Five

CALIFORNIA AND THE MODERN GARDEN (1920–1960s)

In 1967, a month after I was born, my parents moved into a house in the hills above Goleta, California, an expanding suburb of Santa Barbara then mostly made up of cheap housing tracts lunging into citrus and avocado groves and stubble-grass ranchland lined with old eucalyptus windbreaks. The house was one of ten or twelve of wildly differing styles on a short spur road called Twinridge, a mile or so up the old San Marcos Pass road, which climbs up the Santa Ynez mountains. Ours was the “modern” one, what might be called a developer’s Case Study house (after the famous program of experimental houses built in Southern California from the late 1940s to the 1960s): one-story, flat-roofed, post-and-beam, E-shape, open-plan, with floor-to-ceiling glass walls opening to the south and a wide view of the Santa Barbara Channel. My mother set about remodeling it, opening up walls inside and packing it with white deep-shag carpets, Danish teak modular furniture, hip art, and a freestanding black steel Scandinavian fireplace in the glassed-in corner of the living room, overlooking the garden. The Douglas fir planking on the ceiling continued beyond the glass to form deep, overhanging eaves that framed two outside patios. A handful of the four-by-sixteen-inch roof beams extended ten and twenty feet farther to support a four-by-six-inch trellis that shaded pebble-aggregate concrete walkways, and, below it, a built-in redwood table and bench, of the by-then-classic modernist type: backless, with a seat of three planks. The lot was a shelf bulldozed into the natural grade—the standard rape-and-pillage mode of postwar California tract builders, and still the preferred one—but they had skirted a natural pile of rounded sandstone boulders, each the size of a bathtub or larger, clumped on a hillet crowned by a huge, gnarled coast live oak probably sixty feet across. On this “wild” side of the patio, my mother had planted pointy junipers, aloes, jade, grap-topetalum, and other succulents in profusion. In beds along the house were massed lines of fortnight lilies, podocarpus, natal plum, star jasmine, and the bright red pompoms of the bottlebrush bush, Calliandra haematocephala, espaliered on one wall.

Twinridge house, Goleta, California, 1967. (Courtesy of the author)

Twinridge house, Goleta, California, 1973. (Courtesy of the author)

To the left, where the patio and planting ended, a lawn curved away toward an embankment and a small, detached studio with a wooden deck wrapped around it on three sides. Embedded in this was a hot tub, one of the first in the state. It was made from an old redwood water tank that my parents had salvaged from a Napa County cattle ranch with the help of an eccentric hippie birdhouse maker named Fred Carr, who lived in the same canyon west of town, called Refugio (“refuge”), as the newly inaugurated governor of California, Ronald Reagan. We had brought it home in a U-Haul truck, each board numbered with white chalk to aid watertight reassembly. It was heated, almost imperceptibly, by a crude solar hot water heater built of mats of black rubber tubing mounted at an angle on the ceiling of the studio roof. Beyond the lawn, where the bulldozer driver’s scrape into the hill ended, the slope resumed, first clothed in a sward of annual grasses that burst out green in winter followed in the early summer by the loud yellow of black mustard (a lovely Mediterranean weed spread around by the Spanish padres back in the 18th century) that gave way to the crispy brown of late summer and fall. Below the point where my dad was willing to clear it (sometimes with the help of borrowed goats), clumps of chaparral formed a rough barrier between our suburban outpost and the former, agricultural world; a flowing grid of avocado orchards draped over the curving canyon slopes and soft ridges below us, down to the Goleta flats. The ocean gleamed in the distance like a wide blue-silver stripe on a Rothko canvas, dotted with oil drilling platforms that lit up at twilight as if a procession of Spanish galleons were returning from Manila. On the horizon, the dark shapes of the Channel Islands studded the blue band like the molars in a dog’s jaw. Fog banks plied the miles in between, advancing and retreating in a slow dance of cool, wet, cotton gauze. Some weeks, especially in spring and summer, the fog filled the view like a thick white blanket, nearly to the lawn’s edge, then evaporated without a trace in crisp north winds and a frosting of whitecaps on the sea.

Author and grandmother. (Courtesy of the author)

As a little boy, I remember living outside: eating, playing, climbing the trees, even occasionally camping in a tent. The glass sliding doors were always open, with no distinction between inside and out except when the Siamese cat sitting on the kitchen floor became too whiny for my dad and he threw it out and closed the door behind it. I remember, or at least see in my head from old color photographs, parties on the patio and the lawn, with my mother in a fabulous, flowing long dress, hair piled on her head, my dad in a tight, gray suit, with sideburns, holding forth animatedly, smooth and assured. Jazz played on an LP through the open glass doors. Guests sporting leather vests and mustaches enjoyed tumblers of wine and trays of hors d’oeuvres that we’ve since forgotten: roasted water chestnuts or chicken livers wrapped in bacon, smoked oysters, cream-puffs, and crab dip. They mingled amid modern ceramic sculptures set in the boulder garden or sat in the egg-shaped wicker swing that dangled from the oak. After dinner, trays of drinks and cordials were passed: Bailey’s, Benedictine, brandy, Drambuie, and White Russians.

My parents had come to California by way of Oahu, where they’d met in 1958, each enjoying an unlikely, dreamy idyll, my dad a Marine lieutenant from Tennessee doing soft duty as a peacetime artillery spotter and my mom a college girl from Michigan who had rather cleverly transferred to the University of Hawaii to “chaperone” her younger sister there. After marriage, grad school, and my sister’s birth in 1964, my dad landed a job teaching American history at the new University of California at Santa Barbara campus, and this little house was the couple’s starter home. They were part of just one of many waves of Americans that broke on the Golden State’s shores after the war, the biggest being the World War II generation itself, which passed through on the way to and from the Pacific Theater and often stayed. California held 7 million people in 1940, and 10.5 million in 1950. The number would double again in twenty years.

The Twinridge house was a statistical bull’s-eye of the new life: a nuclear two-plus-two family with no servants, living in a detached house in the suburbs, far from work, hence with two cars in the carport. It was a new kind of house, modern in plan and styling, but the most notable things about it were functional: the kitchen was in front, while the living and dining rooms opened to the backyard, where an historically unprecedented number of “household” activities went on, except in the rare event of precipitation. This was a complete reversal from traditional norms, and only recently had mortgage lenders accepted it. Glass sliding doors opened to several patios, tying inside and outside together in a tight knot. The postwar California garden didn’t just offer the “outdoor room” of the Mediterranean-inspired gardens of the previous fifty years, but true outdoor living: a lawn for leisure, a barbeque for cooking, a patio for eating, drinking, and playing, a pool for the sheer delight of it (we had a “slip-n-slide” on the lawn—more in line with an assistant professor’s salary). Its shapes were different: no primary axis, but several smaller ones tied to specific rooms; no overt symmetry; lots of curves; flowing lines; few “fine” materials, but instead concrete, wood, and gravel; less emphasis on flowers and plants, and more on the “plan”—the shapes of each piece and the relationships between parts of the garden and adjacent rooms of the house. There was a new relationship to work in the garden (the goal being as little as possible), with simplified planting plans, few flowers, and the selection of low-maintenance plants meant to look the same all year and not to require a skilled gardener (all this garden needed was someone to mow the lawn). Here is where Mow, Blow, and Go was invented: no bedding, mulching, trimming, deadheading. No agriculture, no seasons, no work, really: the new garden was all about play. Each man (or, increasingly, inescapably, woman) at leisure in his and her own happy home.

Twinridge yard, 1973. (Courtesy of the author)

The New Garden’s asymmetric geometries were intended to reflect a new world: of changing configurations of family, work, and community, and equally of the dreams and plans that the owners and designers of these gardens, people like my mother, had for it. But the evolutionary path of the modern garden’s development was not—though it is invariably told as though it were—a series of artistic milestones by avant-garde landscape architects advancing the cause of innovation. It was driven instead by harder things: war, depression, and wrenching economic, social, and geographic shifts remaking the country and the world. And its innovators were not initially landscape architects at all, but a small group of visionary—if sometimes bizarre—architects designing responses to the voracious suburban space that was taking over America in the 20th century. The beachhead of the new wave was California, where these new big-picture conditions met new ideas and new influences. Fashions and fads gathered there from all over America, Europe, and Japan. Though the modern California garden began as a distinctively regional style, it quickly spread, inexorably it seemed, back to those places and beyond, becoming in our own era a global style.

Author’s mom, 1973. (Courtesy of the author)

From 1967 into the mid-1970s, the house my mom made was it, as cool as it got in that time and place, full of artists who made ceramics and weavings chatting with progressive academics and intellectuals at endless parties, traipsing through the empty threshold of the glass sliding doors that joined the shag to the succulent jade plants outside. The mode was the apex of hip, but it wasn’t unique; it had been formulated over the course of a few decades—fully crystallizing in the late 1960s—and documented in the pages of Sunset magazine, the DIY bible of an entire culture taking root all over the American West, but preeminently in heavily populated coastal California. Our garden and the hot tub were featured, with me and my sister in it, splashing each other with very cold water, from the looks on our faces, in Better Homes & Gardens magazine’s annual “Garden Ideas and Outdoor Living” issue in 1976. We were living in Utopia.

 

If this Utopia had a blueprint, an original paradise where transcendence had first been reached, it was for practical purposes the Donnell garden, built in 1948 in Sonoma County by San Francisco landscape architect Thomas Church. The garden, and the house that it has always overshadowed, occupy a corner of a vast ranch in south Sonoma overlooking the sunlit mirror of San Pablo Bay in the distance and a nearer expanse of wetlands and farmland where the Sonoma River enters the bay. Photographs inevitably depict the view toward the south, over the bold, boomerang-shaped swimming pool, at the center of which floats a stark white biomorphic-surrealist sculpture that looks like a blow-up recliner with a headrest and a drink holder. The pool is set in a grid of concrete paving that meets the lawn in a curve; then the lawn curves out again to meet a sweep of low, mounding shrubs at the base of the horizon, framed on either side by tall, dark green oaks.

The Jean Arpesque geometries boldly defined the garden’s style, but this is a water garden as much as the garden at the Taj Mahal is: a composition of shimmering reflections where the Hockney blue of the pool mirrors that of a sky streaked with wispy horsetail clouds, which are in turn repeated in the creeks and grasses of the salt marshes and the open bay beyond. Off to the left, one cluster of large oaks embraces a wooden deck of plank squares set in alternating directions, pierced by tree trunks, with a built-in wood bench around the perimeter. The less common reverse photo shot always revealed the poolhouse by architect George Rockrise, a little rectangle that was cheerfully called a “lanai,” the Hawaiian word for porch. Facing outward, from the inland side, it was executed in the by then already canonical modernist style, with a long, low-angled roof overhanging four panels of floor-to-ceiling glass, three of which could slide away to expose a single, open room. The building nestled into a mass of oaks. Some large boulders were set into the grass in front of it, along with a few, sparse, ovalish planting beds, and a single burst of tropical-looking birds-of-paradise at the base of the glass. Otherwise there were few other flowers in the garden, just anonymous, massed plants meant to weigh the other elements down.

The whole composition is simple, and now seems unassuming, involving just a few rather unglamorous materials: concrete, grass, wood, trees, lawn, and shrubbery. But it also remains assertive and dynamic, expertly balanced between the centrifugal—everywhere are curves swooping in different directions, drawing the eye out to the splendors of the view—and the centripetal, as the curves draw back from the corners, ballasted by the dark, heavy oaks, and return to the anchor of the icon-sculpture at the hub of the wheel. In spite of this centering object, there is no central axis, no front or back. The garden was clearly meant for people to inhabit it, move through it, or play in it, rather than gaze at it.

