That’s because Palm Springs, like the Golden State, is a modernist project, built by people who broke from old tradition and established cultures, and experimented relentlessly to construct new systems that buried the past. Throughout California, modernism has produced freeways that span the state, waterworks through swamps and deserts, culture-dominating industries from Hollywood to Silicon Valley, and brand-new approaches to art, architecture, literature, philosophy, politics, and religion.

But modernism also damaged California communities, structures, and habitats. So, today modernism is in retreat, with post-modernism ascendant. We worship the past, and tell ourselves we want to go backward and restore it. We talk about taking down the dams and interstates, getting back to nature and repairing the environment, staying off our screens and cracking down on the tech companies, and restoring the lands and traditions of our ancestors.

That’s what makes Palm Springs—and its public devotion to modernism—so distinctive. The city is effectively promoting the creation of the new, by looking not forward but backward into its own past.

Palm Springs has long touted its mid-century modern architecture—those 20th century desert homes, with lots of glass and open spaces, that encourage indoor-outdoor living and have become synonymous with California in the American mind.

In 2006, after some years of holding a Modernism Show & Sale and successful symposia on modern design, Palm Springs created a major event—Modernism Week. It’s grown into a colossus of the February calendar, with home tours, bus tours, walking tours, bike tours, garden tours, films, lectures, parties, concerts, fashion shows, and cars shows. There’s now a second, smaller-scale Modernism Week, in the fall. This year, the pandemic expanded the calendar, with Palm Springs hosting an online Modernism Week in February, followed by an in-person week in April.

All celebrate a Palm Springs modernist aesthetic of—as the designer and writer Brad Dunning told Palm Springs Life—“forward-facing the future with open arms and a martini.”

Modernism Week, of course, is about commerce. Palm Springs’s tourist economy needs visitors, local arts-oriented businesses want customers, and real estate interests need to sell local homes. But the event also taps into what might be called a nostalgia for the new.

Palm Springs is keeping alive a time when Californians could violate old strictures and fashion entirely novel things without having to spend years fighting planning commissions or CEQA lawsuits. But Modernism Week also evangelizes for an updating of modernism, to fit the more diverse needs of today.

This year’s Fast Forward/Designing the Future of Palm Springs event showcased a new and decidedly modernist design for affordable housing by local architect Maria Song. Her design for the 60-unit Monarch Apartment Homes on Indian Canyon Way nods to the renowned work of Donald Wexler, the architect of many of the area’s steel-and-glass homes.

Song’s goal is creating affordable housing beautiful and distinguished enough to be embraced by wealthy neighborhoods. “I want people to understand that there is nothing cheap about affordable housing,” Song told me. “Rents are affordable, but not the materials or landscaping or the quality of the building.” The Monarch proposal, being developed by Fairfield-based Community Housing Opportunities Corporation, should produce “a building that opens minds and that any community would be proud to have as part of its fabric,” she added.

That Palm Springs is a citadel of modernism is both appropriate, and rich with contradictions. Is any California community more defiantly modern? This is a lush city in the middle of a desert valley full of golf courses and swimming pools, in a state plagued by drought. The largest landowner in Palm Springs is actually the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, which in recent years has asserted more of its property rights, frustrating the expansive ambitions of some businesses.

Palm Springs is thus, like California itself, caught in a purgatory, between the urge for the new and the demands of the old. In other words, we Californians occupy a no-man’s land, somewhere between modernism and post-modernism. We know we need to create new systems that are sustainable and climate-friendly, inclusive and anti-racist. But we are afraid of displacing stakeholders, or burying the past, or not respecting our ancestors. For these and other reasons, we maintain nearly insurmountable regulations and obstacles to building anything new.

This conundrum can leave us feeling as though we are trapped in time, not sure which way lies the past and which way lies the future. The feeling is expertly captured in a new installation outside the Palm Spring Art Museum by the artist Gonzalo Lebrija. It is a car that is suspended over a pool of liquid—not going in any direction, frozen. The work’s title is “History of Suspended Time (A monument for the impossible).”

If we take inspiration from Palm Springs, we’ll try to go multiple directions at once. We’ll take the risk of creating modern novelties for our post-modern world. And we’ll recognize that the fastest way to restore the past is to go boldly forward into the future.

