Long Beach.[note] Kwikset door hardware became the industry leader in cheap locksets, a necessary component for the mass home building of the 1950s. Even the smallest tract homes needed scores of doorknobs. Just how many is suggested by another advertisement. Rezo Hollow Core Doors boasts of “more than 6,000,000” sales, which, stacked in a single pile, “would reach up into the sky for 165 miles!”[note] Nothing could be more symbolic of elemental capitalist private property that is inscribed into uncountable micro-spaces of the metropolis, than Kwikset locks on six million doors.
Arts & Architecture, in short, occupied a precarious position between the avant garde and the mass homebuilding industry. It illustrates beautifully the dynamic between “modern art and the common culture” as described by Thomas Crow: “a necessary brokerage between high and low, in which the avant-garde serves as a kind of research and development arm of the culture industry.”[note] Although Arts & Architecture embodies the political-economic contradictions of modernism, it occupied the high and narrow end of the aesthetic magazine market, a market that virtually exploded during the 1950s to feed an insatiable demand for lifestyle and consumer culture journalism.
As image-maker for Southern California Modernism, photographer Julius Shulman occupied a key aesthetic position. His stark, rectilinear, and functionalist style epitomized a Cold War, corporate culture in the immediate postwar 1950s. While his images soon achieved iconic status as fine art, he always sow himself as commercial photographer first and foremost. Shulman published throughout the complete spectrum of magazines devoted to architecture, so his influence spread very far from Los Angeles, radiating Southern California Modernism at every level: Architectural Forum, once the sole leader in architectural publishing, was joined in the early postwar period by House and Home, a builder-oriented magazine which emphasized the residential sector, while Architectural Forum came to specialize in commercial architecture. Architectural Record, the official magazine of the American Institute of Architects, along with Progressive Architecture, targeted the architects themselves. Beyond this narrow circle of the magazines catering to builders and designers was the mass market of “shelter magazines,” which stressed living ideas rather than the architecture itself. The shelter magazine heavyweights were Better Homes and Gardens, its chief competitor, American Home, and Good Housekeeping. These three addressed the vast middle-class market without pretension. House and Garden and House Beautiful emphasized a more upscale market, while Town and Country and Architectural Digest exclusively covered the homes of the affluent, rich, and famous.[note] Julius Shulman published in all of them. As a photographer his views or influence cannot be reduced to any one of them; his style became indispensable to the popular aesthetics of Fifties America.
Cold War Consumer Landscapes: Of Suburbs, Grocery Stores and Shopping Malls, 1930s-1950s
During the 1930s, despite the hardships endured by many in the Great Depression, Los Angeles was also, for many, “in the money,” expanding constantly throughout the worst decade in U.S. economic history, before or since. New arrivals of settlers continued to pour in and developers continued to plot and sell subdivisions, greatly empowered by the Federal Housing Authority’s loan guarantees. A most revealing indicator of the actual health of the Los Angeles economy during the Great Depression is the massive supermarket construction campaign mounted by Ralph's Grocery Company, beginning as early as 1929 in Westwood, but accelerating in 1935. Investing millions of dollars in giant retail stores between 1935 and 1941, Ralph's set new standards for food retailing. Mostly sited in both established and newly developing areas, the streamline moderne supermarkets were designed by Stiles Clements to present visually striking profiles for passing motorists, who also found ample parking. “But most of the new supermarkets were sited in isolation on the urban periphery, staking claim to a trade area that was often still coalescing.” The new store built in 1936 at 4641 Santa Monica Boulevard was intended to draw customers away from existing competitors, while the location at 3635 Crenshaw Boulevard was built among vacant fields, anticipating residential growth. Walter Ralph, who began the company decades earlier downtown, claimed that he studied the residential development of areas for years before building a new store. Conversely, the appearance of a new Ralphs became a major asset for developers, stimulating home sales.[1]The massive wartime buildup generated not only an acute demand for housing, but also, a technological aesthetic valorizing movement, flight, and streamlines. Both the New Deal and the war also generated a will and a bureaucratic capacity for planning: moving millions of persons and millions of dollars worth of goods to and through specific sites created a Mandarin class of “planners” who thought on a large scale of social planning. The modernist architectural movement led by John Entenza, Richard Neutra, and visually publicized by Julius Shulman set the design standard for the entire era, but the contradictions of that movement arose most powerfully in the rise of postwar “suburbia.”
