‘House-Machine’ at Home on Southland’s Hillsides
“If we eliminate from our hearts and minds all dead concepts in regard to the houses and look at the question from a critical and objective point of view, we shall arrive at the ‘House-Machine’ . . . beautiful in the way that the working tools and instruments which accompany our existence are beautiful.”
With this famous statement, included in his 1923 book “Towards a New Architecture,” the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier sounded the rallying cry of a radically new manner of design that came to be called the International Style.
The International Style, also known as Modernism, was a deliberate and total break with the traditional fashions in house design--such as the local preference for Craftsman bungalows or Spanish Colonial Revival styles--that prevailed in the 1920s.
Despite its austere ideology, its penchant for plain flat roofs, large glass windows, Cubist white stucco shapes and open floor plans, the International Style was soon adapted to a more livable mode to suit Southern California’s easy climate and relaxed folkways.
Modernism was introduced to Los Angeles and adapted to its ambience by Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler, two gifted emigre Viennese architects. Schindler built Los Angeles’ first purely Modern house in 1922 on Kings Road in what is now West Hollywood.
A series of low pavilions intimately linked to outdoor spaces through glass walls, the design of the Kings Road house fused the garden with interior rooms in a manner that became a major characteristic of the Southland version of the International Style.
For a time the Schindler and Neutra families shared the Kings Road house, which became a meeting place for a generation of young Angeleno architects such as Gregory Ain, Harwell Harris and Raphael Soriano, who would further gentle the Modernist severity to our topography.
Neutra’s own early 1930s house in Silver Lake, sponsored as a research project by the Dutch industrialist C. H. Van der Leeuw, embodied many of the standard characteristics of the style.
A two-story oblong in white stucco with ribbon windows, the VDL House, as it was known, had an open plan and a rooftop solarium. A sleeping porch overlooking Silver Lake reservoir opened off the living room.
Both Neutra and Schindler designed landmark International Style houses for Philip and Leah Lovell, a Los Angeles physician and his wife, who were prototypical Californian health faddists and political radicals.
Schindler designed a beach house for the Lovells at Newport Beach in 1926; Neutra finished a house for the Lovells in the hills overlooking the Silver Lake reservoir in 1929.
Neutra’s Lovell House exemplified another Californian characteristic of the International Style--a fondness for dramatic sites, often on a steep slope.
The 1937 Ernst House, designed by Gregory Ain in the Ferndell section of Los Feliz, is a fine example of dramatic siting. Perched on the edge of a ravine, the house is a Cubist composition of flat, off-white stucco and wraparound glazing with spectacular long views toward downtown.
Owner Bob Tollefson, who bought the house in 1963, said he is an unexpected convert to the International Style.
“My wife, Donna, and I were looking for a Spanish house, but as soon as we walked through the front door we were dazzled by the simplicity and openness of the spaces here,” he said.
Like many Modernist houses set on slopes, the Ernst House inverts the living room and bedroom levels. The bedrooms are below the living room, which is entered off the street level.
All of the main rooms share vistas opened up through floor-to-ceiling corner windows that make the landscape seem part of the house’s interior.
The simplified details, built-in closets and flush surfaces typical of the style reinforce Le Corbusier’s notion of a house as a “machine for living in.”
Following this mechanistic metaphor, the movable furniture found in International Style houses was often restricted to the barest minimum--so much so that there’s a feeling in many Modernist homes that if the architects had had their way, the clean-limbed rooms would be free of all objects and the occupants would sit cross-legged on the floor.
All the purists permitted might be a solemn array of Mies van der Rohe’s famous chrome steel-and-black-leather Barcelona chairs, or maybe a laminated bentwood chaise designed by Finland’s Alvar Aalto. These carefully placed pieces could be accompanied by Marcel Breuer’s elegant cantilevered tubular metal chairs arranged around a Le Corbusier dining table made of plate glass floating on a light steel frame.