Thomas Church was at the time in mid-career, a successful, progressive Bay Area designer known for wearing gardener’s khakis and carrying his pruning loppers confidently propped against a shoulder, and for reportedly trimming his clients’ shrubs, unbidden, while having meetings. He and his collaborators (the clients, the architect, and a young associate in his office, Lawrence Halprin, who guided the project) had understood the context and the site perfectly: they kept the entire area level and set it back from the edge of the slope. The pool, lanai, and another accessory building were constructed first, because of material shortages in the years after the war, but the house was carefully sited well back from the slope, swathed in trees, out of view. Church understood that the garden would be secondary to the main event: the view. He also understood that the view wasn’t a single event, but something that could lend energy and form to every part of the garden—the lanai, the pool, the lawn, or the deck. He made very conscious use of the Japanese theory of shakkei (borrowed scenery). In his 1955 book Gardens Are for People, Church would title one section “How to enjoy land you don’t own” and included a diagram of an English ha-ha fence for do-it-yourselfers to copy.

As a garden, the Donnell project made a clear statement: the design was not a function of the plants, but of the form. This emphasis was no different from the 17th century classicists’, though it was fairly ironic that the modernists, in spite of their revolutionary claims, had made it central to their program. In an article for House Beautiful that year, Church wrote: “A good garden is like a really beautiful woman. It is the distinction of her bone structure beneath her fresh, delicate skin that sets her apart. Architectural pattern is the bone structure of the garden…[If] a garden has a bold and basic pattern, it will have a beauty that neither snow nor sleet nor gloom of winter can ravage.” This was another way of saying what the designer is not fully interested in: weather, seasons, time, change—in short, nature.

Donnell pool from house. (University of California, Berkeley, Design Archives)

Nevertheless, the naturalistic bent of much California design in the 1920s and ’30s persisted in the Donnell garden, especially in the treatment of the oaks, which Church took great care to weave into the built structure of the deck. And, in stark contrast to International Style precedents then also being imported from Europe and the East Coast, the formalism of the Donnell garden was in the service of an uncomplicated functionalism: everything unequivocally revolves around the swimming pool. And while modernist “art” stakes a loud claim at the pool’s center, the sculpture appearing to float in the middle of the pool, by Bay Area artist Adeline Kent, was designed to be climbed on and sunbathed on and slid down (underwater there was a hole meant for swimmers to swim through). The sculpture said: this is modernity, this is art, this is sophisticated and new. But it was a newly friendly, even whimsical art, art as the basis for a newly liberated, leisure lifestyle. After the privations, stress, and sacrifice of the Depression and war years, by 1948 there was an outpouring of youthful exuberance in American culture, of which the Donnell pool was a uniquely beckoning example. Church aptly captured what the evolution of social mores meant for gardens in Gardens Are for People: “The change from tea in the parlor to drinks in the garden gives us the terrace or outside room, which increases in importance as the house gets smaller. The change from high-neck ruffles and bloomers to the Bikini gives us the sun-bathing terrace.”¹

Donnell pool from deck. (University of California, Berkeley, Design Archives)

The Donnell garden was an important milestone in the movement toward transforming the garden into the singular site of family and social life, a kind of one-stop shop, a perfect domestic universe. Church’s second book was aptly titled Your Private World. The question by then was, had he and other designers created a cut-off universe, one’s own private Idaho, at the cost of community? In the Sonoma garden, the designers’ attention to and near communion with the site provided for exquisitely sensitive sighting and ample privacy, but had taken the latter to an austere point. There is no “outside”: one can’t see the house, which was intentional; neither can one see cars, driveways, power lines, trash, or infrastructure—well and good; neither can one see any trace of neighbors, town, or city. The only sign of other people is many miles away—an exquisite sense of isolation it shares with Monticello, Olana, and Naumkeag, to name just three predecessors. The garden is ruled by a cleanness and self-sufficiency that erases context, society, history, politics, and nature. Practically the only clue we have to when it was made is the astonishing white sculpture in the pool. This result was, of course, the whole point of the exercise, the fulfillment of the modernist dream of liberation from all of the horrors of war and the dysfunctional baggage of bourgeois civilization, the creation of a clean slate on which to inscribe a new order of rationality, functionality, new materials, techniques, and attitudes. It was also, in some sense, what so many Americans and immigrants moved to California for: a fresh start, without the sticky encumbrances of the places they had left. In 1948 it remained to be seen what the price of this disassociation would be.

Could the Donnell project be a template for the New American Garden? The million-dollar view had cost real money: the owner, Otto Dewey Donnell, Jr., handpicked this spot out of the 5,500 acres—over eight and a half square miles—of ranchlands he’d purchased in South Sonoma. Donnell was originally from Ohio, where his father had been a lieutenant of John D. Rockefeller at Standard Oil. He’d gotten a business degree at Stanford in 1941 and decided to stay in the area and become a gentleman cattle rancher and landscape architecture patron. Many if not most people who moved to California during the period probably had similar ambitions, which they realized at a far more modest scale on small lots in cookie-cutter subdivisions. Nonetheless, they wanted to secure their separate domain to look out upon and contemplate. For many, the Donnell garden would become a template, and an exaltation of the new postwar cool.

The Donnell garden garnered lots of press, much of it breathless and admiring. It was the amoeba that launched tens of thousands of kidney pools. Thomas Church, already well-known in California, became a nationally recognized figure. The Church office, by his retirement in 1977, had completed two thousand or so gardens over the course of forty-eight years. Halprin, who oversaw and probably designed much of the work on the Donnell project, left Church’s firm and would become one of the most important American landscape architects of the second half of the 20th century. Another associate, Robert Royston, went on to be a partner of Garrett Eckbo, Church’s younger, more radical counterpart in Southern California. Yet another, Douglas Baylis, collaborated with Sunset magazine for several decades, beginning in 1951, designing and building innumerable gardens, often featuring barbeques, pools, shade structures, benches, and carports, which explored the possible permutations of the new aesthetic and the new lifestyle and showed ordinary homeowners how to do it. They were disciples, spreading the gospel far and wide.

 

Thomas Dolliver Church was an unlikely candidate for modernist master. Born in Boston in 1902, he grew up in Ojai and Berkeley, California, where he was surrounded by the architecture and gardens of California’s Mediterranean tradition. He went to the University of California to study law, but graduated in 1922 with a degree in landscape architecture.² The University of California program offered a full Beaux-Arts education, which Church extended into graduate work at Harvard and a six-month fellowship to travel in Italy and Spain, where he toured the garden masterpieces that had inspired builders in California for two centuries. In 1927 he handed in his thesis comparing Renaissance Italian gardens to contemporary Californian ones, with explicit comparisons between the plans of Santa Barbara gardens with those he had seen in Tuscany. He identified similar ecological and cultural conditions that proved the comparison fruitful: “As in Italy and Spain, the pleasure of living out-of-doors, the need of shade, and the conservation of water are all problems which the California gardener must meet and answer.” He asserted also that the gardens of both places were “delightful and livable because of scale and imagination—not magnificence.”³ This was an odd observation, since gardens in both places were notable for magnificence. But it was an early indication of Church’s concern with the pragmatic and with function, as well as of his instinctive modesty, which would serve him well during the difficult transition from the estate garden making for which he trained in the 1920s and the tighter circumstances that were to come during the Great Depression and World War II.

He returned to the Bay Area in the fateful year 1929.⁴ Through William Wurster, an architect with whom he’d worked on a project in Berkeley (and who would also go on to be an important modernist), he was hired as the house landscape architect for Pasatiempo, a new golf-course-focused residential community near Santa Cruz being developed by a team that included the famous golfer Marion Hollins.⁵ Church’s main job was siting houses amid the sand hills and groves of trees, but he also designed gardens for several of Wurster’s modest rancho-style houses. The landscapes were decidedly traditional, with brick paving, symmetrical panels of lawn, and trimmed shrubs, yet they were spare and economical in a 1930s-modern way. He demonstrated an evolved sense of how to use the native flora to advantage, carefully preserving and pruning native trees both as garden centerpieces and backdrops. Economic conditions stalled the project, and Church and his wife went back to San Francisco in 1932.

Even in the midst of the Depression, Church managed to make a go of it, while some of his contemporaries, such as Paul Thiene, went out of business as the market for big estate gardens dried up. As demonstrated at Pasatiempo, his tendencies were more restrained than many of his flashier colleagues, and he turned this to his advantage, finding new ways to gain clientele by responding to changes either brought about or deepened by the economic crisis. Houses and lots got smaller, as did families, and the employment of servants all but vanished, diminished at first by the adoption of the first federal income tax in 1913, and then eliminated for all but a tiny elite by the Depression. Church designed smaller gardens using cheaper materials and fewer labor-intensive techniques, gardens geared to outdoor living with less need for maintenance.

The downsizing of houses, gardens, and families—forced by the Depression as well as the accelerating movement to suburbia—contributed to basic changes in the gardens Church designed, but by themselves these changes didn’t produce modernist gardens, in the sense of gardens that were different from traditional modes and styles. Throughout the 1930s, Church’s design was still wholly conventional, though sensitive and balanced, taking off from Florence Yoch, Bernard Maybeck, and Lockwood and Elizabeth de Forest. Toward the end of the decade, Church was increasingly adding curves to his plans, in the vein of Fletcher Steele, an accomplished Beaux-Arts landscape architect who was also dabbling with the French curve and whom Church had met in Boston, but that was the extent of his stylistic innovation at the time. It was not until the 1940s that Thomas Church evolved a truly “modern” garden style. More than ever before, gardens followed innovations in buildings, often at considerable remove. The fully modern garden had to wait for the modern house to arrive.

 

EVEN BEFORE WORLD WAR I, the tide of suburbanization sweeping the United States had become so profound and systematic as to transform every corner of the country, distinguishing it from everywhere else in the world. The average American was middle class, lived in a suburb far removed from his job, and owned a home. In the words of Columbia University historian Kenneth Jackson, in his book Crabgrass Frontier, “In 1920, when the Census Bureau announced that more than half the American population lived in urban areas, what was really unique about the United States was not the size of its huge cities, but the extent of their suburban sprawl; not the number of its workers, but the number of its commuters; not the height of its skyscrapers, but the proportion of its homeowners.”⁶ The United States had always posted high rates of home ownership, but this indicator shot up in the first decades of the century, driven by a concatenation of trends: skyrocketing marriage and birth rates, and migration away from the countryside as mechanization eliminated farm jobs. But the flow of people was not, as it had been previously, exclusively into cities (though cities grew enormously); this time there was unprecedented migration into the suburbs of eastern, southern, and midwestern cities, and into new western cities that were made up of little but suburbs—“centerless cities,” best exemplified by the country’s fastest-growing region, Southern California.

