2006-07-28 - 3:52 p.m.
Well I�ve said I was working hard all summer, working every day except when I had Outfest films or the one-day S.S. Lane Victory cruise, and that�s true, but it all paid off. I finished the huge project I was constantly working on and now am on my second day of my 25-day-long vacation! Can I say �hooray!� and �yay!�? Second that, and add a big cherry on top.
I can�t say how many people asked me, �Where are you going on your vacation?�, as if the words �vacation� and �going somewhere� are synonymous. And it�s true that in the previous two summers, I had good �going somewhere� answers that more than satisfied people, as each of those two years I went on a cruise. However, this year, I�m not going on a cruise and don�t plan on going anywhere at all except, perhaps, for a couple of days to Catalina. Instead, I�m more interested in using my vacation time for getting a lot of half-done personal projects finished, taking action beyond some long-term life-blocking quandaries, and otherwise improving my �local� at home life.
I�ve been telling people that ever since I lost weight, I now have �adult-onset attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,� meaning that in a positive and good way, and some people to whom I have said this who have been in a similar situation have concurred with that, saying, �You kind of feel like you now have the energy of a normal person instead of dragging around a ball and chain�, if by �normal� person they mean an 8-year old, which, again, I mean in a positive and good way. (For I don�t feel that �attention deficit hyperactivity disorder�, except, perhaps, in some extreme cases, is a �real� disease or disability at all; instead, another name for it is �childhood�, particularly �normal boy childhood�, although girls would be much more active if set free, too.) Eight-year olds�those are the kind of people I�d see around me every day and marvel at all their great qualities. They have so much energy that they have to run instead of walk, their enthusiasm for life explodes out of them like the undersea earthquakes that generate tsunamis, their joy and happiness radiates like ten thousand suns. And they don�t question everything, trapping their lives inside a box of intellectual quandaries; they simply rush forward, DOING, and hardly ever look back (until they become somber and insecure teenagers).
So maybe now I am in my second childhood, but more or less with a full complement of adult powers and freedom.
Going on a trip would feel like a trap to me right now, and it would be an artificial, moving away from real life into a temporary illusion of something different, whereas where I want to live right now is inside my real life, watching it move forward in the directions I want it to.
I�ve also explained to people that I want to �solve� the housing problem, although I have jokingly told myself that I may as well say to people with a perfectly straight face, �I want to find the solution to world peace.� Although I DO have to solve the housing problem�MY housing problem (the rest of the world can solve their own).
Interestingly, I believe in or live my life in such a way that I pay a great deal of attention to �intersecting streams�, which, probably for me, is genuinely my true religion. NOT scripture from Scripture, but scripture written by life�s sky-writing or that can be read from tracks in the earth.
By �intersecting streams�, I mean the same or supporting things appearing from different sources, such as two alien thought systems or fields of study independently and via completely different methods arriving at the exact same point�THAT, to me, becomes a truth. We may get a truth from a single source, but it isn�t so clearly verified, we have to have a kind of faith, or it is something we can temporarily accept as a �semi-truth�, or a �good enough� truth, but it is not a definite, �take to the bank� truth. But �intersecting streams,� those are solid truth; they now have a coordinate system like a longitude and a latitude that locates them one-pointedly in the otherwise void of space.
Also, these intersecting streams may indicate a path that one should take, or a direction to go in, as in �connect the dots�, and this dot is the first one, or the next one.
For example, my visit to the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Barnsdall House, yesterday. But first, let me give some background.
Los Angeles is always listed among the top ten least-affordable cities in the United States. And as far as housing unaffordability goes, Los Angeles apparently recently superseded even San Francisco and Honolulu, two cities with unaffordable housing from way back. The unaffordability of San Francisco is what led to the huge boom in growth of cities in Contra Costa County and other hardly-bay-area locations, which were in the furthest reaches of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system (something described as a �subway,� but which I think is more accurately akin to the Long Island Railroad), now unaffordable, themselves. The unaffordability of San Francisco even led to a temporary growth spurt in far-away Nevada County in the Sierra-Nevada Mountains (a two-hour drive north up I-80 and then another half-hour inland to Grass Valley or Nevada City); that is, until the lack of any significant employers out there killed the trend. (I, myself, was a victim of that false demographic tide.) And Honolulu�people think of Waikiki and Diamond Head (yeah, if you are a millionaire), whereas, as my astute friend Donna pointed out, the reality is tiny, humid, cockroach-infested shared apartments and ticky-tacky housing in Pearl City all the way over at the far end of the Pearl Harbor military base and about a good hour�s drive from any beach�NOT what people moved to Hawaii for, and in my view, more like Iowa than Hawaii, except populated with violent anti-Haoli Polynesians. (That�s �anti-white� to you.) Although I guess if my limited island paradise had been turned into a haven for millionaires, I�d be anti-white, too.
