The Usc Experiment in Modern Architectural Pedagogy

“WRITING OUR OWN PROGRAM”:

THE USC EXPERIMENT IN MODERN ARCHITECTURAL PEDAGOGY,

1930 TO 1960

Deborah Howell-Ardila

A Thesis Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF HISTORIC PRESERVATION

December 2010

Acknowledgements

It would be difficult to imagine a finer group of scholars to have lent their time and expertise as committee members and outsider readers for this particular study. It’s a pleasure to turn to the task of thanking them now.

Several summers back, I attended Kenneth Breisch’s summer program in historic preservation at USC, known to initiates as summer “boot camp.” Ken’s knowledge and presentation of the topics, and the caliber of students in attendance, convinced me to enroll in USC’s Historic Preservation program. Ever since, I’ve had a growing list of reasons to thank Ken: for his inspiring lectures on architectural history and historic preservation, for advice and guidance on this thesis and many other projects, and for his never-flagging enthusiasm and sense of humor. I’d also like to thank Ken for suggesting the initial direction of this thesis and for photographing, on short notice, the USC demonstration house that turned up in the course of this research. I also thank Ken for designing and leading a program at USC that encourages students to connect the dots between academic architectural history and the street-level view.

I’d also like to express my immense gratitude to Kathleen James-Chakraborty— for defining the gold standard for an academic architectural historian, through the originality and integrity of her scholarship; for always beating the deadline and the odds when it came to returning comments; for the insightfulness and rigor of her critique; and for many enjoyable hours spent attending her architectural history lectures at UC

Berkeley back in the mid-1990s.

My third committee member, Emily Bills, also shared her time and nuanced work on Esther McCoy. I’d like to thank Emily for our productive and enjoyable conversations about the direction of this thesis and SoCal modernism; for her participation in the Oral

History Project round table discussion; and for her close reading of this thesis and many helpful suggestions.

I am enormously grateful to my outside readers, architectural historians William

Littmann and Barbara Lamprecht, whose own work on the UC Berkeley College of

Environmental Design and Richard Neutra, respectively, represents a standard to which to aspire. Bill and Barbara contributed generously of their time and expertise in sharp, close reviews of this thesis, and I’m grateful to them. Stephen Tobriner, Greg Hise,

William Deverell, and Dana Cuff also provided advice and insights along the way.

I would be remiss were I not to thank those who have participated in the USC

School of Architecture Oral History Project. This thesis only begins to draw on the material provided by the USC alums, local architects, and historians who’ve participated so far: Rudi DeChellis, Ena Dubnoff, Eugene Flores, Frank Gehry, John Grist, Ray and

Shelley Kappe, John Kelsey, William Krisel, Randell Makinson, Carl McLarand, Ed

Niles, John Reed, Frank Sata, Dennis Smith, Greg Walsh, Eugene Weston III, and Chet

Widom. My thanks also go to Dottie O’Carroll, Douglas Noble, and Anjie Emeka of the

USC School of Architecture, the Historical Society of Southern California for partially underwriting the Oral History Project, and the Gamble House for hosting two round table discussions.

My colleagues at Sapphos Environmental, Inc., in Pasadena, California, each had valuable insights to share about considering, then determining, contextual as well as

iii

architectural significance (and always on deadline and a budget): our group manager and

architectural historian, Leslie Heumann, and architectural historians Shannon Carmack

Ciezadlo, Rebecca Silva, and Laura Gallegos Carias. I owe a particular debt to Leslie for sharing her vast knowledge of Southern California’s architectural heritage and for our ongoing conversations about architecture. I’d also like to thank David Lee, Cristina

Carrillo Yamasaki, and Sam Ortiz for editing and formatting assistance. A special thanks goes to the founder and principal of Sapphos Environmental, Inc., Marie Campbell, for having the imagination and chutzpah to allow her staff to stretch beyond their comfort zones, in the direction their interests lead them.

This study benefited greatly from the assistance of Claude Zachary and Dace

Taube of the University of Southern California Libraries; Tony Gonzalez of the USC

Architecture and Fine Arts Library; Waverly Lowell, Environmental Design Archives,

College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley; Robert D. Montoya, Charles E. Young

Research Library, UCLA; Jennifer Whitlock, Architecture & Design Collection,

University Art Museum, UC Santa Barbara; and independent scholar and architectural historian John Crosse.

I’d also like to extend a special thanks to John Reed for being the first person to mention Weatherhead’s woefully under-researched role at USC, and Aimee Lind of the

Getty Research Institute (by way of her father, John Merritt) for suggesting the same was true for Arthur Gallion.

And most of all, infinite gratitude to my family, David and Alejandro, for their support and love, and for being el sol de mis días.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ii

List of Figures vi

Abstract x

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 Milestones: Arthur Weatherhead and the USC 19 College of Architecture, 1919 through 1945 Section 1 Department of Architecture, 1919 to 1930 19 Section 2 College of Architecture, 1931 to 1939 33 Section 3 Transitional Years, 1939 to 1945 39

Chapter 2 Beaux-Arts to Modern: Weatherhead’s The History of Collegiate 46 Education in Architecture, in Context Section 1 The Beaux-Arts: A Brief Sketch and Early Critiques 47 Section 2 Pioneering American Departures from the 52 Beaux-Arts System, 1919 to 1935 Section 3 Art versus Pragmatism: The Debate on 62 Architectural Education

Chapter 3 The USC Experiment: Core Ideas behind the Curriculum, 75 1930 to 1944 Section 1 The Philosophy behind the USC “Experiment” 76 Section 2 Contemporary Architecture and “California Living”: 115 Local Press Coverage in the 1930s and early 1940s

Chapter 4 The USC Experiment: Curriculum, Faculty, and Projects, 131 1930 to 1960 Section 1 Pre- and Postwar Snapshot: 1937 and 1957 132 Section 2 Design Curriculum 134 Section 3 Traditional Methods and Historical Precedent 177 Section 4 Pragmatism: Bridge between Classroom and Office 184 Section 5 Social Responsiveness 190 Section 6 Allied Fields: Industrial Design 214

Chapter 5 “The Challenge of the Postwar World Is Here”: 224 Arthur Banta Gallion and Continuity and Change, 1945 to 1960

Conclusion 244

Bibliography 251

List of Figures

Figure 1 Thompson/Moseley House, Buff, Straub & Hensman, 1959 3

Figure 2 Thompson/Moseley House, Buff, Straub & Hensman, 1959 3

Figure 3 Frank House, Buff, Straub & Hensman, 1957 4

Figure 4 Plan, Frank House, Buff, Straub & Hensman, 1957 5

Figure 5 Case Study House 22 (Stahl House), 1960, Pierre Koenig 6

Figure 6 Case Study House 22 (Stahl House), 1960, Pierre Koenig 7

Figure 7 Plan, Case Study House 22, 1960, Pierre Koenig 7

Figure 8 Arthur Clason Weatherhead, 1939 20

Figure 9 Courtyard of USC Department of Architecture, circa 1926 30

Figure 10 USC Department of Architecture, 1928 32

Figure 11 Alpha Rho Chi Fraternity and USC Staff and Faculty, 1935/1936 36

Figure 12 Harris Hall, USC College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1940 40

Figure 13 Harris Hall, USC College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1940 41

Figure 14 School of Architecture, 1930, El Rodeo Yearbook 77

Figure 15 College of Architecture, 1933, El Rodeo Yearbook 78

Figure 16 College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1934, El Rodeo Yearbook 79

Figure 17 College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1935, El Rodeo Yearbook 80

Figure 18 College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1936, El Rodeo Yearbook 81