This centrifugal flight was abetted by the automobile—though the initial pattern of dispersal in many regions had already been established by light rail systems—and its full flower would not have been possible without it. Car ownership was not enough; a perfect alignment of forces was needed: roads, petroleum, land, and public policy all had to move in the same direction for the American landscape and lifestyle to be transformed. Nearly everyone moved to oblige. Over the first half of the century, the ratio of cars to people rose almost geometrically: in 1905 there was one car for every 1,078 Americans; in 1920 there was one for every thirteen; in 1930, one for every five; in 1950, one for every four. Between 1920 and 1930, car ownership rose 150 percent; in the same period suburbs grew twice as fast as central cores.⁷ In the early years of the century, the car was imagined to be a way to clean cities of the filth and congestion of horses and streetcars and to revive both central cities and the farming countryside. The actual effect was to weaken them both and to loose the suburban monster on both of their interests. From the 1920s onward, a phalanx of newly organized economic agents—ranging from carmakers, car dealers, and road builders; rubber, oil, and asphalt companies; parking lot operators, truckers, and labor unions; to bankers and advertisers—joined forces to lobby for the public financing of roads.⁸ They pitched highway construction as the means to the American dream of free movement and as a cure for the nation’s social and economic problems.⁹ Energy went from cheap to cheaper as oil was discovered and refined in more and more parts of the United States. The cost of operating a car—the sum of the price of cars, gas, parking, and maintenance—had fallen consistently from 1900 to World War II.¹⁰ Land also remained cheap and plentiful as policies and market conditions making farming near cities less profitable than suburban development guaranteed a limitless supply of low-priced lots. The Fordist revolution in manufacturing, which had brought automobile ownership within the reach of the masses, likewise transformed the building business, bringing inexpensive, standardized, quality-controlled construction techniques to bear on a larger and larger share of housing starts, in places like Westchester, California, and Levittown, New York, driving the price of new homes way down and pushing their availability way up. For millions of Americans, it became cheaper to buy a house in the suburbs than to rent in the city. And buy they did.

 

In the winter of 1937 the San Francisco Museum of Art held an exhibition titled “Contemporary Landscape Architecture and Its Sources.” Included were works by Thomas Church, Geraldine (Knight) Scott, Lockwood de Forest, Fletcher Steele, and the architects William Wurster, Rudolf Schindler, and Richard Neutra (all except for Steele were Californians).¹¹ From today’s perspective, only the work of the latter two architects at that moment would qualify as modern in the modernist sense, yet even in the staid world of gardens, the outlines of change were visible. That same year, Church embarked on his second trip to Europe, this one organized around seeing firsthand the new modernism that was getting so much press in the United States. In France, he looked at work by the architect Le Corbusier and many modern painters and sculptors. He then traveled to Finland to meet Alvar Aalto.¹² The Continent was in ferment. In architecture and design, a progression that had grown from the Vienna Secession of the early 20th century and had been elaborated by the Dutch de Stijl movement and the German Bauhaus churned out challenging work and took its cues from recent developments in painting and sculpture. European architects and artists had translated these forms into a handful of experiments in modernist gardens. Most shared a decided formalism and minimalism, but not in the postwar American sense of the term, which amounted simply to a lack of clutter; rather, they were dominated by patterned structure, built, if possible, with blocks of primary colors à la Piet Mondrian and abstract shapes and gestures à la Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró, and Paul Klee (who taught on the Bauhaus faculty, and whose 1922 painting Plan for a Garden heralded the interest in and templating of gardens by modernist visual artists). Church must have seen or been aware of the few, widely hyped European examples of a “modern” garden, among them the French Cubist Gabriel Guevrekian’s strange, colored invention at the Villa Noailles, with its triangular form set with square beds, schizophrenically walled off from the surrounding naturalistic English grounds.¹³ The tropes of the day were abstraction and the extension of geometric and curving forms onto the ground plane, with little or no concern for plants or function. But they looked “modern.”

On his return, Church began incorporating into his work some of the new forms he had seen. For the 1939 Golden Gate Exhibition in San Francisco, he designed two gardens featuring curved paving, a serpentine wall, and massed shrub plantings—modern touches (though Jefferson had built serpentine walls at the University of Virginia) but hardly a design revolution. Church’s work manifested a gradual evolution in the 1940s toward replacing axial symmetry with compositions of paving, lawns, planting beds, walls, and projections that adopted the Cubist shape vocabulary of curves, swoops, and amoebas—labeled by enthusiastic critics as “untethered geometries”—and that combined nontraditional materials like wood and concrete. These gardens were plan-driven, dependent on the two-dimensional ordering of elements by the designer, rather than, for example, the growth, flowering, or form of plants, or the play of seasons or light. In this they harked back to the French royal garden, a comparison Church and many of his colleagues would have bristled at. And while it is often argued that the modernist landscape architects liberated the garden from the merely decorative, or even from the tyranny of plan designs on paper, many of their gardens really do resemble student exercises, transcriptions of newfangled European paintings. In working out how avant-garde art could transform the garden, their transformations seemed to take place precisely on paper: Church’s 1938 Raoul-Duval garden is a gathering of curves taken directly from the French Curve drawing template.¹⁴ An early experiment, perhaps, but the Donnell garden, an acknowledged masterpiece of 20th century garden art, is no less an exercise in tracing painters’ forms on the ground.

In 1949, the San Francisco Museum of Art held another show dedicated to the modern garden. This one included Church’s Donnell and Aptos gardens of 1948, undeniable éclats of the new regime, as well as Garrett Eckbo’s more stylized work. In the ten-year interregnum between the two shows, the transition from an immature modernizing impulse to a mature modernism had been achieved. Church contributed an essay to the catalog titled, appropriately, Transition. But, where to locate its first achievement? The answer is not in Northern California at all, nor even with the garden designers who were its subjects and objects. Instead it took place a few hundred miles to the south, in Hollywood, a generation before—and the garden wasn’t the star of the picture, only a secondary love interest who lucked into a speaking role.

The modern garden, for all the gesturing and talk about it in Europe, especially in the 1930s, was born in Southern California, in 1921–22, of a somewhat tangled European and American parentage. Like a human infant, it emerged fully formed. But like many of us, it would need a few decades to reach its potential, to develop more articulate phrasing, self-confidence, and self-consciousness. What is important is that its birth and the early phases of its development were accomplished by the architects who conceived it, built it, defined its terms, space, vocabulary, shape, and function. Architecture provided its DNA, and the rest was nurture: its education, care, feeding, stylish wardrobe, regional accent, and affectations were bestowed upon it by more architects and, eventually—and belatedly—by garden architects.

 

Before Le Corbusier’s 1926 Villa Stein and 1928–29 Villa Savoye, and before Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s 1929 Barcelona Pavilion (all three early modernist houses that have been celebrated for helping redefine the relationship between architectural and garden space), Rudolf Schindler, a Viennese architect recently transplanted to Hollywood, all but invented the modern garden. Schindler found himself standing at the nexus of the Spanish courtyard tradition and the orthodox modernist avant-garde in architecture, and he engineered their marriage.

Born in 1887 in Vienna, Schindler was an elite product of this new school, having studied with Otto Wagner at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, and been influenced by Adolf Loos, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Louis Sullivan, and, through the 1910 “Wasmuth” folios (produced in Europe at Loos’s urging), Frank Lloyd Wright. He came to Chicago to take an apprenticeship at a commercial firm in the inauspicious year of 1914, only to find his return blocked by war in Europe. Both of his American masters, Sullivan and Wright, were at low ebbs in their careers, and in 1915 Schindler set off by train for a tour of the American Southwest. In New Mexico he admired the Pueblo style, in Arizona he was impressed by the landforms of the desert, and in California he saw the full flowering of the Mission Revival at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco and the Panama-California Exhibition in San Diego, including the work of Bertram Goodhue and Irving Gill, a San Diego architect then pioneering a combination of the Spanish courtyard tradition and Bauhausesque unornamented white volumes. Back in Chicago he worked in Wright’s office, beginning in 1917. In 1920 he was sent to Los Angeles to supervise the construction of the Olive Hill estate in Hollywood for Aline Barnsdall. Schindler worked on the project for two years, collaborating with the architect’s son Lloyd Wright on Hollyhock House, codesigning with the elder Wright the Oleander House, and designing, mostly by himself, the Director’s House. He also had a hand in the Ennis-Brown House, a Maya-inspired cliff dwelling on a steep hillside north of Olive Hill.

Los Angeles in those decades was full of new ideas and interests: in the outdoors, in hiking, fishing, and other robust sports; in the body and health, muscle building, calisthenics, gymnastics, yoga, vegetarianism, naturopathy, and nudism; and in spiritualism and the occult. The Theosophical Society, originally founded in New York in 1875 by Madame Blavatsky, was reconstituted in Pasadena in 1895, and Aleister Crowley and Georges Gurdjieff enjoyed repeating vogues among the literati. These tended to be pursuits of the liberal fringe and coexisted with and coincided with, to varying degrees, more populist religious enthusiasms such as Pentacostalism’s Azusa Street Revival, founded in Los Angeles in 1906 by the black preacher William J. Seymour, and Aimee Semple McPherson’s Foursquare Gospel Church, whose giant Angelus Temple was built in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1923, just a few miles east of where Wright’s temple complex was being finished on Olive Hill. It was as good a place as any to be an architect with a vision, since people were famously open-minded, interested in innovation, and readily accepted the self-imposed/self-described mission of modernist architects to change the world through buildings. Schindler was one such missionary, a visionary architect.

In 1921 he began work on a house on King’s Road in Hollywood, just north of Melrose Avenue, intended to house him and his wife and another couple, the engineer Clyde Chace and his wife. In an old photo of it, you can see a treeless backdrop extending all the way to the sea, and the undeveloped Hollywood Hills a mile or two away. Hollywood was still semirural, its proverbial bean fields stretching across the gently tilted outwash plains that fanned out below the hills, here and there interspersed with orchards and ranchettes and clusters of houses and businesses around the central intersections of the growing town. In 1920, Hollywood held only 36,000 souls; all of Los Angeles held just 580,000.¹⁵

Across the street was Irving Gill’s Dodge House. The proximity may or may not have been serendipitous, but the historical convergence was decidedly not. From his former mentor, Louis Sullivan,¹⁶ who stressed the need to integrate man and nature, Gill had gained an awareness of the dialogue between buildings and the outside, through the media of light and air, structured by courtyards, terraces, pergolas, trees, vines, and plantings. In the Mediterranean idiom that he adopted in California, Gill found a subtle and varied vocabulary for expressing that conversation, taken from the missions and the revived practices of Spain and Italy and applied to the modern, suburban house. Gill’s building stood at an intersection of influences: Lloyd Wright had worked for Gill, the Olmsted Brothers, and Paul Thiene before working for his father on Olive Hill. All of these experiences made Gill acutely aware of the role of landscape in the formation of architecture.

Schindler, unlike most of his European peers, was clearly open to regional suggestions—he had already adopted stucco from the Mission Revival, and his King’s Road house, with its thick, angled, tilt-slab concrete walls and lightweight, open wooden clerestory, seemed drawn from the pueblos he had seen in New Mexico and the Pueblo Revival elements of Wright’s practice. From the beginning of his career on the West Coast he was interested in new materials, partly due to the shortages of the war years and partly to his engineer’s obsession with new building techniques. At the King’s Road house the materials are rough, raw, and textured, with an organic feel clearly reminiscent of Wright’s Hollywood buildings of the early 1920s, all of which had Schindler’s hand in them, as well as a hint of the expressionism of Otto Wagner and Schindler’s student work in Vienna. But in the King’s Road house the materials are used with a spareness and straightforward simplicity that set the tone for later modernist work.

Walking around the house even now (it is open to the public) one seems to be walking through the blueprint for the entire cascade of modernist housing that would follow in Southern California, in its two extremes: the formalist style of Richard Neutra and his successors, and the organicist style of John Lautner and others. All of it is here: the flowing, interlocking volumes; the extension of horizontal planes past one another and into the garden spaces. The house is fundamentally asymmetrical, a sort of three-legged pinwheel, with no central axes, either in the interior or exterior, but instead a cluster of semi-self-contained living units, each one separate yet connected, like a series of suites, and each with its own garden space open to the inside yet clearly delineated and separated from adjacent spaces.

