A century of building in Arizona and California
- The whole gamut of architecture, 1908–2007, some of it usually closed to the public.
- Great landscapes, from desert to coast and into the Napa Valley.
- Stunning journey by rail from L.A. to San Francisco through countryside not seen by road.
- 4 bases: Phoenix, La Jolla (San Diego), L.A., San Francisco.
Modernism was made for California. Just as it was on the West Coast that the twentieth century’s dominant art form, the movie, was to flourish; so Modernist architecture blossomed unencumbered by the concerns and limitations of the Old World.
Here was a climate that adored flat roofs and a hilly topography of brilliant views that called for structural daring, a place with a self-conscious lack of history in which displaced Europeans – and Americans freed from the waspish East Coast – could create whole new worlds and life-styles facing the seemingly boundless freedom of the desert and the Pacific.
Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute is perhaps the only true example of the sublime in twentieth-century architecture; Charles and Ray Eames’s Studio House the most innovative; Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hanna House perhaps the most delightful; and right at the beginning of the century Greene & Greene and Bernard Maybeck’s extraordinary reworkings of the Arts & Crafts movement were as long and as extraordinary a journey from William Morris as you can imagine. Equally remarkable in turn are the cities, Los Angeles, the City of 4 Ecologies, and everyone’s favourite American city, San Francisco.
And it hasn’t let up in the 21st Century; Richard Meier’s hill-top Getty Center, Raphael Moneo’s Cathedral of Our Lady of Our Angels, Herzog & de Meuron’s de Young Museum in San Francisco.
If one looks for a beginning to all this, beyond the fragments of the Pueblo and the Spanish Mission architecture, it is found in Frank Lloyd Wright. While Europeans spent the 1920s and 30s playing catch-up to Wright’s disciplined Prairie houses, he went wild in the West.
First a series of houses in Los Angeles that ended with the extraordinary Barnsdall House and demonstrated a virtuosity on California’s slopes at least equal to that of the flat expanse of the Mid-West. (At the same time his ex-pupils Rudolf Schindler and Richard Neutra threw away the cloak of their native Vienna to create a series of exquisite houses in turn leading to the ‘Case Study Houses’ and the ‘Bay Area School’ around San Francisco.)
Then, over a period of thirty years in the desert outside Phoenix, Wright built Taliesin West as a complement to his earlier Taliesin East. Taliesin West is Wright at his most radical, moving – and successful. Indoors and outdoors, building and landscape merge; built of desert rocks and sand its inspiration lies in the light touch of the native Sinagua Indians.
In turn, Paolo Soleri’s eco-city of Arcosanti, still being constructed today, far out in the Arizona desert is both a homage to Taliesin West and a suggestion of how the American West might be brought into an ecologically viable future.
A number of these buildings are not usually open to the public and it is possible we will not be able to include everything listed.