ARCHITECTURE : A Sense of Loss at Unique Community
As you rise up out of Kenter Canyon in Brentwood, a sign warns you that you are entering “Crestwood Hills--An Architecturally Controlled Community.” But you won’t find architecture police patrolling the winding streets for anything that is not a weak imitation of Spanish Colonial imagery.
Crestwood Hills is unlike almost every other controlled Southern California community. There are sweeping roofs supported by clearly expressed wood timbers, and grids of frosted glass and wood enclose the space sheltered below those roofs. Balconies zoom off the hillside with diagonal detailing, and sober whites and grays dominate over pink stucco and red tile.
This particular community looks different because it was not planned by a developer to reflect cliches about wealthy living. It was designed by and for a group of several hundred families of modest means.
In 1946, when this was still the wilds of West Los Angeles, a group of artists, musicians and academics founded the Mutual Housing Assn. The group bought the canyon and hillsides to the east and north of Kenter Avenue and asked architects A. Quincy Jones and Whitney Smith and engineer Edgardo Contini to design three dozen affordable and flexible home plans for the sloping sites.
They all agreed that the best land, a flat area at the end of the canyon, should be a communal area with a park, activity center and school.
By pooling their resources and calling on these modernist designers to create easily built homes that would reflect a way of life open to both nature and new social attitudes, they hoped to create a freer, more open community.
You can see the result of Jones’, Smith’s and Contini’s efforts in the houses at 12404 and 12408 Rochedale Lane. Their sloping roofs dominate the design, providing a man-made counterpoint to the landscape.
Ridge beams and extensions of the roof into open latticework make you understand the simple structure of the houses. Grids contain and visually control the mixture of clear and opaque surfaces that let light in while providing privacy.
Inside, most of the space is given over to an expansive living area. These are tall spaces open to the views and anchored by a fireplace. The kitchen appliances are combined into one unit that juts into the space at an angle. There is an immense feeling of clarity, simplicity and openness about these houses.
Over the years, almost every homeowner has extended his or her house with garages and extra bedrooms. The most disappointing changes are the ubiquitous walls and hedges. They have transformed the composition of fragments that completed itself as a communal landscape into isolated houses hiding behind screens that provide security and privacy.
Driving by the blank walls and giant garages of Crestwood Hills, you often have a hard time finding the modest homes that once made up this Utopian idyll. You also wonder what it is that the Design Review Board is controlling, since many of the additions seem unsympathetic to the original designs.
The Mutual Housing Assn. has come a long way in its transformation of Crestwood Hills. The changes started even before construction, when the FHA refused mortgages to this racially mixed group, causing mass defections.
The more recent development of Brentwood, where a million dollars gets you a shack, has also meant that the members of the creative community have given way to those who can better afford such a bucolic ramble.
Look past the hedges, though, and you can still see the framework out of which a few optimistic people once hoped to construct a community made up of houses in an open relationship to each other and to nature. They built it and, even if it was for a short period, lived that dream.