What was most radical about the house when it was built was the total, unreserved integration with the outside: sliding fiberboard panels open the common and sleeping rooms partially or completely to rectilinear garden spaces set at alternating grades; those facing direct exits from the house are patios or lawns at floor grade centered on an outdoor fireplace and bounded by hedges, and those opposite nonopening walls are sunken gardens with a private and mysterious feel. Above, two roofed but open-air sleeping porches accessible from interior staircases overlook the wider garden, the whole of which replicates and extends the variations of the house plan into the open air. There are no curves, as Schindler’s world in the early 1920s was still a de Stijl world of interlocking rectangles and squares. Today the plantings are more mature than Schindler would have seen, with a huge jacaranda tree shading half the house, towering thickets of timber bamboo partially blocking the ugly stucco apartments that have grown up around it, and impossibly lush skeins of coral trumpet vine draped over the sleeping porches, the six-inch long red blooms lending an unlikely equatorial flavor to this unique hothouse flower of Austro-Californian genius.

Schindler was an exuberant, charismatic man, with a mane of hair and a flair for new ideas. He had a tendency to quarrel with clients, often because he dismissed their input in his zeal to push the envelope of building techniques or radical design concepts. More than once he pushed too far: projects went way over budget, or concrete walls cracked and let in the rain. But the architect’s idealism was undiminished. In 1926 he guest-wrote six articles on the theme of architecture and health for Dr. Philip Lovell’s Los Angeles Times column “Care of the Body.” (Lovell was known as Doctor Health, and he proselytized for physical exercise, natural diet, and a progressive, unstructured education regimen for children, and even encouraged his own children to play in the nude.) In one, Schindler wrote: “Our rooms will descend close to the ground and the garden will become an integral part of the house. The distinction between indoors and outdoors will disappear. Our house will lose its front-and-back-door aspect. It will cease being a group of dens. Some larger ones for social effect, and a few smaller ones (bedrooms) in which to herd the family. Each individual will want a private room to gain a background for his life. He will sleep in the open. A work-and-play-room, together with the garden, will satisfy the group needs.”¹⁷

Erasing the distinction between inside and out had already been and would continue to be a key talking point in the modernist program, but Schindler achieved it more fully than anyone up to that time. Much of his success was doubtless due to the mild Los Angeles climate—though he seems to have woefully underestimated the chill and wet that can prevail in coastal Southern California in winter and even in summer, when, as the sun sinks below the horizon, cool ocean air and fogs can roll in and lower temperatures twenty degrees in a matter of minutes. The house had no heating and no air-conditioning. Its embrace of the elements was the exact reversal of Le Corbusier’s ultracontrolling dream of a “respiration exacte”—where fully sealed glass curtain walls would continuously maintain interior temperature and humidity through heating and cooling—in any climate, anywhere in the world.¹⁸ Architectural historian Reyner Banham called the King’s Road house “a model exercise in the interpenetration of indoor and outdoor spaces, a brilliant adaptation of simple constructional technology to local environmental needs and possibilities, and perhaps the most unobtrusively enjoyable domestic habitat ever created in Los Angeles.”¹⁹

The King’s Road house and garden were different from European and later American “International Style” modernism in one basic sense: they were of the earth, embracing the ground, like Wright’s work, not isolated like a “pavilion in the landscape,” à la Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe, peering panoptically at a distant, denatured green estate; nor a white “machine for living” à la Corbusier, divorced from the earth, literally lifted off of it, levitating in the air, gazing coldly off into the sky. Instead the Schindler house was designed with a complex interrelationship with nature at its heart. It was, granted, a Wrightean nature, complete with lawns, foundation plantings, draped vines, and built-in planters. Schindler’s drawings from the period are much like Wright’s drawings. The King’s Road house was a high point for his garden architecture. Schindler had a long career, but as he progressed, the Wrightean urge to tightly link the building with the ground, and inside space with outside, gradually weakened in the face of the Corbusian urge to lift and separate the building from the ground. Dr. Lovell became a patron of Schindler’s most important building to date, an elevated beach house in Newport designed and built from 1922 to 1926, which made the architect’s reputation. But the beach house is uninteresting from the point of view of landscape, since the ground floor is given over to parking, structural supports, and stairs. Henceforth Schindler’s houses would reach higher and higher off the ground and retreat into ever-boxier rectangular ramparts. Landscape was reduced to what could be seen within a rectangular, Corbusian frame—the view through the plate glass window, canonically a view from above, of unpeopled nature, or, if marked by human habitation or industry, then distant enough to be picturesque. This was landskip again, the picturesque, bringing modernist architecture, which had started out with such a stridently revolutionary mission, back squarely to the obsessions of the 17th and 18th centuries of the natural and pastoral, with their attendant exclusivity and anti-urbanism.

 

From the point of view of a history of gardens, in many ways the most important contribution of Rudolf Schindler was his friend, Richard Neutra, another Austrian and another architect immigrant to Los Angeles, who, like Schindler, didn’t really make gardens per se but nevertheless exerted (and continues to exert) a controlling influence on how the modern garden would evolve. Neutra, though younger, had an architectural background similar to Schindler’s. Born in Austria in 1892, he studied architecture and engineering in Vienna (where he knew the young Schindler), went to war in 1914, worked for a Swiss nurseryman and landscape gardener for a stint in 1917,²⁰ and in Berlin for the great expressionist architect Erich Mendelsohn in 1921.²¹ In 1923 he came to the United States to make a pilgrimage to an aging, destitute, and forgotten Sullivan in Chicago. Poetically, he met Frank Lloyd Wright at Sullivan’s funeral. He worked with Wright for just three months (it’s reported that he couldn’t bear the master’s use of heavy, “unnecessary” masonry), then moved on to California in 1925, where he and his wife, Dione, moved in with the Schindlers and the two men formed a loose partnership.²² Neutra designed landscapes for two of Schindler’s residential commissions, the Howe and Lovell beach houses (these seem to have consisted mainly of potted plants), and collaborated on a competition plan for the League of Nations. Shortly thereafter, he picked up Schindler’s main client, Lovell, after the two had a dispute, and designed for him a downtown Los Angeles office and a large house near Griffith Park called Health House. The house, with a novel prefabricated steel and concrete frame, was an international sensation. Neutra was off and running, displaying from the start a talent for self-promotion in the media, publishing his first book—of nine—in 1927.

Like his compatriot Schindler, Neutra was on the lookout for new ideas and new materials, partly for practical reasons—because of shortages through the Depression and World War II—and partly for philosophical ones—he felt no allegiance to the old ones: “because we don’t have a tradition!” he wrote gleefully, dismissing out of hand California’s highly distinct regional architectural tradition, as well as America’s generally. “Here in our lovely country we may often enjoy a lack of local cultural encumbrance and should not artificially burden ourselves with the pasts of others.”²³ His interest in new materials was also part of his lifelong search for liberation from heavy, traditional building techniques, which he had so disliked in Wright’s work. What he craved was lightness. He used thin boards and beams, whether of wood or steel; thin concrete layers for floors, walls, and roofs; and glass wherever possible, in larger and larger expanses. Before long he began to doctor his materials to give them the illusion of immateriality: wooden fascias and sills were painted silver, not to make them look like aluminum but to make them disappear against the sky; reflecting pools, at times just an inch or so deep, were spread out on terraces and rooftops to bring the sky down to the ground plane.

In 1937, Neutra built a house for Grace Miller in Palm Springs that employed all of these elements, plus a wall of mirrors facing a wall of glass windows and sliding panels, which had the effect of bringing the surrounding Mojave Desert inside the house. The house was customized for Miller, an American woman who taught wealthy clients a German body movement technique that involved practicing dance-type moves while watching oneself naked in the mirror. Building such an evanescent structure in such a harsh environment was considered quite a trick. Neutra—bearded, kinetic, and slightly wild-eyed, looking like a cross between an artist and a professor—had first arrived at the bare site in a Packard car towing a trailer customized with a drawing board and shade awning, under which his wife played cello while he studied the angles of wind and sun in order to align the house so that its stucco “front” backed into the sandblasting wind, to shelter its open, glass rear. He believed in good design as a kind of therapeutic prescription for physical well-being, and believed that the key to achieving it lay in careful assessment of the site. Neutra was famous for visiting sites at all hours, even walking about at night with a flashlight, noting microclimates, views, sight lines, and topography—the “physiognomy” of the site, as he called it.

As his technique developed, the interplay between materials and forms became a deft choreography of surfaces sliding past one another, traversing and blurring the boundary between outside and inside: ceilings extended beyond walls, interior floors continued outside to form terraces, reflecting ponds passed under panes of glass and wound into the kitchen. Only sheets of glass separated the two, and these frequently, magically, disappeared. Neutra perfected the butted glass corner using huge floor-to-ceiling panes. By making certain corners transparent, he shifted the gravitational center of the house from the central axis to the oblique. This became his signature move, and he almost always had his houses photographed, often by Julius Shulman, from carefully rehearsed oblique angles, with the camera as often looking out from the glass corner as back in. Increasingly, the house’s structural members continued out into the garden to form outriggers or “spider legs”—“tentacles of structure in surrounding nature,” he wrote in Mystery and Realities of the Site.²⁴ The technique also worked in reverse: “Just as the building may root itself in Nature by outward reaching tentacles, so the site may be tied into the building by pleasant infiltrations.”²⁵ In the case of a pond slipping under the glass into the kitchen, one wonders if such infiltrations included mosquitoes.

All of his techniques were aimed at creating illusions of spaciousness in small houses on constricted lots. Like Thomas Church, he was a student of shakkei: “Even little benefits to be drawn from outside the property lines, like a neighboring garden, or an askew glimpse of a tree between two structures across the street, are often very precious. Anything that may serve the satisfying illusion of expanse is important.”²⁶ Here is how he described the architectural importance of a distant view at one Montecito house: “The living space sweeps on through and reaches out for miles until finally it is closed off by the mountain. The mountain is, indeed, the ‘back wall’ of this stupendous living room.”²⁷

Richard Neutra, Miller House, Palm Springs, California. (IK/Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License)

The potential downside of living in such a stupendous room was exposure, a feeling more than one Neutra client admitted to. But, unlike Philip Johnson’s or Mies’ glass houses, Neutra neither intended nor ignored the problem. In fact, he was very committed to privacy: he often “buried” bedrooms in the back (street front) of the house, making them small, with small windows, and comparatively dark, like a womb (the analogy is his). In the open, glassed part of the house (the functional front, though facing the backyard), he proffered a theory of “planting out” neighbors and “screening your little visual empire.”²⁸ Nevertheless, the perception of many people was that his was a brave new world that they weren’t quite ready for. An oft-quoted comment: “it was possible to sit inside a Neutra living room and still wish that one could get indoors.”²⁹

 

NEUTRA WAS FAMOUS for giving his potential clients a long, detailed, and very personal questionnaire, called a “Client Interrogation,” covering their childhood experiences, family life, and current likes, dislikes, and aspirations with regard to the house. In analyzing the results, he filled out two columns, one labeled “client needs,” the other “architectural response,” which was to be rendered in drawing form, variously plan, section, or elevation, as the case required. His was a new paradigm: architecture equaled space equaled the optimal expression of the psyche. Space became environment, designed for and tailored to each person.

