A Liberator Finally Gets His Due

In the mythological landscape of Los Angeles, architecture still revolves around two opposing figures: Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler. Neutra was the publicity-seeking genius; Schindler the talented second fiddle, the underappreciated bon vivant.

The truth, of course, is more subtle. Judging by the work he produced in Los Angeles from 1922 to his death in 1953, Schindler was an undeniable success, a larger-than-life figure who created half a dozen or so genuine architectural masterpieces. But his raw, somewhat sculptural designs were out of step with the functional Modernism favored by the cultural establishment of the time, and he never received the adulation for a first-rate talent. Seen from our age of relentless self-promotion--where celebrity is the only measure of greatness--that makes him a flop.

Now, thanks to a number of books, seminars and exhibitions, including a retrospective opening today at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, Schindler is finally getting his due. But what makes Schindler’s revival so compelling is not the supposed injustices of the past, but the relevance of his work to the present. No architect of his generation embodied a spirit of freedom like Schindler. As such, he has become a model for young architects afraid of being swallowed up by the new global culture.

Schindler was born in Vienna in 1887. Trained as an engineer, he studied at the Vienna Academy of Arts under Otto Wagner--a central figure in the birth of the Modern movement. Wagner--along with a younger generation that included Josef Hoffman and Adolf Loos--saw the neoclassical style that dominated the 19th century as the flotsam of a dying culture--one that had yet to come to grips with the advancing technological age.

But to Schindler, Wagner may have been most important as an advocate for artistic freedom. As an architect, Wagner could not completely shed himself of the past. Modern in spirit, the taut facades of his best-known works--and, to a lesser degree, of the works of Hoffman and Loos--concealed interiors that retained many of the trappings of bourgeois life.

Schindler’s first glimpse of a more open future came some time after 1911, with the publication of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wasmuth Portfolio. A collection of his Oak Park designs, the portfolio depicted houses whose informal entries, free-flowing plans and low-slung roofs represented a radically new architectural language--one liberated from the crushing weight of history.

For Schindler, the portfolio was a revelation. In 1914, the young architect set out for Chicago. His timing could not have been worse. When he arrived, Wright was still reeling from the scandal of his affair with a client’s wife, Mamie Cheney. Two months later, Mamie was dead, murdered by a family servant who then burned down Wright’s Wisconsin workshop.

Schindler would have to wait four years before Wright would hire him--without pay--in 1918. Nonetheless, there is little doubt that the time he spent in Wright’s office left a deep impression. Almost immediately, he was given tremendous responsibility, including work engineering the monumental Imperial Hotel in Tokyo--one of Wright’s greatest achievements.

But equally important, Schindler displayed an intuitive knack for creative survival. Even as he sought to decipher Wright’s genius, he was itching to make his own mark.

The break came with startling speed. In 1920, Wright sent Schindler to Los Angeles to oversee construction of Aline Barnsdall’s Hollyhock House, the first of Wright’s Mayan-inspired structures. Soon, Schindler was placed in charge of the design of other buildings on the site, including a small director’s residence. Within a year, he had launched his own office. By 1922, at 34, he had completed his masterwork, his Kings Road house in West Hollywood.

*

The house is a brilliant synthesis of Schindler’s social and aesthetic beliefs. Set in an open field, it was conceived as an experiment in communal living. The pinwheel-like plan allowed two couples to live at opposite ends of the house, with a shared living room joining the two wings, which frame a series of garden courts. On warm nights, couples could sleep on the roof in wood-frame structures covered with light canvas tarps.

That sense of communal idealism was reinforced in the building’s structural design. Schindler modeled the house’s tilt-up concrete slabs on those used by Irving Gill in the design of the 1914 La Jolla Women’s Club. But Schindler’s structure is lighter, less monumental. Light streams through narrow gaps between the slabs or through clerestories above. Sliding canvas and glass partitions open up the house entirely to the gardens.

Few works could match it. In comparison, Le Corbusier’s apartment studio in Paris for the painter Amedee Ozenfant--also completed in 1922--was radical because of its unadorned simplicity. As a composition, it is little more than a diagram. In America, the legendary competition for a new Chicago Tribune headquarters building produced several modern designs--including Loos’ remarkable skyscraper in the form of a giant Doric column. But they were quickly dismissed by locals as a new form of insanity.

The Kings Road house, meanwhile, quickly became a sort of Bohemian salon, with late-night poetry readings, music recitals and semi-nude ballets performed in front of roaring fires--all organized by his increasingly unstable wife, Pauline. (Pauline, who attempted suicide in 1924, left Kings Road three years later. The couple divorced in 1940.)