The post If Only California Were More Like Palm Springs appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Guggenheim is also the defining symbol of the legacy of its designer, the legendary American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Through his work and the force of his personality, Wright transformed the architect into artist—a feat he never could have accomplished without a long, complex and rich relationship with New York City.

Today, Wright is best known as a pop icon, a flamboyant individualist with a chaotic love life who routinely bullied clients and collaborators—all in the service of his powerful personality and homegrown American aesthetic. But there was more to him than that. Wright was the first true star of his field, and his vision and success liberated generations of architects in his wake, from Frank Gehry to Zaha Hadid to Santiago Calatrava, inviting them to move beyond utilitarian function packed in square boxes to explore sculptural forms with autonomy.

Less known is the role New York City played in his vast influence as an artist. Wright complained shrilly about the city, calling it a prison, a crime of crimes, a pig pile, an incongruous mantrap and more, but this was the bluster of someone who protested too much. New York forged Wright’s celebrity as an American genius, resurrected his career in the late 1920s, and ultimately set him up for the glory of his final decades and beyond.

Wright got his start far from New York. Born into a dysfunctional Wisconsin family in 1867, he weathered his parents’ divorce but dropped out of college. He became the righthand assistant of the architect Louis Sullivan, a pioneer in Chicago’s efforts to create a distinctive American architecture, and in the 1890s started his own practice in Chicago, and Oak Park, Illinois.

By 1909 Wright had revolutionized domestic architecture, opening up the interior spaces of houses and harmonizing them with the landscape. He spent much of the 1910s in Japan designing the Imperial Hotel. Upon his return to America in the early 1920s, he found his career in shambles and his personal life in disarray, and spent much of the decade trying to reestablish his practice and his personal equilibrium. His brilliant projects went mostly unbuilt, and the yellow press covered his messy divorce and daily exploits. In the early 1930s Wright began to reemerge to acclaim in the public eye. In the last two decades of his life, his built work proliferated, and he rocketed to international fame.

Wright lived almost 92 years, so he had a long time to establish this fame—and he is experiencing one of his periodic resurgences of popularity today. Wright’s houses are once again in vogue (after decades of going in and out of fashion) and two chairs from the early Prairie period recently sold at auction for hundreds of thousands of dollars. What’s more, the architect is enjoying renewed status as a cult figure, revered by his followers for his independence and individualism—the inspiration, at least indirectly, for Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Wright’s latest generation of fans are rushing out to buy a recent biography that revisits the tragic and notorious fires at the architect’s compound at Taliesin, his home and studio near Spring Green, Wisconsin. They gather enthusiastically on the Internet, posting snippets of Wright’s writings on Twitter. Some still refer to him reverently as “Mr. Wright.” He’s a cash cow for the eponymous foundation which, having just announced closing his unprofitable school, licenses his name on everything from tea cups to ties.

Wright’s detractors have a lot to talk about these days, too. Wright was the sort of old white male who makes easy target practice, a famously arrogant figure who often alienated the very clients he relied upon to bring his architecture to life. A recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art reminded visitors of strands of racism and misogyny in his work. Wright and his last wife, Olgivanna, exerted domineering control over apprentices, even dictating who married whom.

But all the focus on Wright’s sensational biography—whether it elevates him to pop icon status or hoists him overboard as a monstrous egomaniac—avoids the serious question: beyond the hype, what is Wright’s legacy? That brings us back to New York.

Although Wright wanted to portray himself as unique and self-created, he was part of a long tradition of seekers that continues today, artists of every stripe, in all media, who recoil at the terrors of New York while seeking to know it, to celebrate it, and to use it to find out who they are. A series of prominent American writers saw New York as a “terrible town” (Washington Irving) with skyscrapers that erupted in a “frenzied dance” (Henry James). For Henry Adams, New York had an “air and movement of hysteria.” Hart Crane, the poet, wrote Alfred Stieglitz in 1923 that “the city is a place of ‘brokenness,’ of drama.”

Interwoven into these complaints was an acknowledgment that New York spurred creativity and transformed artists. Herman Melville badmouthed New York at length. But during his first stay there, from 1847 to 1851, the city’s vibrancy and burgeoning publishing industry turned him from an unknown into a great popular success. Not only was Melville’s career transformed but, according to his biographer, the “pulse” of his energy increased. Melville remained tethered to the city and its publishers for the rest of his life, and he died there.

