Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
arched doors and windows, long covered porches, fountain courtyards, solid walls and red-
tile roofs. Several SoCal train depots showcase this style, as does San Diego's Balboa Park
and downtown Santa Barbara.
Arts and Crafts to Art Deco
Simplicity and harmony were the hallmarks of California's early-20th-century Arts and
Crafts style. Influenced by Japanese design principles and England's arts-and-crafts move-
ment, its woodwork and handmade touches marked a deliberate departure from the Indus-
trial Revolution's mechanization. Pasadena architects Charles and Henry Greene and the
Bay Area's Bernard Maybeck and Julia Morgan popularized the versatile one-story bunga-
low, with overhanging eaves and sleeping porches.
Cosmopolitan California couldn't be limited to any one set of international influences.
In the 1920s, the international art-deco style took elements from the ancient world - May-
an glyphs, Egyptian pillars, Babylonian ziggurats - and flattened them into modern motifs
to cap stark facades and outline skyscrapers, notably in LA and downtown Oakland. Later,
streamline moderne kept decoration to a minimum and mimicked the aerodynamic look of
ocean liners and airplanes.
California Modernism
Clothing-optional California has never been shy about showcasing its assets. Starting in
the 1960s, California embraced the stripped-down, glass-wall aesthetics of the Internation-
al Style championed by Bauhaus architects Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
and Le Corbusier.
In LA, Austrian-born Richard Schindler and Richard Neutra adapted this minimalist
modern style to residential houses with open floorplans and floor-to-ceiling windows per-
fectly suited to SoCal's see-and-be-seen culture. Neutra and Schindler were also influen-
ced by Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed LA's not quite successful Hollyhock House in a
style he dubbed 'California Romanza.'
Together with Charles and Ray Eames, Neutra contributed to the experimental Case
Study Houses, several of which still jut out of the LA landscape and are used as filming
locations like in
LA Confidential
.
