A CHRONOLOGY OF ARCHITECTURE IN LOS ANGELES∗

∗I would like to thank Professor Joseph E. Spencer for his comments and criticisms during the development of this paper.

ABSTRACT

The study of urban architecture requires a correlation of forms with their cultural, economic, and political determinants. The chronology of residential architecture in metropolitan Los Angeles reflects changes in population density, construction technology, cultural myths, and environmental fantasies. Neither chaotic in form nor haphazard in evolution, urban residential architecture is the record of a plural society.

Notes

∗I would like to thank Professor Joseph E. Spencer for his comments and criticisms during the development of this paper.

1Fred Kniffen, “Louisiana House Types,”Annals, Association of American Geographers, Vol. 26 (1936), pp. 179 93, and idem. Folk Housing, Key to Diffusion,”Annals, Association of American Geographers, Vol. 55 (1965), pp. 549 66; John Fraser Hart and Eugene Cotton Mather, “Character of Tobacco Barns and Their Role in the Tobacco Economy of the United States,”Annals, Association of American Geographers, Vol. 51 (1961), pp. 274 93; Richard Pillsbury and Andrew Kardos, A Field Guide to the Folk Architecture of the Northeastern United States, Dartmouth Publications in Geography, No. 8; Amos Rapoport, House Form and Culture (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1969); Joseph Spencer, “House Types in Southern Utah,”Geographical Review, Vol. 35 (1945), pp. 444 57; Wilbur Zelinsky, “Log Houses in Georgia,”Journal, Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 13 (1954), pp. 9 12, and idem, The New England Connecting Barn,”Geographical Review, Vol. 48 (1958), pp. 540 53.

2Studies of single-family domestic architecture deal essentially with suburban situations. Where the singlefamily dwelling continues to dominate the housing pattern, its persistence is evidence that the pressures on available land are such that population densities typical of urban configurations have not been reached. The “monumental” single-family dwelling continues to dominate the literature in architectural history and criticism; its persistence has been attributed to “an unworthy appeal to intellectual snobbery…. The idiom … belongs to a much simpler society and a much simpler view of the world. It represents the last flowering of the Nineteenth Century—the era of the important free-standing house which bore little or no relation to its surroundings” H. G. West, review of “Built in U. S. A.,” Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1953, in Landscape, Vol. 3 (1953), No. 1, p. 29. Geographers studying residential architecture include John E. Rickert, “House Facades in Northeastern United States,”Annals, Association of American Geographers, Vol. 57 (1967), pp. 211 38; and Robert W. Bastian, “Architecture and Class Segregation in Late Nineteenth Century Terre Haute, Indiana,”Geographical Review, Vol. 65 (1975), pp. 166 79. A recent study by Dennis Dingemans, “The Urbanization of Suburbia: The Renaissance of the Row House” (Landscape, Vol. 20 (October, 1975), pp. 21 31), chronicles the architectural changes resulting from demographic pressures in suburban areas.

3Kevin Lynch has characterized the modern city as “characterless and confused … noisy and uncomfortable” in Robert Gutman and David Popenoe, eds., Neighborhood, City and Metropolis (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 859. Wilbur Zelinsky points to the “haphazard morphology of the American city and the nearly universal lack of any aesthetic or functional association between adjacent structures” W. Zelinsky, The Cultural Geography of the United States (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1974), p. 49. According to Christopher Rand, dissatisfaction with the contemporary city can be attributed to the preprogramming of perception: “People's affections for localities depend on the existence, for a long time, of clichés about the type of place concerned. Thus we can love a village or a traditional city—which means a walled city, essentially—because poets through the ages have taught us how.” The modern city, according to Rand, is a new kind of settlement “still without a loving literature, and affection for it comes hard” C. Rand, Los Angeles: The Ultimate City (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), p. 141.

4Christopher Tunnard and Boris Pushkarev, Man-Made America: Chaos or Control? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963).

5The moral and judgemental factors which enter into consideration of environmental quality are discussed in Allen Carlson, “Environmental Aesthetics and the Dilemma of Aesthetic Education,”Aesthetic Education, Vol. 10 (1976), pp. 68 82. Peter Blake's photo polemic, God's Own Junkyard (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1964) is a good example of a presumption of general agreement on the part of all sensitive, intelligent people, with the author's system of social values and environmental aesthetics. Urban planners and other specialists involved with environmental engineering generally operate according to similar presumptions of consensus. According to John Friedmann, comprehensive urban planning from its inception had “necessarily to reflect a single and consistent set of values and hence suppose a fundamental agreement among those with an interest in the outcome of the plan” J. Friedmann, “The Future of Comprehensive Urban Planning: A Critique,”Public Administration Review, Vol. 31 (1971), p. 315.