Wright had a similar response to New York: repulsion and irresistible attraction. He first visited the city in 1909 anonymously but his most transformative experience there began in the mid 1920s when, fleeing his estranged wife, Miriam, he took refuge with his lover, Olgivanna Hinzenberg, and their infant in Hollis, Queens, in 1925. A year later he returned. This time he went to Greenwich Village, home of his sister Maginel, a successful illustrator.

Wright’s stay of several months occurred as he was struggling to rebuild his practice and his reputation. All his projects—from an innovative office building in Chicago to a spiral shaped “automobile objective” for motoring tourists in Maryland—had fallen away. He had high hopes for “San Marcos in the Desert,” a lavish resort in Arizona, but it had no secure funding. Building new projects in New York could be a way out of debt.

New York offered energy, culture, and connections. His visit to the city enabled him to reconnect with his client and close friend William Norman Guthrie, the iconoclastic rector of St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie at East 10th Street and Second Avenue. Guthrie wanted to reform religion by making it inclusive and global. He invited New York literati to the church, and introduced his followers to rituals and practices such as services from Hindu swamis and Native American leaders, and, to raise cosmic consciousness, Eurythmic dancing by scantily clad young women. Guthrie’s work set the stage for the 1960s counterculture in the East Village.

Wright designed two visionary projects for Guthrie during the 1920s, an immense fantastical modern cathedral, attached to no particular site, and a pinwheeling skyscraper to be located on the church’s grounds. The feasibility of the cathedral and the skyscraper’s scale in the neighborhood mattered little to Wright. Their role was to confirm the architect’s creative imagination. The skyscraper in particular became a vehicle in Wright’s publicity campaign against European modernism from 1930 onward (he pushed the argument that he had originated what Europeans followed). The skyscraper’s model became a set piece in all his exhibitions, and visitors today can see it at the Museum of Modern Art.

At the same time Wright was designing the St. Mark’s projects, he began forging a network of connections that would propel him forward. A circle of young modernists—including the critic Lewis Mumford and the designer Paul Frankl, known for his “skyscraper furniture”—championed and honored Wright. Mumford defended Wright in his writings and would insist Wright be included in MoMA’s epochal International Style exhibition of 1932. Frankl extolled Wright in books and saw to it that the American Union of Decorative Artists and Craftsmen recognized the architect with an honorary membership.

The city’s more conservative, established practitioners welcomed him too, if somewhat belatedly. The buzz surrounding Wright led publishers to seek essays and books from him. Wright wrote a series of essays for Architectural Record that articulated the nature of modern materials and building practices. Princeton University published lectures he gave there, in which he expanded his theory of modern architecture. He also wrote for mass market publications like Liberty magazine. Intertwined with the publications were a series of exhibitions of Wright’s work that raised awareness of his architecture domestically and internationally.

By 1932, when Wright’s Autobiography debuted to critical acclaim, the Depression had devastated the careers of most architects, but Wright’s would only advance. He conceived of his masterwork, Fallingwater, in 1936, while he was developing a new type of middle-class American home that he called Usonian. He was one step away from the pinnacle of his career.

Wright wasn’t living in New York when he designed Fallingwater—he worked from Taliesin—but throughout this period he remained connected to the city and its institutions, including MoMA. By 1943, when he received the commission to design the Guggenheim Museum, Wright knew the city and its challenges intimately. The project would encounter problems with the city building department, protests from artists who thought the building might compete with their art, and pushback from obdurate museum directors whose agendas differed from Wright’s and that of the late founder, Solomon Guggenheim.

By the early 1950s Wright and Olgivanna spent so much time in New York that they remodeled and moved into a suite at the Plaza Hotel. Unlike his first visit to Manhattan, this time around Wright basked in glamor. He entertained Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller as clients, gadded about with Hollywood star Ann Baxter (who happened to be his granddaughter), and appeared on television for interviews with Mike Wallace and Hugh Downs. He even showed up on “What’s My Line,” a quiz show where blindfolded celebrities tried to guess the guest’s identity.

