Perpetuating the California
Mythology of Progress
James Steele


Since it morphed from a Mexican Pueblo to a young American city
in 1848, Los Angeles had long suffered the civic equivalent of an
inferiority complex, quite aware of its dearth of cultural institu-
tions. Invariably labeled “Tinseltown” or “LaLaLand” because of
its burgeoning entertainment industry, Los Angeles has often been
viewed as superficial and vapid, lacking the cultural capital of its
more glamorous and substansive alter ego, New York City, on
the country’s opposite shore.

This complex and the perception which it generated
started to change, slowly and almost imperceptibly, right after
World War II. A decade later, the Ferus Gallery —founded by Walter
Hopps, Edward Kienholz, and Robert Alexander in 1957—held
landmark exhibitions, including the first individual showing of
Andy Warhol’s work on the west coast. The experimental enter-
prise closed in 1966, but during that brief period, it nurtured such
young talent as Edward Ruscha and Robert Irwin and became a
formative Salon for nascent architect, Frank Gehry.

Then in 1979, City Councilor Joel Wachs, recognizing the
city’s rising stature as a center of contemporary artistic expression
and as antipode to the Big Apple, convinced Mayor Tom Bradley
that Los Angeles needed a Museum of Contemporary Art. In 1986,
a world-class design by Japanese Architect Arata Isozaki was
finally built to house it, on Grand Avenue. In the following year,
the Disney Concert Hall was proposed by the family it honors, but
realizing Frank Gehry’s design for the structure took another 16
years. The delay resulted from a “Perils of Pauline” style saga, in
which a spectacular museum of the same stylistic genre by Gehry
was first built in Bilbao, Spain. The civic shame and anger that this
coup generated was finally enough to galvanize the local intelligen-
tsia into action, and the immense hole in the ground across the
street from Isozaki’s gem finally started to be replaced with con-
struction. An aluminum apparition filled it, becoming the glisten-
ing urban icon that Gehry had first envisioned.
© 2012 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
69
DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 4 Autumn 2012

---

Similar cultural success stories then started to fol ow, fast
and furiously, as if a critical mass of aesthetic awareness had
final y been reached. The most dramatic of these tales, fol owing
Disney Hal , has surely been the monumental construction of the
spectacular, 110-acre Getty Center in the Santa Monica Mountains
north of Brentwood, which was completed in 2003. The institution
selected Richard Meier as its architect in 1984, and construction
started in 1989.

From the start, the Getty Center has exemplified the philan-
thropic intentions of its founder, and the Pacific Standard Time ini-
tiative continues to demonstrate that mission. The intention of the
Getty’s leaders, in launching the Pacific Standard Time campaign,
is to use a range of media to identify, col ect, document, and pre-
serve post-World War II art and artifacts in Los Angeles and the
Southern California region. Because even one generation’s artifacts
are considered to represent ancient history in Los Angeles, this col-
lection risks fal ing into the category of archeology; and as a result
of this artificial y foreshortened perception of time, the fear is that
items from this era are now threatened with being scattered, lost,
or destroyed.

In addition to its own exhibition, held in its lofty Brentwood
redoubt and titled “Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in LA
Painting and Sculpture, 1950–1970,” the Getty Center has report-
edly distributed approximately $10 mil ion among more than 60
other venues around the city. An exhibition titled “Living in a
Modern Way: California Design, 1930–1965,” which is on view at
the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), is one of these.1
Curated by Wendy Kaplan and Bobbye Tigerman under the Direc-
torship of Michael Govan, the exhibition can be seen from October
1, 2011, to June 3, 2012.
Consolidating a Threatened Heritage
The Pacific Standard Time initiative coincides with a discernable
col ective awareness of the singular role that Los Angeles design-
ers in all realms of the arts played in creating a distinct, modern
aesthetic, both during and immediately after World War II. In the
midst of the more than 60 institutions participating in this ambi-
tious institutional effort, the LACMA show plays a special role in
the historic panoply of events now taking place across the city, in
part because it neatly brackets, or expands upon another similar,
in-depth retrospective titled “Blueprints for Modern Living: The
History and Legacy of the Case Study House Program,” which was
on display from October 17, 1989, to February 18, 1990; the exhibi-
tion was curated by Elizabeth Smith and researched by Amelia
Jones for the Museum of Modern Art in Los Angeles.
1 Roberta Smith, “California: A New Pin
on the Art Map,” The New York Times
(November 13, 2011), 22.
70
DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 4 Autumn 2012