Figure 19 College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1937, El Rodeo Yearbook 82

Figure 20 College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1938, El Rodeo Yearbook 83

Figure 21 College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1939, El Rodeo Yearbook 84

Figure 22 College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1940, El Rodeo Yearbook 85

Figure 23 College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1941, El Rodeo Yearbook 86

Figure 24 College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1943, El Rodeo Yearbook 87

Figure 25 College of Architecture, 1946, El Rodeo Yearbook 88

Figure 26 College of Architecture, 1947, El Rodeo Yearbook 89

Figure 27 School of Architecture, 1958, El Rodeo Yearbook 90

Figure 28 William Lee Judson, circa 1910, College of Fine Arts founder 93

Figure 29 USC School of Architecture Goes Hollywood, 1928 103

Figure 30 Bullocks-Wilshire Building, Parkinson & Parkinson, 1929 121

Figure 31 “Home Nestled Amid Foliage,” Proto-Ranch House, 1931 123

Figure 32 Raymond Kennedy and College of Architecture, 1937 140

Figure 33 “Architects to Finish Santa Ana Rejuvenation,” 1938 142

Figure 34 Editorial Cartoon, “Santa Ana Bound,” 1938 143

Figure 35 Planning Hollywood, 1940, USC Design Project 145

Figure 36 Planning Hollywood, 1940, USC Design Project 146

Figure 37 Planning Culver City, 1942, USC Design Project 148

Figure 38 “Class at S.C. Designs Cabins to Suit Landscapes,” 1941 152

Figure 39 Gordon Drake, USC Class of 1941, Presley House, 1947 158

Figure 40 Gordon Drake, USC Class of 1941, Presley House, 1947, Plan 159

Figure 41 Gordon Drake, USC Class of 1941, Architect’s Residence, 1946 161

Figure 42 Gordon Drake, USC Class of 1941, Architect’s Residence, 1946 162

Figure 43 Gordon Drake, USC Class of 1941, Architect’s Residence, 1946 163

Figure 44 “Five Zones for California Outdoor Living,” Gordon Drake Unit 167 House, 1950, Alameda, California

vii

Figure 45 “Tomorrow’s Architect” presents the USC Study House, 1952 168

Figure 46 “Tomorrow’s Architect” presents the USC Study House, 1952 169

Figure 47 Three-Stage Plan, the USC Study House, 1952 171

Figure 48 Three-Stage Plan, the USC Study House, 1952 172

Figure 49 Three-Stage Plan, the USC Study House, 1952 173

Figure 50 Calvin Straub, Sedlachek House, 1949 175

Figure 51 USC Shades and Shadows Course, 1933, Lee Kline illustration 178

Figure 52 Small-Family Housing, Santa Anita Village, 1939, USC Design 195 Project

Figure 53 The Villageaire Model Home, USC Student Project, 1948/1949 199

Figure 54 The Villageaire Model Home, USC Student Project, 1948/1949 200

Figure 55 Villageaire Model Home, USC Student Project, 1948/1949 201

Figure 56 Plan, Villageaire Model Home, USC Student Project, 1948/1949 202

Figure 57 Advertisement by Gaffers & Sattler, the manufacturers of the stove 204 in Villageaire’s “New Freedom Kitchen”

Figure 58 “Villageaire, Model SC Home, Draws Visitors,” Los Angeles Times 205

Figure 59 Small House Design, 1955, USC Design Project, Calvin Straub 207

Figure 60 Multi-family Residential Project, 1939, USC Design Project 209

Figure 61 Multi-family Residential Project, 1939, USC Design Project 211

Figure 62 USC War-Time Curriculum, 1942, Design Project, Airport 212

Figure 63 USC Industrial Design Lecturer, Kem Weber, Airline Chair, 1934 217

Figure 64 USC Industrial Design Lecturer, Paul T. Frankl, Studio, Los Angeles 219

Figure 65 USC Industrial Design Lecturer, Paul T. Frankl, Studio, Los Angeles 220

viii

Figure 66 USC Industrial Design Students, December 1939 222

Figure 67 Greg Walsh, “A Panel House,” circa 1952/1953. Third-Year Design 226 Project for Calvin Straub

Figure 68 Greg Walsh, “A Panel House,” circa 1952/1953. Third-Year Design 227 Project for Calvin Straub

Figure 69 Gallion and Gruen’s Pacoima Public Housing Project, 1954 236

Figure 70 Gallion and Gruen’s Pacoima Public Housing Project, 1956 236

Abstract

Although USC offered the region’s first and only professional degree in

architecture from 1925 until the 1960s, very little research has been conducted on the

school’s history. Much of the secondary literature has generally accepted – and

perpetuated – the assumption that, in the post-World War II period, through the work of a

few determined actors, the USC School of Architecture shed virtually overnight its

Beaux-Arts-influenced curriculum and adopted a modern, pragmatic approach.

This thesis demonstrates that USC launched a modern “experiment” in

architectural education far earlier than is generally acknowledged—beginning in the early

1930s and primarily shaped by the exigencies of the Great Depression, rather than 1945

with the end of World War II. The individual who was most decisive in launching this

experiment is also the person least cited in the literature: Arthur Clason Weatherhead,

head of the program and dean from 1914 to 1944.

In 1930, through Weatherhead’s design and initiative, the USC College of

Architecture became the fifth out of 45 American collegiate schools of architecture to

shift away from the Beaux-Arts system and craft a modern, hands-on alternative. In the

case of USC, this alternative was grounded in pragmatism, social responsiveness and

“present-day conditions,” contemporary, site-specific design, regional identity, and a

close association with the allied arts.

Weatherhead’s thirty-year career at USC coincided with an era of widespread re-

evaluation and subsequent overhaul of American collegiate schools of architecture. This thesis sheds light on this era through an examination of departmental bulletins and course lists, newspaper and trade magazine articles of the day, faculty and student publications,

as well as interviews with alumnae. Once the USC “experiment” was established and in

place in the late 1930s, the curriculum and design philosophy remained largely intact through the early 1960s.

This study does not intend to diminish the achievements of the postwar dean,

Arthur Gallion. From 1945 to 1960, Gallion built on the foundations in place and expanded the school according to the pressing issues of the day: housing, planning, industrial design, and landscape architecture. In national terms, the example of the USC

School of Architecture illustrates how educators and architects on the “far western” periphery of Southern California responded to the issues challenging – and changing – the architectural profession and academy across the United States.

Seen in the context of the 1930s, Weatherhead’s program at USC was shaped by the need to reject prescriptive ideas about style emphasized under the Beaux-Arts system.