But while the median house prices in San Francisco and Honolulu may be a couple of a hundred thousand more than Los Angeles, the salaries here are low enough to make the houses harder to buy. So one can�t just look at housing prices, you have to compare incomes, too (or, more fruitful, determine what kind of an income YOU can earn, regardless of what others may be earning).
People who don�t live in this setting simply don�t understand. I am able to work myself up into a close-to-violent rage over a 24-year-old just starting out on his career blithely showing on his �MySpace�-type of �social� website photos of the brand-new four-story townhouse that he just bought. �Here�s the living room, and here�s the bedroom, and on this floor I�ve got the computer room, and down on this floor I�ve got the media room, and here, let me show you outside what I am doing with the backyard�I�ve put in a deck and a pond and I think this is a great place to entertain.� He�s a �little scared� to have made this financial commitment, but he can swing it. Where is this? Some suburb of Columbus, Ohio.
I, on the other hand, am 58-years-old, successful in this career (and several others previously), and yet am living in a VERY crappy apartment that measures 500 square feet. I could do better than that if it were reasonable; I could pay two or three times the rent that I am paying now and have a better apartment, one that maybe has at least one or two bedrooms, but that is not reasonable, as what they call �rent� would be about two or three times what they call a �house payment� in some other location. And no matter how big it is (and even at two or three bedrooms, they really aren�t all that big), IT IS STILL AN APARTMENT! All your money goes to making your landlord rich, whereas all you have is a temporary foothold on this planet.
This is �New York� stuff, without all the advantages of New York.
At the after-party for the Outfest opening night screening of Puccini for Beginners, I was talking with a group of women about how I liked the movie. One thing I said was, �And it make New York look so beautiful and romantic, all those inviting outdoor cafes and intimate little restaurants,� to which all three of them responded, �Yeah, it was beautiful and romantic, notice they didn�t show much of the INSIDE of their crappy little apartments, this is New York, where all your living is done elsewhere.�
The terrible thing is that I LIVED in Manhattan when I was in my early 20s and my apartment there was BETTER than the one I have in L.A. now.
No wonder I never quite feel like coming home after work every day. I feel like a child afraid to go home after school, because at home, he or she is being abused by his or her parents. Except in my case, I am abused by my living situation.
But even people who LIVED it and got out fail to understand, because they only look at their current situation and put the bad out of their minds.
I was having a difficult conversation with my brother�s wife, the other day, who�s nice and loving, but who I think listens to me with only a portion of her brain. I was complaining about this (since the subject of my vacation came up) and her response was to basically laugh at me in that embarrassed, jeering sort of way people do when they don�t get your situation AT ALL but think that whatever it is, THEY know the exact answer but it is your own stupidity or bullheadness that prevents you from acting on their wisdom.
She forgets how a couple of decades ago they had wanted to find a house somewhere in Orange County (Los Angeles had way previously been ruled out of the equation), but ended up in the outskirts of utterly unacceptable Riverside County, and then burned out a succession of about five cars with all the commuting they where doing. The madness of that lifestyle finally got to them, and they realized that more and more they were escaping to Las Vegas and LIKING it, so they finally decided to close down their Southern California business and move to Las Vegas, where they bought (as they say, I�ve never seen it), not only a mansion, but their dream house.
So for them, the absolute solution was to move to �boom town� Las Vegas (where even now my brother admits that such a solution, if I even wanted it, no longer exists, as all those Southern California transplants managed to make even THOSE houses overpriced). But as for me, of all the regions and ecosystems offered in the United States, �desert� would be my last choice, even if whatever city was IN the desert offered a reason-based economics. But to me, Las Vegas is totally artificial and not based on any kind of fundamental reasonableness. I have so little interest in the place that the last time I was there, the Excaliber was the most recent hotel. I can�t even count how many years ago that was. Las Vegas never ever had anything to appeal to me, and now, I think of it as �a �reality� show brought to life,� that is to say, all that is wrong with our society as represented by the popularity of �reality� shows is the reason d�etre of Las Vegas. Not that my brother and his wife would understand it (because what they see is billions of dollars changing hands and on display every single day), but to me, Las Vegas isn�t the inside of a Swiss Bank Vault, but the inside of a shell game. There�s no way around it, their core industry is games of chance and I don�t care how many �services� have to follow along in order to make that system work, it�s still based on not only a totally frivolous economy, but one that is actually sociopathic. Come ANY kind of disaster--economic collapse, climate change, social unrest�Las Vegas would blow away like a sand dune in the Sahara.