---

The Case Study House Program, launched by Modernist
proselytizer John Entenza in 1945 in his newly acquired Arts and
Architecture magazine, plays the leading role in a regional mythol-
ogy that “Living in a Modern Way” identifies and celebrates; never-
theless, a majority of the architects involved in that program are
noticeably absent from the exhibition even though the dates cov-
ered by “Blueprints” and “Living in a Modern Way” overlap by
two decades. Like the “Blueprints” effort more than 20 years ago,
the “Living in a Modern Way” exhibition uses full-scale architec-
tural reproduction as a means of presenting context and meaning;
for example, it includes a life-size mock-up of the Charles and Ray
Eames House of 1949. However, the mock-up is used as the denoue-
ment of the entire experience, rather than being an integral part of
it. In contrast, for “Blueprints,” Smith cleverly transformed archi-
tectural icons of the period, such as Case Study House #22 by
Pierre Koenig, the Unbuilt Ralph Rapson Case Study #4, or Green-
belt House commissioned in 1944, into commentaries not only on
their own meaning but also on their wider significance. She com-
missioned Craig Hodgetts and Ming Fung to recreate and realize
her reinterpretations, as well as asking other leading architects,
such as Adele Naude Santos, Itsuko Hasegawa Toyo Ito, Robert
Mangurian, and Eric Owen Moss to reexamine and update the
entire Case Study House ethos, with schemes of their own for a site
in Los Angeles.

One more historical strand of this multi-colored skein should
be mentioned before considering “Living in a Modern Way” more
closely: the exhibition titled “Birth of the Cool: California Art,
Design and Culture at Midcentury,” which was held at the Oakland
Museum of California from May 17, 2008 to August 17, 2008. This
event—organized by Chief Curator of the Orange County Museum
of Art Elizabeth Armstrong and with a title inspired by a Miles
Davis album of the same name—comprised architecture, furniture,
and decorative arts, as well as painting, graphic arts, film, and
music. In its own campaign to put Los Angeles forward as the
nexus of mid-twentieth century Modernism, the exhibition used
more than 150 objects, as well as the recreation of a 1950s Jazz
Lounge designed by Frederick Fischer, to examine the creative
interaction between artists, architects, designers, filmmakers, and
musicians that helped to produce an iconic California style. The
2008 book, by the German publisher Prestel—of the same name as
the show, and which accompanied it—has now become part of
regional scripture, as has the highly collectible Blueprints for Modern
Living text that preceded it.
DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 4 Autumn 2012
71

---

Seeing a Challenge as an Opportunity
Herein lies both the paradox and the strength of the “Living in
a Modern Way: California Design 1930-1965” concept: It stands on
the shoulders of both the Elizabeth Smith and Birth of the Cool
achievements, which have now reached legendary status in Los
Angeles. Serving as a subliminal rather than overt reference,
as well as a foil, “Living in a Modern Way” finds the fertile inter-
stitial space that was left unexplored in the earlier events. To some
extent, it must be judged on that basis, but it also certainly stands
as a remarkable achievement in its own right, in spite of several
notable omissions.

The LACMA exhibition, which is the result of five years of
research and an extraordinarily difficult curatorial effort, is based
on the premise that “the California of our collective imagination” as
a “democratic utopia where a benign climate permitted life to be
led informally and largely outdoors” was transmuted into a mate-
rial culture that defined an entire era, not just in Southern Califor-
nia, but also throughout America and the rest of the world.2 To
support this premise, the Exhibition is organized into the four dis-
tinct themes of “Shaping,” “Making,” “Living,” and “Selling,” each
of which has its own zone in the gallery.

