‘Obscura’ Explores Myths of L.A. Lifestyle

No images capture Modernism’s warm, soothing, hedonistic face better than Julius Shulman’s photographs of the great architectural works of mid-century California. Shulman’s pictures were the first to present these experimental structures to the world at large, and his current show at USC’s Fisher Gallery, “L.A. Obscura: The Architectural Photography of Julius Shulman,” is a nostalgic leap backward to that time, to the delicately balanced suburban utopia that has long been identified with California.

The show, which runs through April 18, was organized by five graduate students under the guidance of Robert Sobieszek, curator of photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Each student examined a theme within Shulman’s work that caught his or her eye. That raised a fascinating opportunity: the chance to examine the fantasies of the past through the lens of the present, decades after Modernism’s blistering rise and subsequent fall. What does little Tommy, now all grown up, think of the life that Mom and Dad once conceived as a glorious model of the future? Do students today see these earlier experiments with misty-eyed longing or cool cynicism?

Those questions, unfortunately, are never deeply explored here. The show’s central themes focus instead on the well-worn myths of the Southern California lifestyle, on the overlapping cliches of a culture bound by freeways and embedded in an artificial landscape. The titles of the show’s accompanying wall texts sum up that point of view: “Carports, Freeways and Parking Lots,” “Leisure and Lifestyle,” “Desert L.A.” Life becomes a smooth blend of cars, highway overpasses, man-made landscapes and streamlined kitchen appliances. Yet skip over the texts and the images collected here reveal a more fragile union between architecture and the world around it.

The show centers on scenes of domestic tranquillity. In a beautifully composed 1958 image of Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House No. 21, all the elements of a suburban fantasy so particular to Los Angeles are carefully interwoven. A Dodge station wagon sits silently under the open steel frame of a carport, nature creeping in all around. In the foreground, twin glasses filled to the brim with crystal-clear water are set on a round table set for two. Only the thin frame of a sliding door separates this domestic scene from the car, which beckons like some glistening escape pod.

When human figures appear in the photos--a rarity--Shulman composes them with equal care. In a 1949 photo of the Harry Harrison’s Engelberg residence, for example, three single beds line up end to end, the first two occupied by pre-pubescent boys. At the back of the room, a third boy stands carefully writing out large numbers on a chalkboard. Reading, rest, study. These are children incapable of vicious little pranks. The folding partitions that separate each boy’s space are thrown trustingly wide open. Modernism, here, is a gentle frame for perfectly balanced lives.

Yet as one moves along the gallery walls the confidence that sustains that vision of domestic bliss begins to come apart. The future seems suddenly less stable. In a 1941 photo of Richard Neutra’s Kahn House in San Francisco--one of the few works here not in L.A.--the gleaming modern box is perched precariously on the edge of a steep cliff. Two thin columns support the house. Taut telephone cables cut across the scene, like trip cords ready to tip the whole structure forward. In a final detail, a small steel-frame window is left ajar in the lower left corner of the building, setting the building gently off balance.

That subtle tension--between the fragility of man’s conceptual world and the natural forces ready to swallow it all up again--gives the show an unexpected edge. A beachfront house appears as a simple glass frame, the powerful curl of a breaking wave cutting the horizon in two in the background. A thin steel column, glass doors thrown open on either side, marks the only boundary between the smooth floor of the living room and the dark mountains looming nearby. In each, Shulman captures the feel of a city perched on the future, but about to get sucked back into the past. Earthquakes? Brush fires? Floods? They all loom nearby. Nature, here, has not been tamed. It is licking its chops, ready to devour us.

It is their delicate vulnerability, as much as their sense of conviction, that makes these buildings so heroic. In a 1960 photo of Koenig’s Case Study House No. 22--the show’s most recognizable image--a living room is suspended on a concrete slab over a night view of Los Angeles’ twinkling grid. Two women sit at the far end of the room, elegantly balanced on the edge of their chairs, the city spread out underneath them. Legs crossed, heads gently tilted to one side, these women were, of course, the real heroes of that age. Each day they polished the dream, concealing the cracks in its well-scrubbed surfaces, smoothing over pauses in the conversation, keeping us all blissfully calm.

That kind of Modernist world, of course, was killed off long ago. By the 1970s and 1980s, the movement was in disrepute, coolly condemned by its children, mangled by the Postmodernists, finally deconstructed by the academics. But the generation enrolled in architecture schools today sees those battles as meaningless. Students no longer see Modernism as a painful disappointment. Set free from its utopian aspirations, they are able to sift through the wreckage for fresh meanings and messages. Shulman’s images hint at other lessons, less dogmatic, that are worth revisiting.

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* “L.A. Obscura: The Architectural Photography of Julius Shulman,” Fisher Gallery, USC, 823 Exposition Blvd., through April 18, (213) 740-4561.