At USC, the social aspects of modernism became the focus. In this way, the affinity between the USC design philosophy and the iconic work of the region’s modernist avant- garde is not meant to suggest that the USC School of Architecture fits within the larger story of the region’s genius-architects. Rather, this thesis suggests that the work of the region’s early “starchitects” fits within the broader social context that also nurtured and produced the modern USC School of Architecture. To paraphrase Gwendolyn Wright, this study hopes to highlight not the “individual stars” but the larger “constellation” of modern architectural thought and design in Southern California.1

1 Gwendolyn Wright’s original quote read: “From Craft to Profession shifts the focus of architectural history from individual stars to constellations.” Woods (1999), back cover.

xi Introduction

In 1975, writing in the journal Perspecta on the Case Study House program,

Southern California’s pioneering architectural critic Esther McCoy described what had

come to be seen as two distinctive paths in the region’s post-World War II modernism:

the Case Study House “style,” reflecting the presumably Miesian, steel-frame

construction of, among others, Raphael Soriano, Charles Eames, and Pierre Koenig, and

what had come to be known as the “Pasadena” or “USC style,” a type of residential

design based on

a panel system and framed with 4 by 4-inch posts 4 feet on center. Roofs were gabled and low pitched, and glass often followed the gable line. Decks and porches were oriented to the mature trees of Pasadena. They were influenced by Greene and Greene and earlier cottages, which Randell Makinson calls the Brown and Browns, and by Harwell Harris.1

As described by McCoy, the USC style was characterized by an exposed wood

post-and-beam structural system, with aesthetic effect achieved through an asymmetrical

but balanced arrangement of modular, in-fill panels. The use of post-and-beam construction allowed for an open, flexible plan, as well as a high level of integration with the outdoors. Patios directly off rooms, visible through generous expanses of glazing, helped extend living space and provided transitional areas between indoors and out (with indoor-outdoor integration the leitmotif of the style). In homage to its Arts and Crafts’ roots, McCoy wrote, a low-pitched gable, with wide eaves punctuated by exposed rafter tails, capped the building. On equal footing with any given architectural feature was a concern for site-specific design, in which the existing topography was understood as a

1 McCoy, Esther, “Arts and Architecture Case Study Houses,” Perspecta, vol. 15 (1975): 55-73, quoted here p. 72.

1 canvas half filled. Classic examples for each are reflected in, for example, Buff, Straub

& Hensman’s Frank House (1957) and Thompson/Moseley House (1959), and on the other side of the presumable divide, Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House #22 (1960).

(Figures 1 to 4, Buff, Straub & Hensman, Thompson/Moseley House and Frank House, and Figures 5 to 7, Pierre Koenig, Case Study House #22).

During the 1950s, the principal practitioners of the “USC style” included the architectural firms of Buff, Straub & Hensman, formed by three graduates of the USC

School of Architecture, Conrad Buff III (1952), Calvin Straub (1943), and Donald

Hensman (1952); Ladd & Kelsey, formed by USC alums, Thornton Ladd (1952) and

John Kelsey (1954); and Smith & Williams, founded by USC alumni Whitney Smith

(1934) in collaboration with fellow alum Wayne Williams (1941). Given the shared alma mater and architectural language, it is unsurprising that commentators of the time looked toward the USC School of Architecture to characterize this work.

McCoy’s Perspecta article on the Case Study House program is an eloquent piece of architectural criticism. However, what goes undeveloped in the article—but what stands out today—is how thoroughly pre-1945 USC graduates dominate the roster of postwar Case Study House architects described by McCoy. Although she does not identify the architects as USC graduates, the list reads like a reunion of the 1930’s and early 1940’s School of Architecture: Sumner Spaulding, a USC instructor from 1923 well into the postwar period, Thornton Abell (1931), Spaulding’s young partner, John Rex

(1932), Smith, Donn Emmons (partner of Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons), and Raphael

Soriano (1934), Jules Brady (1936), Edward Killingsworth (1940), Kemper Nomland, Jr.

Figure 1. Thompson/Moseley House, Buff, Straub & Hensman, 1959, San Marino, California. Photograph by Deborah Howell-Ardila.

Figure 2. Interior, Thompson/Moseley House, Buff, Straub & Hensman, 1959, San Marino, California. Source: Buff & Hensman (USC 2002).

Figure 3. Frank House, Buff, Straub & Hensman, 1957, Pasadena. Los Angeles Times Home magazine, led by Dan McMasters, spread the gospel of site- specificity as the epitomy of modern California living: “Planned to inhabit is wooded site naturally and effectively in both concept and use of materials without disturbing original beauty of the hillside.” Source: Los Angeles Times Home magazine, 18 March 1962.

Figure 4. Plan, Frank House, Buff, Straub & Hensman, 1957, Pasadena, California. Landscaping by Eckbo, Dean, and Williams. Source: Buff, Smith & Hensman, Pasadena.

Figure 5. Case Study House 22 (Stahl House), 1960, Pierre Koenig. Julius Shulman’s stylized photographs helped make Case Study House 22 one of the icons of John Entenza’s program. Shows detail of corregated steel sheets that served as the roof, sheltering the house under wide overhanging eaves. Source: Courtesy of Getty Research Institute, Julius Shulman Archives.

Figure 6. Case Study House 22 (Stahl House), Los Angeles, 1960. Sited on a small, irregularly shaped lot at hill’s edge, the house utilizes a cantilevered L-shaped plan to capitalize on the view. Source: J. Paul Getty Trust. Used with permission. Julius Shulman Photography Archive, Research Library at the Getty Research Institute (2004.R.10).

Figure 7. Plan, Case Study House 22, Pierre Koenig, Los Angeles. Source: USC School of Architecture.

7 and Williams (1941), Straub (1943), and, finally, reaching the postwar period, Buff,

Hensmann, and Koenig (1952).

Clearly something was underway at USC in the 1930s. Thus far, the story has gone untold. Virtually no scholarship exists with the clear-eyed certainty expressed by

McCoy placing the “USC style” within the context of the USC School of Architecture itself, whose post-World War II environment was identified as critical. Although USC offered the region’s first and only professional degree in architecture from 1925 until the

1960s, very little research has been conducted on the school’s history. Much of what has been written accepts—and perpetuates—the assumption that, in the post-World War II period, through the work of a few determined actors, the USC School of Architecture shed virtually overnight its Beaux-Arts-influenced curriculum and adopted a modern, pragmatic approach. In these accounts, when it comes to the USC School of Architecture, the year 1945 is presented as a caesura—social, cultural, and technological. But the language of caesura eclipses the possibility of continuity between the pre- and postwar periods. After all, something was underway at the School of Architecture in the 1930s and early 1940s – and given the breadth and richness of the work created by even the partial list of graduates above, it went well beyond modern meditations on the Arts and

Crafts.

This thesis demonstrates that a modern, hands-on curriculum at USC not only began far earlier than is generally acknowledged (in the early 1930s rather than 1945) but was designed and launched by a figure who has been all but forgotten in the literature:

Arthur Clason Weatherhead, department leader and dean from 1914 to 1944. In 1930, through Weatherhead’s initiative, the USC College of Architecture became the fifth out

8 of forty-five schools of architecture in the United States to shift from a Beaux-Arts- influenced pedagogy toward a pragmatic, hands-on alternative, grounded in contemporary, site-driven design and regional identity.

Weatherhead’s thirty-year career at USC coincided with an era of widespread re- evaluation (and subsequently overhaul) of US architectural pedagogy. This thesis illuminates this era, through an examination of departmental bulletins and course lists, newspaper and trade magazine articles of the day, faculty and student publications, as well as interviews with alumnae. These documents demonstrate a remarkable level of continuity in the USC curriculum from the 1930s through early 1960s, in terms of classes, sequence, design philosophy, and methodology.

This study does not intend to diminish the achievements and leadership of the postwar dean, Arthur Banta Gallion. From 1945 to 1960, Gallion maintained the approach established by Weatherhead and expanded the school’s scope according to the pressing issues of the day: planning, industrial design, and housing. In national terms, the example of the USC School of Architecture illustrates how interwar educators and architects on the “far western” periphery of Southern California began responding to the issues challenging (and changing) the profession and academy across the United States.

Beginning in the 1930s, the goal at USC was the fashioning of a middle ground between the history-free “ultra-modern,” as Weatherhead and Gallion both referred to the machine-age side of the modern movement, and the style-prescriptive Beaux-Arts educational system and historic eclecticism.

Recent scholarship has begun to contend with the theme of pedagogical reform in

American schools of architecture during the transitional era of the 1930s. In dissertations

9 written in 2009, Brendan Daniel Moran2 and Avigail Sachs3 explored how the emerging

field of research (primarily in the social sciences in Moran’s work, and the technical,

building, and environmental sciences in Sachs’ study) proved decisive in the

development of alternative theories for architectural pedagogy beginning in the 1930s.

