The history of California’s Modern architecture has long focused on works like the Hollyhock House (Frank Lloyd Wright, 1921), the Lovell Health House (Richard Neutra, 1929), or the Weston Havens House (Harwell Hamilton Harris, 1941), all custom-designed homes built for affluent clients. Indeed, many Modern architects made their name with high-end domestic environments, works which have over time proven more aspirational than pragmatic. Even the iconic Case Study House Program (1945-1966), aimed at prototyping a Modernist middle-class existence, fell far short of its goals.

In this presentation, the architectural historian Luke Leuschner considers the long history of affordable and social housing in California. Many of the state’s most famous Modernists—figures like Richard Neutra, RM Schindler, Albert Frey, William Wurster, Irving Gill, Gregory Ain, and Vernon DeMars—experimented with their own ideas of affordable housing. Their “clients” included pensioners, defense workers, migrant farmworkers, and the generally less-than-well-to-do, and these projects were developed by a variety of private, government, and cooperative arrangements.

This talk will address a broad range of realized and unrealized projects in Southern and Northern California to expand the discussion of Modernism. The problem of housing the greater public has spurred an array of experiments, leaving behind a history as prescient now as it was at midcentury.

1 HSW