ARCHITECTURE : Aging Strips Veneer of Modernity to Reveal Apartments’ Basic Roots

In architecture, things are not always what they seem. Often, we dress our buildings up to look as if they were built by the Spanish in the 17th Century, or the French in the 18th. Even modernist architects fake it; they try to make their buildings look new, machined and precisely manufactured, even when they are made out of the same materials put together in the same way as those Spanish neo-haciendas.

That is certainly the case with one of the most famous pieces of modern architecture in Los Angeles, the 1937 Strathmore Apartments designed by Richard Neutra.

After 50 years, the stark white planes and seemingly machined metal mullions that once made this complex sing of a simpler world are now sagging and chipping, revealing the simple wood frame construction and stucco layers underneath the veneer of modernity.

Neutra biographer and UCLA Prof. Thomas Hines tells the story of one of the famous architect’s junior designers asking him, “What is the best material out of which to build a steel house?”

“Wood, of course,” was Neutra’s supposed reply.

Wood was the cheapest, easiest-to-use building block for any fantasy set, including one that was about the honesty of modern materials. Now old age has revealed the nature of that romance.

The aging process has also brought out the historical roots of the complex. These eight apartments are arranged around a central staircase rising up a hill to connect a series of gardens and porches, so that the whole structure looks like a turn-of-the-century bungalow court that has been tilted uphill.

The same half-century has allowed trees and shrubs to surround the pristine, naked forms, clothing them with all the lushness that our climate, with a little help, is capable of. The result is an apartment building whose clear forms and assertive geometries have been mellowed into something that looks quite at home, nestled into its corner of fraternity row.

Period photographs show the building sitting all by itself, its naked forms matched by the barren hills of Westwood. Neutra developed this and several other apartment buildings in the area, and he and his family helped transform this outpost into a neighborhood crammed with apartment buildings and condominiums. Now it is only the front of the Strathmore, hemmed in on both sides by lesser buildings hiding the sides of the complex, that still gives you an idea of how different Neutra’s creation once looked.

Two blocks of white stucco enclose wood garage doors painted to look like metal, while above these sturdy ramparts the buildings dissolve into lines of glass caught between wood mullions treated with the same metallic paint. Strong horizontal eaves contain the glass box, creating dark shadows.

The building is not rigid: Pieces of the stucco wall come forward to anchor the composition at either end, and the walls of glass above recede to make way for balconies. As you walk between these resolutely human-built forms, the buildings recede and the foliage takes over. Glimpses of white walls and the intersection of window mullions direct you toward entrance porches beyond which the apartments flow in carefully choreographed levels and rhythms of light and shade.

The whole experience of moving past the announcement of the modern world at the front (where you park your up-to-date car), through the slot, into the garden world of the hillside and finally to the lively, light-filled cubicles of the apartments makes you relive the dream of building a machine in the garden. Here is technology married to its site, here is modernism building a beautiful new world even if it had to fake it a little bit here and there, and had to become a piece of history in the process.