The architectural path taken by Schindler and Neutra from Vienna to Los Angeles was by no means the only one. Victor Gruenbaum also studied at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. He settled into an apparently comfortable career designing retail storefronts, but the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938 forced Gruenbaum to flee to the United States, where lucky connections landed him a job on a design team for the City of Tomorrow exhibit for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, as well as commissions with major department store companies, which during the war were beginning to plan branch stores.
In 1943 Gruenbaum became Gruen, dropping the “baum” in response to American anti-semitism. He was commissioned that year by Architectural Forum to conceive of an ideal “center” in an experimental re-planning of Syracuse New York called “194X”—the “X” denoting that the end of the war was as yet unknown. In these projects, Gruen began to promote the idea of shopping centers that preserved the urban life of his beloved Vienna, while serving a much lowerdensity and decentralized social geography in the New World. Gruen’s plans for Syracuse were, significantly, inspired by his new surroundings in Los Angeles, which he thought foretold “an automotive-rich postwar America.”[2]
Gruen thought it important to attract business away from “overcrowded downtown sections,” and designed, in effect, artificial downtowns that motorists could enter and exit with minimum difficulty. Gruen’s first showcase for his theories, Milliron’s Department Store, opened in Westchester, just north of the Los Angeles Municipal Airport, at 8739 Sepulveda Blvd, in 1949. As if to symbolize the domination of the supremacy of the automobile, Gruen put the parking lot on the roof, treating the ramps themselves as ”futuristic sculptural elements to entice shoppers.”[3] Indeed, the thrill of ascending and descending these ramps imitated the take-off and landing of aircraft. Gruen’s Milliron design signaled to passing motorists with other, equally bold exterior design elements, such as plate-windowed free-standing display structures interrupting the sidewalk.[4] On the strength of his growing reputation as a design apostle of the new geography of consumerism, Gruen’s first big “shopping center” commission was the Northland Center in suburban Detroit. Built at a cost of $25 million from 1952 to 1954, Northland was the largest shopping center ever built: comprising one million square feet of retail space, anchored with a large J.L. Hudson department store (which had commissioned the entire development).[5] Gruen was not the first architect to promote shopping centers as a fundamental reconfiguration of retail space, but he is widely credited as the most influential.[6]
Massive suburban shopping centers presupposed, of course, a massive clientele of shoppers for whom “downtown” was somehow too far to travel. Promoters of shopping center developments produced studies to back their desires. One planning text estimated that in 1929, Angelenos had conducted one third of their retail transactions in the downtown central business district, but that by 1949 only twelve percent of their transactions were made there.[7] To a very large extent, the projections of a postwar suburban movement were the spurious artifact of a regional geography already long established. Multiple, competing centers surrounding downtown Los Angeles has already been established, in Pasadena, the San Gabriel Valley, Long Beach, and Santa Monica. The automobile made it easier to include these centers in one’s shopping territory.
The Broadway department store had already established a branch in Hollywood as early as 1931, another in Pasadena in 1940, and was researching intensely on the best location for another as early as 1938. Using the 1940 U.S. Census, they determined that the corner of Crenshaw and Santa Barbara held the greatest promise. Fifteen percent of the County—567,000 people--lived within a 20-minute drive from this corner. They had a combined income of $200 million and the highest rates of homeownership in the county: 40.5 percent.[8] Construction crews broke ground for the Broadway-Crenshaw Center in 1945 and when it opened in 1947, it was the most ambitious shopping center yet built in the United States, attempting a complete “functional equivalence” with downtown, rather than offering only a smaller, suburban version of the anchoring downtown department store, and rather than offering upscale alternatives to downtown. The point was to obviate downtown altogether, with variety stores, drug stores, banks, and automobile repair shops.[9] The Broadway-Crenshaw Center was such an ideal place in 1945-7 for a “Main Street” development simply because of the massive military production that had grown up around the Douglas, Northrup, and North American plants in the previous five years.
