Chronicles of Old Los Angeles

by James Roman

  Schindler encouraged fellow Austrian architect Richard Neutra to explore opportunities in Los Angeles, too. Neutra designed the pergola at the Hollyhock House complex, collaborated with Schindler on a beach house, and then literally stopped traffic when the beach house owners asked him to create a house above Griffith Park, in the Los Feliz neighborhood. The Lovell residence, completed in 1929 at 4616 Dundee Drive, is a National Landmark today, too. Constructed on a platform that is perched on a dramatic cliff overlooking the park, Neutra introduced industrial design into residential living, a hallmark of the International style. In place of Wright’s repeating concrete blocks, Neutra made repetitive use of factory windows. Ford Model-A headlights illuminate the main stairwell. The modern look was so radical when juxtaposed beside traditional homes in the area that it attracted hordes of sightseers, earning an international reputation for Neutra. The Lovell House is recognized as a turning point in architectural history: the first residence in the U.S. to be built with a steel frame, and one of the first to use Gunite, sprayed-on concrete, in its construction. Despite numerous LA earthquakes, the residence remains stable, while other constructions in less precarious settings have toppled.

  First floor plan of Schindler House

  The Lovell House, with Richard J. Neutra, c. 1931

  These creative architects pushed the borders of modernism, winning Los Angeles its reputation as a testing ground for innovative architecture that continues to this day.

  IN THE MOVIES:

  The Schindler House is seen in Twilight (1998). The Lovell House is seen in L.A. Confidential (1997) and Beginners (2010).

  MID 20TH: LLOYD WRIGHT GOES GOOGIE

  When modernists broke away from the rigidity of traditional architecture to give LA its exciting new façades, another element emerged: whimsy.

  That whimsy was expressed in Googie architecture—flashy, futuristic structures that imagined Space Age design years before America (or any nation) put a man into space. Although the style had its genesis in Los Angeles, it was soon franchised across the country, usually in coffee shops, bowling alleys, motels and other public structures. The word comes from Googie’s, an archetypal coffee shop on the Sunset Strip (that is long gone), designed by architect John Lautner. These ultramodern buildings beckoned with bright lights and cantilevered roofs, attempting to proclaim to us what the feel-good future would look like.

  The form actually started with Lloyd Wright in 1928, decades before the style had a name. He designed the Yucca-Vine drive-in store, a precursor to the drive-in restaurants that would soon be ubiquitous in LA. With its upswept corrugated roof and pylon that jutted into the skyline, making it visible from all directions, Wright’s building was the first to address an important functional issue. Los Angeles was becoming a car-oriented society. Yucca-Vine was the first urban strip architecture, a spatial concept with the car and driver, not the pedestrian, in mind. The building was a polygon with folding doors that completely exposed the market’s wares to the street and the parking spaces nearby.

  Architects ran with the idea for the next three decades. Near the oil wells and tar pits on Wilshire Boulevard, Wayne McAllister designed Simon’s drive-in, the first circular restaurant with parking spaces in lieu of tables. (There were exactly 12 stools inside.) Cars were organized around the building like spokes in a wheel, making all vehicles equally accessible to the central kitchen and the carhops waiting under a canopy outdoors. Like Wright’s building, Simon’s had a pylon jutting into the sky too, but this one was illuminated in neon, lighting up the night sky with a giant exclamation point. Simon’s drive-in never closed, literally; it had no doors!

  Yucca-Vine drive-in store

  Theme building at Los Angeles airport, 1961

  McAllister designed several more Simon’s, as well as many of its competitors. In the process, he established illumination as an integral Googie element. To make these relatively small buildings visible, the entire structure must be conceived as a sign to attract customers.

  America’s prosperity after World War II put more cars on the road, and not just in Los Angeles. The expanding car culture turned all roadside businesses into a growth industry, including motels, drive-in movies, shopping centers, supermarkets and, yes, snazzier drive-in restaurants that were not always circular. A roadside vernacular took hold; drivers learned to discern the services they sought from the highways. The bright orange roofs on Howard Johnson’s coffee shops pioneered that roadside architecture, bringing Googie style to countless locations across the nation. Angles were emphasized, and chevrons and wings—anything to lure passing motorists into the imaginary future.