Moran and Sachs point to the tension emerging in this time between research and design

in the schools. The debate boiled down to these basic ideas: “research” was carried out

in the service of practice—the specifics of site, location, and client and societal needs

were intrinsic parts of any solution to an architectural (or increasingly planning) problem.

The emphasis on “design” held that architecture was above all an art form, and valuable

classroom time should not be wasted on practical experience.

In terms of the emergence of modern architecture in the United States, as Sachs

pointed out, recent scholarship by Kathleen James-Chakraborty and Gwendolyn Wright

refutes the long-held view that a fixed set of heroic émigré architects introduced the

modern idiom and philosophy to the United States.4 James-Chakraborty observed that

The Museum of Modern Art’s 1932 exhibition of modern European architecture and the immigration to the United States of the two Bauhaus architects highlighted in it, Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, have been widely credited with transforming American architecture and design. This is a

2 Moran, Brendan Daniel, “Sociological Imagination and the City: Encounters between Architecture and Planning Education in America, 1933-1957” (PhD Dissertation, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 2009). 3 Sachs, Avigail, “Research for Architecture: Building a Discipline and Modernizing the Profession” (PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2009). Studies on the history and modernization of the profession also include: Woods, Mary N., From Craft to Profession: The Practice of Architecture in Nineteenth Century American (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999). Bentel, Paul, 1992, “Modernism and Professionalism in American Modern Architecture, 1919-1933,” PhD Dissertation, MIT, Cambridge, MA. Hyungmin, Pai, The Portfolio and the Diagram: Architecture, Discourse, and Modernity in American (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). 4 See, for example, James-Chakraborty, Kathleen, “From Isolation to Internationalism: American Acceptance of the Bauhaus,” in James-Chakraborty, ed., Bauhaus Culture from Weimar to the Cold War (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), and Wright, Gwendolyn, Modern Architectures in History: USA (London: Reaktion Books, 2008).

10 myth. The Great Depression and World War II, not the presence of the émigrés, were responsible for far more substantial changes in both fields. These shifts led to the adoption of forms that in most cases bore little resemblance to their supposed European antecedents.5

While scholars such as James-Chakraborty and Wright have helped broaden the

understanding of the emergence of American modernism, Sachs and Littmann observe a

narrow view persisting when it comes to the history of architectural pedagogy, with a

continuing overemphasis on “the theories and practices developed at the German school

the Bauhaus, and the influence of Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe.”6 The

centrality of Gropius and Mies has led to an oversimplified conclusion, Sachs argues,

with respect to their influence. They arrived in the US, set the agenda, and all other

schools followed. In Littmann’s research on the University of California, Berkeley, in

which he demonstrates that a student movement from below, rather than administrative changes from above, occasioned the shift toward a modern curriculum, he observes the same problem:

Most scholarly descriptions of this era credit this shift to the determined actions of a handful of architects. In these narratives, noted modernists like Walter Gropius and Joseph Hudnut are portrayed as heroic actors almost single-handedly casting out the old-fashioned French approach from the universities.7

A similar dilemma exists in the literature on Southern Californian modernism. In

terms of design, a wealth of scholarship illuminates the work of a small but important set

of avant-garde architects. This work includes excellent monographs on the triumvirate of

Frank Lloyd Wright and his one-time protégés, Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler,

as well as studies on Harwell Hamilton Harris, who, along with William Wurster, is often

5 James-Chakraborty, “From Isolation to Internationalism,” 153. 6 Sachs, “Research for Architecture,” xiii. 7 Littmann, William, “Assault on the Ecole: Student Campaigns Against the Beaux Arts, 1925-1950,” Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 53, no. 3 (February 2000): 159-166; quoted here p. 159.

11 said to have provided the bridge between the “first generation” and later modernist

architects. But there remains a relative shortage of comparative scholarship on secondary

narratives and actors. Given the lack of comparative work, in particular on the 1930s,

Mid-Century Modern design in Southern California is often observed through an

exceptionalist lens, through which certain design principles (such as site-specific design

and indoor-outdoor integration) are understood as uniquely Southern Californian, and

uniquely postwar. However, this exceptionalist lens misses the movement’s continuity

with the 1930s and place within the larger context, as architects throughout the United

States (and beyond) began exploring the middle ground, between a new history-free

architectural idiom and regional precedent and identity.

With respect to education, the focus on post-World War II educators and architects has left untold the story of the continuity between the pre- and postwar periods at USC. The dominant narrative emphasizes the contributions of postwar actors, with the

Beaux-Arts system itself serving in the role of progress’s enemy (though coursework well into the early 1960s shows that neither Weatherhead nor Gallion intended to throw out all vestiges of traditional methods).

In her study of the history of architectural practice, Mary Woods challenged what she described as a long-standing tendency among architects and historians to focus on genius-artists “to the exclusion of other narrators and narratives.”8 She described the tendency as “Roarkism,” referring to the iconoclastic architect of Ayn Rand’s novel The

Fountainhead. Broadening the focus to present a “mise-en-scene of the architectural

profession,” Woods’ concern lies “with multiple participants, overlapping

8 Woods, Mary N., From Craft to Profession: The Practice of Architecture in Nineteenth Century American (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 1.

12 responsibilities, and the settings for design and building.” The Roarks, she writes, do

play a role in the story,

since they were, after all, principal players in constructing professional identity and institutions. But I view them from unorthodox perspectives. Here they are not omniscient creators but collaborators, partners, entrepreneurs, merchandisers, educators, employers, and lobbyists. Their narratives are interwoven with those of modest, provincial, renegade, and failed architects.9

In this spirit, this thesis hopes to help broaden the mise-en-scene of Southern

Californian modernism by exploring the secondary narrative represented by the USC

School of Architecture, its principal authors, Weatherhead and Gallion, and the work of selected faculty and alumnae. The goal is not to elevate Weatherhead and Gallion to the

Roarkian pantheon but rather to consider how their stories, thus far unexamined, fit within the formation of modern architectural thought and design in the region, as well as planning, industrial design, and landscape architecture.

The most fruitful path for examining the modern USC program, though, lies in the context out of which the program emerged. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on this context.

Following a brief biographical sketch of Weatherhead, Chapter 1 aims to outline the administrative milestones of the School of Architecture, during its formative years, and the career milestones for Weatherhead, whose career directly mirrored the growth of the department he led. During this time, the architecture program at USC went from several courses in the 1910s, housed in the College of Fine Arts, to a “department” offering the region’s first specialized degree in architecture, to a stand-alone College of Architecture in 1931. Architectural pedagogy became Weatherhead’s professional focus, beginning in

9 Woods, From Craft to Profession, 1.

13 1918 as he traveled the US and Europe to study teaching methods, and culminating in the

1941 publication of his book, The History of Collegiate Architectural Education in the

United States. Chapter 1 introduces limited historical context, as it reflects the growth of the USC College of Architecture during this time; but, given the dearth of material on the

USC program, the main goal of the chapter is to clarify the administrative milestones in the early years.

In the wake of World War I, spurred by the advent of European (and US) modernism, US colleges of architecture began fashioning alternatives to the Beaux-Arts system. While early educational experiments varied from college to college, one shared objective was writing pragmatism into the coursework. Chapter 2, “Beaux-Arts to

Modern: Weatherhead’s History of Collegiate Education in Architecture in Context” traces the early evolution toward modern pedagogy from approximately 1919 through the

1930s. Excerpts from Weatherhead’s book illuminate his views on the shortcomings of the Beaux-Arts system as well as his goals for USC. Following a brief sketch of the

Beaux-Arts system, the early departures from it are detailed in Chapter 2, beginning with the University of Oregon in 1919. The chapter concludes with an overview of the debate between proponents of traditional methods and those favoring contemporary, pragmatic alternatives.