By the time Gruen had established his Beverly Hills headquarters in the early 1940s, Fritz Burns was already furiously building the social landscapes that would make Gruen’s visionary prescriptions profitable. Burns was the residential developer we last observed at work building tract developments such as Playa del Rey, until the Crash in 1929 temporarily put a wet blanket on his enterprises. Burns, who would become an indefatigable foe of government involvement in the real estate market, quickly figured out how to leverage the New Deal’s housing policies to rebuild his tract-development business. The Federal Housing Authority’s guaranteed mortgage loan program, combined with the upturn in military aircraft orders in 1938-9, enabled Burns to develop and sell tracts even during the depression. His “Westside Village,” centered at National and Overland, sold 788 units by the end of 1939. Implementing industrial methods by setting up a factory-like “staging area” nearby, Burns ruthlessly standardized his designs to conform with FHA guidelines: a “design of 885 square feet, with two bedrooms, one bath, and a two-car garage.” With a total price less than $3,000 and (subsidized) mortgage payments of just $30 a month, Burns had a formula that made money and served the mass end of the market. Burns next built and sold 400 units in his “Toluca Woods,” development near the Cahuenga Pass in the southeast San Fernando Valley: “Minutes away were Lockheed and Vega Aircraft, Warner Brothers, Disney, Universal, and Columbia Studios...”[10]
It was the 1940 Lanham Act, combined with the massive war orders, that defined Burns’s career, however, both profiting from and denouncing government interference with the housing market. That act authorized the construction of 700,000 units of public housing, but also pledged Congressional support for private homebuilders “in areas with acute shortages of affordable housing for war workers.” Burns inserted his profits from Westside Village and Toluca Woods in Westchester, a 1,000-acre tract adjacent to the North American Aviation plant just north of the Municipal Airport (later LAX). The Westchester development, begun in 1941, included a master plan for shopping and recreational facilities, making Gruen’s Milliron store possible in 1949.[11]
While Burns was making a killing from the expanding warfare state, he organized vehemently against government interference in the housing market. He was elected president of the Home Builders Association of Los Angeles in 1942, as ground was broken for the Westchester Business District. In that same year the National Association of Home Builders formed, spurred by concern about the threat posed by the 1940 Lanham Act to private housing markets. Burns used his official position as leader of the Los Angeles home building industry to canvass the nation, speaking tirelessly to mobilize the nation’s private home builders against the “socialization” of the housing market. By 1943 he was elected president of the NAHB itself, and warned FDR against “public housers” in his administration. Burns would emerge in the immediate postwar years as a major and very effective opponent of public housing in Los Angeles.[12]
In the meantime, Burns had his own vision of the future. As if to answer Entenza’s 1943 Case Study House challenge for modernist, socially progressive housing, Burns established his own “Fritz B. Burns Research Division,” and teamed up with architect Welton Beckett in 1943 to design and build a prototype, called simply the “Post-War House.” Later renamed “The House of Tomorrow,” the Postwar House stood at 4950 Wilshire Blvd, near the very busy corner of Wilshire and Highland. The profits Burns had realized to date were peanuts compared with the postwar market he sought to shape: “We must ... be fully prepared to fight for private builders’ just share of this postwar market which, it is estimated, will require the building of 10,000,000 units annually.”[13]
To anchor this dream, Burns poured an astronomical $175,000 into the Postwar House, which became a cornucopia of consumer luxuries, including “the first electric garbage disposal in Los Angeles, the first residential large-screen television, and automatic climate control system, and two-way intercoms between all rooms of the house.”[14] Burns made a lot of money on the Postwar House, but oddly, by treating it as an attraction. He charged $1 for entry, and reportedly totaled 1,000,000 visitors by 1949, at which point he closed it, remodeled it, and re-opened it as an attraction under the new name "House of Tomorrow." When attendance fell off, it became a real estate office, and served as a business address for decades. By the 21st century, it no longer looked futuristic at all. Dilapidated and under foreclosure in 2009, it looked like the "House of the Past." Despite the involvement of the architects Wurdeman and Becket, who would later design the daring Capitol Records building, Burns was opposed to modernist design principles of the Case Study House program. “I feel, and so do my associates--that people today and in the near future-prefer the ‘home-like’ type of house,” Burns explained: “In the mass, they like an exterior design which is reasonably familiar to them. That’s why we offer familiar styles of American home architecture...the ‘revolutionary,’ the strange and bizarre is, I believe, disconcerting.”[1] Revealingly, the 1946 "Souvenir Booklet" that visitors could purchase for an additional 25 cents, presents the home within an overtly traditional aesthetic, sporting a 19th-century font, an old-fashioned picture frame, and rural draperies festooned with frisky horses.
