1920 - The Aline Barnsdall House, aka the Hollyhock House, 4800 Hollywood Boulevard, LosAngeles CA. Commissioned 1917. The AlineBarnsdall HollyhockHouseis designed by FrankLloydWright as a residence for oil heiress Aline Barnsdall, built in 1919–1921. The building is now the centerpiece of the city's BarnsdallArtPark. A fiercely independent and wealthy feminist, bohemian, devotee and producer of experimental theatre, Barnsdall was a very public single mother at time when women were not publicly single mothers.
The house was donated to the City of Los Angeles in 1927. Renovated in 1947 by son LloydWright, it became part of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Museum. Lloyd Wright, was commissioned in 1968 for a remodel of the gallery complex and fountain, unbuilt, but he was hired later for a successful overall 1974 renovation. First opened to the public as a house museum in 1976. Closed and restored again 2011-2015, then reopened for tours.
Barnsdall originally intended the house to be part of an arts and theater complex on a property known as OliveHill, but the larger project was never completed. This was Wright's second project in California, and, atypically for #Wright, he was not able to personally supervise much of the construction due to his preoccupation with designing the Imperial Hotel in Japan at the time. He delegated many of the responsibilities involved in designing the house to his assistant, Rudolph Schindler, and his son, Lloyd Wright.
Disillusioned by the costs of construction and maintenance, Barnsdall donated the house to the city of Los Angeles in 1927 under the stipulation that a fifteen-year lease be given to the California Art Club for its headquarters, which it maintained until 1942. The house has been used as an art gallery and as a United Service Organizations (USO) facility over the years. Beginning in 1974, the city sponsored a series of restorations, but the structure was damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. It was again restored, and was open to the public as of June 2005.
The Gilardi house is a single-family house built for the Gilardi family, built and designed in 1976 by Mexican architect Luis Barragán Morfín in the San Miguel Chapultepec neighborhood in Mexico City. The home was designed after almost 10 years of retirement, makes its last work, perhaps the most quintessential and essential of his homes. It is considered a masterpiece in the cannon of Barragán, and can be described architectural testament. Its main idea and theme lies in the colors, textures, sequences and arrangements of spaces, the way to introduce light into the different rooms of the house, to filter it, always generating sensations and emotional experiences from the use of colored light. Within this architecture of sensations, the journey to this house begins with a very simple entrance, a corridor leads us and expands, then you can see the staircase without railing that seems to levitate, ascending by the effect of zenithal light. This staircase leads to a corridor bathed in a yellow light that filters through a series of vertical openings with onyx-colored glass, at the end of which it gives way through a door to an austere space that contains a swimming pool, a hand hewn dining table, chairs and a sideboard, while a red wall holds the skylight and bathes the pool, the rest of the experience is the effects of light. The pool-room-dining room becomes the central space of the house, a place where the floor is interrupted in a passage covered with silences; between the solid and the liquid. The dining room is installed at the edge of the pool, and that is where a red wall, which interacts with the geometries produced by the overhead light that is transforming the space throughout the day.
Lovell Health House is a pivotal modernist building by Richard Neutra, built between 1927 and 1929. It is located at 4616 Dundee Drive in Los Angeles, California adjacent to the Griffith Observatory in the Hollywood Hills. The home was designed for the revolutionary holistic doctor, and health advocate Philip Lovell. The importance of this home cannot be understated in the development of Modernism, and even pre-dates Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier’s Parisian masterpiece of early modernist architecture.
The idea of this home was to elevate the health of the occupants by offering a healthful lifestyle, with plenty of sun and fresh air. Also the home featured an outdoor gymnasium, a school, and a swimming pool which was weekly filled, and after a week of use, drained to irrigate the garden and re-filled. This unique pool construction proved to be expensive to operate, and has not been filled since the 60’s.