By the time Weatherhead’s 1941 book was published, the ideas he had begun developing in the 1920s had emerged fully in the USC curriculum. Chapter 3, “The USC

Experiment: Core Ideas behind the Curriculum, 1930 to 1944,” draws on newspaper articles by Weatherhead and his staff, departmental course bulletins, and student publications to illustrate how the dean’s philosophy evolved into a core set of ideas.

14 These ideas centered on: (1) realism and “present-day” conditions, not as a Zeitgeist to

intuit but rather a set of social, economic, and aesthetic conditions to be studied and

incorporated into design solutions; (2) pragmatism, providing a bridge between the

classroom and office, as seen in a core of technical classes and emphasis on three-

dimensional visualization and modeling rather than paper techniques; (3) a

multidisciplinary approach, including allied fields such as planning, industrial design, and

the fine arts; and (4) a rational, problem-driven approach to design that inflected regional

characteristics and conditions. The chapter concludes with a brief sketch of local

architectural press coverage and reactions to (and interpretations of) contemporary architectural thought and style. Chapter 3’s passage on local context and press coverage seeks to introduce the issues shaping the curriculum at USC, in particular with respect to the good “California life” and housing modernization. The particular spin given to these ideas in Los Angeles suggests the ways in which the language of regional exceptionalism, which later came to characterize the work of both the heroes of the modern movement and postwar USC graduates, had its roots in the 1930s.

Chapter 4, “The USC Experiment: Curriculum, Faculty, and Projects, 1930 to

1960,” illustrates how Weatherhead’s ideas translated into a program of study that remained largely intact until the early 1960s. The chapter draws from course catalogs,

published projects, as well as faculty and student work. In the period under consideration, the most radical change in the design curriculum, as reflected in course catalogs, took place during the first several years of Weatherhead’s experiment, from 1929 to 1934.

During this time, Beaux-Arts problems sets and classicism as the aesthetic focal point decrease, then disappear. Since course descriptions cannot fully describe the content and

15 atmosphere of the classrooms, newspaper articles describing projects, both in terms of

topics and methodology, will help complete the picture. Throughout the 1930s, the Los

Angeles Times reported frequently on the initiatives and student projects of the College of

Architecture. The frequency of this coverage, as well as the tenor of the articles, reflects

the increasing regional profile of the USC program and its role in establishing and fostering modern ideas about architecture and planning.

As reflected in Chapters 3 and 4, the principles driving the USC design philosophy will sound familiar to anyone with a working knowledge of Southern

Californian – or, more accurately, Californian – modernism. By the late 1930s and early

1940s, Weatherhead and his faculty emphasized resourceful, site-specific design;

“original expression” and regional identity, as reflected in environmental factors such as climate, topography, and locally available materials; and economy (which through the

1930s included prefabricated materials such as plywood) but never at the expense of

craftsmanship. While little photographic evidence of student projects exists, the

descriptions of projects reflect a design ethos that was highly compatible with that of the

region’s architectural avant-garde.

This affinity, the predominance of USC graduates on the early Case Study House

roster, and the degree of pre- and postwar continuity in the USC curriculum begs the

question of how engaged Weatherhead was with the local architectural avant-garde.

Although the dean’s program shared central concerns with the iconic work of modernist

architects that began putting Southern Californian architecture on the national map (in

particular in residential design), the evidence shows some but not an extensive level of

involvement by Weatherhead either interacting with or promoting the region’s

16 modernism. Placed in the context of the time, Weatherhead’s philosophy appeared

grounded in a need to reject the prescriptive ideas about style embodied in the Beaux-

Arts’s approach to education. In this way, the affinity between USC and icons of the

region’s avant-garde should not be interpreted as a suggestion that the USC School of

Architecture fits within the larger story of the region’s genius-architects. In fact, the

argument presented here is that the stories of the genius-architects fit within the broader

social context that also nurtured and produced the modern USC School of Architecture.

To paraphrase Wright’s review of Woods, then, this study hopes to emphasize not the

“individual stars” but the constellation.10

While Chapter 4 demonstrates the continuity in the pre- and postwar College of

Architecture, a short coda in Chapter 5 sketches the postwar departures and innovations initiated by Gallion. During his term as dean, from 1945 to 1960, Gallion built on the

foundations in place and oversaw the rapid expansion and influence of the school. In his

first several years at USC, Gallion expanded the areas of planning, landscape

architecture, and industrial design, converting the four-year course in industrial design

created in 1939 to a stand-alone department. In addition, with the debate on pragmatism versus high art in architectural education largely resolved, Gallion appears to have re- engaged the question of aesthetics (which Weatherhead, like other progressive educators of the time, skirted in deference to the science and sociology of architecture). Interviews

with alumnae of the School of Architecture from the 1940s through early 1960s11 will

10 Ibid, back cover. Gwendolyn Wright’s original quote read: “From Craft to Profession shifts the focus of architectural history from individual stars to constellations.” 11 This thesis draws on interviews collected by the author as part of an ongoing Oral History Project on the USC School of Architecture. The following USC alumnae, as well as local architects and historians, gave generously of their time in interviews carried out by the author: Rudi DeChellis, Ena Dubnoff, Eugene

17 shed light on the curriculum at the time, as well as the atmosphere of the school, which

architectural historian and Neutra scholar Barbara Lamprecht aptly described as “the

region’s flashpoint for an agile curiosity… [during] a heady, exhilarating time.”12

Concluding comments explore the avenues for further research suggested by this

study, as well as revisit McCoy’s ideas about the “USC” and “Case Study House” styles,

in the context of the “California school” of design and regional modernism in the United

States.

Flores, Frank Gehry, John Grist, Ray and Shelley Kappe, John Kelsey, William Krisel, Randell Makinson, Carl McLarand, Ed Niles, John Reed, Frank Sata, Dennis Smith, Greg Walsh, Eugene Weston III, and Chet Widom. 12 Lamprecht, Barbara, 2005, “Pasadena Modern,” Pasadena Heritage Tour Brochure. On file at Pasadena Heritage, Pasadena, California.

18 Chapter 1

Milestones: Arthur Weatherhead and the USC College of Architecture, 1919 through 1945

Although accounts of the USC School of Architecture often highlight Arthur

Gallion and his considerable contributions to the school’s postwar development, the individual who initiated the modern School of Architecture is the same person who is least cited in the school’s history: Arthur Weatherhead, faculty member, de facto department head, and dean from 1914 to 1944. (Figure 8, Arthur Weatherhead,

“Architecture Instructor, Dean, Enthusiast.”)

During his 30-year tenure as dean and faculty member, Weatherhead’s research in architectural pedagogy mirrored the growth of the department he led and shaped its philosophy. If Weatherhead’s story, and the history of the School of Architecture in general, remain largely untold, though, it is less due to willful oversight than the scarcity of primary sources illuminating the school’s early years. Consequently, the available literature traces an inconsistent path with respect to the school’s establishment and growth. In order to clarify the founding years, this chapter marks the major milestones for both the school and Weatherhead, placed in the context of the era.

Milestones: Department of Architecture, 1919 to 1930

Scant biographical information exists on Weatherhead’s personal or professional life. Public records, articles, as well as a self-authored entry in Who’s Who in California, offer some detail on his early life and education. Born October 9, 1888 in Minneapolis,

Minnesota, Weatherhead was the elder son of Eugene Haskell and Hattie A.

