Designed for living
Of all the modern marvels a house may possess--intercoms, clap-on-clap-off lighting, dumbwaiters--none is more marvelous than the deceptively simple but aesthetically complex sliding glass door, whose job it is to be there and not there, permeable, impermeable. Its nature is tripartite: door, wall, window, indivisible, invisible. It mediates between interior and exterior, belonging to both, joining even as it separates.
One may find the sliding glass door wherever hotels have balconies, but it is Southern Californian by nature. (Everyone notices the pools and sprinklers in David Hockney’s L.A. paintings, but the sliding glass is there as well.) Here in the 1920s and ‘30s came European expatriate Modernist architects, following function with form; here in the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s were erected the open, modular Case Study houses; here was born the ranch house, which replaced the bungalow in the hearts of American builders and buyers as the last century hit its midpoint. All betrayed an interest in the union of inside and out, of shelter and nature, all for the betterment of humankind, mediated by glass, liberally used.
It is a door/wall/window with a philosophy. The houses of the postwar world were not just boxes to keep out the cold, but designs for living. People came west to live, to have a life, a lifestyle. To enjoy themselves in a temperate world. They came for the sun and the space, and the great big beautiful tomorrow the West promised. In the words of R.M. Schindler, whose flat-roofed 1922 Kings Road house with its (paned) sliding glass doors and garden orientation is sometimes said to be the original modern California house, “The sense for the perception of architecture is not the eyes--but living.” Cliff May, of San Diego and then Los Angeles and largely credited as the father of the ranch house, was inspired in his work by the haciendas of old, “with cross-ventilation and rooms spread out and around courtyards, basic old California plan.” It seemed, he said, “to be a much better way to build and live.”
If the porch was where the old bungalow met the world, the ranch house looked away from the street, toward the new social reality of the backyard. Neighbors were people you invited over, to eat or swim or drink, not people you waved at from your rocker or swing seat as they incidentally strolled by. The house was there to overlook the patio, the garden and (if you were fortunate) the pool--a private and a social space.
I grew up in such a house, one of legions spread across the San Fernando Valley. In the future-friendly year of 1956, having spent their young married years in an in-town apartment, my parents put a deposit on a house in Reseda, in an older neighborhood of small stucco boxes where their friends had moved, and were headed back toward Sepulveda Pass when they happened upon the model homes of the nascent Encino Village. “All the glass, the open ceiling, the modern look of the whole house,” says my mother now. “It seemed like a more hip kind of thing. The sliding door was practically the whole width of the room, and you looked out and it brought the outside in.” After that, “there was no way” they were going to live in a stucco box.
So ambiguous was the relationship between house and yard that during hot summers we sometimes put a wading pool in the living room. My parents are still there, and the sliding glass door is still doing what it was made to. “I love it in the morning,” my mother says, “because the sun comes up from that direction, and the room is just filled with light.”
