Significant architecture lost to time skin#

Several decades later still, he completed his magisterially curvilinear Disney Hall, which remains the architectural icon of the city.Īt the other end of the spectrum of cultural importance and triumphant commercial deployment of content-free avant-garde aesthetics sits a host of so-called Googie-style buildings, roadside shops and restaurants, with their large windows, oversized graphic and monumental commercial signs, designed to be seen at speed from the car.

Significant architecture lost to time skin#

A couple of decades later Frank Gehry built his seminal essay in postmodern aesthetics in the form of his house in Santa Monica (1977–78), with its enclosure of a conventional house in a skin of confrontational and dramatic angular planes, formed from industrial materials. From the dawn of the jet age comes the wonderfully futuristic and thus dated LAX Theme Building (used as a visual leitmotif for the marketing of the exhibition) standing in all its curved, spiderlike-cum-UFO glory. Innovative design survived, of course, but mainly in the form of a few rare trophy buildings that articulated the zeitgeist. So it was that economic pragmatism prevailed over the utopian hopes of so many architects. In the process, they jettisoned any attempt to refashion the world through design in favor of giving the market what it wanted: simple homes aesthetically decked out in colonial or ranch styles. While form following function was an intellectual mantra for modernists the world over, these commercial builders proved so functional that they didn't bother to employ architects at all.

Exemplary was the world's largest home builders, Kaiser Community Homes, which in the late 1940s was building 20 houses a day using mass production and prefabrication techniques developed during the war.

These structures were built, however, not by creative architectural firms, nor by urban planers, but by defense and other industrial companies, armed with government loans and repositioning for peace. of sprawling, identikit suburbia, familiar to us now, was built. In 2000 the majority of the structures in L.A.-52 percent-dated from 1940 to 1969. Just as these particular dreams were fading, other rather more pragmatic but vastly more ambitious (in terms of scale at least) visions of the future succeeded in making themselves manifest. With the McCarthy era looming, however, the wider community looked upon the group's progressive ideals as verging on anti-American socialism, and this, combined with a number of practical problems, limited the project and only 100 were built. In 1945 a cooperative of progressively minded individuals formed the Mutual Housing Association and hired a top modernist team to design 500 low-cost homes in Brentwood Hills. (Few of the more visionary architects had the foresight or drive to team up with the large-scale property developers who emerged postwar.) However, in some instances opposition to expressions of modernist principles was explicitly political. Mostly, architects suffered from the small-scale and bespoke nature of their operations that naturally limited legacy. with a cluster of historical trends, their impact on the weight of history was minimal. While these local outbreaks of ideologically sophisticated design left L.A. Most experimentally of all, John Entenza, editor of Arts & Architecture magazine, became proactive in trying to launch the Case Study House Program, which ran from 1945 to 1966, commissioning eight innovative architectural firms to design eight model homes.

In 1944 the magazine Architectural Forum, anticipating the postwar hunger for change and innovation, published an issue on 'New Building for 194X' filled with creative ideas for new styles and forms for living. In the 1920s Austrian emigrés Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler attempted to adapt the ideals of Frank Lloyd Wright to create Southern Californian modernism for the masses, experimenting with new materials and glass-enabled design principles to dissolve traditional boundaries between the interior of buildings and the exterior world. There were moments when alternative visions flourished.