  By 1961, when the restaurant at the center of the Los Angeles International Airport opened for business (a designated city landmark today), Googie style reached its exuberant crest. A perfect storm was stirring in the 1960s. Americans soon witnessed the hard realities of the real future, and they were not whimsical. The assassination of John F. Kennedy; the Russians’ first man in space; the Vietnam War; the British invasion of music, fashion and film; then hippies, yippies and recreational drugs all steered culture in a different direction. Googie was no longer fun; it was tired. It was someone else’s fantasy, now left behind. One by one, as the paint wore thin, the buildings were demolished. Today, just a few are protected by landmark status. Instead, recreations of the now-retro style can be found at Universal Studios and Disneyland.

  LATE 20TH: POST-MODERN FRANK GEHRY

  Architect Frank Gehry moved to LA in 1949. He witnessed the artistry of Schindler and Neutra as it happened. He studied architecture at the University of Southern California during Googie’s most prolific years, then watched the construction of the Music Center, LA’s proper theaters for opera, dance and drama. That knowledge, both formal and assimilated, served Gehry well in 1987, when Lillian Disney, Walt Disney’s widow, donated $50 million from her personal fortune to add one more theater to the Music Center complex: a dedicated hall for the LA Philharmonic. It was the largest single gift in U.S. history for a cultural building. Local architect Frank Gehry won the competition to build the Walt Disney Concert Hall in honor of Walt Disney.

  The instructions were plain: “a single purpose hall, a space where musicians and concertgoers will feel at home and the audience will embrace the performers, with acoustics that are rich, clear and warm.” Seeing that proscenium arches separated players from listeners, and that balconies and boxes reinforced a social hierarchy, Gehry and his team restarted from scratch. Starting with its interior, they created a more democratic auditorium where the audience surrounds the orchestra and faces each other on all sides.

  Seventy years earlier, Frank Lloyd Wright had it easy: He only had to appease one wealthy client at a time. For Gehry, on the cusp of the twentieth century, things were different. Los Angeles was a sprawling and populous city, regulations were in place, and a committee that was frequently in disagreement oversaw the development of this very public building. Thankfully, the tense collaboration between Gehry and the committee is what produced LA’s most iconic structure, an edifice hailed today to be as important as the Eiffel Tower and the Sydney Opera House.

  From the start, Mrs. Disney’s generosity was woefully inadequate. Had everyone rallied behind the project and raised the necessary funds, the project could have been completed by 1993, but the hall would have fallen far short of the acoustic and aesthetic masterpiece that finally opened in 2003. A chronic lack of funds forced the committee to demand changes. Switching the surface to stainless steel saved a purported $10 million over the stone in Gehry’s earlier design; that new surface freed Gehry to reinvent its shape once again. Employing a new software product called CATIA, Computer-Aided Three-dimensional Interactive Application, Gehry devised the exuberant curves and daring contours that were inconceivable to earlier generations of architects.

  The Walt Disney Concert Hall

  He also recognized that no matter how spectacular the exterior was, “if the hall didn’t work acoustically
, it would be judged a failure.” To achieve warmth and intimacy for the audience, the interior walls were covered in wooden panels of Douglas fir, but they are merely decorative. Working with acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota, the sound is actually enhanced by four inches of plaster beneath the wooden panels. As the outer surface took on its dramatic shape, Gehry and LA Philharmonic conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen climbed to the back of the empty auditorium while first violinist Martin Chalifour stood onstage. Upon hearing the first notes from the violinist, Gehry grabbed Salonen’s hand … and the two of them wept. After a few minutes, Salonen whispered, “This is the best sound I’ve ever heard in a hall.” From that magic moment, Gehry knew that the 16 painful years he invested in Walt Disney Concert Hall were not in vain. Disney Hall is the defining achievement of his career, and best of all it’s in his hometown! When Walt Disney Concert Hall opened in October 2003, pundits everywhere lauded Gehry’s spectacular success. As the LA Times reviewer exclaimed:

  The hall’s flamboyant undulating exterior is a sublime expression of contemporary cultural values. Its intimate, womb-like interior should instantly be included among the great public rooms in America. But what makes the building so moving as a work of architecture is its ability to express a deeper creative conflict: the recognition that ideal beauty rarely exists in an imperfect world. It is this tension—and the delicacy with which Gehry resolves it—that makes Disney Hall such a powerful work of social commentary. Its success affirms both Gehry’s place as America’s greatest living architectural talent and Los Angeles’ growing cultural maturity.

  CHAPTER 23.

  THE VILLA AND THE ACROPOLIS

  J. PAUL GETTY CHANGES THE ART WORLD FOREVER

  1954—Present

  In 1957, Fortune magazine reported that J. Paul Getty was America’s wealthiest man. Actually, the Los Angeles businessman who earned his fortune from oil wells in Oklahoma (and the nickname Oklahoma Crude from his detractors) had been gone for years. In 1951, the oilman left Los Angeles to consolidate his home and businesses on one glorious compound: a sixteenth-century Tudor estate called Sutton Place, about 40 miles from London.

  What should Getty do with the sprawling house he left behind in Malibu, on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean? Unlike his detractors, Getty hadn’t just diversified his wealth in predictable investments like real estate; he expanded it into art, where values increased steadily, regardless of economic downturns. Not an art scholar, Getty simply bought what intrigued him, especially antiquities with their storied histories. Apparently, it was the thrill of the conquest that satisfied Getty most (also possibly explaining why each of his four sons were born to different wives!). Now the Malibu house was filled to the rafters with his art collection; so much art, in fact, that he began to give it away simply for the tax write-offs. Getty changed that plan, however, when he donated a precious Rembrandt painting to the LA County Museum of Art, only to receive a meager write-off for his generous gift. On the advice of his accountant, Getty needed a better tax shelter. In 1954, he established the J. Paul Getty Museum. At first, the “museum” was just a visit to his existing house, open two afternoons a week by appointment only. Still, Getty continued to collect. By 1968, he had amassed more than 1,000 additional works of art. Now Getty needed a bigger museum.

  From left: Portrait of J. Paul Getty, Gerald L. Brockhurst, 1938; J. Paul Getty at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London with his secretary Robina Lund, 1965

  Perhaps even more than art, Getty loved science. The process of salvaging and restoring ancient artworks fascinated him. For his enlarged museum, Getty would try another kind of salvage. He would raze the existing house and then apply modern construction techniques to build an exact replica of the Villa dei Papiri, an opulent Roman estate that was destroyed in 79 CE by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius. He would call it the Getty Villa.

  Every three months, the project manager flew to England to deliver progress reports, pore over blueprints, present marble samples, color schemes and photos of the Villa’s development while Getty micromanaged the budget. A notorious miser, Getty challenged even the smallest expenses: Is air conditioning really necessary? Can’t the museum staff clean the reflecting pool? Why spend $23 on an electric pencil sharpener when a manual one costs just seven dollars? Getty balanced the Villa’s books to the penny.

  When the completed Villa opened to the public in January 1974, art critics everywhere shrieked with derision. The shiny new ancient villa was called “an intellectual Disneyland.” Loudest of all was the LA Times critic, who labeled the Villa “Pompeii on the Pacific,” and a monument to “aggressive bad taste.” The public, however, was delighted. A few Sundays after the opening, the line of cars waiting to get in stretched for two full miles along Pacific Coast Highway. Just seven weeks later, the Villa recorded its 100,000th visitor: one hundred times the annual attendance of the old museum. The Getty Villa was an immediate success. Perhaps in scale with the wealth of its benefactor, monumental transitions soon followed.