The place may continue to thrive for the rest of my lifetime and for several more generations after (maybe there always will be gamblers to throw their last nickel away), but it still doesn�t change the fact that Las Vegas is 100% �inorganic� and utterly unsupportive of human life.
What makes more sense is a region that could be self-sufficient; where there is plenty of rainfall and fertile soil and at least some semblance of technology even if small and individual in scale�writing that, New England seems to come to mind as an example, if only in �idea� instead of �reality�, although that may be true in reality, as well.
Or, here is the kind of thing I have in mind, a quote from a book that I use as a kind of �dream book�, The Audubon Society Nature Guides publication, Eastern Forests: �The rich and productive mixed deciduous forests have long invited human settlement.� They would never say that about a desert, nor do they say that in The Audubon Society Nature Guide�s companion book that I have, Western Forests. (Western forests except in the Pacific Northwest nearly all have the eternal problem of lack of rainfall.)
I wonder, does something like this sound inviting to anybody (quote from the same Eastern Forests book):
�There are abundant streams, from mountain brooks to major rivers: the James, Potomac, Shenandoah, Ohio, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Missouri rivers all run through the mixed deciduous forest. Bottomlands, floodplains, and alluvial valleys are filled with accumulations of rich soils. Springs and seeps as well as underground rivers provide evidence of immense subterranean reservoirs.�
Or, how about this, from their section on The Southern Appalachians:
�The forests become more dense the closer to water they grow�and water is abundant. It surges from springs and seeps and cascades for miles down rocky canyons, plunges over cliffs, and flows into major rivers, principally the Tennessee. In this upended, rocky landscape there is scarcely a placid pool of any size. The water is crystal clear and silt-free even after days of downpour, and although the flow removes many tons of sediment from the mountains each year, it is not evident here. The enormous biomass of trees, shrubs, mosses, ferns, and decaying vegetation thoroughly absorbs the precipitation and filters the downflowing waters; as a result, the streams are among the purest on earth.�
I am still stuck with wanting to be close to an ocean, and to have warm weather. But perhaps an acceptable second choice to being close to an ocean is to be near all these streams and rivers, and an acceptable second choice to having warm weather is to have an even four-season climate (not one in which winter has the lion�s share of the year). I admit that there is something in my body that misses the four seasons.
But California has been my home off and on more than any other region, and it is here that I have a good job that is my security (and a major part of �aging�, unfortunately, is that security becomes more important than the �opportunity of risk�). So right now I am still balanced somewhat on the �still trying to make it work in California� side instead of moving elsewhere, such as to somewhere in the east (or south), where although I would be able to afford a place to live, I would have to start all over again and look for a job!
The economics of housing is so screwball (in fact, the economics in the nation in GENERAL is screwball). I may have written this before, so I apologize if I am repeating myself, but I do remember the price of the first house that my parents bought in California. But a little background, first. My father had succeeded in earning his masters in nuclear engineering from M.I.T. These were hard economic times for the family, as my father couldn�t earn an income while he was going to school and my mother had to take care of three very young children, but my parents somehow made it. I wonder, how many today could POSSIBLY support a family of one wife and three children (the fourth child did not come until my parents were way settled in California) in the Boston area and succeed in obtaining an advanced degree from M.I.T.? What is the cost of a top-notch college education today? How can anybody afford it at all, let alone support a family at the same time?
Then my father and mother went on a �job hunting trip� across the United States and once they were back home, my father received thirty-two job offers.
What? Thirty-two job offers? Is that how it used to be in those days? When it was my turn in the early 70s, I considered myself lucky to get any job offer at all, and whichever one I got, I TOOK. There sure wasn�t any great choice. Thirty-two?