The home is known as being the first steel frame house in the United States, and a very early example of spray on gunnite exterior construction. The house is very much designed in the spirit of the International Style. Like Le Corbusier’s work, the home features a steel frame, pilottis to elevate the home off the ground, and walls of uninterrupted windows. The rooms feature access directly to the outdoors, and a blending of the inside and outside. It was included in the 1932 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that retrospectively defined the style. The ideas contained within the walls are reflections of Neutra's interest in industrial production, and this is most evident in the repetitive use of factory-made window assemblies. The home is clearly influenced by Cubism and is peppered with themes of transparency, and hygiene. Philip Lovell was enchanted with the house and praised his architect publicly. Lovell had previously commissioned architect Rudolf Schindler to build his landmark Lovell Beach House in 1926 and a mountain cabin which immediately collapsed upon completion due to its flat roof and the snow which fell on it the very first winter. This was why Schindler did not receive this commission. Interestingly, Schindler was the on-site project architect. Neutra interestingly was living in Schindler’s King’s road house in Hollywood, which must have added interest to their dynamic. The Lovell House was added to the list of Registered Historic Places in Los Angeles in 1971.
Luis Barragán House and Studio, also known as Casa Luis Barragán, is the former residence of architect Luis Barragán in #MiguelHidalgo district, #MexicoCity. It is owned by the #FundacióndeArquitecturaTapatia and the Government of the State of #Jalisco. It is now a museum exhibiting Barragán's work and is also used by visiting architects. It retains the original furniture and Barragán’s personal objects. These include a mostly Mexican art collection spanning the 16th to 20th century, with works by Picasso, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, Jesús Reyes Ferreira and Miguel Covarrubias. Located in the west of Mexico City, the residence was built in 1948 after the Second World War. It reflects Barragán's design style during this period and remained his #residenceuntil his death in 1988. In 1994 it was converted into a museum, run by Barragán’s home state of Jalisco and the Arquitectura Tapatía Luis Barragán Foundation, with tours available only by appointment. In 2004, it was named a World Heritage Site by UNESCO because it is one of the most influential and representative examples of modern #Mexicanarchitecture. In 1993, the government of the state of Jalisco and Arquitectura Tapatía #LuisBarragánFoundation acquired the house, turning it into a #museumin 1994. In 2004, it was named a #WorldHeritageSite by #UNESCO, the only private #residence in #LatinAmerica to be named so. It was named because of its representation of 20th-century architecture, which integrated traditional and vernacular elements and mixes various philosophical and artistic tendencies of the mid 20th century. It has also named as one of the ten most important houses constructed in the 20th century. It has also been the subject of various publications including the book, “La casa de Luis Barragán,” written by three experts on Barragán’s work. Despite its importance, the house is little known to Mexico City tourism, generally visited by architects and art aficionados from various parts of the world.
1923 - The Alice Millard House, aka the Mrs. George M. Millard House, aka La Miniatura, 645 Prospect Crescent, #Pasadena CA. Wright's son LloydWright did residence and studio additions in the 1920's and 1930's. The Millard House was the first of Frank Lloyd Wright's four "textileblock" houses — all built in LosAngeles County in #1923 and #1924. Wright took on the Millard House following his completion of the HollyhockHouse in Hollywood and the Imperial Hotel in Japan. Wright was commissioned to build Millard House by AliceMillard, a rare-book dealer for whom Wright had built a home in Highland Park, Illinois. in 1906. Seeking to integrate the Millard House with the land, Wright designed the home to cling to the lot's steep ravine, nestled it among the trees, and fabricated the home's concrete blocks using sand, gravel and minerals found on the property. By using roughly textured, earth-toned blocks, he sought to blend the house with the color and form of the trees and hillside. While the #design was in most ways a departure from Wright's prior work, it was consistent with his lifelong love of natural materials and his belief that #buildings should complement their surroundings. He later said that Millard House "belonged to the ground on which it stood." The 2,400-square-foot (220 m2) house consists of a vertical three-story block. The first floor has the kitchen, servant's room and a dining room opening onto a terrace with a reflecting pool. The second floor has the main entrance, guest room, and a two-story living room with a fireplace and balcony. The third floor contained Millard's bedroom with a balcony overlooking the living room and outdoor terrace.
Like many of Wright's homes, Millard House suffered from leaks during rains. After the house flooded in a storm, Millard wrote a letter to Wright complaining about the inadequate storm drain that resulted in the basement filling entirely with muddy water and the water rising to six inches (152 mm) in the dining room. Thankfully the home was faithfully by architects marmolradziner .