The Bohemian Left in the 1920s
“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]