6Los Angeles has been described in the popular press as topless, bottomless, shapeless and endless … the greatest metropolitan collective in America, 450 square miles of urbs known generically to the rest of America as Los Angeles” “The Far West,”Better Homes and Gardens, Vol. 54 (1976), No. 11, p. 201.

7Glenn S. Dumke, The Boom of the Eighties in Southern California (San Marino, Calif.: The Huntington Library, 1944).

8David Burbank, a New England-born dentist, acquired the tract on which the city was later built in 1871. Burbank sold the property in 1886 to a group of Los Angeles speculators who laid out a business district, divided a portion of the surrounding area into small farms and residential lots, and named the new town after its former owner. The sale of the new town began on May 1, 1887; A Brief History of Burbank, California, City of Burbank, 1961, Part I.

9The literature on traditional (i.e., proletarian) architecture in western cultures is frequently compromised by the “high culture” bias of its authors, particularly in their approach to urban forms. An important contribution to literature was made, however in Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Stephen Izenour, Learning From Las Vegas (Boston: M.I.T. Press, 1972).

10John Hart, “1880 Homes Recall Burbank's Earliest History,”Burbank Daily Review, Dec. 1, 1970; for an overview of the Victorian style, see John Maas, The Gingerbread Age (New York: Bramhall House, 1957).

11Carey McWilliams, Southern California Country (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, Inc., 1946), p. 356.

12John Walton Caughey, California (New York: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1953), p. 406.

13John Hart, “18 Local Homes Date Back to 19th Century,”Burbank Daily Review, Dec. 2, 1970.

14Regional proselytizing was accomplished through late nineteenth century publications such as S. Storey, To the Golden Land, Sketches of a Trip to Southern California (London: W. Scott, 1889); J. W. Hanson, The American Italy (Chicago, 1896); and R. Hicks, Southern California, or The Land of the Afternoon (Springfield, Mass.: Springfield Printing and Binding Co., 1898). The annual Pasadena Tournament of Roses (or “Rose Parade”), formally established in 1893, is a survival from this period of promotion on the basis of climate; Joe Hendrickson, The Tournament of Roses (Los Angeles: Brooke House, 1971).

15According to Harold Kirker, “The characteristics that made the bungalow practical in India and Ceylon, maximum circulation of air achieved by means of raised foundations and wide verandas, assured its success in California” H. Kirker, California's Architectural Frontier (Santa Barbara: Peregrine Smith, Inc., 1973), p. 128. The colonial bungalow in Asia, however, was described as the irreducible minimum of accommodation” House and Garden, Vol. XII, August, 1907, p. 45. It underwent considerable modification in its transplantation from India to California.

16A survey of the various bungalow substyles was made in Robert Brown, “The California Bungalow in Los Angeles: A Study in Origins and Classification,” unpublished Master's thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1964. Bungalow pattern books of the period, such as Eugene Murman, Typical California Bungalows (Los Angeles, 1914), and Henry Wilson, The Bungalow Book (Chicago, 1910), acknowledge the Asian origin of the style as does The Origin of the Bungalow,”Country Life in America, Vol. XIX, Feb., 1911, p. 309. Architectural historians, however, prefer to “legitimize” the form by attributing it to the architects Greene and Greene; Vincent Scully, American Architecture and Urbanism (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973), p. 130; and Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 72–73. Kirker (op. cit., footnote 15) goes even further in crediting the full “flowering of the bungalow style [to] the work of the Greenes, Bernard Maybeck, Myron Hunt and Edgar Mathews.” Especially through the agency of the Greene brothers, the bungalow became “the first indigenous domestic architecture in California,” representing, according to Kirker, a compromise between the Spanish-Mexican adobe culture, New England “timber tradition” and “certain Richardsonian and oriental influences.”

17According to Clay Lancaster, “the balance of the United States often spoke not of ‘bungalow’ alone, but of ‘California bungalow’ as the more meaningful appellation,” and attributed its popularity to the fact that in California it was comfortable as a perennial home rather than as a summer vacation house, that Californians were more eager to accept new ideas in house building than were “Atlantic Folk,” and that California architects and carpenters were generally more creative than those in other parts of the country; C. Lancaster, “The American Bungalow,”Art Bulletin, Vol. XL, Sept., 1958, pp. 243 44.