The setting in the Resnick Pavilion—which was designed by
Renzo Piano is significant in itself, in that the Resnick is the latest
addition to the sprawling, eight-building Los Angeles County
Museum of Art campus and a resounding reaffirmation of the con-
tinuity of the Modernist tradition in the city. The theme zones, in
the order given, are aligned on both sides of a central, vertically
ribbed aluminum spine, which is laid out in a stretched “S” curve
that runs diagonally across an entire, rectilinear area. This volumi-
nous space has a fully glazed window wall overlooking a garden at
the end, opposite the entrance; the designers have used the win-
dows to full advantage by having spectators move from a darker,
more confined entry along the divider, toward the light. The cen-
tral, luminously spectral, evocative divider, as well the replica of
part of the Eames House at its terminal point, were designed by
Craig Hodgetts and Ming Fung, providing one more hint of the
influence that the earlier MOCA show has had here.

After entering the gallery, an introductory panel proclaims
that “after 1945, a burgeoning, newly prosperous population that
was intoxicated by the power to purchase after the deprivation
years of the Great Depression… turned the state into America’s
most important center for progressive architecture and furnishings.”
This characterization sets the stage for the central contention of the
2 Michael Govan, “Forward,” in Living
show, which is that California then became the primary source of a
in a Modern Way: California Design
1930-1965,” ed. Wendy Kaplan (Boston:
material culture that shaped an entire era in American history.3
MIT Press, 2011), 22.
3 Exhibition panel, Living in a Modern
Way: California Design 1930-1965,
Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
72
DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 4 Autumn 2012

---

Without giving away the punch line of the show entirely,
suffice it to say that the architectonic sensibility made evident by
the elegant skeletal wall is initially reinforced by the first of two
spectacular vehicular bookends. Beside the introductory panel is a
pristine, 1936 Wallace Airstream Trailer, manufactured by Wallace
Byam. His company had been one of the few trailer manufacturers
to survive the Great Depression, having been incorporated only
five years earlier. Byam had also bought the struggling Bowlus air-
craft company, which had built Charles Lindbergh’s “Spirit of St.
Louis,” which may explain the signature aerodynamics of the Air-
stream’s riveted aluminum hull. The presence of the trailer ele-
gantly encapsulates not just the growing automobile culture of
Southern California that began to flourish at the time it was built,
but also the nascent aerospace industry that was established and
grew there during the War and that would come to future promi-
nence in the region, as well as the growing mobility of the nation as
a whole.
Shaping and Making
This sleek and evocatively symbolic artifact acts as a fittingly
totemic gateway into the “Shaping” zone, which sets the stage for
the zones that fol ow. It tel s the story of the dramatic growth that
took place in California during the 1920s, using “before” and
“after” photographs of Los Angeles to prove this point. This period
was the heyday of the Real Estate Boosters, characterized so wel
by Kevin Starr in his book, Material Dreams: California Through the
1920s—the period prior to the crash of 1929 and the Depression
that fol owed. During this explosive decade, all these new resi-
dents needed housing and furnishings, and this demand was the
impetus for the design revolution that fol owed. By the end of the
1930s, at the outset of World War II, the characteristics of opti-
mism, experimentation, and an affinity for new materials, as wel
as the vibrancy that has come to be associated with California
design, were wel established.

“Making,” which is the second of the four themes pre-
sented in the Exhibition, is a loaded term for architects. Recent
technological advances in the sourcing, manufacturing, and pro-
duction of materials and their integration into the design process,
have profoundly changed what has until recently been an elemen-
tal, almost existential relationship with materials. This enduring
empathy is due, in large part, to the widespread pedagogical effect
of the Vorkurs, or Basic Course, introduced by Johannes Itten at
the Weimar Bauhaus in 1920 and taught by him until he left for
Switzerland in 1923. Itten believed that everyone was inherently
DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 4 Autumn 2012
73

---

creative, under the right circumstances and with the proper
encouragement, and that this innate creativity was effectively
elicited through the study of the nature of materials. This perspec-
tive was consistent with the principles of Bauhaus founder Walter
Gropius, who hired Itten, and with his belief in the necessity of
combining handcraft, technology, and design.4

