ARCHITECTURE : Freeman House Is a Victim of Its Own Splendid Daring

When people ask me to define the term architecture, I often answer: “If the roof leaks, it must be architecture.” Though this might sound a bit facetious, there is a reason why good architecture so often seems to be plagued with leaking roofs or other functional problems: Good architects take chances, refuse to abide by rules, and try to come up with structures that open our eyes.

One of my favorite examples of such risk-taking and roof-leaking sits above Highland Avenue in the Hollywood Hills. The Freeman House was designed in 1924 by Frank Lloyd Wright. It is a magnificent building, but it is falling apart. Terraces are falling down the hillside, walls bulge and whole pieces of the house are separating from one another.

It is in bad shape because Wright had the idea that a house should be made out of the materials of its site and should give back to the site what it had taken away. In the 1920s, Wright put his theory to practice in a series of four houses in Los Angeles, each of them constructed out of “textile block,” a stamped concrete structural block that, at least in theory, could be made out of the sand of the site. Wright had the thousands of 16-inch pieces for the Freeman house poured one by one, on the site, and emblazoned them with a motif that represents the plan of the house itself.

There is no foundation, since the house was meant to grow out of the site, and the roof was given over to terraces, so that the open site taken away by the construction could be regained. The house was meant to be an addition to the hillside, a cantilevering jungle gym of different levels moving out to capture the sheer verticality of the place.

The Freeman House is essentially a retaining wall set into a steep hillside and a cage of concrete block columns and beams that opens out to the view of the Los Angeles Basin. Everywhere you go, you are made aware of the site. Wright accomplishes this awareness by continually changing your direction and level as you move through the otherwise rather modest two-bedroom house. You are always moving from the darkness of the hill to the light of the sun, which is allowed to define the spaces of living.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the living room, where a hearth sits in the blank northern wall, facing two columns that define a rather grand living area and frame a projecting balcony that steps down and out to meet the stream of traffic coming up Highland Avenue. The sense of shelter and release is increased by Wright’s use of corner windows and stepped ceiling planes: You are continually being pressed by structure and pulled by light.

This choreography in concrete is elaborated by the almost 60 pieces of furniture designed by Wright’s associate on the job, R. M. Schindler, who spent 25 years making the house more livable as the needs of the clients changed. All of Schindler’s furniture folds out to reveal hidden storage or to open rooms to each other while at the same time providing a mirror, a table or a seat.

It is the very complexity and daring of the Freeman House that is its downfall. All those levels, all those blocks, all those cantilevers and windows that make the house such a masterpiece of form seem to want to fragment out and literally go sailing down the hillside. Luckily, the house is now owned by the USC School of Architecture, which is raising money for restoration of the house. The money spent will be well worth it, because there are few structures in our city that more fully engage the landscape and show us the potential of living in the hills.