Still Radical: Schindler’s Design for Living
Rudolph Schindler’s Kings Road House once stood out because, in an era that prized prominence, it settled unpretentiously into the landscape. Now, the house stands out precisely because it doesn’t stand out. While the tall, neighboring apartment complexes vie for attention, Schindler’s house recedes, becoming a sort of self-sufficient urban sanctuary.
When Schindler designed the residence at 835 Kings Road, West Hollywood barely existed. Farm land still dominated, and the young cities of Hollywood and Beverly Hills had yet to spill over. Completed in 1922, the house had slender walls, long narrow windows, exposed concrete, raw wood beams and a floor plan that felt like an extension of the grounds. You had to navigate the rooms by feel not logic, since each part of the house felt autonomous and, with the exception of kitchen and bathrooms, none of the expected spaces were included—no sitting rooms, no bedrooms. Doorways were so subtly placed that you only knew where they went if you’d been there before.
“The residences of Schindler are intimately related to the earth,” wrote Pauline Gibling Schindler, discussing her husband in a1932 issue of Creative Art Magazine. “Meant for a life which flows naturally from the house out of doors, but which at the same time maintains an intense privacy, they are woven into their gardens and the gardens themselves become rooms.” Rural but still close to an urban center, Kings Road made a perfect home for four creatives—it was initially designed for engineer Clyde Chace, Clyde’s wife Marian, Schindler, and Pauline. They could be intensely private and still woven in to Los Angeles cultural life.
By the 1930s, however, West Hollywood did exist. The Sunset Strip began to emerge as a mecca, home to bohemian hang outs like the Chateau Marmount, Cafe La Boheme, Mocambo, and Ciro’s. By the 1960s, city activity immersed Kings Road.
Today, if you go looking for Schindler’s house, you might miss it at first. A hedge, assisted by those towering apartments, hides the single story structure from the street. The elusiveness doesn’t end there, either. You’d have to go up in a helicopter to understand the building as a whole. From almost any grounded vantage point, you can only see one side at a time. Yet this intangibility has an attractive side effect: by severing you from a sense of the space as a whole, the design compels you to engage your immediate surroundings.
It’s ironic that a house so good at helping people live is no longer lived in. Pauline Gibling Schindler (she and Schindler had divorced in the 1930s, though they still lived in the house together) stayed at 835 Kings Road until her death 1977. The house had joined the National Registry of Historic Places in 1971. But Pauline Schindler still feared for the house’s future and, in 1976, Pauline Gibling Schindler established the non-profit Friends of Schindler House (FOSH) to make sure it would be protected. FOSH officially acquired Schindler’s House in 1980s, when the California Office of Historic Preservation helped fund the purchase, and proceeded to tame the unruly grounds and restore the building to its original design.
Though still owned by FOSH, the house is now run by the Los Angeles chapter of the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts (MAK Center), an organization that hosts exhibitions and offers residencies to emerging artists and architects. The MAK Center has given Schindler’s house a new purpose—as a haven for new ideas, the architecture of Kings Road seems almost prescient.
On the evening of September 4, the Schindler House hosted the opening of the three-day Final Projects: Group XXVIII, a showcase of work by 6 international MAK Center residents. Wouter Osterholt, Elke Uitentuis, Anna Kovacs, Bernhard Wolf, Bara, and Rainer Prohaska are all interested in how people relate to environment, and so the Schindler House provided their work with a discerning habitat.
Austrian artist Ranier Prohaska’s project “Restaurant Transformable [Director’s Cut]” explores the fine art of food, but it’s not the edible product that takes center stage. Instead it’s the process of making and the residue of that process. Hung in Schindler’s rear studio, white boards provide the grounds for “paintings” Prohaska has made of artfully spilled food. The marks on each board, like Motherwell’s spills, have the dynamism of accidents but the control of minimalist design. Spaced in between Schindler’s thin windows, the paintings are co-opted into the house’s organic atmosphere. Outside, Prohaska has created a long chain of red shopping carts, cooking utensils and particle board work surfaces. He cooks throughout the night, presumably creating a meal, though watching him move about behind his contraption and smelling the scents that waft through the courtyard makes the end result unimportant.
At 7:30, German artist and musician Bara performs Lovesongs in the backyard. He has a looming expressionistic painting behind him and two friends to accompany him. The yard fills up as Bara launches into haunting ballads and freestanding lights illuminate the performers, projecting the hand of one guitarist onto an exterior wall of the house. The hand moves up and down, its shadow taking over the wall’s entire span. This seems metaphoric for Schindler’s vision: he wanted to create an environment that responded to its surroundings and, instead of dwarfing its inhabitants, gave them the exact space they needed.
The evening’s most resonant work, the one that makes the disparities between Schindler’s idea of living and the way things really work painfully apparent, is a documentary by Wouter Osterholt and Elke Uitentuis. Osterholt and Uitentuis, both from the Netherlands, spent the summer in Victorville, a Los Angeles exurb debilitated by the housing crisis. They built an undersized replica of a two-story standard-fare house—yellow siding, white porch, two car garage—and wheeled it around the Victorville’s neighborhoods. The replica (called “McMansion”) functioned as the film’s set and home-owners sat on its steps talking about their struggle to hold onto the American dream. The dream, of course, has become a commodity—it means having new carpet, a backyard, and a driveway. McMansion makes the commodity seem deficient, a ready-made standard that doesn’t acknowledge life’s nuances.
Projected in a center studio at Kings Road, this documentary brings the still-radical aspect of Schindler’s architecture to the forefront. The point of Schindler’s house, built on a tiny budget, was to give people the space they needed to live the way they wanted. Unlike many new developments, the project never claimed to embody any dream of life; it simply enabled life. And it still does, giving young artists and architects a sympathetic forum for investigating design’s potential.
>Written by d/visible contributor Catherine Wagley.
Photos: ©MAK Center/Joshua White