Figure 8. Arthur Clason Weatherhead, “Architecture Instructor, Dean, Enthusiast,” 1939. Source: Southern California Alumni Review, December 1939. Printed courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries, University Archives.

20 Weatherhead. From 1907 through the year he graduated in 1914, Weatherhead worked

as a draftsman apprentice in architectural firms. By 1910, census records indicate that the

Weatherhead family, which included Arthur’s younger brother, Ray, had relocated to a

Yamhill, Oregon, a small town close to Portland.1 During this time, Weatherhead began

attending the University of Oregon but reportedly withdrew during his senior year of

studies due to “poor health.”2 In 1912, he relocated to Southern California and enrolled

at USC, completing his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1912 and Master of Fine Arts two years

later, in 1914.

When Weatherhead began teaching in the USC College of Fine Arts in 1914, the

offerings in architecture consisted of a three-year “architectural course,” leading to a

Bachelor of Fine Arts. The College of Fine Arts, established in 1895 by artist William

Lee Judson, attempted at the time to encompass “all branches of the graphic arts, both

academic and collegiate,” including “architects, scientific investigators, newspaper artists

and correspondents, machinists, designers in glass, textile ware and ceramic ware.”3 Los

Angeles architect Sumner Spaulding, who joined the USC faculty in 1923 (and who, along with partner and USC alum John Rex, contributed one of the first Case Study

House designs to Arts and Architecture), recalled his 1914 introduction to Weatherhead and his initial impressions of the dean:

[Weatherhead] undertook to run a School of Architecture at the University of Southern California. It seemed to me an impossible task, for the building was

1 United States Federal Census, 1910; South Newberg, Yamhill, Oregon. Roll T624 1290, Page: 12B, Enumeration District: 297. Available at: http://www.ancestry.com. 2 Harrington, Johns, “A Dream Come True: Biography of Architecture Dean Discloses His Vision and Efforts toward Realization of Combining Architecture and Allied Arts,” Southern California Alumni Review, December 1939, 14-15, 26-27, quoted here p. 15. USC Libraries, University Archives. 3 Johnson, C. Raimond, “University of Southern California, The School of Architecture,” Los Angeles Times, 1 March 1930.

21 inadequate, there was no library, and there was only a small faculty. During the many years when funds were not available to develop the school, he managed by support of the profession to build up the school’s reputation.4

While the booster’s tone is difficult to miss, this excerpt, drawn from a

commemorative issue of The USC Alumni Review, marking the 25th anniversary of the

School of Architecture, is noteworthy as one of the few sources commenting directly on

Weatherhead and the early years of the school. In the same issue of The Alumni Review,

Edwin Bergstrom, former president of the Allied Architects’ Association of Los Angeles

and, by 1939, president of the American Institute of Architects, echoed Spaulding’s tone:

I have known Arthur Weatherhead for many years and have watched him bring his college from its lowly beginnings to its present authority and extended influence on the architecture and fine arts of our community. … [F]rom the beginning he had a new interpretation of teaching the arts of design so that architecture and its allied arts would ever be coordinated in the thoughts of his pupils, whichever way their talents led them to go. This is his great contribution to the teaching of the arts.5

The article claims that, in 1914, the department’s “lowly beginnings” were two courses in

architecture, both of which were taught by Weatherhead, the sole staff member of the

architecture department: free-hand drawing and design.”6 The architecture department at the time, it is said, occupied a corner in the Music Arts building.

From the late 1910s through 1920s, the Department of Art and Architecture appears to have been an ongoing, multidisciplinary work in progress, with a curriculum balanced between fine arts and engineering. While some sources name 1914 as the inaugural year of the USC “department of architecture,” which corresponds with the year

4 Harrington, “A Dream Come True,” 15. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid.

22 Weatherhead began teaching, the College of Fine Arts course catalog indicates that a limited course of study in architecture, leading to a general Bachelor of Arts, was already offered as early as 1912. Judging by the 1912/1915 course catalog, the architectural program appears to have relied upon cross-listing with the USC Department of

Engineering, established in 1906.

Course bulletins of the day, as well as Weatherhead’s 1941 book, cite 1919 as the year an independent Department of Art and Architecture was formed, as part of the

College of Liberal Arts. Although the curriculum does not change substantially from

1918 to 1919, the year 1919 corresponds with the retirement of Dean Judson of the

College of Fine Arts, at which time the College of Fine Arts was “discontinued” and its curriculum was absorbed in the newly formed Department of Art and Architecture.

The affiliation with USC’s Department of Engineering proved fruitful. Course bulletins starting in 1917/1918 highlight the association between the two departments, which reflected the general pattern of architectural schools at the time. As of 1911/1912, of the twenty US architecture schools of architecture, eleven maintained “internal connections” to a department of engineering; six were stand-alone schools or colleges.7

The link to fine arts, though, reflected an emerging trend in the field. As of 1911/1912, just three US colleges with professional courses in architecture had established internal links with an affiliated department of fine arts.

7 Weatherhead, Arthur Clason, The History of Collegiate Education in Architecture in the United States (Los Angeles, CA, 1941), 136.

23 A year after completing his Bachelor of Arts, in December 1913, Weatherhead

and Mabel Stewart wed in Santa Ana.8 On December 11, 1917, their son, Roland, was born. By 1922, Weatherhead’s parents, then retired, and younger brother Ray, had relocated from Oregon to Los Angeles, living with the couple in their home at 813 N.

Virgil Avenue. Weatherhead’s obituary, published in the Los Angeles Times, stated that

the dean served “overseas” in World War I.9 However, most available sources, including his 1942 autobiographical entry in Who’s Who in California, contradict this.

Weatherhead indeed enlisted in the draft in June 1917 (on his Draft Registration Card, he indicated that he was a professor in the USC “Engineering Department”).10 But this

enlistment appears to have been in response to an initiative by the US War Department to

responded to the call, marching together in military fashion and proclaiming they were

“ready to go to war if needed.”11 (At 29 years of age and married, Weatherhead would

not have been likely to have been called, since the second-round draft called “unattached

men” up to the age of 30.)

Although Weatherhead was a licensed architect and member of the American

Institute of Architects (AIA), the focus of his professional life was architectural

pedagogy. After joining the faculty at USC, his first foray in architectural education

began in 1918, when he took a sabbatical to conduct research on “architectural studies

8 Biographical information draws from voter registration rolls, census records, and birth, death, and marriage data from the State of California. 9 “Funeral Today for Former SC Architecture Dean,” Los Angeles Times, 19 July 1952. 10 United States National Archives and Records Administration, World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918, Los Angeles County, California, Roll 1530895, Draft Board 10 (Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration). 11 “College Professors Prepare to Go to War if Needed,” Los Angeles Times, 3 May 1917.

24 preparatory,”12 returning to Los Angeles in time to teach during the summer 1919 term.

Weatherhead spent at least part of the 1918/1919 academic year at the University of

Oregon,13 his former home state, college and, during the period of his sabbatical, the first

US school of architecture to abandon the Beaux-Arts system, a transition Weatherhead would have witnessed first hand. Shortly after Weatherhead’s return to Los Angeles,

University of Oregon instructor Clayton M. Baldwin joined the architectural faculty at

USC, where he remained on staff for nearly forty years, until his death in 1958.

