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Community Homes: Race, Politics and Architecture in Postwar Los Angeles ANTHONY DENZER University of California, Los Angeles

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Community Homes: Race, Politics and Architecture in Postwar Los Angeles ANTHONY DENZER University of California, Los Angeles COMMUNITY HOMES: RACE, POLITICS AND ARCHITECTURE 77 Community Homes: Race, Politics and Architecture in Postwar Los Angeles ANTHONY DENZER University of California, Los Angeles After World War II, the national housing shortage solution to the city’s postwar emergency. was especially acute in Los Angeles. The city’s hous- ing supply was already stretched thin; first, due to As the cooperative grew, a majority of the new migration from the “dust bowl” during the 1930s, members came from Hollywood unions; others and second, because of the millions of industrial came from friendships developed through political workers that came during the war to work in de- organizations. Many were socialists or communists, fense industries. With a third wave, the resettle- and therefore, the project had an explicitly politi- ment of veterans, came a true emergency. For each cal character. Bill Hurtz, who was elected the of the next five years, according to market analy- cooperative’s president, had made his name as the ses, 100,000 units of new housing would be needed animator who led the strike against Walt Disney in 3 to satisfy demand. As a stop-gap measure, the city 1941. The cooperative was also racially integrated erected ‘villages’ of temporary houses in public from the beginning, and eventually, non-whites parks, such as Rodger Young Village, which con- made up about 6 percent of the 280 members, 4 sisted of 750 war-surplus Quonset huts.1 including the singer Lena Horne. In the context of postwar housing, to be organized as a coopera- A crippling shortage of materials intensified this tive was a fundamentally political act, but they housing emergency. Architect Gregory Ain found found from the start that to be racially integrated “veteran after veteran turned up in his office for was truly radical. When the cooperative completed advice about building a home.” He told them all their purchase of land, a local Race Restrictions the same thing: “Trying to build one small house Board asked them to place restrictive covenants today is next to hopeless. Small builders can’t get on a portion of the property, but they refused. materials. Big builders won’t take small jobs. But if a group of veterans pool their plans and finances Architect Gregory Ain carried a reputation as “one 5 they might interest a big builder and stand some of the best modern architects,” but it was his chance of getting new homes.”2 It was amidst this politics that made him a fitting choice for this group; atmosphere of emergency and scarcity that, in at the time he would have been identified as January 1946, 15 members of the motion picture ‘sympatico’ or a ‘fellow traveler’. Having been raised cartoonists’ union met to discuss forming a hous- in working class Los Angeles, Ain spent part of his ing cooperative. childhood with his family at Llano Del Rio, an ex- perimental cooperative farming colony in the desert They called themselves “Community Homes.” north of the city, which has been called “the most Within weeks eighty-eight families subscribed, and important non-religious utopian colony in Western the group drew up a prospectus, by-laws, and American history.”6 He participated in Communist bought 100 acres of land, forecasting a commu- Party meetings in the 1930s; he was also publicly nity of 280 families. They began working with Gre- named as a Communist by the California Un-Ameri- gory Ain, the architect, who assembled a”‘dream can Activities Committee in 1947. Many of Ain’s team’ including planners, local housing officials, most important private houses were completed for and landscape architects. Community Homes was clients who were active in the party, and indeed to be the first fully conceived social and aesthetic many of these buildings functioned as meeting 78 THE ART OF ARCHITECTURE/THE SCIENCE OF ARCHITECTURE houses.7 In other words, there is an extensive measuring 2,016 square feet. Prices ranged from unreported history of a Communist architecture in $7,500 to $15,000. These were absolutely consis- Los Angeles, which was organized around Gregory tent with the market rate for new tract homes, but Ain. Community Homes, at least to an extent, no Los Angeles tracts exhibited this range. The shares in this identity. architecture, then, was oriented to a unique de- gree of socio-economic diversity. The houses them- The plan for “Community Homes” included 280 selves were designed in a modernist idiom of flat detached single-family homes, as well as schools, roofs and glass walls, and their floor plans included community buildings, and a shopping center, in several innovations which Ain had pioneered, based other words, a completely planned community. In on feminist ideals and progressive theories of the typical private housing tracts of the time, the parenting. He advocated