California's Houses in Costume

Abstract

By 1900 the gold of the Golden State had become its solar symbols: orange groves and poppy fields. Soon however, the alchemy of real estate speculation would transmute them into harder coin. Entrepreneurs of several stripes and creeds struck a single chord in their fundamental appeal: this place in the sun offered Everyman a chance for proprietorship. In California, the commonplace imperative to your own might be raised occasionally to utopian expression and socialistic organization, as in William Smythe's five Colonies of Little Landers (190916). But in the end, the universal effect was to impose the autarchic, single-family house with circumjacent garden as the canonical, endemic dwelling type, and spread it across the landscape. Here the American Dream was no mirage; a mild climate and cheap construction materials placed its realization within the reach of most. Shortly the automobile would confirm the right to a home of one's own, keeping land value low by extending the low-density morphology of the American small town over vast virgin tracts. Identifying the rationale of an underlying structure does not account, however, for its surface articulations. Nowhere is this truer than in the case of Southern California architecture, where the ubiquitous mode of building, balloon-frame construction, produced few, if any, stylistic consequences on the surface. Inner architectural structure became a mere prop onto which builder or owner might project any surface: the standard shed, box, or bungalow might be dressed to suit the fancy of its occupant (Figure 1). Builders offered buyers a range of options in the form of variant masks (Figures 2 and 3). While the deep structure remained unchanged, the efflorescence of surface representations might evolve unchecked, to the point that in Los Angeles, actor Basil Rathbone (of Sherlock Holmes fame) could actually walk into his home through a British Tudor front, exit through a French Provenqal back, and dive into a contemporary California swimming pool overlooking the Bel Air golf course. However, the result of such freedom proved more an anarchy of allusions than the birth of a new language. Left free in a landscape of little architectural tradition, the newly arrived developed a vernacular fiction made of allusions to distant times and distant places (Figures 4 and 5). Perhaps Gertrude Stein's complaint about her native Oakland, is no there there, was echoed unconsciously in these buildings, inhabited by less literate immigrants. The fact remains that form and function were divorced in Southern Californian architecture as nowhere else. The cosmetic skills of Hollywood, the Dream Factory, could be extended from residential fancies to industrial follies (illustrated by Jim Heiman and Rip Georges in California Crazy, San Francisco, 1980). The New Californians might commute daily from an English coun-