There is no way to understand Neutra outside the context of psychoanalysis, which suffused postwar urban America, especially in California. Psychoanalysis and psychology had been welcomed in the United States since their successes in treating shell-shocked soldiers after World War II. The technique was not initially tied to Freud, as it later would be in the popular mind, but to a broad range of theories and techniques associated with other analysts. By the 1950s it had been “domesticated,” playing roles in every field of public policy and private enterprise, broadly depicted in popular culture, with psychological therapy a widely consumed commodity and psychoanalysts ensconced in home offices in suburban neighborhoods as a matter of course.³⁰

Neutra had been born and raised in the epicenter of the revolution, fin de siècle Vienna, where as a boy he was a close friend of Freud’s son and for years frequented the Freud household. He met many other prominent psychoanalytic theorists, such as Otto Rank and Wilhelm Wundt, and as an architecture student would have been aware of the progress of his master Otto Wagner’s Steinhof, a sprawling psychiatric hospital complex being constructed outside the city. Neutra wrote constantly of psychoanalytic theory, and in a psychoanalytic vein, yet he was more practically influenced by the gestalt theories of perception of Wilhelm Wundt than the ideas of Freud. Wundt believed that mankind’s physical, sensory processes were tied to psychic ones, in a kind of two-way street: for example, feelings could be projected onto objects and imbue them, and space could become a receptacle for feelings projected onto or into it. For Neutra this meant that the tenor and quality of those feelings—both elicited from a person by the house or space, and projected into it by them—had to be carefully planned and managed. Throughout his career he fervently maintained that a well-designed house could and should provide a form of therapy for its occupants, helping defuse the ills and alienation of modern life. His concern with making people feel better through their environment was a thoroughly modern update on Olmsted and Vaux’s earlier therapeutic program. Neutra explicitly cast himself in the role of the analyst, listening to the client-as-patient in order to learn who they were and what their needs were in order to prescribe the correct house. Where his prewar houses had offered prescriptions for physical well-being, his postwar houses offered prescriptions for mental well-being: an architecture of mood management, with careful attention paid to modulations of the domestic environment, using techniques for manipulating and directing air, such as louver systems and clerestories; using screens and deep overhanging eaves to determine light; water, deployed in thin, flat films, both as reflecting pools and for evaporative cooling; temperature, most dramatically in the form of the radiant heating in the floor extending from the hearth out into the garden; and of course, space, made to seem both infinite and domestic, cosmic and comforting. If Le Corbusier’s modern house was to be “a machine for living,” Neutra’s was to be a machine for feeling.

Today we’re accustomed to architecture and other forms of “environmental” design taking these issues into account, but for Neutra there was an additional, fundamental, and more radical substance to be choreographed with wood and glass: energy. He believed space “is vibrating life itself.”³¹ All flows—air, light, water, temperature—were infused with energy, and our bodies were highly tuned instruments for receiving it: “Our skin is a membrane, not a barricade,” he wrote. “The most remote contours of the cosmos are not just ‘out there somewhere’ but causally interlaced with the nearest and deepest folds of our interior landscape.”³²

Neutra’s ideas weren’t far from those of Wilhelm Reich, one of Freud’s early protégés, who broke ranks to pursue a theory of cosmic and bodily energy, called “orgone” energy, which he believed permeated everything in the universe. If orgone energy was blocked by neuroses and “body armoring,” typically resulting from bourgeois sexual repression, illness ensued; his cure involved the physical release of blockages, preferably through orgasm. Reich built boxes called “orgone accumulators” composed of layers of different materials, organic and inorganic, in which patients would sit to absorb the cosmic rays. His methods, which also included measuring men’s ejaculations with electrodes and subjecting his patients to therapy while dressed only in their bras and underpants, provoked angry denunciations by mainstream psychoanalysis. The Food and Drug Administration investigated his claims and banned the interstate sale of his boxes. In 1956 he was convicted of violating the injunction, and the FDA seized and then burned six tons of his books and other work. Reich died a year later in prison.

Neutra’s houses were constructed much like Reich’s orgone boxes: with layers of sheet metal, wood, fabric, stone, and glass; and they were conceived with a somewhat similar aim, to rationalize and purify the interaction between the client’s body and the environment. Indeed, their revolutions catered to some of the same personnel: the Clueys, clients for whom Neutra built a dramatic house high in the Hollywood Hills in 1955, owned an orgone box, and were friends of Timothy Leary, the LSD guru. Neutra went to parties with many of these protagonists, and frequented the commune of Krishnamurti, in the Ojai Valley north of Los Angeles.

 

FROM THE POINT of view of the garden, Richard Neutra brought about two major changes—one by conscious design, the other probably not. First, very deliberately, he categorically reordered the relationship between the inside and outside of the house by making openings at certain corners and by making other corners see-through. Earlier modernist designers had opened up the house and broken down the hierarchy between front and back, but Neutra’s glass corners completely unhinged it. This change decentered garden geometry, far more than did copying avant-garde paintings onto lawns and pool decks, and decentered nature by reducing everything to the visual—to a constant, inescapable connection between inside and outside (not unlike surveillance). Second, it is what Neutra didn’t do in the garden that most disturbed the traditional form of the garden: he didn’t garden. He brought the foreground out and the background in until they touched, where the polished, heated terrazzo terrace reaches out to virtually touch the distant mountain peaks, and the “outward reaching tentacles” of the stretching house combined with nature’s “pleasant infiltrations,” as he poetically termed plants, water, air, and light—the materials of gardens.

Neutra blurred the distinction just as his disappearing glass walls blurred the entry threshold, transforming it into what he called a “membrane, not a barricade.” In the process, the middle ground, what traditionally makes up the garden—the space between the house and the wild—all but disappeared. Where he could, Neutra eliminated it altogether by bringing the view directly to the end of the terrace and calling it a day—note that his terraces almost never have railings, even on precipitous slopes or on the roof of a house, so that the terrace edge functions just like a ha-ha, causing the distance to appear continuous with the house owner’s more modest property. It was the return of the 18th century picturesque, lending a touch of transcendence to the suburban tract lot. But this 20th century suburban nature was no longer sublime in the sense of being untamed, wild, and symbolic of deeper metaphysical beauty; instead it was an abstracted, thoroughly tamed, denatured nature, reduced to a reassuring, soothing aesthetic—nature as anaesthetic. Where the circumstances didn’t allow for this pure use of shakkei, he reduced the garden to strips of lawn circling the buildings, by reflex peppered with a few boulders and vaguely exotic-looking plants. With few exceptions, the gardens in photographs of Neutra’s houses are indifferently planted. This isn’t because he was a bad plantsman—he had had nursery training—but because he was ambivalent about the role of the garden, since it hadn’t been assigned a role in his psychological and aesthetic reorderings of the universe. And Neutra’s ambivalence about gardens has translated into a general, troubling, and unfortunate quality of much modernist design. Modernist buildings are often hard to design gardens for because it is unclear what function the garden should have in mediating between the building and the larger world—so much so that the designer’s effort to speak the building’s language often makes the garden seem pointless or pretentious.

The two outstanding exceptions to these charges against Neutra’s gardens were each planted by independent nurserymen and designers. At his 1946 Kaufmann House in Palm Springs, built for the same client who had commissioned Fallingwater from Wright, Neutra had intended to plant a segmented, traditional garden of camellias and roses, and other things he and Mrs. Kaufmann fancied (as laid out in a ten-page plant list he prepared). Fortunately, the two were dissuaded when a local friend, Patricia Moorten, introduced them to her husband, who went by the nom de plante Cactus Slim. He took them to the nearby Joshua Tree reserve (now a national park) to see the desert’s own, much better adapted architectural flora. Cactus Slim was then invited to plant a garden of succulents such as cactus, agaves, Joshua trees, and ocotillos that perfectly bridged the divide between the obligatory lawns that surrounded the house and the stark, rugged desert beyond, heightening the visual tension between the smooth machine aesthetic of the architect’s object and the rough, organic forms of the wider landscape. Like the Kaufmann House, the 1948 Tremaine House in Montecito is a big pinwheel featuring long glass sections opening out to a heated terrace (an unbelievable fifty-six feet long here), a pool, and breathtaking views of distant mountains. Ralph Stevens, who had contributed much horticultural creativity to Ganna Walska’s Lotusland, performed a similar feat at this far smaller site, creating a miniature version of that great estate garden, complete with an assortment of surreal aloes and other succulents densely crowded into an irregular bed between the terrace and a bit of lawn that terminated at the surrounding oak forest. What was striking was the effect that such a small area of planting achieved, joining together the two faces of Neutra’s world with a demonstration of nature’s own architecture of texture, form, and color. Each man in his own way introduced plants to the modern garden as architectural objects in their own right—the garden designer sharing credit for their genius with nature. After these two gardens, the best in modernist garden design would come from deep plantsmanship (as a love and facility for plant materials is called by garden makers) and from delight in exuberant natural forms, not simply from the formalist’s brio with spatial and geometric effects.

 

The person who would take up what Thomas Church had pioneered in the Bay Area and carry it forward into the exploding suburban supernova of Los Angeles County was Garrett Eckbo. Born in Cooperstown, New York, of Norwegian heritage, Eckbo moved as a child to Alameda, across the bay from San Francisco. A few years younger than Church, Eckbo also studied at Berkeley, graduating in landscape architecture in 1935 and continuing at Harvard from 1936 to 1938. He matriculated a few months before Walter Gropius, the head of Germany’s legendary Bauhaus, arrived as director of the Graduate School of Design with the aim of remaking American architecture in the Bauhaus’s image. Eckbo drank in the excitement, intense idealism, and concern with transforming society that characterized the early 20th century avant-gardes (along with their fervent faith in science and technology). Eckbo wanted landscape architecture to become a “humanistic science”³³ and he wrote a series of articles with fellow students James Rose and Dan Kiley (each of whom would become important designers), outlining an important global landscape practice divided into a hierarchy of “urban, rural, and primeval” typologies. The language was turgid and pretentious, yet committed to a more analytical and structured garden making than had come before. Eckbo’s penchant for words was unleashed: text began to appear on his student drawings, describing functions, layers, and intentions. So too did Cubist lines and shapes and clear nods to Gropius’s austere style. He experimented with tropes from modern painting and wrestled with how to inject “non-perspectival space” into the garden. He was exercised by what he considered the false dichotomy between formal and informal, and the tyranny of the “planar” view, with the paper plan view dominating composition. Above all, his work was extremely systematic. In one 1937 project, “Small Gardens in the City,” he drew eighteen identical rectangular lots, then proceeded to design eighteen different treatments. Incorporating a three-foot level change, each one involved a unique geometry of steps, walls, gravel, concrete, lawns, beds, shrubs, trees, and fountains. The series demonstrated flat-out formal virtuosity—and was not a bad series of small city gardens, either.