Anyway, my father picked the best one, accepting a job as an engineer for Lockheed and taking his place in the emerging aerospace industry in California (which industry is nowadays long dead). Lockheed paid the way for the family to move across country (again, how often does something like that happen today, and yet this was standard practice back then).
Their first California house was in Palo Alto, in one of the Eichler developments (Eichler homes with their flat roofs, private, hidden fronts, open glass walled rears, beamed ceilings, inner atriums and courtyards, and other super-modern features, represented the innovative new intellectual space age of 1950s California), and it cost $10,000. Well, we all know about inflation, so $10,000 doesn�t mean anything except in context. So I recently asked my father if he remembered what his annual salary was at the time.
�Oh, I�ll never forget,� he said, �because since I was from North Carolina and didn�t understand the California salary structure, they cheated me. My salary was only $6,500 a year, and I should have gotten at least $8,000.�
Okay, so let�s just make these figures more current and add a zero to them. An annual salary for an engineer today of $65,000 to $80,000 is probably pretty good, I think that�s over the median. But are they selling houses in Palo Alto for $100,000? Adding that zero to the end doesn�t work, does it? The very same house that my parents bought for $10,000 on a $6,500 annual income in 1957 is now going for about $1,200,000, and NOWHERE in the San Francisco Bay Area can you buy any kind of housing for $100,000, not even a condo. And a house in super-expensive Palo Alto? Fagedaboutit!
And if that wasn�t enough, three years later my mother got pregnant again and my parents felt that the Palo Alto house wasn�t big enough; may father had received a couple of major promotions, so they bought a house in the rich super-suburb of San Francisco, Atherton, for $55,000, living in the very same neighborhood where Eichler, the developer of the neighborhood where my parents had lived in Palo Alto, had his OWN home. Thanks to Silicon Valley, Atherton is now one of the highest per capital income towns in the U.S. (and there have been some studies that have pegged it at number one).
In 1982, after the kids were all grown and out of the house, my parents sold that Atherton house and moved back to North Carolina. Their Atherton house sold for $750,000�and, again, my parents feel that they were cheated for not quite knowing any better; my mother thinks that house could have been sold for at least a million, and she is probably right. However, two years ago, that house WAS sold for way over a million, only to be razed by the new owner so that he can build a grotesque McMansion. The new owner filed a building permit for a new structure priced out at approximately $3,500,000.
So something is just very, very, very, very wrong here.
I keep saying, �My mother never needed to work, my father was an Engineer, not one of the highest paid of professions, completely supporting a family of six, we lived in one of the richest towns in America, we had two swimming pools, one outdoor and one indoor, we kids had a � of a mile asphalt-paved go-kart track that wove around through the 1.7 acres of property, each child got a car on his or her 16th birthday, we each had our own telephone on a private children�s line, and for all four of us, our four years of college was fully paid for�AND I AT THE AGE OF 58 AND EARNING MUCH MORE RELATIVELY THAN MY FATHER EVER DID AM LIVING IN A FUCKING 500 SQUARE FOOT APARTMENT!� No wonder I turn violent when I think about this too long.
WHERE in the world today is the CALIFORNIA of the 1950s? I�d move there in a second�please God don�t say Bombay or Shanghai.
Regarding a different realm of my personality, a friend of mine accused me of being �na�ve and optimistic� (thank you, I�m quite proud of that), maybe that goes along with �adult-onset attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder�, but I still think there is a secret solution, if only I can discover it.
I mean, it worked regarding my CAR.
I had had this crappy 1982 Chrysler LeBaron that could hardly go over a hill and its worse-than-shit Mitsubishi engine developed carburetor problems (it worked fine in North Carolina, but just couldn�t handle California) that cost me thousands of dollars in repair bills that NEVER solved the problem, and finally it just cracked its engine block and I paid somebody to tow it away out of my life forever (junk yards didn�t even want it�they�d ask me what kind of a car it was and I�d say �1982 Chrys�� and they�d interrupt me with, �No, don�t want it.�). After that experience, I checked out of the realm of �the economics of automobiles� for a while, showed the world I didn�t have to buy into that system and rode busses and subways all over L.A., the least-non-car-friendly urban area in the country, for several years. Call it part of my �ability to survive� nature�I mean, deep down inside of me beats the heart of a cockroach. Nuclear winter? Bring it on, fuckers.
