Light and Open

What makes the Schindler House an international landmark is its groundbreaking integration of interior and exterior. “Schindler made a series of ‘L’ shapes to make the building a background for the garden. The three L’s come together to form a pinwheel, which itself makes a figural space within the garden, and that forms an outside figure too. The balance between the ‘L’ shape and the exterior space allows the building to be part of the garden and be completely open to it. That idea is pretty amazing, and it was the first time in the Western world that it was done,” Sheine says.

The MAK’s purely idealistic competition hopes to force a rethinking of the way in which the Schindler House now occupies its spot on Kings Road and, by extension, in the city at large. As Peter Noever, MAK Vienna’s director, says, “It is very ignorant to say, just by law, that this is your property and you can do what you want. Our idea is to take possession of the site by ideas — ideas from all the architects who joined this competition. Which is, of course, a competition without the real issue of a competition, which is to build. But we have to raise this question, because in 10 or 15 years they’ll say these idiots from Vienna were very careless. You can speak about beautiful architecture, and put it in a magazine and it’s beautiful again, but the main task for architecture is, even as the dynamics of a city are changing, you still must consider the site. You can’t say it doesn’t matter — and just build a building. So we want to let the public know there is a border you cannot cross. Of course, if I knew where that border was, we wouldn’t be having this competition.”

Lorcan O’Herlihy has his own answers to Noever’s inquiry (which he has been invited to display, alongside the MAK winners, in August). Hired three months ago by Richard Loring, a builder who holds a degree in architecture and has built some of L.A.’s most significant architectural homes, O’Herlihy says that “the biggest challenge is to create architecture about light and materiality and not about spectacle. On this project it is inappropriate to do a building based on a complex form. I didn’t take this on thinking, ‘Let it roll.’ It is a question of simplicity next to the Schindler House. I want to do something important architecturally, but I do not want to create a conflict formally. I want something peaceful next to the house.”

Based on early drawings, the building O’Herlihy has designed presents Kings Road with a restful composition of voids and volumes, squares and rectangles, skinned in glass and two-toned horizontal cedar cladding. The effect is a cross between the iconic steel and glass of Craig Ellwood and the resonant warmth of Raymond Kappe, ä the founder of SCI-Arc. Near the critical property line separating the proposed 18 townhouses and the Schindler House, Loring’s partners, Scott Oshry and Sean Brosmith (both in their mid-30s and both automotive-design graduates of Art Center in Pasadena), have agreed to step the building down from four stories to two. This will prevent shadows from changing the quality of light at the Kings Road residence — answering, Brosmith says, “Peter Noever’s fear of a bowling-alley effect. It will be invisible from that side of the property, and certainly not any worse than what’s there now.”

O’Herlihy also created a courtyard layout without corridors between units, in another nod to Schindler, allowing a piece of the outdoors to filter, unmediated, indoors. “The courtyard housing is all about trying to bring light, and not a box, next to the Schindler House,” O’Herlihy says. He believes that with another large void opening the long façade facing its famous neighbor, “You won’t get the feeling of density.”

“MAK is viewing this as an invasion of their space,” Brosmith says. “Schindler was at the birthplace of a specific modern architecture. They should embrace that. Eighty years later we are looking at and studying what he invented. They should be thrilled by that. What he was part of inventing we are still using and still influenced by.”

What up to now has been a relatively quiet tug of war between a developer and its prominent neighbor may soon emerge as a bristling political snafu. Kings Road is one of the most densely populated streets in West Hollywood, which itself is the third most densely populated city in California. It was once the premier street in West Hollywood, with Irving Gill’s Dodge House at one end, the Schindler at the other and a number of other modern homes in between. The rest were 1920s and 1930s mansions — of which six are still standing on the stretch between Melrose and Santa Monica. Bruce Kaye, who lives across the street from the Schindler House, has started the Committee for the Preservation of Historic Kings Road, and hopes to convince the city to grant cultural-resource status to the remaining single-family homes. Early next month he plans to lodge his nominations with the city.