Time to Work Out the Angles : 38 Years Later, Architect Still Labors Over His ‘Unfinished Symphony’

For 38 years, architect George Frank Ligar has been painstakingly building a dream house on the slope of a hill in the View Park section of Baldwin Hills. He may be finished in, oh, about two years.

Ligar, who in the 1950s briefly won international recognition for his geometrically designed houses in the style of organic architecture that was pioneered by the late Frank Lloyd Wright, holds what is believed to be the longest-running building permit ever in Los Angeles County, officials say.

Now 70, Ligar still finds time to periodically work on the house he started in 1951 and calls his “unfinished symphony.”

“Most houses are nothing more than coffins,” he said. “You know what a coffin is--it’s a box. And that is what most houses look like--boxes with holes for doors to go from room to room and holes for windows to look outside. There is no emotion or feeling behind it. I try to create something that has feeling, something with character, expression. It’s not just so many square feet.”

The unfinished house, which is built to resemble an equilateral triangle and fashioned out of concrete and stone, is taking so long to build, he said, in large part because a mudslide three decades ago buried the project, causing him to lose his financing. “I had to start over from scratch,” he said in his gentlemanly fashion. “I had to finish the house on my own, sort of pay as you go.”

Not all the neighbors are so enthusiastic about Ligar’s visionary house. Over the years, some have blamed him for maintaining an unsightly, even hazardous property.

Vera Jo Smith, who has lived next to Ligar’s property on Presidio Drive since 1951, wonders why he has been allowed to stall development for so many years. “I don’t see how he can get a permit to build a house and take 35 years to do it,” she said. “It’s an eyesore and I have complained many times, but nothing does any good.”

Initially, the county lacked the authority to force Ligar to complete the house because there was nothing in the law setting time limits for builders. In 1971, the law was changed--largely in response to complaints about Ligar’s project.

Code Revised

The Board of Supervisors revised the building code to make it a misdemeanor if a project takes more than five years to complete and if it “detracts from the appearance of the neighborhood or reduces the value of property.” Ligar’s house was declared substandard by the county’s Building Rehabilitation Board and the architect was ordered to complete the structure or demolish it.

However, Tim D. Hansen, a deputy district attorney at the time, declined to take the matter to court. In a 1972 letter, Hansen wrote that “I could in no way envision Mr. Ligar’s project as substandard.” He added that he thought the property would probably be “extremely valuable when completed.”

Hansen said recently that he recommended against prosecuting the case because he did not believe that it was the intent of the Board of Supervisors to use the law to tear down a man’s life work. “That would have been a very hard decision to make,” he said.

Donald Wolfe, superintendent of building for the county Department of Public Works, said Ligar will be allowed to continue to work on the house under a 1955 building permit (his second for the house) until the job is completed. Ligar estimates that may take another two years.

The triangle pattern is repeated throughout the house. The roof, with its heavy redwood beams, reflects the triangular pattern. The mailbox is in the shape of a triangle, and even the sidewalk is laid out in triangles.

The large rock walls give the house the appearance of a fortress, a look Ligar said is fitting on a street called Presidio. Ligar said he personally built the walls with more than 350 cubic yards of concrete and 360 tons of rock trucked in from Malibu beaches.

He hired contractors to help put up 20 tons of reinforcing steel, he added. In hand-building the walls, Ligar was careful not to put rocks of the same color or size next to each other and to fill in the spaces with smaller rocks to give the wall a solid, natural appearance, he said.

Because it has taken so long, Ligar said he can’t estimate how much he has spent on his labor of love.

Despite the completed walls and roof, much of the 1,700-square-foot house remains open to the elements. The hole for a swimming pool is built into a slope above the house. There are plans to include a waterfall, and there is a concrete room designed as a 1950s-era bomb shelter. Inside, the living room is dominated by a large rock fireplace. Much of the rest of the house is unfinished.

Ligar, who studied architecture at USC and now lives in Huntington Park with his mother, said his critics want to force him to abandon the home because they don’t understand what he is doing.

“They want to bring things down to their level of understanding, and if they can’t do that, then they reject it,” said Ligar, who was born in Russia to Greek parents.

The design, he said, is called “organic because it gives the appearance of being created by nature as if it grew out of the ground, rather than just being parked on it.”

The same concept was used in his design of a house completed in 1955 on Cantada Drive in the Hollywood Hills that became known as the “Beehive House” because of its domed, circular design. The house actually has 24 sides, each angled so slightly that it appears to be round. A free-standing round fireplace is at the center of the house.

To Ligar, most contemporary architecture is big business, not art. “It is a business profession of pseudo-intellectualism and hush-hush, underhanded public relations work,” he wrote some time ago. “True merit and expression of deep, creative feeling have no place. Architecture has lost no audience or glamour--there is a plethora of both. All it has lost is architecture.”

Eric Wright, 59-year-old grandson of Frank Lloyd Wright, is familiar with Ligar’s architectural practice, which he still maintains. “He was a great admirer of my grandfather,” Wright said. “I saw his house when it was under construction in the late ‘60s. It was very much built in the style my grandfather called organic.”

And even though some View Park residents sneer at it, others have grown to appreciate the house over the years.

“It adds something special to the community,” Patricia Yeldell said. “People are always stopping to admire the wall. My husband is 41 years old and he remembers seeing (Ligar) building the house as he walked by on his way to high school. That was over 20 years ago.”