But throughout all this bus-riding, I�d look out the windows or from bus stop benches and forlornly watch all the cars going by, even thinking that the drivers of non-descript Toyotas were lucky, and wondering how I would ever manage to buy a car. Again, not that I couldn�t afford it, but I just couldn�t SEE paying $25,000 for a Dodge Neon, you know? (This is if you wanted something beyond the Spartan-stripped model.) Four rinky-dink law mower engine cylinders and squash my over-six-foot-frame into a plastic and vinyl space capsule for crawling along the 405-freeway, no thank you, that was just WRONG.
But finally one night I had a dream that alerted me to the answer. I had been going about this all wrong�looking at and thinking of system compromises that were unsuitable, I was placing myself outside the PIG TROUGH and fighting to get my snout in. My dream put me into a different position. To heck with the pig trough and trying to fit into where I couldn�t squeeze in, what did I WANT and NEED? I was driving and loving a car in my dream and it was a full-size car with a V-8 engine. It actually happened to be a used taxicab in my dream, very plain and with a mile-wide bench seat, but the point was clear, these were the two factors that meant the most to me and if it took a used taxicab in order to get them, then that was it. No more four-cylinder, tiny interior, �I can�t have a Mercedes� (or whatever the hell it is the average American thinks he wants) compromise.
I began to study what was available on the Internet and began to focus in on the possibilities. I actually decided what I wanted before I went to even one single car lot: Either a 1992 or a 1993 Cadillac Fleetwood or Sixty Special. Depending upon the condition and mileage, I could get one of those for somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000. It helped that such a car was not fashionable, was considered �grandpa�s car� (but hey, if you manage to BUY one from �grandpa�, you are in like Flynn), with the average age of the driver somewhere in the 60s. Well hell, I was nearly 60 anyway, so what did I care? THIS is what I wanted.
I bought those used car newspaper/magazines from the local convenience store and found in there an ad for a 1993 Cadillac Sixty Special (the top end of the four choices I had given myself) with only 30,000 miles, priced at $10,000. I took the bus to the used car lot in Marina del Rey. The car was beautiful beyond belief, in absolute mint condition, and when I drove it, I knew it was mine. I didn�t even bargain, because I am terrible at that and the used car dealers are good at it. Besides, it was right, the price was what I expected, and so that was that. I had my new car and I have loved it ever since.
And oh, all those people who supposedly �hate� Cadillacs or think it is �grandpa�s car�? Don�t you believe it! I�ve gotten more admiration for that car than for any other car I have ever owned. A $25,000 Dodge Neon? The answer is to get away from the pig trough.
And ever since the �Cadillac� example, I have been hoping and expecting to apply that principle to housing in California. One should not go to the pig trough and then begin compromising�that takes you all the way down, instead of a decent house in Los Angeles, to a tiny $300,000 Spanish bungalow in a gang-infested neighborhood, or a $200,000 condominium in Palmdale, or anything in Las Vegas.
Not for me.
Honestly, like the used taxicab dream example, I don�t really care all that much what is �fashionable� in housing�what I want is space, lots and lots of it, and outside spaces, too. While I am craving housing, I am also craving the outdoors�balconies, decks, patios, courtyards, atriums.
The school has grown significantly since the current buildings and classrooms were built, so right now they�re undergoing a huge rebuilding project that is just in the planning stage, so as a temporary (several year) solution, they have moved in and assembled the two pieces of a long, double-wide portable �trailer� office unit. It will have inside it four large offices and one classroom.
I explored it the other day and was immediately taken by how much ROOM they had in there; it�s equal to about six of my apartments, at least, and a thousand times nicer. I mean, from the inside looking out, I could easily LIVE in something like that (if it had a kitchen and bathrooms, which it doesn�t), and honestly, �mobile homes� or �manufactured housing� is really very cheap (and I don�t mean this negatively)�all you need is a place to put it. And being worried about being considered �trailer trash� is similar to worrying about what the media says the average schmoe thinks about Cadillacs, not even worth the nanosecond it takes the mind to blip across and beyond the idea.
Actually, all of the alternative solutions I have in mind have one major problem�you need land to put them on. I�ve considered various �kit� houses from log cabins to geodesic domes to steel houses to my absolute favorite, �up on central a column� hexagonal Topsider houses (with decks all the way around) that are shipped and built all around the world and are made for hurricane as well as earthquake regions, so that �up on a central column architecture� is not a problem, but an asset, because such a house can sit on a very steep, otherwise unusable slope. So maybe there is some very hard-to-sell steeply sloped lot that would go for a very cheap price, that might be an option. However, although I love that house, my �sloping lot� idea might be too much of a compromise, because part of having land would be to be able to use it for something more than simply planting a column on it. Still, this idea is under serious consideration�.
