Hollyhock House exterior. Photo: jwpictures. Hollyhock House is a gorgeous Mayan Revival style house with 17 rooms and 7 bathrooms. Oil heiress, theater producer, single mother, and social activist Aline Barnsdall commissioned the house, and it was originally intended to be part of an avant-garde arts and theater complex known as Olive Hill, now known as Barnsdall Art Park.
Barnsdall tapped Wright for the job when she bought Olive Hill in Wright was hired to design multiple buildings, but he only finished the plans for Hollyhock House before being fired.
This project marked a transitional moment for Wright, as it heralded the end of his prairie style home period. All three went on to create iconic buildings throughout Los Angeles, defining California modernism in the process.
Hollyhock flower against the Hollyhock motif. Photo: Lily Spitz. Before it was even designed, Barnsdall decided to name the house after her favorite flower—hollyhock. Actual hollyhock flowers are located in the central courtyard and the exterior spaces. Hollyhock receiving fresh concrete in September Photo: Project Restore. Hollyhock House is almost years old, and with age comes much need conservation work.
Due to financial limitations, Wright used hollow clay tile and plaster instead of poured concrete to build the house. These materials made the structure susceptible to water and seismic damage. Over the years, the house has confronted intense leakage problems, sagging concrete beams, distorted paint color, cracks in the pool, soil settling, and the impact of some pesky trees. In , a restoration team fixed damage caused by the Northridge earthquake, but many other problems remained.
Their work lead to a ton of discoveries about the original house, as well as previous conservation efforts in the s, s, s, and early s. Japanese Kwon Yen sculpture. Photo: Sarah Waldorf. The Hollyhock House Archive contains original drawings and blueprints detailing plans for an ambitious arts complex that was partially realized by Aline Barnsdall and her architect Frank Lloyd Wright in This digital archive currently holds 81 digitized documents related to the history of the Hollyhock House and Barnsdall Park.
Browse the Archive. You can unsubscribe anytime. This digital archive currently holds 81 digitized documents related to the history of the Hollyhock House and Barnsdall Park Browse the Archive. Abbey Chamberlain Brach Associate Curator abbey. Related Cultural Centers. Each of the rooms inside the house also leads out to a variety of external spaces, including porches, pergolas and a narrow pool.
The upper level provides access to rooftop terraces, which are linked by bridges and staircases and offer impressive views to Los Angeles basin and the Hollywood Hills.
Ornamental hollyhocks, Barnsdall's favourite flower, wrap the upper level of the cast concrete exterior, and were used to decorate furniture and windows. These are some of a series of ornamental features in the house, including a large concrete-bas relief fireplace that forms the centre of the living room. Inside, spaces transition from tight corridors to large and open-plan rooms. Once completed, the huge house included seventeen rooms and seven bathrooms.
During the project, Wright and Barnsdall encountered a series of artistic differences. The architect was designing the Imperial Hotel in Japan at the same time and so apparently left a lot of decisions to his son, the lesser-known Lloyd Wright, and the Austrian-born American architect Rudolph Schindler. Towards the end, Barnsdall fired Wright from the project and the house was finished by Schindler, who later urged Richard Neutra to join him in Los Angeles.
Afterwards the trio — Wright, Schindler and Neutra — all created projects in the Californian modernist style. In , Barnsdall donated the residence and its surrounding 11 acres 4. Over the years the residence fell into disrepair, as a result of earthquakes and design faults.
0コメント