Garrett Eckbo, Small Gardens in the City. (University of California, Berkeley, Design Archives)

On graduating in 1938 he went back to California, where he worked for Church for two weeks before decamping for a better-paying offer from the Farm Security Administration, a New Deal agency dedicated to planning and building housing for the rural displaced. Until the end of World War II, Eckbo designed migrant worker camps, nearly fifty of them, and defense housing all over the West, projects that included parks, sports fields, and community buildings. In 1945, with the end of hostilities, he opened up shop in San Francisco with two partners. Two years later he came to Los Angeles to open a branch office for the firm.³⁴ In Los Angeles, Eckbo hit paydirt, as breakneck suburban expansion—California’s population tripled from 1930 to 1960, with most of the growth in the south—opened up a huge market niche for landscape designers. Much of the new housing in the western part of Los Angeles was modernist or partly inspired by it, and even that which wasn’t was explicitly intended for “outdoor living”—the great mantra of postwar California life. No matter the style, the new California house had outdoor living space and needed someone to design it. Eckbo, a trim, tanned, and handsome figure in slacks and a white buttoned shirt, was the man for the job. For the next two decades he and a changing cast of partners kept up an astonishing level of production, designing hundreds, perhaps thousands of gardens, for every conceivable kind of house, all scrupulously modernist. Eckbo took Church’s innovating concepts and scaled them up, multiplied them, and pushed them to their limits. He spun endless variations from the vocabulary of shapes and elements that Church and Halprin had first imported from painting, while adding his own, and tested endless permutations of the new “materials kit” of concrete, aggregate, metal, wood, plastic, and more. He wrote about mass production, industrial production, and how the use of modern manufactured materials would transform the garden art.

Garrett Eckbo, ALCOA Forecast Garden. (University of California, Berkeley, Design Archives)

From the outset he was a fan of benches, walls, fences, screens, trellises, scrims, and accretions of several of these elements into quirky garden buildings. In 1959, funded by the Aluminum Company of America, which had been looking for new consumer markets for its defense materials, Eckbo got the chance to make a signature landscape at his own house in Laurel Canyon in the Hollywood Hills, part of a development he helped format, Wonderland Park. Called the ALCOA Forecast Garden, it was a wonderland—a futuristic stage set of shade scrims, screening walls, pergolas, and a huge faceted fountain in the shape of a flower, all constructed of bars, rods, panels, and meshes of aluminum in several colored finishes, arranged around a small lawn. In spite of the amount of metal, the garden is colorful and whimsical, with bits of varied materials set into the paving and lush, exotic plantings framing a circular procession of carefully modulated, unique garden rooms.

Even without such a level of building activity, Eckbo’s gardens were often remarkably three-dimensional, yet always also essentially dependent on planar forms: usually concrete paving—patterned, angled, and curved—alternating with panels of lawn, often also with a swimming pool at the center, befitting their suburban settings. Eckbo designed every imaginable kind of pool, in a dizzying variety of shapes: amoebas, zigzags, arcs, semicircles, rhomboids, angular kidneys, and free-form Cubist doodles complete with islands. “The garden must shape the pool, rather than being forced to conform to it,” he wrote in 1950.³⁵ Superficially, the pools might look like the pool at the center of Church’s Donnell garden, but they were rarely ever balanced by the expanse of a distant view. Eckbo’s gardens tended to be inward-looking and centripetal, often with terminal curves of hedges or tall walls literally closing them in on themselves. Eckbo liked enclosure and invented it where it didn’t exist.

For all his mannerism, Eckbo did succeed in humanizing landscape architecture: his gardens really were for people, as this deceptively simple definition from his student days makes clear: “Gardens are places where people live out of doors.”³⁶ He thought about how his clients would use the gardens, and, no matter how stylized the shapes or materials he used, they all derive from a clear assessment of function. His drawing style was unique in favoring neat 3-D views: axonometric or isometric perspectives, done in clean ink, frequently with human figures inserted into the diagrams to give them scale and dynamism. On the other hand, a downside of his attention to European art invited the charge of simple-minded copying: many garden plans looked exactly like avant-garde paintings of an earlier generation. He proudly published one alongside a Kandinsky drawing he had used as a model.

Garrett Eckbo, swimming pool from above. (University of California, Berkeley, Design Archives)

Like Neutra, Eckbo wrote often and long, publishing his first book, Landscape for Living, in 1950, the first modernist garden book to appear in English since the British designer Christopher Tunnard’s 1938 Gardens in the Modern Landscape. It made his reputation nationally, and even internationally; the freshness of the design, a signature of the California style, made it visually irresistible. But it is a strange document, consisting of endless platitudinous classifications and typologies, sermons on theory and history, lacking narrative organization and wrought in a jargon-filled, ponderous pseudo-scientific mode common at mid-century. An impatient reader’s carping aside, Eckbo did bury a few nuggets of wisdom in the sands, particularly about the importance of thinking carefully about site.

At his book’s core lay the insistence that landscape architecture be considered a keystone art, modeled on science and the scientific method, which “takes nothing for granted, accepts no precedents without examination, and recognizes a dynamic world in which nothing is permanent but change itself.”³⁷ He made big claims for the profession, arguing that it had an interdisciplinary reach and humanist latitude that ought to place it above merely decorative arts in the hierarchy; yet the terms he used betray delusions of grandeur: he repeatedly wrote of a “unified landscape” and a “total landscape” shaped by the all-seeing landscape architect. There is a strong undercurrent of defensiveness in his writing, a status anxiety about the field carried forward from his student days, when, enrolled in an architecture and design program, it was made clear to him that landscape occupied the basement. Walter Gropius was not interested in landscape; and it was not included in Alfred Barr’s much-fetishized 1949 Museum of Modern Art show in New York on modernism in the arts. Eckbo is not alone among landscape architects of his era who trained at Harvard and seemed to come away with a bad case of “slide-rule envy.” To accomplish this, he and others first tried to make it more like painting—and architecture, and “science” as Eckbo conceived it. His own “humanistic science” would ultimately become enveloped in a single, highly codified style that ignored architectural context completely, despite his habitually railing against “style.”

It is tempting to frame this attitude as a gender problem: in an age of ascendant technocracy, the Harvard men (they were all men) tried to professionalize garden making, which had historically been the province of women, gay men, the self-taught, the unlicensed, artists, and trespassers from other realms like Thomas Jefferson, and had focused on flowers, horticulture, and seasons (a feminist view would translate these to procreation, generation, and dirt). These were effectively banished, and men—straight men—wearing white shirts and ties, drawing at well-lit desks with engineering tools, pouring concrete and welding steel, remade the garden into a place of expertise, technique, “science,” and function, totally divorced from the garden’s earthy origins but instead defined by modern use values as a place of consumption, leisure, and recreation—the three sisters of postwar American aspiration.

In his defense, Eckbo had a real concern for democracy and social justice. Like Neutra, whose designs for schools in the Los Angeles area and health clinics in rural Puerto Rico rank among his most important—and overlooked—contributions to opening modern institutional buildings to the outdoors, Eckbo’s New Deal landscape work and his later collaboration on a series of cooperative suburban housing schemes demonstrated this. But the Eckbo firm increasingly turned to large public and commercial development work, designing campuses, parks, subdivisions, and, unavoidably, tacky desert resorts.

In the end, Garrett Eckbo succeeded. He designed, he estimated, 1,100 gardens.³⁸ Along with his cohorts—Church, Halprin, Baylis, Royston, and others—he literally remade the California garden and in turn much of the nation’s garden. Through sheer volume and prolific media, including the Sunset magazine program, they wielded a huge influence over the weltanschauung of landscape, design, and, presumably, how people used outdoor space, all over the world. Eckbo helped define the physical contours of our suburban lives these past few decades, no matter where we live or in what style of house. In Wonderland Park today, as in so many similar neighborhoods, the houses have migrated away, via serial remodeling and creeping mansionization, from the original 1960s one-story pseudo-Mod boxes, but the gardens around them seem to retain something of his flavor with every revamping. One can’t help but marvel at this small, surprising bit of cultural continuity in a society intent on tearing everything down and rebuilding it over and over again.

In 1963, Eckbo returned to the University of California at Berkeley, this time as chairman of the department of landscape architecture. He enjoyed stature and influence, but the modernist program he’d championed hadn’t panned out as envisioned. Good design had not made the world a better place. There was no revolution, no social transformation, no outbreak of justice for those who needed it. Indeed, the beginning of the 1960s was marked by growing income stratification, continued residential segregation, building anomie, anxiety, and anger at society’s direction. Even among modernist design stalwarts, there was a spreading realization that the suburban model had sold out nearly all of the movement’s revolutionary commitments and had in fact encouraged, abetted, and worked for the bourgeois counterrevolution, if there was such a thing. Architects and landscape designers had been complicit. They had a suburb problem.

 

Suburbanization didn’t just happen magically, nor was it simply chosen by consumers or ordained by free-market forces. The conversion of rural land to suburban housing development has always been a process stoked, shaped, and sustained by government policies—not a single, coherent, or necessarily intentional one, but many overlapping ones, promulgated by different parts of government at many levels, local, state, and national. It is a Kafkaesque, bureaucratic morass of crossed purposes that is singularly American and to which we owe a good part of our built environment. The first rule is that local governments nearly always encourage sprawl development because they stand to gain from property and sales taxes, even though it will cause them and their neighbors trouble down the road. Much of the time, local governments are in the pocket of business interests that benefit from public spending on infrastructure. The case of Los Angeles’s bringing water from the distant Owens River in 1913 to fuel the development of farmland in the San Fernando Valley, which was owned by a cabal of well-connected businessmen, set the standard that others would follow. Los Angeles, already a dispersed city, was locked into a suburban model to the perpetual benefit of land developers reaping subsidies. By 1930, 94 percent of Los Angeles consisted of detached houses. By 1950 the proportion had fallen to one-third, but the City of Angels would always look different from Chicago (28 percent detached homes), New York City (20 percent), or Philadelphia (15 percent).³⁹ The Los Angeles model was adopted nationwide, and the gravy train for speculators feeding at the public trough has been rolling ever since.

The second rule is that state governments tend to behave just like local governments, especially in large states, since no one can see what they are doing behind the screen. Just one example is the California tax code provision that allowed local authorities to recalculate rural property taxes based on potential land value, rather than its real, assessed value, forcing farmers to sell out before development even came close to them. In Los Angeles County, which up until the 1940s was the single highest-earning agricultural county in America (in good measure because it specialized in high-value crops such as grapes, citrus, and vegetables), this rule helped crush the citrus industry and see it replaced by housing tracts: in 1947, citrus orchards covered 135,000 acres; in 1960 there were fewer than 50,000. A 1965 state law stopped the practice, but too late; today the number of acres in commercial fruit trees is negligible.⁴⁰

At the federal level, the list of inducements to decentralization in the postwar period is long: a redirection of defense spending from the North to the Sunbelt; massive spending on roads extending from the Federal Highway Act of 1916 to the Interstate Highway Act of 1956, which by itself opened millions of acres to subdivision; the deduction of mortgage interest and real estate taxes from gross income; reimbursement for state and local government building of new water, sewer, and other infrastructure; and massive government spending on housing after the Depression, in the form of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Veterans Administration (VA) insuring mortgages. The federal government made it often literally cheaper to buy in new suburbs than to rent in cities, and millions did.⁴¹

In combination, these policies formed a big, tangled ball, which, once rolling, was unstoppable. There was a huge burst in housing starts,⁴² but the majority was in suburbs, speeding the demise of inner-city areas by vacuuming up middle-class buyers.⁴³ The twinned stories of the American postwar landscape are the growth of affluent white suburbia and the decline of poor black cities—processes that were intimately intertwined. The historian Kenneth Jackson pointed out that it was not the racist exclusion of the postwar period that was new, “but the thoroughness of the physical separation”—the sheer distance that highways helped put between different parts of the American population.⁴⁴

In an even deeper sense this process of withdrawal from the mixed public space of the city was at the core of the postwar American zeitgeist, especially in the 1950s. It was an age of paranoia: fear of the Soviet Menace, fear of racial miscegenation, and fear of infection, particularly in light of the polio epidemics of the period. Multiple, sometimes contrary threats of surveillance weighed on the public mind: fear of communist infiltrators and spies, but also of U.S. government wiretapping, aired in the congressional wiretapping hearings of 1953; fear of subliminal suggestion, hypnosis, and miniature spy cameras; and fear of UFOs. All of these reinforced a desire for privacy that was also a key selling point for the flight to suburbia, away from the noise and lack of privacy of city tenements, streets, and public transportation. This had an explicitly racial component: between restricted covenants and racist government lending criteria, suburbia was built only for white people. But it also spoke to a practical urgency: from the point of view of architects, builders, and landscape designers, the need for privacy was a consumer obsession that had to be factored into day-to-day business. The old rule of the house facing the street, with living room and dining room in the front and kitchen behind, was reversed. These family areas now opened onto the rear yard, with ever-increasing amounts of glass, making the achievement of privacy in the garden critical.

