I finally had the opportunity to travel down to LA to see the first modern house -- the Schindler House. In the same way that all roads used to lead to Rome, many of my favorite architects lead back to Schindler. Schindler studied at Taliesin in Spring Green Wisconsin, for example. Jack Hillmer rented an apartment in a complex built by Schindler when he first moved to California to become an architect. Hillmer told the SF Examiner that he used to lay in bed and stare up at the beautiful sheen of the untreated redwood on the ceiling, inspiring him to never paint or finish redwood in any of his houses. More recently, I had the opportunity to talk with Robert Swatt of Swatt Miers, and he told me he likes to go back to the Schindler house every once in a while to "touch home."
The house was originally built in what were then essentially open fields just west of Beverly Hills, as shown in the picture below:
1922 with Schindler House lot on North Kings Road in the upper right. 2016 from Google Earth on the right of approximately the same area.
Now it resides in a completely residential neighborhood. From the street, all that is visible is a wall of bamboo and a narrow dirt driveway on the far side of the lot, next to a multi-story apartment building. The hedges run the length of the dirt driveway, again obscuring the house from view as you walk its length. You pass a door, and then the ticket office. After buying tickets, you retrace your steps back to the previous door, and enter a narrow passage with a low redwood lined ceiling. The hall opens to an empty room with concrete floors and narrow slits of glass between each slab of concrete. The walls were not poured in place - they were made horizontally, in sections, and then tilted up vertically. The spaces are sparse, bare, essential. Is this all there is, I thought?
But then I noticed the canvas covered door leading to the next room, and this is where it begins to happen, where the house begins to unfurl itself. Despite knowing the house was arranged in a modified pinwheel, each turn, each room, each window revealed something new. This is the very essence of the experience of walking through the Schindler house, and why it is impossible to capture in pictures. Small, perfectly crafted rooms with low ceilings and floor to ceiling windows opening to a garden lead into a narrow hallway, and around a corner another exquisite room opens up to a field of tall green grass. Another turn reveals a copper fireplace, book shelves, and a few slits with frosted glass between each slab of concrete.
One of the most interesting aspects of the house are the two sleeping baskets on the roof. Each is accessed by a very narrow set of stairs that runs to a small covered deck on the roof, for sleeping on hot summer nights. Apparently Schindler had been to Yosemite before building the house, and wanted to re-create the experience of nature with a permanent-campsite feel to their home.
Another unique aspect of the house is the landscaping, which reflects the form of the house. Two large rectangles of ivy are sunk four feet below the floor of the house, and the surrounding landscape. Hedges form rectangular walls of roughly the same depth and height as the interior walls of the house, shaping exterior space and forming private areas outside of the pinwheel form.
I was not the first to be initially confused by the Schindler House. Esther McCoy, and architectural historian known for bringing California architecture to the attention of the world, wrote this about the Schindler House:
When I first saw the Kings Road house in 1941 from Pauline's [Schindler's wife] garden I could not make out what was happening. The leap from concrete to clerestory to "sleeping baskets" was disorienting. When I was shown through the house an hour later the very act of movement began to slow down the images, and the forms unfolded slowly. There was an inner dynamism in the forms that involved the muscles of the body as well as the eye.
Esther McCoy, Vienna to Los Angeles: Two Journeys (Santa Monica: Art & Architecture Press, 1979).
The walls are not quite vertical on the outside, having more mass at their base and tapering towards the roof, as in pueblo construction in the American southwest. The way the rectangles of each room connect, and the interplay of the heights of the ceiling remind me of Frank lloyd Wright's Usonian houses, but this is more sophisticated, more complex. The Schindler house, built in 1921, also predates the Usonian houses by a decade and a half. Perhaps this is why the Schindler house has been called the first modern house. One critic wrote:
There are plenty of learned punidts around who will point out that there can never be a genuinely fresh start in architecture, that it is improper to suppose that anyone could design a house as if there had never been houses before. Yet the Schindler House comes disturbingly near to being a totally new beginning.
R. Banham, "The Master Builders", The Sunday Times Magazine, London, 1971.
Schindler should also be given credit for being the first to set the guidelines for what it means to be a California House. He accurately said:
In my own house I introduced features which seemed to be necessary for life in California: an open plan, flat on the ground; living patios; glass walls; translucent walls; wide sliding doors; clerestory windows; shed roofs with wide shading overhangs. These features have now been accepted generally and form the basis of the contemporary California house.
R. M. Schindler, 1952, quoted in Susan Morgan, "Not Another International Style Ballyhoo: A Short History of the Schindler House", (MAK Center, 2015).
The picture below is from the book Schindler House by Kathryn Smith, and illustrates what one of the rooms looked like furnished:
K. Smith, Schindler House, 7 (Hennessey + Ingalls, 2010).