All kit houses have a pricing advantage in that they avoid �California� prices�they come from places like North Carolina or Arkansas, so they fit a more reasonable economic picture.
Way far afield (and has probably too many compromises), I�ve discovered a company that custom-manufactures extremely beautiful and awesome houseboats. These houseboats have a living space that is about 1,500 square feet, plus the entire ROOF is a usable deck, and they are actual movable BOATS (not just houses sitting on pontoons that you can�t take anywhere). The big problem with the boats is that they are for LAKES; ocean waves would swamp and sink them, whereas their engines aren�t strong enough for moving thorough river currents. Also, there is no land for this (if one wants land), although you don�t NEED land for them, so there is a good price advantage. These are mostly popular in regions that have strings of lakes, so they probably aren�t a good choice for California, but in states like Arkansas or Tennessee or Kentucky, one could even buy a lakeshore housing lot, build on the lot a dock for the houseboat and a garage for cars and plant vegetables, etc., and still have this 1,500 square foot house that can go anywhere on the lake.
That basically takes one away from L.A., though, so that kind of an idea is tucked away for consideration if THAT has to happen.
My most current thinking for L.A. (or maybe further out into maybe Kern County), though, is the modular concrete block concept. I first came across this concept via Frank Lloyd Wright, who later in his career put his attention on affordable housing solutions for the masses. He didn�t like the awkward name of �The United States of America� as a name for our country, so he took the letters �U.S.� and came up with the name �Usonia.� So this new type of house he wanted to design was named �Usonian�. His best idea along these lines, I think, was his concept of �the Usonian Automatic,� which were meant to be OWNER built houses. Now, for some reason, this idea never took off like it could have�maybe people just are turned off by thinking that the idea of self-building a house is impossible (no matter how �American� that used to be during the colonial and frontier days). Maybe, also, already-made housing was cheap enough that all you had to do was sign your name on the dotted line like my parents did in the 1950s, brand-new houses cost only a tiny bit more than one�s annual salary. But when houses now are 10 or 20 times one�s annual salary, maybe an idea like that would be more appealing.
FLW knew that concrete was the least expensive housing material. However, although concrete, itself, is inexpensive, it becomes expensive to pour concrete walls and so on, because you have to build the forms into which to pour the concrete, therefore you have the expense of what is really more or less building the house out of wood, pouring the concrete, and then taking the wood down. So that was silly. It makes sense for freeway overpasses and the like where the STRENGTH of concrete is an asset, but for somebody�s little old house, not so much.
Well, FLW came up with the concrete BLOCK idea (what Wright called textile block. The same forms could be used over and over again to make concrete blocks, and the ones that FLW made were beautiful, with sculpted designs, patterns, or embossed themes that turned houses into palaces. He had used them to great advantage in the Los Angeles houses he designed, and then adapted and simplified the idea into smaller, more middle-class houses. The walls could be assembled like Legos, with iron reinforcing rods fitting into and mortared in grooves in the blocks with the ultimate product being hand-built walls of amazing strength. The Usonian Automatics were partially kit-built, in that the owner would select the plans and have instructions to follow, and the blocks would have some of the plumbing, electrical wiring, and so on, already installed (or easily placed) and the plans would show where to put in the windows, doors, and so on. These houses were placed on flat slab foundations, which are fine for California where the very shallow frost line does not require basements. The truth is that these are very doable and I have toured a Usonian Automatic that was moved around the country from museum to museum, temporarily assembled and then disassembled and assembled again in the next location. Not only did that house have many of the spectacular architecture details of any FLW house, but there is NO development house being built today that is anywhere near equal to it.
I came across a building contractor�s book on concrete block building materials and although I haven�t fully studied the various systems, yet, their construction costs per square foot seem quite reasonable. These building systems are not the normal ugly old concrete blocks the people see everywhere; The Skirball Museum near where I work seems be made of this kind of beautiful concrete block and it is very beautiful. And anyway, it is possible for a person to make his own concrete blocks just the way FLW recommended. I�ve worked with concrete and it is really rather fun. This method, however, would take a long time, just to make them, but it is not impossible. When the old rancheros were built in early California, they certainly made their own adobe bricks.
