The Lost Niemeyer After five decades of relative obscurity, Oscar Niemeyer’s forgotten masterpiece, Alto de Pinheiros, has been rediscovered in a lush corner of São Paulo, Brazil. by Manuel Montenegro and Nicholas Olsberg Tucked inside one of the leafy Garden City developments near the Pinheiros River in western São Paulo, sits a fairly inconspicuous semi-urban villa built in 1974 for a prosperous...
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Welcome to the Valley As the movie and aerospace industries spread to the San Fernando Valley, Rudolph M. Schindler broke new ground in its craggy hills and lowlands. by Judith Sheine With its suburban grids and commercial sprawl, Studio City, California may not seem like the most likely place to find innovative modern twentieth-century works of architecture. But after Austrian architect Rudolph M....
Inhabiting Steel Beverley D. Thorne may have been the lowest-profile and last surviving Case Study architect, but his never-seen-before Oakland residence reveals a world of astounding grandeur. by Pierluigi Serraino To visit the personal home of an architect is the ultimate litmus test of the design aesthetic at work. It is a rare opportunity, revealing the creator’s internal philosophy and tenets....
Wright Time, Wright Place The Henry O. Bollman House isn’t just another nod to Mayan Revival nostalgia. With its use of decorative concrete blocks, Lloyd Wright adapted what he’d learned working with his illustrious father and the innovative Irving Gill and made it his own. by Kathryn Smith As the fear and deprivation of World War I gave way to the optimistic building boom of the early 1920s, the...
Living Lightly on the Land When William Turnbull Jr. designed the Hines House early in Sea Ranch’s history, he took his cues from the weathered slopes, craggy cliffs and pristine beaches. by Mark Morrison Photography by Scott Mayoral and Morley Baer (archive) “I’ll sleep there sometimes,” says Shev Rush, referring to the living room window seat of his multi-story Sonoma Coast home. It’s...
Editor's Note By Crosby Doe A Los Angeles Times reporter once asked me to name my favorite L.A. house. I chose the Walter L. Dodge House by architect Irving J. Gill—and I am still fascinated by the elegance of the design, the power in its simplicity, the use of materials and finishes, and what, to me, was the ideal plan for living in a California garden. However, I never got to experience the...
American Idyll With the restoration of a neglected mid-century Neutra home in the West Covina hills came a renewed sense of history and a revived quality of life. by Mark Morrison Photo by Cameron Carothers The first time Deborah Chumi Paul set eyes on Richard Neutra’s Roberts House in early 2014, it looked more like a drug den than a mid-century find. “There was garbage everywhere, needles...
Editor's Note: Appreciation and Preservation By Crosby Doe Two years ago, Richard Neutra’s mid-century Roberts House sat derelict, decaying and ripe for demolition when the 60-year-old property hit the market. Thankfully, wiser and more enlightened minds prevailed, and the house fell into the right hands as detailed in this issue’s cover story, appropriately titled “American Idyll.” Earlier this...
The Art of Mastering the Slope Never one to run from a creative challenge, Rudolph Schindler proved he could conquer hillside terrain with his innovative Kallis House in suburban Los Angeles. by Nicholas Olsberg As our perspective on mid-20th-century Los Angeles grows with the passage of time, we are quicker to recognize that its experiments in modern living were as vast as they were varied and the...
Pletsch in Pasadena by Barbara Lamprecht “I have lived with over 500 women—because I have over 500 houses,” Theodore Pletsch told an interviewer in 1985 while recording his oral history. “I have learned how to dig a house out of a woman’s mind. Matter of fact, I sit down on a slope board and I draw it in front of them. We just talk and I draw. Sometimes they help me draw.” Nowhere is his...