  The Villa’s earliest curators shared a disdain for their stingy benefactor. Over the years, they presented countless opportunities for Getty to acquire important works for the collection, only to see those rarities land elsewhere when the boss couldn’t hustle a satisfactory bargain in the process. Early in 1976, they were notified that Getty was diagnosed with prostate cancer. There would be no further communication, as Getty retreated from the world for medical treatment. Expense requests and even telephone calls went unanswered. In June 1976, 83-year-old J. Paul Getty died in England. He never saw his new ancient Villa or its employees. When the Villa’s chief curator was summoned downtown to the LA County Courthouse for the reading of Getty’s will, many suspected that they would soon be seeking employment elsewhere. What happened next changed the art world forever.

  Getty had already provided for his three surviving sons through a family trust and was estranged from all of them. He supported no particular charities. Where would his money go? “I give, devise and bequeath all the rest, residue and remainder of my estate … to the Trustees of the J. Paul Getty Museum, to be added to the Endowment Fund of said Museum.” The Villa suddenly owned 11 percent of the Getty Oil Company, catapulting the tiny museum in Malibu into the wealthiest art institution on the planet.

  The Getty Villa in Malibu

  The curator raced back to Malibu, broke the jaw-dropping news to the Villa’s 30 employees, and then the champagne flowed! Taking turns toasting the dear, beneficent old man, they hailed the bright new horizon, and envisioned the untold acquisitions that such wealth could confer. Clearly, they were going to need a bigger building.

  Not so fast. There were more immediate concerns. To maintain the museum’s tax-exempt status, the Getty was required to spend 4.25 percent of its endowment’s value annually. By 1981, when the oilman’s heirs finally exhausted their various disputes over the will, Getty’s bequest had swelled to more than one billion dollars. That meant the museum had to spend more than 50 million dollars a year. (By contrast, the enormous Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York had to spend just two.) How often does museum-quality art find its way to the marketplace to make such expenditures possible? How could any museum even plan for such unknowns?

  The problem escalated as competing oil companies wrangled for a takeover of Getty Oil, knowing that no deal could be consummated without the bizarre twist of gaining approval from an art museum. A showdown between Pennzoil and Texaco eventually yielded another $1.165 billion for the museum’s endowment from Texaco. Thanks to wild fluctuations in the oil market, by 1987 the museum’s endowment had ballooned to $3 billion dollars, increasing the required expenditure to over $140 million annually. Meanwhile, jealousies within the art world stoked wild accusations: The Getty invested in fakes; the Getty was trading in contraband. The museum needed to change global opinions in a hurry.

  Harold M. Williams, former chairman of the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) under President Jimmy Carter, accepted the job as the Getty’
s chief executive officer. He devised a visionary plan for the Getty’s wealth: create a Trust. The Getty would not merely collect art and display it like a conventional museum, it would operate five independent but related programs. To fulfill the late benefactor’s interest in science, the Trust would sponsor a Conservation Institute to restore damaged objects, sending experts throughout the world to save cultural monuments that were deteriorating. The Trust would launch an Education Institute to bolster art studies in the public schools, along with an Art History Information Program. It would create a Research Institute to build a common database for art historians everywhere, and expand its philanthropic reach through the Getty Foundation. And yes, now was the time to erect a new campus to achieve these goals. Antiquities would remain on display in the Getty Villa in Malibu, while the rest of the vast collection of paintings, sculptures, rare books and decorative arts would be shown on the new campus.

  Williams and the Board of Directors selected a 750-acre site on an undeveloped hilltop above Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, with unrivaled views that spanned from downtown skyscrapers to the Pacific Ocean. The design by architect Richard Meier & Partners, a stunning work of art itself, was selected to become The Getty Center, which the locals soon dubbed The Acropolis.

  After three years of designs, discussions and approvals, construction began in 1987. The Getty even acquired a stone quarry in Italy to guarantee a steady supply of matching marble for the construction of all buildings. Richard Meier lived in a cottage on the site for years, overseeing construction details to completion. The magnificent Getty Center was opened to the public—for free—in December 1997.