placing the kitchen at the physical planning emphasized automobile traffic center of the house and ‘opening’ it, which would and the privatization of land, a pattern with politi- allow the housewife to watch young children in the cal connotations. Bill Levitt famously said: “No man living room or backyard while she worked. He also who owns his own house and lot can be a commu- employed movable partition walls, which mitigated 8 nist.” But Ain and his team worked from a posi- the small size of the houses by allowing them to tion of criticism relative to these merchant-builders. be reconfigured according to changing needs. Ain The postwar housing emergency, Ain said, would called his houses “flexible,” and he argued that they be “a problem in planning, which, if not well solved would give older children a “greater independence now by the architects, will be badly solved later by and responsibility.”14 the jerry-builders.... Most contemporary work is done in a fever of ruthless money-making. That What made “Community Homes” extraordinary as attitude must be replaced by an entirely different work of design was the relationships between set of values.”9 Likewise, the project’s site plan- houses; the brilliant integration of planning, ar- ner, Simon Eisner, argued that designers should chitecture, and landscape design. The scale of the resist the priorities of the real-estate industry: “If community was broken down into nineteen ‘neigh- architects have learned anything during the past borhood groups’ of 14-20 houses each. Ain de- lean years it certainly should have been the need signed thirteen different house types, each of which to consider housing in terms of an overall pattern could be reversed, and this produced an immense instead of on the basis of a single unit.”10 array of possible combinations, like a mathemati- cal game. In his theoretical writings, Ain frequently The ‘overall pattern’ that Eisner and Ain developed spoke of “...the need to consider the relation of for Community Homes gave precedence to public one dwelling to another,”15 a philosophy which re- space over private, making it radically different from calls Eliel Saarinen’s comment of the same period: tract housing of the time. Sixteen acres of the one “Always design a thing by considering it in its next hundred total were given over to greenbelt parks, larger context — a chair in a room, a room in a pocket recreation spaces, and what they called ‘fin- house, a house in its environment, an environment ger-parks’, which were located at the center of each in a city plan.”16 block, connecting each family’s back yard. These fin- ger-parks, in combination with the plan’s “ingenious Ain also worked in collaboration with landscape street design,” allowed children to play in protected architect Garrett Eckbo, and from the earliest con- areas, separate from traffic.11 A New York Times jour- ceptual stages, the two of them developed strate- nalist noted that “it will be possible to go from one gies to integrate the buildings and landscape. spot to another in any part of the property, on foot, Significantly, Ain’s first drawings for the project, tricycle or roller skates, without having to cross a submitted to the cooperative in April 1946, included street.”12 A city planning commissioner wrote: “In a short narrative which did not describe the fea- my opinion, this sub-division is the finest example of tures of the houses themselves at all, but instead land planning for individual home ownership which emphasized the spatial relationships between the has ever been presented to the Planning Commis- houses and the landscape:’“All houses have pro- sion for approval.”13 tected living gardens ... away from the entrance side. Garages are paired at alternate lot side lines, Ain’s house designs ranged from a 2-bedroom for minimum interruption of continuous front land- model at 784 square feet to a 4-bedroom plan COMMUNITY HOMES: RACE, POLITICS AND ARCHITECTURE 79 scaping.”17 Eckbo clearly appreciated the intelli- “craft equipment for the teenagers,” and would also gence of the plan and embraced the problem of include an assembly hall for lecture programs, the working at different scales. He found that “the content of which can only be imagined. Most pro- houses had a repetitive clarity with subtle varia- vocatively, the cooperative planned for social struc- tions. They challenged me to exploit variations … tures oriented to the liberation of housewives. within overall unity.”18 On close reading it is pos- sible to infer from Eckbo’s statement of the prob- “Sitters will be superfluous,” the New York Times lem that the designers faced a difficult balancing reported, “since each mother will take her turn at act, encompassing: first, the need for repetition of watching all the pre-school children of her neigh- 21 a few house types for economic efficiency; sec- borhood group.” In similar vein, Ain placed “two- ond, variations, to ameliorate the problem of ho- family drying yards” between pairs of homes, mogeneity; and again, thirdly, social unity, to make offering the opportunity for shared work.
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