One of the Outfest films I saw was shown at the theater at Barnsdall Art Park, which brought back to my mind FLW�s Hollyhock House that was built there in the 1920s. (The house and eleven acres surrounding it were given to Los Angeles by Mrs. Barnsdall for the purpose of establishing Barnsdall Art Park after her death.) I had taken a tour of that house once before, but it had closed for quite some time for extensive renovations. However, I saw that (six million dollars later) it was now reopened for public tours.
This was one of Wright�s major California houses, but at the time, he was in Japan supervising the building of the Imperial Hotel, which, after a major earthquake that hit Tokyo at the time, was the only building in Tokyo that remained standing. THIS served to renew interest in Wright�s architecture, as you can well imagine.
To supervise the building of Hollyhock, Wright sent Viennese architect, R.M. Schindler, who, while he was in Los Angeles, built his own innovative house, which I discovered could be seen in West Hollywood. Schindler�s method was to form three feet by eight feet by three inch concrete wall sections in molds on the ground, and then raise them up to standing position and then mortar them into place. He spaced them about four inches apart, and filled each space between them with strips of glass, also mortared into place. While I didn�t really like the Schindler house all that much (my biggest complaint was the extremely low ceilings, but one wouldn�t have to copy that feature), I did admire his self-build methods and could see how doable it was. I also liked the efficient way that Schindler did the plumbing in the bathrooms, turning utilitarian pipes into a form of sculpture. He also seemed to have self-made the huge bathtubs out of concrete, too. I�ve always wanted to have a huge bathtub and it seems that they are making them smaller and smaller, nowadays. The one that is in my apartment is all but impossible to use. Lying down as flat as I can in it (which isn�t saying much, as it is so short), the ventral part of my body never gets wet. Of course, one can buy a hot tub, but Shindler�s method would cost almost nothing. When we were all children, my father had similarly made a permanent wading pool in our playground out of concrete. (That was before he got into his pool-building phase once we got to California. Dad designed and built four swimming pools in his life, two of them indoor pools. The indoor pool in North Carolina was walled and roofed in thick glass. It was awesome to go swimming in there with snow built up outside.)
Schindler�s house was designed so that he could open up most of his external walls when he wanted and turn the rooms into indoor-outdoor rooms. I really LOVE that.
Yesterday I toured the Hollyhock House and while with it�s vaguely Mayan-looking style it looks �interesting� and �okay� from the outside, when you go INSIDE, it takes your breath away. It�s impossible to describe how beautiful it is or even to explain what it is that makes it so beautiful; this is just something that one has to see and experience and it clearly needed to be the design of an incredible genius like Frank Lloyd Wright who understood every single detail of what he was doing and what its effect was going to be on the senses. Schindler, while innovative, in no way equaled that level of beauty. But where (save for the Usonian houses) Wright was building for the richest people of American industrialism, Schindler was more utilitarian and clever and therefore for more ordinary pocketbooks. For that there is a place for Schindler in my heart, too, although I�d still rather take my cues from FLW.
As for the resident of this house, Aline Barnsdall, I gather that she didn�t quite appreciate what Wright had done. It seemed that she complained constantly and even seriously tried to get out of the deal. Perhaps she was somewhat like my grandmother, my mother�s mother, who lived in a huge, white, three-story house with green and white striped awnings over each window, a house that had been over a hundred years old when THEY bought it and since it had been built prior to the use of electricity, all the electrical wiring had to be installed in an already existing house. There was no place in my grandmother�s mind to understand a �modern� house like the Eichler house my parents bought in Palo Alto. My grandmother revealed to me that she never understood that that house WAS a house, she just couldn�t wrap her mind around it. And the house my parents bought in Atherton, although quite a bit larger, wasn�t much better to my grandmother. Since there was absolutely NOTHING like what Wright designed for Mrs. Barnsdall to be seen anywhere in the world, it is possible Mrs. Barnsdall couldn�t �wrap her mind around it� any more than my grandmother could my parents� Eichler.
Some of the things I noticed and liked about the Hollyhock house:
First of all, I appreciated the concept of a �theme design� for the house, such as the Hollyhock flower. This concept Wright had used before in other houses; finding some thing that represented that house or property and then using it in all the patterns and designs that the house contained, right down to furniture decoration, stained glass windows, carpet patterns, and even designs on the china and eating utensils. In this house, Wright�s �Hollyhock� design was embossed on all the textile blocks and columns and table pedestals and planter urns, etc. As you approach the 250-pound finely-balanced concrete double front doors, there is a bronze �Hollyhock� sculpture that decorates the face of the doors. To find the hidden lock to insert the front door key, you have to slide open a small plate in the sculpture, like opening a Chinese puzzle box.
