Still standing: Schindler House West Hollywood – ADC

A snapshot scene of 835 Kings Road in Hollywood, California, in the late 1920s, shortly after its completion:

“The influential health guru Philip Lovell, the actors Arthur Rankin and George O’Hara, the newly arrived Austrian architect Richard Neutra and family, and the already eminent photographer Edward Weston… The art agent Galka Scheyer, representing Lyonel Feininger and Wassily Kandinsky; an emergent John Cage, studying with the established Arnold Schoenberg; and the eccentric bon vivant Sadakichi Hartmann all gathered in the landscaped courtyards, illuminated only by the intense glow of the outdoor fireplaces…”

Sounds like a helluva party.

This portrait of life in the home of Rudolph Schindler—sketched by contemporary designer Mark Mack, another Austrian turned Angelino—compresses things somewhat. But it conveys the basic tenor of the goings-on at the remarkable house the Vienna-born architect designed for himself and his then wife Pauline in what was, at the time, the cultural Wild West of the United States. Having been dispatched to LA by his sometime master Frank Lloyd Wright, Schindler put down roots and put out a shingle for himself, then turned his private home into the centre of operations for his mission to turn Tinseltown into a mecca for Modernism in art and architecture.

The house’s design opened up a key front in this larger battle. Los Angeles in the second decade of the 20th century was, in the words of author Nathaniel West, a “dream dump,” a vast and dismal “Sargasso” of poorly-constructed, poorly-furnished homes unconvincingly stylised in shades of Tudor, French Renaissance, and the ubiquitous Spanish Mission. The incursions of Schindler, Wright, and Wright’s sometime colleague Irving Gill had thus far only begun to strike a blow for good taste; by 1922, having spent the last two years as the grand old Chicagoan’s designated West Coast factotum, Schindler decided it was time to make a gesture of his own.

What he created does not, to put it mildly, lend itself easily to expository description. Pinwheel in plan, with multiple spokes protruding outward into the landscape, the Kings Road house is a confounding whirl of private and public, work spaces and social spaces, with garden courtyards penetrating inwards towards the central node. The planar and spatial complexity marks Schindler’s first assault on the plodding processional normalcy of the prevailing residential scene; the program presses the attack, breaking up the typical domestic arrangement with a two-family, communal living arrangement centered around a shared kitchen and dining space. For their first pair of home mates, Rudolph and Pauline tapped construction contractor Clyde Chace and his wife Marian—a fitting choice, since it was Mr. Chace who ticked off the last item on the building’s radical agenda: its tilted-concrete walls, a construction technique first pioneered by Gill and intended to make low-cost housing easier and less labour-intensive, with poured-in-place panels that could be lifted into position (as Schindler claimed in a private letter) “by as few as two men.”

Whatever the financial advantages of the architect’s approach, Schindler made the most of the building’s material and spatial economy, squeezing every inch of the3,500-square-foot interior for mystery and tranquility. Between the leaning mottled panels, the Southern California sunshine is squeezed into narrow glazed channels that pierce the interior like laser beams.

Clerestory windows and canvas partitions condition the light, which filters down to splash across the burnished concrete floors. The gardens surround the house, and a high hedge surrounds the garden, giving the whole place a feeling of total campestral seclusion. Worlds away from the typical houses of its time, the house is also a world unto itself, less like a building one enters than like a kaleidoscope held to one’s eye, now brown and yellow, now grey and green.

Not as an inevitable consequence of the house’s extraordinary design, yet somehow plainly an extension of it, the Schindlers helped to cultivate a burgeoning artistic atmosphere in Hollywood that prefigured—and, in time, would help give rise to—Los Angeles’s status as an essential node on the global cultural network. The thinkers and makers who flocked to the house represented the first flowering of that now-famous local scene, though like all such blooms, this one was fleeting: by 1927, Pauline and Rudolph called it quits and she left the house; Schindler’s relationship with Neutra also soured, as it did with Wright and his assorted LA-based sons, splitting the city’s Modernist community into warring camps. While Schindler’s career marched on, the party on Kings Road never quite came back. What did come back, oddly enough, was Mrs. Schindler, who returned to live in the separate apartment and remained there along with Schindler until his death in 1953. The tension of this chilly ménage may be one reason the glitterati decided to move on.

That they did so surely proves that the house itself, for all its extraordinary character and architectural radicalism, was not so much a launching pad for LA’s great leap into modernity as a convenient stepping stone along the way. And yet Schindler did seem to have a knack for creating not merely cozy, convivial modernist spaces, but authentic incubators for culture. To this fact the present author can personally attest.

My grandmother was a dancer who trained and performed with Modernist dance companies in the 1930s. At the height of the Depression, she found a job with a troupe that brought her from her native Brooklyn to Los Angeles, where she landed in a peculiar housing complex in the Silver Lake neighbourhood, recalled by her as a funky pile of apartments with courtyards and shaded pergolas, and which served during her time there as a de facto commune for progressive creatives like herself.

In later years, she described the experience as one of the highlights of her life—but it was only when the author tracked down the address that he, and she, realised that the building in question was Rudolph Schindler’s Sachs Apartments, built just two years after his Kings Street Road house and in a similar mode. Plenty of architects can claim to be builders of communities. Schindler is one of a rare breed: a maker of entire milieus; of circles; of movements pointing toward a possible future.