The decor might permit a painting by the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, whose abstract geometric canvases were much favored by International Style architects.
In the 1920s and ‘30s, the dictum of “form follows function”--coined by turn-of-the-century Chicago architect Louis Sullivan--became the slogan of a movement in Europe and the United States that expressed a visionary faith in the beauty of machines as an ideal of social and aesthetic perfection free of fake historical nostalgia.
The name International Style was coined at a landmark 1932 exhibition of modern architecture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art that introduced Modernism to the United States, barely a year before Adolf Hitler closed the famous Bauhaus School in Dessau, Germany, and its most influential teachers were forced to flee to America.
In 1945, John Entenza, editor of the Los Angeles-based Arts & Architecture magazine, sponsored a Case Study House program that experimented with an evolution of the International Style in Southern California.
Twenty-six Case Study houses designed by local Modernists--including Charles Eames, Raphael Soriano, Craig Ellwood, Quincy Jones and Neutra--epitomized the International Style at the height of its post-World War II popularity through the 1950s and early ‘60s.
Case Study House No. 22 in the Lookout Mountain area of Los Angeles, designed by Pierre Koenig in 1959, is one of the program’s most dramatic residences.
A light steel I-beam frame supports a deeply cantilevered roof plane covering an L-shaped plan wrapped around a pool on the edge of a precipice. The living room, with floor-to-ceiling glass on three sides, offers spectacular nighttime views over the lights of Los Angeles.
After the Case Study House program petered out, several International Style architects continued to design in the Modernist manner.
Soriano and Ellwood persisted with the purity of Modernism’s expression for another decade, while others, including Neutra, began to play around with less hard-edged materials such as wood and natural stone, and with more romantic plan forms.
Modernist maverick John Lautner elaborated Modernism’s rectangular geometries with the dramatic addition of swirling circles and lush curves in a series of striking houses that continues to this day.
In the 1950s, a fourth generation of local Modernists further domesticated the International Style to Southern Californian conditions.
Ray Kappe, Calvin Straub, Douglas Honnold, Rex Lotery, Bernard Zimmerman, James Pulliam, Thornton Abell, Quincy Jones, Whitney Smith, Ed Killingsworth, Carl Maston and many others developed the simple post-and-beam Modernism first seen in Schindler’s Kings Road house into a series of sophisticated and humane homes.
But the International Style’s severe abstractions, much admired by avant-garde architects and a few adventurous patrons, never really caught on with the public. No tract developer ever adopted Modernism for the mass market.
These machines-for-living-in may have elevated the occupants’ sense of living on the cutting edge of innovation, but they offered little comfort to the body or the soul.
In an International Style house there are no gloomy corners or “unhealthy” nooks and crannies where curious cobwebs or compelling dark thoughts might lurk.
Yet even in our comfort-seeking, historically nostalgic Postmodernist times, the ghost of the International Style will not die. The abstract purity of Modernism appeals to many designers by comparison with the convoluted, often sentimental gestures of the fashions that have followed the International Style.
The image of Le Corbusier’s classic 1931 Villa Savoye at Poissy, France, haunts the imagination of contemporary architects.
A stark white stucco cube topped by Platonic cylinders, floating clear of its greensward on slender columns, the Villa Savoye stands as a superb and enduring icon of Le Corbusier’s credo that, “starting from conditions more or less utilitarian, you have aroused my emotions; this is architecture.”
RECOGNIZING AN INTERNATIONAL-STYLE HOUSE
A preference for horizontal, rectangular, flat-roofed shapes composed of white stucco and large areas of glass.
Frequent dramatic siting on hillsides.
Open interior floor plans with a minimum of internal divisions and an emphasis on clean lines, with most furniture built in.
Fusion of indoor and outdoor spaces through sliding-glass walls.
Smooth surfaces, with an absence of purely decorative details inside or out and free of color, except for a very occasional use of primary reds, yellows or blues.
