Walt Lockley

California Romanza

Hollyhock House, Hollywood, California

Orwell said that growing up is "the imperceptible and gradual
destruction of one's ability to recognize what is false," dig that for a moment.
Then consider that the Hollywood hills degenerate into solitary geologic
bumps as you move south. Balanced on one of those bumps, right south of
Hollywood Blvd.,sits a Frank Lloyd Wright house, the Hollyhock House. It
looks Mayan and long and monumental from the exterior like something Lara
Croft would discover in a Guatemalan jungle. (Cool idea, Lara Croft
shotgunning her enemies in Fallingwater then maybe the Guggenheim. Have
your people call the Foundation. You heard it here first.) Couldn't wait to go
in.

The young ponytailed docent patiently explained that the client,
Aline Barnsdall, was independently wealthy with oil money, a sex rebel, a
single mother by choice in the 1920's, her daughter called Sugartop, and made
the mistake of hiring FLW to design her house and theatrical complex. The
house is undeniably cool even when you tour it with those people who tour
FLW houses.

Predictably, Wright screwed it up. This is the first of his LA houses
and he was in Japan during most of the construction. He fired the first
supervising architect (his son)*. He never spoke to the second supervising
architect again (Schindler). Under some asinine delusion about the salubrious
California climate, he didn't provide any interior heat. He didn't provide
exterior doors. He put the main circulation, the hallways and main staircase,
outside. The roof leaked like a rattan chair and rain pooled in the living room
with regularity. Spite flowered; Aline sued him and moved out after six years
of struggling to afford this maintenance pit. From 1926 to 1946 it was in the
unkind hands of the "California Art Club" and ripe to be torn down.

Was the Barnsdall house ever really lived in, except as a sort of a
playhouse and theatre of the mind? Nope. No big deal.
That puts it in the same category as Fallingwater and most of the modernistic
classics in Palm Springs like the Loewy House and Bob Hope's big Lautner
house. And the Gamble House, etc.. But what are these places? Not
houses like you and I are familiar with the concept.

And the damned stooping. They should issue everybody a
motorized wheelchair for these tours.

But, you know. Talk about leaking ceilings gets tiresome. Kids
recognize what is false. Kids would see this place for what it is: the coolest
playhouse. The Mayan exterior gives way to a complicated, inventive, maze of
interior space. The design genius here was taking apart basic 3-D ideas about
up vs. down and interior vs. exterior, and reassembling them wrong, in the
central sunlit courtyard, in the play of slightly split levels, with interconnecting
ladders and passageways, the inhabitable roofs and balconies like a
whitewashed Greek apartment building. (Yeah, I know, spatial organization is
impossible to describe. That's how architects keep their jobs.) Hollywood is a
poor place to gauge one's imperceptible and gradual destruction of falsity
detection, but I gotta think kids would see these impractical design ideas as
experiments, openings, invitations. Kids don't know from maintenance costs
and stained carpets. Kids want to play on the roof.

Me too.

There's a giant surreal hearth, with a moat. It's gloomy and exotic and
complicated. I'd like to have a reception here. Uh, from the formal entrance at
the porte cochere there's a long, telescoping entry sequence, the most dramatic
one I know of. There's a formula called 'embrace-and-release', a favorite of his,
a trick of ceiling height where you push the user under a low entry for contrast,
and always more dramatic with his claustrophically low ceiling heights, like 60
inches. At the Hollyhock House the approach from the porte cochere to the
front doors , pushes you through a long, progressively shallower and narrower
corridor with such energy that finally arriving in the house is like being shot
out of a cannon.

The young ponytailed docent was more a work of art than the house,
brown eyes a design masterpiece, likely physique more of the coolest
playground than even this house. I didn't mean to flirt, I don't usually, but
there was plentiful eye contact. Trained as an architect. (What's your story
then? Lack of nerve? Crisis of artistic vision? Pouty subcontractors?) The
house wouldn't erupt and stretch like our docent would have. Wright's
usually playful and sexy. I liked the careful pronunciation of the word,
'torcheres'. I even like the word 'docent' now, half decent, half docile. (Raises
the question of where the best sex rooms are in FLW houses. Tough question.
Personally I'd be haunted by the architect's Walter-Brennan-snapping-turtle
face chanting, cunnilingus! Cunnilingus! Cunnilingus! Good name for a
house by the way. "I name this house - Cunnilingus! It's Welsh for 'shining
mustache'!" Cape swirl.) We chatted about Audebras and what Joel Silver
was doing to it.

As the tour group stepped into the bookstore (former kitchen) the
docent said something about, "You'll want to finish your last-minute
shopping," and stopped in mid-sentence. We were privately in friendly tune.

Moral: The Hollyhock is a perfect house for Hollywood, theatrical,
entrancing, unworkable, badly built, impermanent, but worth keeping if
you can find somebody to pay the bills.

Moral: Try to see failed experiments through kid's eyes. Orwell said
that growing up is "the imperceptible and gradual destruction of one's ability
to recognize what is false," dig that for a moment, lords and ladies of the royal court.

Photos: Historic American Buildings Survey. Photos date from 1965 and have a nice 'Loved One' frisson, don't you think?