Could New York be the Gotham we prize without the Guggenheim? Could Wright have become the figure we know today without New York? No, to both questions. Wright might have always remained identified with the Prairies, but he needed New York to confirm his superstar identity. New York, in turn, needed Wright to announce the future of architecture—for better or worse—from the world capital of culture, and to set the stage for the visionary projects of the 21st century.

Without each other, these two institutions, the city and the man, would be altogether different.

The post How Frank Lloyd Wright’s Architecture Turned New York Into the Center of the World appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

1.

Home is where most Angelenos wanted to live when World War II ended, in a house where “the new” might be acquired as Better Things for Better Living, just as the slogan from DuPont put it. The question then was, which new things? In what kind of house? And would any of these new things actually make living better?

The GI Roundtable booklets included discussions of urban planning and new technologies in home construction.

Surprisingly, the U.S. government had urged GIs to ask those questions even as the war wound down in Europe and the Pacific. In 1944, a series of pamphlets distributed to soldiers in the field urged them to discuss their post-war home, its cost and design, and if their arrangements for domestic life would be different from those their parents had known.

The questions contained biases about what the future should look like–small town America seemed to be the ideal–but the questions were thoughtful and broadly open-ended.

Home is where war-weary GIs wanted to be. But what kind of home?

When the answers came in the decade after 1945, they highlighted fractures through mid-century America that were real dividing lines between working-class and middle-class aspiration, between “high brow” taste and popular culture, and between conflicting authorities on living in a modern way.

Ultimately, the answer to the question “how to be new” in the 1950s affected all the things we use today, the habits of our everyday life, the look of our homes, and even our politics and beliefs.

2.
America after the war was heading somewhere–to the future, most of us hoped–with an almost erotic attachment to all the shiny stuff of “the new” (although, even then, desire was mixed with uncertainty about the things we wanted and what those things might make of us).

America after the war was heading to the future with an almost erotic attachment to all the shiny stuff of “the new.”

But in order to desire “the new” and to project our lives into it, we needed to see it. We needed to see what the home of tomorrow should look like, what furnishings it should contain, and how living there–with “the new” all around–would definitely be better.

Mid-century “shelter magazines” supplied those defining images of desire.

And the consensus in them was that the post-war home should hold things that are practical, well-made, and unfussy; that these things–indeed the entire house–should be designed to make life more convivial, informal, and unpretentious; and that lives in that kind of home would be securely private, utterly self-possessed, and yet paradoxically more open to nature.

House Beautiful pictured a “domesticated modernity” through practical solutions to everyday problems.

The preferred way of life–free, informal, and private–might be found anywhere, but the magazines insisted that life was fullest only among wide suburban lawns, patio decks, and outdoor grills. If “the new” was both shelter and sunshine, both privacy and liberation, then there was one place where “the new” was permanently at home. You only had to go to one of Southern California’s ranch house suburbs and see for yourself what educated taste in architecture and interior design could do with a newly bulldozed orange grove.

In glossy spreads of color photographs, the magazines (perhaps too well) presented the beaches, valleys, and foothills from San Diego to Berkeley as the ideal places for liberating manners. Southern California became the mecca for those aspiring to fully embrace “the new,” and cast off the cumbersome past.

3.
Maynard L. Parker took many of those photographs in and around Los Angeles. Parker was a prolific supplier of images to the editors of House and Garden, The Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, and Sunset Magazine. (The Huntington is preparing a comprehensive survey of Parker’s work, edited by Curator of Photography Jennifer A. Watts. The book will include over 200 of Parker’s photographs, as well as essays covering his photographic practice and his role in popularizing Southern California’s homes and lifestyle. You can explore the Parker collection at the Huntington’s website.)

Glossy magazine spreads of homes in Southern California supplied the defining images of mid-century desire: comfort, informality, and privacy.

By the early 1950s, Parker had firmly hitched his career to Elizabeth Gordon, the controversial editor of House Beautiful. Gordon thought that the values of Modernism–timelessness, objectivity, and purity–offered little room for the intimacies of ordinary American life or the particularities of American places. Gordon told her readers to adopt an alternative modernity, one that married a taste for “better things” with a lively informality. And to illustrate what she meant, Gordon turned to Parker, who had a knack for idealizing in his photographs of suave living rooms and sunny pool decks what Gordon called (at various times) Better Living, The Station Wagon Way of Life, and American Style.