Now, however, as Borden and Meredith have described the
changes that are taking place in the architect’s relationship to mate-
riality and making, “[t]he design application limits of a particular
material are no longer seen as inherent within the material itself,
but rather as functions of surrounding processes.”5 The observation
suggests that the process by which an entire material culture has
been created in Southern California and throughout the world
seems to be in danger of being lost—rather than the artifacts of that
culture themselves. The change in perspective is clear from Itten’s
emphasis on the importance of discovering the nature of a particu-
lar material and expressing it in design; here, Itten was echoing the
Arts and Crafts mandate of truthfulness beyond mere functional-
ity—penetrating into the material’s very essence.6

Wendy Kaplan, the LACMA Director of Decorative Arts and
Curator of the California Design exhibition, has explored this crucial
Arts and Crafts connection in great detail in both a previous show
at the museum (December 19, 2004 to April 3, 2005) titled, “The
Arts and Crafts Movement in Europe and America, 1880-1920:
Design for the Modern World,” and as editor of the Thames and
Hudson catalog of the exhibition that accompanied it. In her intro-
duction to that book, she thoroughly traces the Arts and Crafts
belief in “the spiritual benefits of work done by hand,” in contrast
to the German view of craft as the first step in the creation of an
object-type or model that could then be mass produced.7

Kaplan brings that same sensibility and wealth of historical
background knowledge to bear on the transformative Post-War
period in Southern California, in which all of these various strands
were seamlessly woven together. Then, as now, there were innova-
tive, new materials being introduced that had been hastily con-
ceived and tested in the crucible of battle. In addition, many
émigrés such as Richard Neutra came to the region from Europe
bringing with them the technological ideology of the International
Style, and its faith in mass production. Despite this influx of foreign
4 Magdalena Droste, Bauhaus: 1919-1933
design philosophies, local designers nevertheless continued also to
(Berlin: Benedikt Taschen, 1990), 25.
5 Gail Peter Borden and Michael
channel the Arts and Crafts legacy of the Greene and Greene broth-
Meredith, Matter Material Processes
ers, as well as the Bay Area tradition of Bernard Maybeck and the
in Architectural Production (London:
heritage of Frank Lloyd Wright (who spent a short but decisive
Routledge, 2011), 2.
6 William Curtis,Modern Architecture
period of his life in Los Angeles) into their work to create a variant
Since 1900 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
that was uniquely their own.
Prentice Hall, 1982), 121.
7 Wendy Kaplan, The Arts and Crafts
Movement in Europe and America,
(London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 13.
74
DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 4 Autumn 2012

---

Living
The pattern of movement that the exhibition designers and curators
have established, which funnels visitors seamlessly from the wide
entrance to the gallery, along the diagonal spine toward the large
garden-facing window at the back of the room, also wends its way
through several sleek and exquisitely streamlined islands that serve
as vitrines for the display of objects related to each theme. These
displays contribute immeasurably to the architectonic feel of the
show, perpetuating the legacy of the Blueprints for Modern Living
benchmark, which the show recalls. They also punctuate the path,
contributing an element of surprise as patrons approach and
encounter the unexpected surprise of the entire experience which is
the centerpiece of the living segment.
A Spectacular, Hidden Centerpiece
This pièce de résistance is nothing less than a full-scale recreation of
part of Case Study House #8, the Charles and Ray Eames residence
in Pacific Palisades of 1949, which was one of the first projects real-
ized in that Program and has had worldwide influence ever since.
One of the most remarkable things about this partial reproduction
is that all of the furniture, as well as the hundreds of artifacts in the
living room collected during the Eameses’ many travels, have been
moved from the original house and lovingly placed here. This feat
is especially noteworthy because the Eames family is understand-
ably protective of the Palisades house, which is one of the few
buildings the couple ever realized; the family not only restricts the
number of visitors who can see it, but has also put the interior off
limits, allowing it to be viewed only from the outside. Thus, their
cooperation in recreating this vignette—in the removal and even-
tual replacement of all of the contents of the main living space, in
recording the location of all the artifacts, packing them, moving
them, setting them up within the simulacra, repacking them, and
replacing them in the actual house, all under the critical eye of the
Eames family—is staggering in its magnitude.