The Department of Architecture’s fortunes mirrored the economic boom of the

1920s. In Los Angeles as elsewhere, post-World War I stagnancy had given way to a rapid, dramatic expansion in population and building. Between 1920 and 1930, Los

Angeles County’s population more than doubled, expanding from just over 936,000 to over 2,208,000, a rate double that for the state overall.14 In terms of construction, in

tandem with the increase in US housing starts in the early 1920s (which rose rapidly

beginning in 1922, reaching a peak in 1925), Los Angeles recorded in 1924/1925 a total of 16,400 permits for new housing, with over 80 percent of these for single-family homes.15 New subdivisions also increased during this time, with the total number

doubling between 1920 and 1921, from approximately 300 to 600, then doubling again

by 1923, with 1,434 new tracts recorded.16

12 “Lessons in Art: Clever Instructors in Designing to Aid Summer Students,” Los Angeles Times, 27 June 1919. 13 Harrington, “A Dream Come True,” 14-15, 26-27. 14 Forstall, Richard L., “California, Population of Counties by Decennial Census: 1900 to 1990,” Population Division, US Bureau of the Census, Washington, DC. For a study of Los Angeles’s growth in the 1920s, see Sitton, Tom, and William Deverell, ed., Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001). 15 Hise, Greg, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 23. 16 Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles, 23-24.

25 At USC, following the initiation of the Department of Architecture in 1919, the

enrollment increase reflected this expansion. A patchwork of available sources helps

illustrate the rate of enrollment expansion and hints at the school’s need to add faculty

and studio space.17 Between 1919 and the fall of 1924, enrollment increased from 12 to

120. This number jumped another 20 percent between the academic years of 1924/25

and 1925/26, rising from 120 to 150. By 1929, the department had grown to 182,

including 71 architecture majors and 111 pre-majors. (Enrollment at USC overall

mirrored this trend; from 1921 to 1931, enrollment increased threefold, from just over

5,600 in 1921 to over 16,100 by 1931.)18

The need to expand the faculty became especially acute when Weatherhead

announced plans for a 1924/1925 sabbatical, during which he planned to continue his

study of architectural pedagogy, visiting “architectural centers of learning” in the United

States and Europe, and to undertake, as the Los Angeles Times put it, “post graduate work

in eastern universities.”19 The post-graduate work actually entailed the completion of a

Bachelor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, one of the leading Beaux-

Arts schools in the country at the time, led by Paul Cret. During Weatherhead’s absence,

Spaulding was to handle all architectural history courses, and Clayton Baldwin took over the full load of drawing, graphics, and design classes.

Faced with Weatherhead’s imminent sabbatical, Spaulding drafted a letter to the

Allied Architects’ Association, requesting assistance for the expanding department at

17 In lieu of departmental records, enrollment statistics are gleaned from the following sources: for the year 1919, “Fine Arts Hall Planned,” Los Angeles Times, 10 March 1929; for the academic years 1924/1925, “Added Courses in Architecture School Opened,” Los Angeles Times, 26 October 1925; for the academic year 1929/1930, Johnson, C. Raimond Johnson (1930). 18 University of Southern California, “Administrative Progress,” El Rodeo Yearbook, Class of 1932, 21. 19 “Director of Art at University Is to Tour Europe,” Los Angeles Times, 14 July 1924.

26 USC.20 In the fall of 1924, collaboration began between the USC Department of

Architecture and the Allied Architects’ Association of Los Angeles, an organization established in 1921 to “advance the art of architecture…and secure for and provide municipal, county, state and national governments with the highest and best expression of the profession of architecture at the least possible cost.”21 (Bulletins of the Allied

Architects’ Association, and subsequent coverage in the Los Angeles Times, have

erroneously asserted that this collaboration was initiated by USC President Rufus von

KleinSmid, who it is said, “asked this Association to advise and help it in the conduct” of

the Department of Architecture.22 However, the meeting minutes from the association, as well as Spaulding’s letter requesting assistance, reveal the USC instructor’s role in initiating the collaboration.)

Based on Spaulding’s request, a resolution to “prepare a tentative program” to

assist the Department of Architecture was unanimously approved and passed to David J.

Witmer, the newly appointed chair of the association’s Education and Publicity

Committee (Witmer ultimately remained on the College of Architecture advisory

committee into the postwar period). In August 1924, Witmer, along with appointed

members of the advisory committee, Spaulding, W. Templeton Johnson, and Winsor

Soule, met with von KleinSmid to present their proposal for assisting the Department of

20 Allied Architects Association, “Assistance for Architectural Schools,” Minutes of Adjourned Meeting, Allied Architects Association of Los Angeles, vol. VI (25 July 1924), 120. UCLA Special Collections, Archives of the Allied Architects Association, Box 3. 21 Allied Architects Association, “The Organization, Purposes and Aims of the Allied Architects Association of Los Angeles, California,” Bulletin of the Allied Architects Association of Los Angeles, vol. II, no. 6 (April 1926). 22 Allied Architects Association, “Report of the President Concerning the Activities of the Allied Architects Association for the Year 1924,” Bulletin of the Allied Architects Association of Los Angeles, vol. I, no. 4 (February 1925).

27 Architecture. Witmer explained to von KleinSmid that “the director Mr.

Weatherhead…would not be in attendance this school year, and that there was great need

of a program of instruction and administration and the appointment of a personnel to

carry out such a program.”23 Spaulding addressed the group, explaining

how he had undertaken to assist in the instruction and had been drawn into this work more and more. He stated that he found the ninety-three students working for a degree and a score of others were very earnest in their work, but the conditions and facilities were not adequate. He felt that this situation provided the Association with a wonderful opportunity of assisting Architectural students and so performing a great service to the Profession of Architecture.24

Ten days after this meeting, von KleinSmid accepted the association’s offer to assist in “an advisory capacity” and informed them that the University Board of Trustees had approved the appointment of an advisory committee. Beginning in 1924/1925, the committee included Witmer, Spaulding, Johnson, and Soule, a core membership that

remained intact until at least 1945 (the practice of inviting the city’s architects to

participate as lecturers and design critics continued well into the postwar period). In

January 1925, the advisory committee expanded to include John T. Vawter, H.F. Withey,

and Carleton Monroe Winslow, Sr., a former colleague of Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue.

Beginning in 1924/1925, during Weatherhead’s sabbatical, the advisory

committee provided upper-division design instructors and lecturers. In an arrangement

worked out with university officials, student access was provided to the association’s

drafting rooms in downtown Los Angeles. In addition, in December 1924, the

23 Allied Architects Association, “Special Committee to Cooperate with the Department of Architecture, University of Southern California,” Minutes of Adjourned Meeting, Allied Architects Association of Los Angeles, vol. VI (5 August 1924), 138-141; quoted here p. 138. UCLA Special Collections, Archives of the Allied Architects Association, Box 3. 24 Allied Architects Association, “Special Committee to Cooperate,” 140.

28 Association announced plans for a “complete library on art and architecture,” consisting

of over 1,000 donated volumes to which USC students would have access.25

The curriculum did not change as a result of this affiliation. Indeed, that the

Allied Architects’ Association would not participate in shaping the curriculum figured in the agreement between the association and USC. But in 1925, the Allied Architects’

Association made recommendations for an expanded five-year program of study. Similar

plans to expand the curriculum and create a dedicated school had already been underway

as early as 1922, as part of the broader plans for the university.26 In any case, the department did become a stand-alone School of Architecture in 1925, offering a five-year curriculum leading to a Bachelor of Architecture. With this, USC began conferring the region’s first and only professional degree in architecture until the 1960s.27 While the advisory committee continued intact, the Allied Architects’ Association profile at USC diminished through the late-1920s, as the association became embroiled in mounting legal entanglements regarding its system of collective compensation, among other issues.

