Wright Chat

Commission Recommends Silver Lake Home Built by Rudolph Schindler as Monument


David

I hope this goes through. It is one of RMS's most innovative designs, but is located in an area where such small houses are just in the way of massive McHouses. Its advantage is that the lot is not very large, so it might escape demolition even without designation.

The term "International Style" is being bandied about with abandon, these days. Here it is applied to a building designed by R M Schindler, none of whose work qualifies (thank heaven) as International Style. The other day I saw it applied to a WWII-era brick public housing complex which seemed to owe something to Eliel Saarinen or perhaps Harris Armstrong--but not to Walter Gropius or Mies van der Rohe. Perhaps this is the architectural equivalent of the venerable automotive term "coupe" now being applied to certain racy-looking sedans ?

S

I agree that RMS was not an Internationalist architect, but some of his work in the 30s that shows a lot of glass and white stucco certainly can imply a connection. A glimpse of Oliver or Elliot could cause confusion as seen from the exterior; it does not ring true once inside, however, especially at Oliver.

I'll buy that. Houses of the mid-thirties, built and unbuilt, often meet that description; Buck, Delahoyde, Shep II, and Walker are a few others. Schindler favored exterior volumes wrapped in folded planes; these often took the form of short right-angled downward returns of the roof plane.

(I wish I still had the little handbook-sized volume on Schindler authored by Judith Scheine; it was paper-bound in white, and had small illustrations of everything, including section drawings. I don't find evidence of this book online, today . . .)

S

I have Scheine, an excellent chronology of RMS's work from beginning to end. I would say that the buildings mistakenly accused of being Internationalist begin with the Elliot House of 1930 (one of my favorite Schindler designs) and end with the Mackey Apartments of 1939, with proof aplenty of work that cannot possibly be judged thusly before during and after that period.

Scheine's paperback edition is on Amazon for $46.90, used, A hardcover expansion from Phaidon is available for $432.96

Thanks. I speak of a different Scheine publication, one I'm curious to know if anyone here has ever seen . . . as described above.

Or perhaps I'm wrong. A copy-and-paste link to the relevant Amazon page would suffice; "copy" is Command+C and "paste" is Command+V on the keyboard.

S

Aside from the 2 that I noted, Scheine has published only one other book, "Schindler, Kings Road and Southern California Modernism," co-authored with Robert Sweeney (University of California Press, 2012).

Here it is:

R. M. Schindler (Obras y Proyectos / Works and Projects)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/8425217458?ta ... th=1&psc=1

Thank you, Roderick and Craig. That has to be the book; odd that I remember it as smaller. When I went to purchase it at Amazon, it turned out not to be available. But I found one at a similar price on eBay, so it's on its way to me. I didn't recall it being a Spanish publication. Interestingly, a companion volume on Mario Botta can be had from the same source for under ten dollars . . .

It was the section drawings that I championed in this book; I look forward to seeing what else it contains I have not remembered. The complexity of Schindler's spaces cries out for sections . . .!

S