When Neutra arrived at Kings Road in 1925, Schindler was working on the Lovell Beach House in Newport Beach. According to legend, the two architects worked side by side in a storm of creative activity until 1929, when Philip Lovell hired Neutra to design a second house, this one on a hillside in Los Feliz. Had the project originally been promised to Schindler, as the architect later claimed? Had Neutra cunningly stolen Schindler’s one wealthy client?

Who knows? What matters is that the Newport Beach and Loz Feliz houses--both masterpieces in their own right--reveal the philosophical distance between the two architects. Despite its Modernist agenda, Schindler’s design seemed to spring out of its immediate context. Propped up on a series of concrete piers, its exterior was a complex sequence of interlocking forms--like a three-dimensional Cubist painting. Exterior stairs wove their way up through the piers. Inside, the apartments were equipped with loft-like balconies and roof terraces. Views opened up everywhere: through narrow, vertical-slot windows and long, horizontal bands of glass.

Neutra’s house, on the other hand, completed three years later, was a picture of rational order. The first steel-frame house built in America, its form jutted out of the side of the hill like a ship’s prow. Its taut facade and cantilevered planes were intended as models for a new machine-age aesthetic--a composition of light, air and glass that was meant to foster physical and psychological well-being.

It was Neutra’s vision that captured the attention of the East Coast establishment. In 1932, Philip Johnson chose Neutra for the now legendary “International Style” show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art--the only California architect to be included.

Schindler was enraged. But the choice had a certain logic: Johnson’s mission was to introduce America to a new--and uniform--architectural style--the sleek, rational Modernism that equated form with function and modernity with a machine-like efficiency. He had little interest in Modernism’s underlying social meaning.

One could argue that it was Schindler’s imaginative freedom that doomed him at MOMA. But it is also possible to see the rejection as a blessing in disguise. Without the imprimatur of Johnson and his ilk, there was little temptation to return to the internationalist fold. Instead, he would burrow more deeply into the specific conditions of life in Los Angeles: its toasty climate, sprawling landscape, ephemeral structures, and capacity for indoor and outdoor living. His clients would continue to be left-leaning intellectuals like himself--not the small, wealthy cultural elites who considered themselves patrons of the avant-garde.

The results were often stunning. Schindler’s 1934 design for the Oliver House in Silver Lake, for example, is a masterful blend of Classic Modernism and an idiosyncratic aesthetic more closely rooted to its context. Seen from the street, the house’s long, planar facade, horizontal windows and folding planes have a crisp simplicity. Inside, however, the house steps up gently to create two wings that enclose an interior courtyard. Above, a large, pitched roof folds down over the main living spaces like an enormous wing.

*

As Schindler matured, his work became even more eccentric and free. Unlike Neutra, who remained enamored of the sleek, glass-and-steel aesthetic of Classical Modernism throughout his life, Schindler was increasingly drawn to affordable, everyday materials--stucco exteriors, standard wood frames, built-in plywood interiors. As such, his work retains a remarkable accessibility and lack of pretension.

The most radical of these projects was the 1949 Janson House that Schindler designed for his final lover, children’s book writer Ellen Margaret Janson. The house’s tall, slender core is anchored to a steeply sloped Hollywood Hills site. Balconies, platforms and open trellises protrude from the core on three sides, giving the house an unusual lightness and ephemerality, like a balloon about to break free of its tether.

Similarly, in the 1950 Tischler House, Schindler experimented with low-cost materials like corrugated plastics, including a roof that allowed colored light to filter down into the living room.

In all, Schindler designed more than 250 houses in Los Angeles. During the postwar years, as Modernism--or its watered-down equivalent--began to take hold in suburban America, Schindler drifted further toward a quirky, fragmented architectural style. That shift was more than an aesthetic choice. To Schindler, the rigid order and elegant compositions of Neutra’s works reflected a repressed society--one that suffocated individual expression.

By the early 1980s, that thinking was becoming the norm. Architects like Frank Gehry were again exploring the use of everyday materials--chain-link, plywood, corrugated metal--as an antidote to the spirit of conformity that shaped the suburban landscape.

It is that sensibility that makes Schindler’s work resonate today--especially to those architects now entering the profession. In part, the attraction is pragmatic: Schindler’s cheap materials and simple construction techniques seem accessible to young architects designing garage additions and starter houses for friends who have chosen more lucrative careers.

But the connection runs deeper. It stems from the feeling that Schindler’s best designs embrace the messiness of everyday life. As such, they seem more forgiving, more accepting of human fallibility than those of some of his peers. Those values will endure despite the fickle nature of celebrity, because they are embedded in his life’s work.

*

“The Architecture of R.M. Schindler,” today through June 3 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A., (213) 626-6222. Open Tuesday-Sunday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thursday, 11 a.m.-8 p.m.