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JANUARY 28, 2020 Who Cares If It Leaks? An Afternoon Search at Hollyhock House by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Hollyhock House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1919- 1921, crowns a knoll called Olive Hill in East Hollywood. Once it was surrounded by citrus fields, now Hollyhock House and the small shady park it inhabits is hemmed in by New from LA sprawl: strip malls, gas stations, fast-food joints, the CounterPunch endless growl of traffic. The views from the hilltop stretch from the imperial towers of downtown LA to the Griffith Observatory in the Hollywood Hills. The commission for the house came from Aline Barnsdall, an oil heiress, who wanted Wright to build a complex of buildings on the site–a theater, art gallery, concert hall, cinema–to enrich the cultural life of Los Angeles. But the doyenne and the architect fell out before construction even began. Wright headed to off Japan to build the Imperial Hotel and oversight of the Hollyhock project was left to his radical young protegé, Rudolph Schindler, who felt the decorative Mayan design was a minor retreat from Wright’s modernist aesthetics. (Wright and Schindler were both uncompromising iconoclasts, but Schindler designed the more comfortable furniture. Alexander Cockburn, who adored them both, described Wright as “a little man who hated chairs.”) Barnsdall lived in the house less than a year, before moving into a smaller Wright-designed house nearby, where Schindler had worked during the two-year-long construction, and then donated the entire site to the city of Los Angeles, which has never really known what to do with the bequest. What Wright understood February 18, at the time, and the city’s boosters, managers and moguls 2020 failed to acknowledge for decades, was that LA’s architectural past and future pointed south, to Mexico and JOHN PILGER Julian Assange Central America. Must be Freed, Not Betrayed On the sunny day I visited, there were maybe 100 people PETER HARRISON sprawled across Olive Hill, doing yoga, drinking wine, vaping Religion is a and photographing the Hollywood sign. Few seemed to Repeating notice the iconic structure, now barricaded behind an Chapter in the unsightly and forbidding fence. Barnsdall complained that History of Politics the house was dark, moist and tomb-like. In fact, for a NORMAN SOLOMON structure with so few windows natural light flows through The Escalating Class War Against the building, softening the edges of the interior, leaving few Bernie Sanders dark corners and giving the living quarters a warm, golden CONN HALLINAN tone. Wright was 54 when Hollyhock was completed. He was Irish Elections to build only seven more structures in the LA area, including and Unification the Ennis House, which can be seen clinging to the DEAN BAKER Hollywood Hills from the grounds of Olive Hill. Wright’s We Shouldn’t Mayan structures aren’t exactly dead ends, more like Have to Beg Mark Zuckerberg to exuberant follies, expensive case studies. Remarkably, Frank Respect Lloyd Wright’s most innovative work was ahead of him and Democracy the spacial lessons and building techniques he learned in Los SAM PIZZIGATI Angeles he would put to creative effect in his later A Silicon Valley masterpieces: Taliesin West, the Usonian houses and Falling Life Lesson: Money That Water. But LA belonged to his three understudies: Schindler, ‘Clumps’ Crushes Richard Neutra and John Lautner, who would soon redefine ARSHAD KHAN modernist architecture. Hollyhock remains, a house out of Minority Abuse: A place and out of time, a lovely manicured ruin on a hill, Slice of Life in under siege from all sides. – JSC Modi’s India WALDEN BELLO China’s Economy: Powerful But Vulernable NICOLAS J S DAVIES Afghan Troops say Taliban are Brothers and War is “Not Really Our Fight.”

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All photographs by Jeffrey St. Clair.

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Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent books are Bernie and the Sandernistas: Field Notes From a Failed Revolution and The Big Heat: Earth on the Brink (with Joshua Frank) He can be reached at: [email protected] or on Twitter @JSCCounterPunch .

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