18Burbank Daily Review, Aug. 17, 1923, p. 5.

19Charles Kyson, “Fashions in Architecture,”California Southland, Aug., 1928, p. 30.

20Frederick Ackerman, “An Influence for Better Small House Design,”Architectural Forum, Vol. 32 (1920), p. 167.

21Ackerman, op. cit., footnote 20, p. 168.

22Leigh French, Jr., “The Small House and Candor in Designing,”Architectural Forum, Vol. 44 (1926), p. 175.

23The founding of the Minnesota Bureau had been prompted by the increase in residential construction which occurred in that state after World War I. The Bureau was described as a response by Minnesota architects to the “vicious architecture of small houses” in that region—houses typically designed by lumber companies, carpenters or building contractors; Robert Jones, “The Architects' Small House Service Bureau,”Architectural Forum, Vol. 44 (1926), pp. 201 16.

24 Architects' Small House Service Bureau of Minnesota, Inc.,”Journal, American Institute of Architects, Vol. 9 (1921), pp. 134 40.

25Cement, an inexpensive, attractive alternative, was the subject of many experiments in construction during this period; William Kent, “Domestic Architecture of California,”Architectural Forum, Vol. 32 (1920), p. 151.

26Local enthusiasm for the “Mission Revival” style is attributed to the publication in 1884 of the romantic novel, Ramona, by Helen Hunt Jackson. It was the first piece of literary fiction to devote itself exclusively to southern California. According to Earl Pomeroy, Ramona set the pattern for all subsequent “glucoside sentimentalizing over the years of Spanish and Mexican control in the Southwest” In Search of the Golden West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), p. 37. The awe in which Americans held the mission ruins puzzled European tourists. A French traveler to California remarked upon the naïveté of Americans who displayed “before these walls without history and without architecture, hardly secularized, the same respect which we experience before our cathedrals of the Middle Ages or the ruins of the Parthenon” Jules Huret, En Amerique de San Francisco au Canada (Paris, 1907), p. 22.

27The history of these styles is discussed in David Gebhard, “The Spanish Colonial Revival in Southern California (1895–1930),”Journal, Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 26 (1967), pp. 131 46; the focus of the article, however, is on the monumental rather than on the vernacular contexts in which the style was manifested. See also James Parsons, “Home Building and Furnishing Industries,” in Clifford Zierer, ed., California and the Southwest (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1956), pp. 262–75.

28See E. W. Sexton, Spanish Influence on American Architecture and Decoration (New York: John Wiley and Sons 1926) and Rexford Newcomb, The Spanish House for America (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1927).

29Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Book of the Fair (New York, 1894), pp. 61–62.

30Bancroft, op. cit., footnote 29.

31Scientific American, Feb. 27, 1915, p. 196.

32Clarence Stein, “A Triumph of the Spanish-Colonial Style,” in Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, The Architecture and the Gardens of the San Diego Exposition (San Francisco: Paul Elder and Company, 1916), pp. 11–18.

33California Stucco, California Stucco Products (ca. 1919).

34McWilliams, op. cit., footnote 11, p. 359.

35Kyson, op. cit., footnote 19.

36Leslie Lippiatt, “A Bit of Old Normandy in California,”California Southland, May, 1928, p.24.

37When approached by the President of the American Institute of Architects, Sears officials declined professional assistance in their small house operation. It was difficult for them to see the point of view of the Institute” Octagon, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1930), p. 22.

38Octagon, Vol. 2, No. 12 (1930), p.22.

39Ladies' Home Journal, November, 1929, p.211.

40Octagon, op. cit., footnote 38, p.22.

41Octagon, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1935), p.17.

42Postwar architects attempted to introduce contemporary technology and design to a wider public. See George Nelson and Henry Wright, Tomorrow's House, A Complete Guide for the Home-Builder (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945); and Fritz Burns, The Post-War House (Los Angeles: Research Division for Housing, 1946). “Modern” architecture eventually did enter the design vocabulary of mass or “popular” housing, but only in eclectic or diluted configurations.

43George Nelson, “The Individual House,” in Talbot Hamlin, ed., Form and Function in Twentieth Century Architecture (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1952), Vol. 3, p. 13.

44Burbank Daily Review, Jan. 17, 1947.

45Popularization of the term “dingbat” must be credited to Reyner Banham, op. cit., footnote 16.

46Bob Nero, “The Blooming of the Plastic Hibiscus,”West Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Feb. 13, 1972, p. 24.