An Architectural Journey
For the past nine months, the art and architecture produced in Southern California after World War II has starred in an extraordinary number of exhibitions. Pacific Standard Time, the name given by the Getty for this showcase for post-War II art, gave generous attention to mid-century design. LACMA hosted ‘California Design, 1930-1965,’ and as the centerpiece of the exhibit recreated the original living room of the Eames House in Pacific Palisades’the designer couple’s home and workplace. I have always loved modern residential architecture for its sensitivity to the site, stripped down design and light. My parents’ house in Mandeville Canyon was a jewel box of glass and horizontal lines bidding the outside in. Last Christmas, my son offered to take me to three architectural treasures that most distinctly define a strictly American modernism. In May, we began in Chicago, appropriately, as the three architects I selected’Frank Lloyd Wright, Eero Saarinen and Mies van de Rohe’established their careers in the Midwest and contributed to Chicago’s rich architectural concentration. Despite being the oldest of the three, straddling the 19th and 20th centuries, Wright seemed to have been incubating his ideas of a modern ‘American’ architecture from the very start of his career; ideas which were decidedly at odds with the Beaux Arts’ reverence for symmetry, formal design and elaborate ornamentation. As his career progressed, Wright achieved his core principle of organic architecture incorporating simple geometry and horizontal lines. I know Wright’s work in Los Angeles; it’s exotic and exciting, theatrical and romantic, but my dream had always been to visit his masterpiece: Fallingwater. Located in rural western Pennsylvania, 50 miles from Pittsburgh, Fallingwater was commissioned by Edgar Kaufmann Jr., a successful Pittsburgh businessman and department store owner. The house, designed in 1936, was a weekend and summer vacation getaway for the family. With limestone verticals and reinforced concrete horizontals, the structure rises from the union of these two materials, creating the living spaces, while a vertical glass curtain three stories high opens to the ongoing drama outside’the weather, mature forest and the wild river below. The drama builds as you walk a quarter mile through a forest of rhododendron and conifers to reach the small entry. From rooms to cantilevered terraces, I felt so precariously close to nature’the incessant sound of rushing water, the boulder jutting through the living room to form the fireplace, and the vanishing windows. Yet the interior spaces are safe, giving way to family activities’conversation, meals, music or study’and warmed by indirect lighting, colorful textiles and the diversity and richness of the Kaufmann’s art collection. Kaufmann had imagined his house situated across from the falls, not rising over the falls as Wright designed it, but Wright, famously uncompromising, dismissed his client’s alarm. ‘I want you to live with the waterfall,’ Wright told him, ‘not just to look at it.’ Wright’s willfulness, though often countered by Kaufmann’s own power and money, demonstrates the architect-client relationship that is always dynamic and at times acrimonious. Mies van der Rohe and Eero Saarinen provide excellent examples of the difference in style between the architect who pursues his vision, often at odds with the client’s wishes, and the architect who works in collaboration with the client. The German-born Mies rode the transition from traditional neoclassical houses after World War I, slowly developing a stripped down idiom, rejecting adornment in favor of a straightforward use of materials and forms. In 1937, Mies immigrated to the United States, after his job as director of the Bauhaus ended abruptly; the school was forced to close after it failed the Nazi ideal of the ‘German’ character. He was hired to head the department of architecture at the newly established Illinois Institute of Technology (ITT) in Chicago, where he remained over his entire 31 years in America. His one and only residence was the commission he accepted from Edith Farnsworth, a successful Chicago physician. At the time, Mies, then 59, was still virtually unknown, having built nothing in the United States aside from some ITT buildings. The two met at a dinner party of mutual friends in 1945. Farnsworth, 42 and unmarried, was at a point in her life when she was looking to spend time outside the city. She wondered if Mies might recommend an architect in his firm who would design a house for her on a site she owned on the Fox River some 60 miles west of Chicago. Mies replied that he ‘would love to build any kind of house’ for her himself. The Farnsworth House turned out to be everything Mies had been thinking about. With its open plan, glass walls and freestanding partitions, it was as pure an exercise in architectural minimalism as Mies could have hoped for. The architect welcomed the challenge of building a weekend cabin and thus being able to disregard the ‘tiresome realities of everyday life’ (the need for privacy, the accumulation of possessions, the daily litter and clutter). However, what started as a close working relationship and exciting romance, soon soured and both sides sued: he for unpaid fees and she for a large cost over-run on the original budget. The battle continued outside the courtroom, as the design itself became fodder for critical review. While some praised the ‘clarity, polish and precision’ of the design, the populist House Beautiful in an April 1953 article branded the architecture, ‘cold and barren.’ Farnsworth herself found Mies’ ‘pure’ forms to be constraining. ’The truth is,’ she told House Beautiful, ‘in this house with its four walls of glass I feel like a prowling animal, always on the alert’. I can’t even put a clothes hanger in my house without considering how it affects everything from the outside.’ Despite all her complaints, Farnsworth continued to live in the house until 1971. Subsequent owner Peter Palumbo brought the house back as close to its original, and rekindled its special relationship between the man-made environment and the natural environment. ’The overriding quality of the Farnsworth House is one of serenity,’ he said. The Miller House in Columbus, Indiana, demonstrates the ideal architect-client relationship. Irwin and Xenia Miller eagerly embraced the clean lines’large expanses of glass, monumental stone slabs and flowing interior spaces’their architect Eero Saarinen proposed for their luscious parkland property just outside Columbus. An Indiana boy through and through, Irwin had nevertheless studied at Yale and at Oxford, an education that exposed him to the ideas of the art and architecture of the world. His business, the Cummins Engine Company, had grown into a highly successful enterprise and made him a rich man. In designing the Miller family home, Saarinen collaborated with architect and interior designer Alexander Girard and landscape designer Dan Kiley. Girard was involved from the beginning, contributing furniture designs and especially bringing color and warmth and a bit of whimsy to the inside. He shared Xenia’s love of folk art from around the world: glass ornaments, wall hangings, Moroccan rugs, and even a doll’s house that presents a fanciful depiction of the Miller family. Kiley imagined the landscape around the Miller House as an extension of the architecture. Sharing the ideas of modernist architecture, he used plantings and materials to create interesting spaces and outdoor rooms. Texture and strong design replaced earlier ideas that the garden should dress up the architecture. When I entered the house, I knew this house: the terrazzo floors, the green landscape pouring through the windows, the colors, textiles, paintings, books, folk art’the life. My parents’ house, coming along 10 years later in modern architecture chronology, shared the open, light elegance of the Miller House. As I walked from room to room, inside and outside, I felt my mother’s spirit right alongside me. In my journey across the country I discovered beacons of modernism that demonstrate the integrity of simple, organic designs that were realized by masters of 20th-century architecture. And in the present era of residential grandiosity, I look at these houses to cleanse my vision with the restraint and serenity of design.
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.