The Republican restoration of 1946-7 on an anti-communist platform gave an enormous boost to Burns’s campaign against “public housers” and secured widespread support for massive residential developments in the 1950s. The Cold War buildup and conversion to aerospace fueled this market as missile and electronics contractors metastacized across the metropolis. During the 1950s thirteen major regional shopping centers (each with a large anchoring department store) had been constructed in Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside Counties: Lakewood (1952); Anaheim Plaza (Anaheim, 1954-7); Buena Park Mall (Buena Park, 1956); Conejo Village (Thousand Oaks, 1959-60); Del Amo Center (Torrance, 1958-61); Eastland (West Covina, 1955-57); Honer Plaza (Santa Ana, 1957-59); Indian Hill Village (Pomona, 1954-56); Los Altos Shopping Center (Long Beach, 1953-56); Riverside Plaza (Riverside, 1955-56); Santa Ana Fashion Square (Santa Ana, 1957-58); South Bay Center (Redondo Beach, 1956-58); Stonewood Center (Downey, 1957-58); and Whittwood Center (Whittier, 1956).[16]
The proliferation of shopping mall landscapes in the dispersion of suburban landscapes inscribed both a topography and aesthetics of power in Cold War Los Angeles. Under the mayoralty of Norris Poulson, an ally Vice President Richard Nixon, the left wing of architectural modernism was sidelined. Most significant was the fate of a progressive Elisian Park Heights public housing project designed by Richard Neutra, to replace the shanty-town landscape of Chavez Ravine. Poulson's government, responding to Fritz Burns and his attack on socialist ideas in residential home-building, cancelled Neutra plan, bought the land back from the Federal Housing Authority, and sold it instead to Brooklyn Dodgers team president Walter O'Malley who built Dodger Stadium (1962) atop of former Mexican-American village, requiring numerous forced evictions before the construction began.
The Mating Dance between artists and the political economy of Los Angeles had by the 1950s fixed in concrete the social shapes of the Cold War state. New-York based Abstract Expressionism, was safe art: seemingly apolitical because utterly unrepresentational. But the 1950s was also a time of rebellion, the rise of a counterculture, and the Civil Rights movement. A new round of the Mating Dance was about to begin, as the midcentury radical avant garde attacked censorship, racism, and the National Security State in the 1950s and 1960s.
ENDNOTES
[1] Longstreth (1999): 116-120. Quotation at 119. 'Post War House' to Display Use of New-Era Innovations." LA Times. March 3 1946; "Home of Tomorrow's Premiere Announced" LA Times March 9, 1951; "Throngs Continue to Visit Home of Tomorrow Exhibit" LA Times April 15, 1951; "LAistory: The Post-War House & The Home of Tomorrow" LAist, http://laist.com/2009/02/07/laistory_the_post-war_house.php#photo-1. Accessed 6 Feb 2015.
[2] Quoted in Hardwick (2004): 82, 95.
[3] Longstreth (1997): 241-245. Quotation at 243.
[4] Hardwick (2004): 93-103.
[5] Longstreth (1997): 330.
[6] Longstreth (1997): 323-335.
[7] Baker and Funaro (1951): 6, cited in Hardwick (2004): 94, 249n6.
[8] Longstreth (1997): 227.
[9] Longstreth (1997): 231.
[10] Keane (2001): 74, 76.
[11] Keane (2001): 79-80, 82-4; Longstreth (1997): 238-245; Hise (1997): 143-4.
[12] Keane (2001): 92-4.
[13] Quoted in Keane (2001): 103.
[14] Keane (2001): 106-7.
[15] Paid advertisement in The Saturday Evening Post in 22 January 1944 [22 Jan 1944], quoted in Keane, Fritz B. Burns, p. 107.
[16] On Lakewood Mall, Waldie (1996): 77-84; All other malls listed in this paragraph are covered in Longstreth, (1997): 341, 463n53.
This page has paths:
- The Fine Art of Rebellion: Southern California Architecture and Avant-Gardes, 1900-2000 Phil Ethington
- structured media gallery test Curtis Fletcher
- Narrative Essays Phil Ethington
This page references:
- Julius Shulman, Milliron Department Store, Westchester, Los Angeles County, 1949
- The Post-War House, AKA House of Tomorrow
- Arts & Architecture Magazine (April 1943)
- The Fritz Burns “Post-War House” and traffic, Wilshire and Highland, Los Angeles. 1945.
- McCoy (1990)
- Note: Julius Shulman
- Sweeney (2001)
- Arts & Architecture (January 1951)
- Sweeney (2001)
- Arts & Architecture (January 1951)
- Hines (1982)
- Arts & Architecture (January 1951)
- Gebhard and Winter (1977)
- Arts & Architecture (January 1951)
- McGirr (2002)
- McCoy (1990)
- Arts & Architecture (April 1953)
- Arts & Architecture (February 1947)
- Crow (1996)
- Ruins of Los Anglees Times Building the day after the bombing, October 1, 1910
- Arts & Architecture (February 1947)
