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• 1 2018-07-19T22:03:29-07:00 From Vienna to Chicago to Los Angeles: The Formation of Southern California Modernism, 1890s-1920s 1 plain 2018-07-19T22:03:30-07:00 By the early 1920s, Los Angeles produced its first global aesthetic export: Southern California Modernism, led by Austrian émigrés Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra.  During the 1890s, while the Chamber of Commerce oligarchs were still envisioning the future growth of Los Angeles, Chicago was recognized worldwide as the cutting-edge city of industrial modernity. There industrialism and immigration had produced a mighty metropolis from a swampy village in little more than fifty years. The White City exposition of 1893 drew millions of visitors, launched the University of Chicago, and drew attention to the revolutionary architectural ideas of Louis Sullivan. Sullivan and his partner Dagmar Adler were not only using steel skeletons to lift office buildings to new heights: they sought to remake aesthetics to match the modern era. Sullivan’s slogan, “form follows function,” spelled the doom of Victorian aesthetics and launched the great worldwide modernist movement in architecture and design.[note]
  
  Excited by Sullivan’s vision were Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos, professors of the Austrian Royal Academy in Vienna. Beginning in the 1860s, Hapsburg Emperor Franz Joseph I ordered the rebuilding of Vienna around the Ringstrasse as a showcase for his empire. The resulting jumble of historical styles provoked Wagner and Loos to lead the “Vienna Secession.” In 1895 Wagner published Modern Architecture, arguing that every age has its own style, and that the age of machines should have a style to match is functional logic. Loos went further in a provocative essay, equating ornament with crime.[note] Crusading to eliminate unnecessary decoration, Loos traveled to Chicago in the 1890s to see the work of Louis Sullivan for himself.[note] Meanwhile, another disciple in Sullivan’s Chicago office was the young Frank Lloyd Wright, who brought a concern for the natural landscape into the modernist architectural movement. Wright reinvented the home by balancing machine age functionality with the harmony of nature, creating dynamic spaces that opened outward into an integrated natural landscape, with an aesthetic that seemed also to grow from nature.
  
  Touring Europe in 1910, Wright brought his drawings to Germany, where Ernst Wasmuth published them in 1911. This Wasmuth Portfolio won instant acclaim across Europe. Amazed by Wright’s Wasmuth Portfolio were two brilliant Viennese students of Wagner and Loos: Rudolph Schindler (1887-1953) and Richard Neutra (1892-1970). As mentor to Schindler and Neutra, Loos taught them his “Raumplan” methods shaping a floor plan into dynamic, interlocking spaces. Above all, Loos implored both young men to go seek out Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago. Schindler did so in 1914, just before the outbreak of the Great War. By 1918, Schindler became Wright’s senior apprentice and office manager while Wright began his monumental Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Neutra remained in Vienna, was drafted and fought for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and eventually was decommissioned in 1918. Its militarists defeated, Germany underwent a period of massive restoration during the Weimar periods and Neutra went to Berlin to work for Germany’s most innovative modernist: the expressionist Erich Mendelsohn. With the founding of the Bauhaus school of design in 1919, Germany gained leadership in the modernist movement. Under the direction of its founding director, Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus promoted a social vision for architecture: Simple designs with strong modern materials made affordable and healthy housing for the working classes. Swiss prodigy Le Corbusier moved to Germany and published “Toward a New Architecture” in 1923. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe later came to direct the Bauhaus, steering it back in the rightward direction of aesthetic commercialism. This was the new generation of modernists: Gropius, Mies, Le Corbusier, Neutra and Schindler.[note]
  
  Meanwhile, in 1919, Aline Barnsdall, Chicago patron of avant-garde theatre, transferred to Los Angeles and commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design her Hollyhock House (1919-21). Wright, still consumed with the Imperial Hotel, summoned Schindler to Los Angeles to supervise Hollyhock. In Los Angeles, Wright experimented with new materials and forms using textured concrete blocks.[note] Schindler, working with Wright’s eldest son Lloyd Wright, supervised Wright’s four landmark “textile-block” houses: Millard, Storer, Freeman, and Ennis houses (all 1923).[note] In the process of supervising Wright’s Los Angeles projects, Schindler came to see Southern California as the ideal environment for modern architecture. The new city welcomed new forms, but also offered a regional vernacular. Schindler made his first major statement with his own Kings Road House, completed in 1922. With his American wife Pauline, a progressive political activist, their home became the center of the Avant-garde modernists in Southern California.[note] Also in 1922, Neutra left Berlin to spend two years with Frank Lloyd Wright at the master’s legendary Taliesen studio in Wisconsin. But Schindler soon insisted that his former classmate Neutra join him in Los Angeles, and in 1925 Richard and his wife Dione Neutra moved into the Kings Road House. Together, Schindler and Neutra founded Southern California Modernism.[note]