The number of artifacts in the space, and the range of their
provenance, is also significant in the context of the story being told
here. British architects Richard Rogers and Norman Foster, who vis-
ited Los Angeles during their student days, each recall not only the
profound effect that the Eames house had on them, but also the
importance of the lesson of how the Eameses humanized their
ultra-modernist surroundings with mementos of their daily life.
This approach was at odds with the minimalism then imposed on
clients by others, such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who insisted
that he dictate the contents of each house he designed and that the
space be as Spartan as possible.
DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 4 Autumn 2012
75

---

The Eames house, then, in being selected as the centerpiece
of the California Design 1930-1965 exhibition, clearly condenses its
essential message: The casual post-war lifestyle in Southern Califor-
nia which verged on barely contained hedonism and was borne of
both the benign climate and its sense of being the “final frontier” of
the historical westward growth—was a formative influence on
every aspect of design in the United States during that period. This
casual lifestyle set it apart from the development of modernism in
other parts of the world, especially in its repressed, Bauhaus-based
birthplace. It is difficult to imagine Mies van der Rohe in a bathing
suit, and probably best not even to try.

As an added bonus for making it to the end of this rich,
temptation-laden, object-fil ed gauntlet, laid out for visitors’ edifi-
cation and pleasure, the exhibition organizers have placed a pris-
tine Avanti (designed for Studebaker by Raymond Lowey and
Associates) between the Eames House corner and the terminating
garden-fil ed window, on a broad apron that recal s a driveway.
The 1962 automobile, which seems futuristic even now, serves not
just as a vehicular echo of the 1936 Airstream Trailer at the exhibi-
tion’s entrance, but also with the Airstream serves to neatly bracket
the intended chronology of the show itself.

Selling
One lap to go, as visitors are directed by the installation panels
around to the left at the end of the central spine and its Eames
House terminus, and back to the Resnick Pavilion entrance. Despite
the city’s newly acquired veneer of cultural sophistication, literary
allusion in Los Angeles is usually still restricted to movie refer-
ences. In this case, the Eames segment is analogous to the end of the
“Spina” in the chariot race of “Ben Hur” with equal amounts of
jockeying for position after people round the living room turn. An
enticing bookstore/gift shop is strategically located along the final
lap, and stress levels begin to rise as soon as it comes into sight
because of the lure of mementos for sale and the desire to get to
them first. This final segment, quite appropriately, is dedicated to
the selling part of the exhibition narrative and is succinctly intro-
duced with a quote by photographer Julius Shulman, who
famously said: “Good design is seldom accepted, it has to be sold.”8
The actual marketing of the products that were unique to California
was an essential part of mythologizing the state.
8 Exhibition panel: Living in a Modern
Way: California Design 1930-1965,
Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
76
DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 4 Autumn 2012

---

In pre-war America, we were still shaking ourselves out
of the doldrums of the Depression; in the post-war period, we
experienced a national explosion of consumer culture. The premise
of this final “Sel ing” section is that, because of its preparatory,
creative phase, California was perfectly primed to fulfill consum-
ers’ needs. The enormous “pent-up demand for new products was
fueled by the lifting of restrictions on domestic consumption,” and
advertising and the media (of which Art and Architecture magazine,
which promoted modernism through the Case Study House
Program, was a crucial part) grew exponential y in response to
this pent up desire to consume.9 What separates this exhibition
from those that have preceded it is its contention that it is that
the California version of modernism transformed the European,
Bauhaus-inspired idea of “Making” into something uniquely
regional, rather than being bul ied into copying it. The show closes
with the thought that, by the mid-1960s, the design ethos of the
region had become so ingrained in our national consciousness that
sel ing the products of California could not easily be separated
9 Ibid.
from the sel ing of the idea of California itself.
DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 4 Autumn 2012
77

---