This was true of “traditional” house types as well as aggressively modernist ones, but the latter were caught in a self-generated paradox: the more modern the house, the more transparent, the more perfect its erasure of the distinction between inside and outside—and the more its occupants worried about “living in a goldfish bowl.” House styles other than modernist, whether tract or traditional, borrowed this problem by building “picture windows” into inopportune parts of the structure, namely the center-front, visible from the street. As a consequence the modern garden increasingly turned in on itself, brilliantly fulfilling the movement’s holy grail of linking house and garden into a seamless whole, yet shutting off the outside from the outside-of-outside. Eckbo’s walls, screens, and fences are perfect embodiments of this. And he was a favorite of modernist architects such as A. Quincy Jones, who literally built glass houses and lived in one himself. In a 1957 magazine article on his own house, Jones said: “Inside the house you’re always with your family or your friends—outside is where you want privacy. That’s why we tried to provide as much privacy as we could, with screens, walls, fences and plantings.” (Emphasis in original.)⁴⁵

The postwar decades were also an age of anxiety about conformity, which generated another, weirder paradox for designers: anyone with the means had to live in suburbia but also had to guard against appearing the same as anyone else. Though it rose from the counterculture, Malvina Reynolds’s 1962 song “Little Boxes,” deriding the identical “ticky-tacky” houses of suburbia as unbearably conformist, expressed a broad spectrum of white Americans’ fear of being “look-alikes,” or drones—organization men. Yet difference had to be achieved within tight limits: too much originality was perhaps more suspect than too little. An astonishing how-to literature developed in magazine articles and books, advising Americans where the lines lay in their politics, dress, speech, vacations, and houses and gardens. Living in cookie-cutter suburbs was no more acceptable than living in a trailer park, but adding a bit of customization to your tract home could establish the right note of distinction. Building from stock house plans was smart, but buying a prefab house, which sounded too much like a trailer, was not. The architect-designed modern house and garden promised the perfect quantum of individuality and were celebrated in the shelter magazines from coast to coast. The editor of House Beautiful from 1945 to 1965, Elizabeth Gordon, waged a tireless campaign for individuality and privacy through “everyday modernism” (a squishy amalgam of post and beam, small windows, mild hip roofs, and softened traditional details) as the path to defending the ideals of American democracy threatened by conformity and lack of privacy. “The challenge of our time is individualism versus totalitarianism,” she declaimed in a 1953 speech at the Chicago Furniture Mart, “democracy or dictatorship—and this struggle is on many fronts. Our front, yours and mine, happens to be on the home front.”⁴⁶ Privacy was the primary battleground. The magazine’s garden editor wrote this in a typical diatribe from 1950:

We Americans give much lip service to the idea of privacy. We consider it one of the cherished privileges we fought a war to preserve. Freedom to live our own lives, the way we want to live them, without being spied upon or snooped around, is as American as pancakes and molasses…. The very raison d’etre of the separate house is to get away from the living habits and cooking smells and inquisitive eyes of other people…. [I]f your neighbors can observe what you are serving on your terrace, your home is not really your castle.

So the backyard had to be made private, unique, and distinctive, designed to showcase the owners’ individuality—hence the endless variation of forms and geometries of the modernist California garden, with its proliferating new materials: corrugated plastic, Plexiglas, fiberglass, aluminum, and patterned concrete blocks, to name a few. Like Garrett Eckbo’s eighteen “Small Gardens in the City,” all of it was a variation in one style—like a General Motors product line, offering a model for every taste, one in every color—but every one had tail fins. Customization and satisfying each and every consumer whim was the order of the day, in the service of an attempt to turn the suburban American backyard into a private country club complete with barbeque grill for cooking, a table for dining, a lawn and swimming pool full of toys for recreation, outdoor stereo speakers, lounge chairs, and a fire pit for adult entertaining. In fact it needed to be even better than the country club: design magazines exhorted architects, landscapers, and homeowners to make the garden “more exciting than anywhere else, canceling the need for seeking family pleasures in private clubs or public beaches,” as House Beautiful did in 1958.⁴⁷ In this age of total automotive mobility, garden designers challenged people to leave the car in the garage. When Thomas Church titled his second book Your Private World, he perfectly reflected the aesthetic of nuclear family atomization.

Though modern garden makers didn’t invent these centrifugal forces in American life—Monticello is a testament to the deep English roots of American attitudes toward city and countryside—they surely did their part to reinforce them, by flacking, in effect, an anti-urban point of view. The preference for rural or wilderness sites, the glorification of unspoiled views, and the rhetoric of “planting out” all trace of the neighbors helped shape and drive suburban development, encouraging sprawl farther and farther away, especially into hilly or mountainous areas poorly suited to traditional development. Even while some designers, such as Eckbo, continued to talk of the need for remaking the city, the imagery and the actual plans they peddled were solidly, iconically suburban—like Wonderland Park.

 

Modernism never did become the housing choice of the masses. Some large developers, among them Eichler Homes, hired modernist celebrity architects like A. Quincy Jones and Craig Ellwood to design affordable tracts. Our house on Twinridge was an example of this sort of modest modernism for the middle class. But in general, the modernist house and garden, in spite of the publicity they garnered, remained objects of desire for a very limited slice of the middle class, and increasingly over the years, the wealthy. So total was this identification that by the late 1950s Alfred Hitchcock “cast” a Frank Lloyd Wright house as an emblem of utmost, unattainable luxury in his film North by Northwest—the residence of the evil villain, the spy Vandamm. Wright, the most famous architect in the world, defined modernism for most people, and his Fallingwater was nearly as well-known as the White House. The Master himself was too expensive even for MGM, but no matter—the set designers in 1958 pretty convincingly aped a Wright house, complete with dressed limestone walls, endless glass, and a massive cantilever (supported in very un-Wrightean but very L.A. style by steel beams), perched by itself, a million miles from anywhere, on a forested, rocky slope below Mount Rushmore, where the film’s thrilling denouement is staged. It was instantly recognizable as a Frank Lloyd Wright to most Americans who could read (or who at least read magazines like House Beautiful, which devoted two issues to Wright in the 1950s). It was also the perfect “country home” complement to the Plaza Hotel, where the hero, Cary Grant as a Madison Avenue ad man, is mistakenly abducted as a spy and is then marched through a parade of luxe locales, cars, and Van Cleef & Arpels jewelry draped on the alluring actress Eva Marie Saint. Hitchcock’s point is that wealth and luxury won’t help you when you need help, but rather will isolate you. Nevertheless, the house’s wilderness isolation would have suited Neutra perfectly—though he, like Wright himself, would have sited the house more sensitively, closer to the ground. The filmmaker’s choice also highlights the degree to which the modernist house, whether full-blown “futuristic” like a Neutra or with one foot still firmly in the soil of the Arts & Crafts movement like a Wright, remained the offspring of that movement, true to its exacting formal and utopian romantic impulses: all were dedicated to the patriarchal family, conceived as a unique, artistic object, usually asymmetrical and idiosyncratic, rendered by fine craftsmen in materials either fine in themselves or finely crafted, and sited if possible in splendid “natural” isolation, a monument to the taste, discernment, and means of its owner.

For most American homebuyers in the postwar decades, “traditional” architectural styles remained the top choice—even in California, where the ranch house held sway. The ranch house had a long, uncodified history as literal ranch dwellings in the Southwest, built according to tradition, local materials, and practical accommodation to an arid, warm climate. The flavor was Spanish for hundreds of years, Mexican for a few decades more, American thereafter. The originals shared a loosely defined form: one-story, low-slung, with adobe walls and low-pitched tile roofs extending over generous eaves and covered porches and exterior walkways—corredors, in pre–World War II parlance. The rooms were arrayed in one-room thick wings flanked and connected by exterior walkways, each room with egress to outside spaces, an arrangement developed as practical accommodation to housing extended families, workers, and much of the animal end of the ranching business as well.

As the Southwest boomed and gained population, the form was picked up and spread as the ideal “informal” and “outdoor living,” that is, suburban mode. In this period, Americans had a genial obsession with a Roy Rogers West of cowboys and Indians, horses, country music, Daniel Boone caps, and Old Mexico—romantic, bucolic imagery that the ranch house complemented effortlessly. (Roy Rogers famously lived in one with a matching horse barn.) Against this backdrop appeared the Los Angeles architect and developer Cliff May, a sixth-generation Californian who had grown up in San Diego across the street from an Irving Gill house and who had spent summer days at various 19th century adobe houses passed down by his mother’s Californio family.⁴⁸ Both as an architect for others and in developing small subdivisions on his own account, May gradually launched a revolution, beginning in the late 1930s, by taking the traditional ranch house and giving it wings—literally, by running the conventional L, V, or U shapes out at odd angles to enclose more space on the generous lots of much of upscale, outer ring suburbia: he fashioned Vs, Ws, Xs, Ys, Zs, and myriad compound combinations. In his early years May more or less faithfully imitated historical precedents, down to the Spanish ironwork grilles over streetside windows. The genius of the form was the fact that nearly every room did, or could, open up to broad garden spaces lush with lawns and towering sycamore trees—often native specimens a hundred or more years old that grew in the West Los Angeles canyons he favored for his developments. At the same time, the houses could turn a blank shoulder to the street with thick walls, small windows, and big, winding driveways. May published a book, Western Ranch Houses, with Sunset magazine in 1946, which became a bestseller in the genre. He then designed the magazine’s offices in Menlo Park, south of San Francisco, as a low-slung, red-tile-roofed zigzag set back from the street like a mission compound. When the book was republished in 1956, the historical bits remained, but the rustic drawings of old rancho adobes had been replaced with photos of May’s own work, which began to reveal remarkable inclusions from the modern lexicon, subtly slipped in: open plans between kitchens, dining and living areas, glass walls and sliders opening to patios, and swimming pools in mod shapes. Like the modernist box, the ranch house was also built with post and beam, so it was easy to add these features while maintaining the traditional roof pitches and detailing. Soon the line began to blur.