For Gordon and Parker, suburban Southern California provided the physical space, the spirit of experimentation, and the emphasis on youth and freedom that would ultimately repackage domesticated modernity as tract house suburbs for the rest of the nation.

The “the new” for middle-class Americans was a safe and attainable suburban beauty.

In defending her American Style, Gordon antagonized the fraternity of European émigré architects and their students by claiming–quite wrongly–that the International Style they championed was un-American, both aesthetically and politically. In the April 1953 edition of House Beautiful, Gordon famously ordered her readers to choose sides between her solution for the problem of being new and their Modernism.

Both sides of the argument were grounded on a questionable ideology–that aesthetic values equaled moral values–but the rivalry was really about something else. It was about Gordon’s gender, her Midwest background, and her self-creation as an arbiter of modern living.

4.
A massive collaboration of editors, interior designers, manufacturers, merchandisers, architects, and developers shaped the desires and habits of millions of readers through images like those that Parker took for Elizabeth Gordon and House Beautiful. They all shared the belief that the much-handled things we live with have a shaping power over our lives. They believed that places matter. And if that’s so, many Americans through the 1950s and 1960s purchased houses, living room sets, bedroom furniture, and even kitchen appliances to resemble life in Southern California.

(You can follow a timeline of California’s impact on everyday living from the 1930s through the 1960s at California Design, 1930-1965: “Living in a Modern Way,” now showing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as part of Pacific Standard Time.)

We rightly celebrate Steve Jobs’ passion for design excellence–exactly the same passion for the useful and the beautiful that motivated much of the industrial design in the immediate post-war period. Consumer demand, greater real purchasing power, and expectations that “the new” would be liberating propelled the manufacture of a range of household products that were well-made, functional, and fun.

5.
By situating assemblages of well-made décor within a sheltering architectural frame and by expanding that frame outward to includes sun-filled patios and gardens, photographs of houses in an around Los Angeles in the mid-1950s projected an image of the “better living” Americans were urged to adopt.

Living in a modern way was going to be unfussy, convivial, and unpretentious.

Critics–pointing to photographs of these homes and their furnishings–dismissed this expression of “the new” as pretty, even romantic. Of course, that’s exactly its unthreatening promise: that “the new,” stripped of Modernism’s zealotry, might deliver the egalitarian, ahistorical, and optimistic fabrication that Californians thought the future should be.

It was a comfortable, safe, and attainable suburban beauty. And young husbands and wives fell in love with that image of “the new” and wanted to buy more and more in order to possess it.

Southern California was the place where “the new” made even the ordinary seem exceptional.

Some still bitterly regret that the image was so beguiling or the selling was so successful or that the Station Wagon Way of Life lacked warnings, but, for 50 years at least, middle-class Americans looked at photographs like those in House Beautiful and saw their image of home.

They were dreams of a new kind of domesticity, but with familiar symbols of safety, privacy, and stable family roles. They were dreams of liberation from the recent past. They were dreams of living in a modern way.

D. J. Waldie is the author of Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir and Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles. He is a contributing editor for the Los Angeles Times.

*Photos courtesy of (from top to bottom): American Historical Assocation (Shall I Build a House after the War?, GI Roundtable EM32, page 22, 1944); American Historical Assocation (Shall I Build a House after the War?, GI Roundtable EM32, cover, 1944); The Huntington Library, San Marino, California (Maynard L. Parker, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Trowbridge residence, Beverly Hills, California, ca. 1944. Allen Siple, architect; Edward Huntsman-Trout, landscape architect); author’s collection (Rothschild Photo, Model Kitchen, Lakewood Park, California, ca. 1950); The Huntington Library, San Marino, California (Maynard L. Parker, Lloyd and Marva Shearer residence, Culver City, California, ca. 1947); The Huntington Library, San Marino, California (Maynard L. Parker, Thomas H. Crawford residence, Los Angeles, California, undated; Cliff May, architect; Thomas Dolliver Church, landscape architect); The Huntington Library, San Marino, California (Gira Residence, Malibu, California, undated; George Erb, interior designer); author’s collection (Rothschild Photo, Model Home, Lakewood Park, California, ca. 1950); Hody’s Lakewood, concept drawing, ca. 1950. Wayne McAllister, architect.

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