I loved the way Wright played with the ceiling height in rooms, having very low ceilings in hallways and then when you entered into large rooms. you�d feel that the ceilings soared half a story or so upward. I loved his use of all the �elements� in the living room fireplace (i.e., the �hearth�)��earth� in the concrete blocks, �fire� in the flames in the fireplace, �air� that blew through fan vents from within the walls of the fireplace, �light� that shown down through stained glass skylights over the fireplace, and �water� in a moat that surrounded the fireplace. (That was particularly wonderful, water surrounding the fire.) I loved the �sunken sleeping porch� in the master bedroom that was three or four steps down from the main portion of the bedroom, and surrounded on three sides with partially-stained glass panels that could be opened up and screens pulled down to cool the hot summer nights. But most of all, I loved how half the time you couldn�t tell whether you were inside or outside, the use of light, clerestory windows, and actual open to the outdoors spaces, with the whole house built around several different courtyards and gardens. From seeing this concept, I figured that the best and most cost-effective way to do a concrete block self-build house was to have in mind an ultimate creation, but to build it room by room as time and your finances permitted. For example, one could start with a main room, a kitchen, and a bathroom, something about the size of the apartment I have now, and then keep on adding rooms over the years. Ultimately, you could snake and wrap these rooms around any garden or courtyard you wanted, and add levels on top and expand outward into various upper story decks and other spaces. And you could make your own concrete blocks as you went. Am I just dreaming? I don�t know, but it does make sense.
Wright used water in various places, water gardens and flowing streams along certain regions of the house. He had planned to have a whole cascading water system that flowed down the hill, but that, along with many other plans never came to fruition. This whole place was supposed to have become an art colony, with several artists�s houses and studios and theaters. I don�t know if the money ran out or Barnsdall lost interest, or what. Wright, of course, went on to other achievements.
So, here�s one of those confluences of two different axes that I mentioned at the beginning, that form a coordinate in space that shows me a stepping stone in a �connect the dots� path. I, myself, had gone to see this house, the major Los Angeles creation of one of the greatest architectural minds of the twentieth century, who built this special house for an heiress of a great oil fortune�the Barnsdall Oil Company had the second working oil well in United States history and the FIRST oil refinery in the country, and the rights to refine ALL the oil in the Oklahoma Territory, I who complain bitterly about living in a crappy 500 square foot studio apartment in a city whose median house price is $650,000, $700,000, what was I doing there looking for �ideas�, wasn�t I WAY out of my league? And yet I was there PRECISELY for the purpose of seeing how I could get out of my quandary.
Well, one might think that that was strange, like a person who can�t afford a car going shopping for a Rolls Royce. However, while I was waiting for the tour to begin, I got interested in the conversation of a man and woman who were also there for the tour. The man was telling the woman (who was visiting him from another city) how terrible housing costs were in L.A. It ends up that he is the head of some department at UCLA and they are now having trouble luring good professors to teach there, because the out-of-state professors know they can�t live a decent lifestyle out here. Why teach at UCLA and not have a decent place to live, when you can have something wonderful in Virginia or Wisconsin? The great weather simply isn�t enough of a draw. �We can�t pay them enough to make it worth their while,� complained this man.
Humm�one stream was a man complaining about the serious business problem of high housing costs, happening to decide to come see this special house on the very day that I was there to refine what it is that I want in housing a la my �Cadillac� example, which was the other stream. Great minds think alike. It just could be, then, that in some subtle way, the answer IS in Frank Lloyd Wright and that the possible actual answer IS the Usonian Automatic idea I was thinking about. That certainly was Wright�s answer, but it wasn�t �fashionable� or currently known or understood and therefore it just may be something that I could actually manage to swing�it would be way beyond the pig trough.
I think now what I have to do is think of what LOCATION is also �unfashionable�. Not crime-infested, not ugly, not terribly far away, but just not what people think of when they think of where to build a house, but someplace that I might find to be absolutely wonderful.
I don�t know, but let�s see if this vacation bears any fruit in this regard. That�s a lot of what this year�s vacation is for.
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