The most interesting case was May’s own house, built in 1939 and remodeled ten years later. It was a long-running sensation. The first incarnation was featured in Sunset in 1944 and 1945, the second in 1956 and 1958; most other top U.S. home and garden magazines picked it up, too. What he said in 1946 set the tone of the open-pollinated hybridization he was effecting: “Looking back at the old ranch houses should help you look ahead and see the real values in tomorrow’s house.”⁴⁹ French doors and fixed windows had been replaced with floor-to-ceiling sliders in the living room, dining room, and master bedroom. Electronic media gadgetry appeared in every room. The garden, originally rustic and “equestrian,” had been revamped by Douglas Baylis into a quietly modernist statement, without the designer knickknacks of plank benches or metal scrims. A big, curving patio of pebble aggregate in a roughly five-foot grid of redwood stringers, set on the diagonal, was fitted with radiant heating that could crank up to 100 degrees—the old Neutra trick. The patio held a circular planting bed and defined the edge of a copious lawn extending to the pool. Curves were everywhere: the drive, the parking court, the elliptical swimming pool. Planting beds held large-leafed Fatsia japonica, the signature plants of the hip modernist landscape architects of the era. In the second edition of his book, Thomas Church’s work on several May houses was photographed, as was Eckbo’s.

May’s updated historicism was electrifying: the ranch house became the most popular model for new, detached home construction in the West. It even came to represent America, at least in Moscow in 1959, where Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon had an argument that looked a lot like a marriage spat in the kitchen of a model ranch house built by the U.S. government to show Russians how well Americans lived. The Soviet leader found ridiculous the idea that the world needed more than one brand of dishwasher, while Nixon took pride in capitalism’s ready multiplication of consumer choice.⁵⁰ Americans sided with Nixon—and Cliff May.

May had pulled off a perfect triangulation, to use our anachronistic, Clinton-era word. How was it so easy? Because of function as much as fashion. The postwar suburban lifestyle’s needs could be satisfied by a short list of functional requirements; any design style conceivably could do the trick, if it were amenable. Both modernism and ranch, in mid-century California, were so and had eager boosters in the media. And both were embraced by the home-buying public, in good part by digesting the salient points of the other—modernism the openness and working relationship between indoors and out of the Spanish-Mediterranean past, and ranch, that tradition’s stodgy progeny, the technological and aesthetic innovations of the new designers.

Soon hybrids of the two styles were everywhere, with butted glass corner windows and spider-leg outriggers à la Neutra appearing on bad May imitations, and hipped roofs and wooden windows on glass boxes; as were odd matings of architecture and landscape: indoor-outdoor patios, long beam-supported spans enclosing atriums filled with trendy plants. Ranch was traditional, in a modern way. Sunset magazine featured it side by side with straight modernism for three decades as the twin models, strangely interchangeable, for the Western house, glossing over the obvious stylistic differences by claiming, ludicrously: “the ranch house is not exactly a style. Instead, let’s call it an approach to living.”

Was this modernism and antimodernism in bed, creating a crossbreed offspring? Or is the difference in philosophical and political outlooks implied by these words trivialized and subsumed when each extreme can be reduced to the choice between one detached, three-bedroom, two-car-garage suburban house with pool and another? At the end of the day—or the decade, or the century, depending on your point of view—what was apparent was that modernism, for all its protestations that it wasn’t a style, that it transcended style, was just another style in history’s bag of looks, ready to be deployed, in variously pure or adulterated forms, in different settings, to satisfy the prospective buyer. Like any of the historicist idioms that preceded it, architectural modernism found itself, when its practitioners couldn’t procure larger or more utopian commissions, serving the old masters of the detached, suburban, single-family home, it’s social and aesthetic aspirations subordinated just as completely as its predecessors had been to the discipline of bourgeois family isolation.

Yet, looked at another way, the modernist house in California suburbia represented the paradoxical triumph and fulfillment of the Arts & Crafts movement’s original aims: to reconnect ordinary families with a more natural order, the workingman of Ruskin and Morris having been transmogrified into the commuting middle-class breadwinner of postwar America, each a master of his own self-contained idyll where close-cropped turf and possibly a swimming pool stood in for the vegetable garden and orchard of the yeoman’s homestead. The evils of industrial cities had been successfully evaded, a new Eden created, within the reach of, if not the masses, then as close to that shapeshifting concept as had ever been achieved. It was the definitive style of the second half of the American century, the most innovative, surprising, intellectually engaged, and democratic—celebrating the aspirations and dignity of the middle classes, unfussy about boundaries, unafraid of embracing its opposites—in sum, as democratic a style as we’ve ever had, even considering its racial exclusivity. And the one for which the era will be remembered.

 

The story told in this chapter would not be complete without paying heed to a phenomenon that modernists and traditionalists respectively tried to ignore—tiki or Polynesian style, a lively, embarrassingly popular part of the built and cultural American environment that contradicted the aims and pretensions of the tastemakers while infiltrating their home turf. Hawaii became a state, the fiftieth, in 1959, one year after Alaskan statehood. The ratification no doubt stoked weeks of celebration and libation nationwide, but revelry in support of Hawaiian-American cultural (mis) understanding was already a long-standing tradition, with its ceremonies first laid down in sticky layers by Mark Twain in 1866 and Jack London in 1907, then refined and broadcast by a trickle-turned-torrent of American servicemen and women in the World War II era, when millions of Americans shuffled through military bases in California and Hawaii en route to the Pacific Theater, and, if they were lucky, back again. They saw things there they didn’t see at home, and some of it traveled well. California, itself a kind of semi-palmy Pacific idyll for folks from colder climates and tighter social bindings, became a conduit and amplifier for the reexport of Americanized Hawaiian culture to the nether reaches of the continent. (The traffic was two-way: the Mission Revival contributed to some of Hawaii’s finest—or at least most memorable—buildings, such as Bertram Goodhue’s Honolulu Academy of Arts and the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, and Cliff May’s triangulated ranch-modern mode was widely copied in both residential and commercial buildings during Hawaii’s surging growth in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s.)

The “Polynesian” culture being trafficked was ersatz, but authentic in a certain catholic sense: a festive bouquet of imagery including visions of South Seas explorers, savage tribes worshipping wooden idols by torchlight, lovely wahines in grass skirts, and barefoot beachcombers living the easy life, sipping from coconuts while the rest of us corporate stooges sweated in tight collars back in Peoria. Tiki represented everything that the GIs and every other average postwar American craved after years of Depression and war but weren’t allowed by the pedantic, puritanical modernist priests and purists who controlled the design PR machinery. It was fundamentally and loudly “about” taboo things, and it wasn’t subtle: it prominently featured images of bare-breasted women—often of dark complexion—dancing in firelight, in primitive tableaux made of premodern materials such as bamboo and volcanic rock, and cocktails—lots of cocktails—mostly based on rum and with alluring monikers, such as mai tais, grogs, punches, fog cutters, Singapore slings, and scorpion bowls. Tiki first and foremost promised rewards: what one might chance into after a long sea voyage or a long war, unmediated by mother figures or librarians: rum, wahines, and song, accompanied by ukuleles and drums, and plenty of pseudo-Chinese-Malaysian food on sticks, eaten in low-slung rattan chairs. It was made simultaneously macho and intellectual by the buff Norwegian explorer-god Thor Heyerdahl’s 1947 voyage in a balsa-wood raft, the Kon-Tiki (and 1948 book of the same name), then was made both literary and pop by James Michener’s blockbuster novel Hawaii in 1959. Each book launched a thousand rum-boat bars. A stream of Elvis Presley movies, beginning with Blue Hawaii in 1961, launched a thousand more.

The tiki statue itself dovetailed perfectly with the vogue for aboriginal art among European modernists like Picasso, who cast himself as an evangelist of the “primitive.” Such a posture was irresistible in the face of the overbearing self-righteousness of the modernists—even for one of the movement’s biggest stars. “Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativity,” Picasso is quoted as saying. It offered a license to rebel against this other conformity: the slick, anaesthetic, cold, clinical modernist world, where no fun was allowed, no music, no women, no contact with the outside. Tiki was the outside, culturally speaking, and its natural habitat was outside, and it quickly made its way there: countless homeowners erected tiki torches and actual wooden tikis, sometimes big ones, in their yards, and planted exotic tropical-looking vegetation on the edge of the lawn. Thatched structures fitted out with wet bars appeared poolside from Palm Springs to Petaluma, melding perfectly with the hybrid architectural forms taking over coastal California, especially in the new sprawl cities of the East Bay, Orange County, the San Gabriel Valley, and South Los Angeles. On the strip boulevards, tiki mixed with the slick, Jetsons-esque commercial architecture of the period in hundreds of motels, restaurants, bars, liquor stores, bowling alleys, and cheap apartments featuring massive, angled cantilever roofs, glass walls, gross stone-veneered walls mimicking “lava” rock, plus a fringery of mod components such as steel beams and chrome chairs, metal fences, and plastic screens. It was aesthetic mixing of the lowest, cheapest commercial sort, but it was hugely popular, a plague of bad taste that Americans couldn’t get enough of.

I can personally attest to the erstwhile popularity and ubiquity of Polynesian style. In my garden design practice, I frequently engage in a kind of archaeology, surveying, picking through, and uncovering layers of buried or forgotten stuff while looking at people’s houses and gardens. Almost anything may offer clues to reconstruct the history of a property: plants that have survived from an ancient vogue, types of paving, pieces of pottery, sculpture, or art, barbeques, basins, fountains, and fences. Sometimes I find 1920s Spanish or Arts & Crafts gems, with extra luck a rim of exquisite Batchelder tile sticking up from a sea of dusty ivy; much more often I find mid-century mini-palaces of occasional debauchery, given away by clumps of enormous tropicalia like giant birds of paradise or monsteras with their joke-huge leaves and wonderful name, and especially by the festering remains of lava-rock niches, fountains, and waterfalls, covered in dirt and detritus, badly grouted and plumbed (because they were often homemade) and teeming with mosquitoes. Invariably, these haven’t worked in decades, and the owners admit to no knowledge of their origins. But right there, I have no doubt, were once luaus, pool parties, swells in aloha shirts sipping stingers on the lanai, leis, lays…I take a picture, then call in the jackhammers. Like so many things about the postwar decades, it was bad, but good. These had been people unafraid of letting their hair down, uncowed by the guardians of good taste. I wish I had been there. Even the best designers got involved: there is a picture of a garden show installation by the firm “Armacost & Royston, West Los Angeles”—recall that Robert Royston had impeccable modernist credentials, having been a Church associate and Eckbo’s sometime partner—featuring a blond girl in full Polynesian regalia surrounded by ginger, plumerias, tikis, orchids, and bamboo screens.⁵¹ That was a stylish garden.

The party went on for many more years. I remember tiki torches burning on the lawn at Twinridge. My family sold the house in 1976 and moved to Montecito, where I lived until 1982, when my mother moved to Los Angeles County, living for the first year in a small wooden house in Malibu, tight between the Pacific Coast Highway and the beach. In winter, my mom and I would watch El Niño storms roll in; one pounding, bright day in 1984, we watched the house next to our next-door neighbor’s—a little, low, pitched-roof affair, clearly from another era—wash away in the waves, broken into a slosh of kindling and boards that clattered frighteningly through our pilings before vanishing. That fall, we watched fires raging down on us from the Santa Monica Mountains, lines of forty-foot-high flames advancing over the peaks and ridges, red fire engines and crews hauling out hose lines on the PCH to make a stand. We climbed up a ladder onto our roof with the garden hose and she shared gin-and-tonics poured from a thermos into plastic cups with the neighbor and the basset hound he had hauled up the ladder, too. The firefighters saved our house, but not some other people’s houses.

In 1990, we found out that Twinridge had burned to the ground in the Painted Cave fire, which started near the crest of the range and in three days burned all the way to the ocean. Most of the houses on the road weren’t touched, some with their flowers continuing in bloom, but ours had vanished—the fire so hot that even the huge old oak tree was gone, leaving barely a trace.