In 1925, the fledging school inaugurated a building, albeit provisional, of its own at 659 West Thirty-Fifth Street, near the USC campus. Following the 1925 demolition of the USC chemistry building, architecture students and faculty “appropriated the remnants” and constructed a building for the Department of Architecture. (Figure 9,

Courtyard of USC Department of Architecture, circa 1926.) “Added to three different

25 “Architects to Open Library,” Los Angeles Times, 7 December 1924. 26 “Architects to Aid University Classes,” Los Angeles Times, 15 October 1922. 27 Other regional colleges included the Art Center College of Design, which started offering four-year degrees in Industrial Design (but not architecture) in 1949; UCLA Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning, established 1964; Cal Poly Pomona, founded by Ray Kappe in 1968; Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, College of Architecture and Environmental Design, established 1972; and the Southern California Institute of Architecture (Sci-Arc), founded by Ray Kappe and Thom Mayne, in 1972.

Figure 9. Courtyard of USC Department of Architecture, circa 1926. Exhibition of student work showcases Academic Classicism and what appears to be, in the center of the photo, a variation on the Taj Mahal. Source: Los Angeles Public Library Photograph Collection, Image #31915.

30 times,” the building became something of an ongoing student project that gained “an

endearing charm” and “distinctive personality” through the years.28 However, plans had been in place for a building that would accommodate the varied disciplines and programs

of the school, and in May 1928, Weatherhead announced its construction:

A three-story structure is contemplated for a site opposite the museum and art galleries of Exposition Park…[it] is to be erected around a central patio, with interior lines kept low. An exhibition hall which extends the full height of the building, drafting-rooms on the first and second floors extending across the rear of the building, and a library extending through two stories with open roof trusses…are among the features of the building.29

The location and description of the building sound not unlike present-day Harris Hall, still shared by the now-separate schools of fine arts and architecture (while Weatherhead executed some initial sketches, the project architect was Southern California AIA chapter head, Ralph C. Flewelling). With funding delayed until 1937, however, the new architecture building was not occupied until January 1940.

Expansion of the school continued through the 1920s, with additional faculty and coursework, in particular in fine arts. In 1928, the Los Angeles Times took note of the

USC Department of Architecture’s election to membership in the American Association of Collegiate Schools.30 (Figure 10, USC Department of Architecture, 1928.) The “Class

A” rating given USC was shared at the time with three other West Coast schools of

architecture: the University of Washington, the University of Oregon, and the University of California, Berkeley. Through this membership, USC architecture graduates became

28 Harrington “A Dream Come True,” 14. 29 Watrous, Valencia, “Architect Structure Projected,” Los Angeles Times, 25 May 1928. 30 “Trojan School Given Honors,” Los Angeles Times, 16 May 1928.

Figure 10. USC Department of Architecture, 1928. Image of the new building, constructed in 1925 from the remains of the demolished USC chemistry building. Source: University of Southern California El Rodeo Yearbook, 1928, p. 38. Courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries, University Archives.

32 eligible to receive licenses to practice architecture following three years of office

training.

Milestones: The College of Architecture, 1931 to 1939

With the onset of the Great Depression, the school’s growth slowed but did not stop entirely. The academic year 1930/1931 brought another sabbatical for Weatherhead and a milestone for the School of Architecture. In March 1931, the school became

USC’s seventh stand-alone “college,” offering an unbroken five-year course of study.

The new curriculum, intended to offer sequential, integrated courses, was drafted by

Weatherhead and published as the departmental catalog in January 1931. In March 1931, the USC Board of Trustees approved the name change and curriculum. With the college’s inaugural fall 1931 semester, members of USC’s architectural fraternity, Alpha

Rho Chi, commented on the change:

The local school of architecture grew up and became a College last spring and this fall all of the freshmen are entering into architecture with a full program of subjects that the Dean thinks will turn out better architects. There are no electives on the program and many new courses have been added. Among these are fundamentals of economics, man and civilization, public speaking, corporation finance, and many courses in architecture. All of these changes have been made as a result of Dean Weatherhead's tour last year on which he visited all of the best architectural schools in the country.31

The following year, in 1932, a graduate program leading to a Master of Architecture was

approved at USC. The year 1933 also brought another name change—this time to the

College of Architecture and Fine Arts, reflecting an expanded emphasis and coursework

31 Hoedinghaus, G.E., “Andronikos,” The Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XIII, no. 5 (October 1931): 8.

33 in the arts, including a series of classes on “Oriental Studies,” including Japanese and

Chinese art and architecture.

Meanwhile, Weatherhead continued to advance his own academic standing, as well. In the 1930s, Weatherhead had enrolled (apparently remotely) in a PhD program at

Columbia University in order to pursue his doctorate in the Political Science, Philosophy, and Pure Science Department. With his long-term research project on the history of

American architectural education serving as the basis for his dissertation, Weatherhead

completed his PhD in the late 1930s.

During the Great Depression, even as construction slowed and professional

prospects dimmed, enrollment in the College of Architecture remained steady. At the

nadir of the depression, in 1933, enrollment numbers had only dipped slightly from the

1929 figures, dropping from 182 to 171 students (among them, 124 men and 47

women).32 A consideration of the mixed fortunes of national Alpha Rho Chi chapters

offers a glimpse into how the economic slump impacted enrollment elsewhere. The June

1935 issue of The Archi (the newsletter of the national architectural fraternity) described

the welfare of active chapters of Alpha Rho Chi. Wishing to “speak frankly as to the

condition of the Fraternity,” the article reported that active chapters overall were “losing

momentum,” with six of the eight organizations either weakened, threatened with closure,

or recovering from the hardest depression years. There were two exceptions: the

University of Michigan and the University of Southern California, which, the writer said,

is “‘goin’ to town.’ It must be the Mae West spirit. We wish we had more chapters in

32 “Application for Registration of the Curriculum, College of Architecture and Fine Arts, University of Southern California,” 31 January 1934. USC Libraries, University Archives.

34 California.”33 (Figure 11, Alpha Rho Chi Fraternity and USC Staff and Faculty,

academic year 1935/1936.)

Los Angeles’s relative economic health during the Great Depression appeared to

help buoy enrollment figures at the College of Architecture. One snapshot of the region’s

economy in the early years of the Great Depression is provided in a 1931 survey of

national single-family housing starts. Conducted by Title Guarantee and Trust Company,

the survey showed Los Angeles leading all other metropolitan areas in the United States

by a considerable margin.34 The survey reported that, in October 1931, Los Angeles

recorded 276 permits for single-family residences, as compared with Detroit (82 permits),

Baltimore (51), Pittsburgh (45), Philadelphia and Boston (both with 42), Brooklyn (35),

and Chicago (24). Figures for January through October of 1931 showed a total valuation

of residential permits for Los Angeles of $17,293,207, a total representing housing for

just over 6,000 families. This total was more than double that of the second most active

market seen in the survey (Detroit, with new single-family construction accommodating

2,877 families).

This data comes with two caveats. These figures of course reflect only single-

family residential starts (and, compared with the other cities in the survey, Los Angeles

had more undeveloped land for this type of expansion). The second point relates to Greg

Hise’s argument against adopting the “accepted wisdom that housing production, not

employment, led and continues to lead to urban expansion,”35 which is implied here as a

33 Ely, Dwight, “How Things Are Going,” The Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XVI, no. 5 (June 1935): 26. 34 “Home Building Surveyed, Figures Show Los Angeles Ahead of Other Cities during October in New Family Capacities,” Los Angeles Times, 22 November 1931. 35 Hise, Greg, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 4.

Figure 11. Alpha Rho Chi Fraternity and USC Staff and Faculty, 1935/1936. Shown are Weatherhead (7th from right), Verle Annis (6th from right), and students Cliff Yates and Jules Brady (future Case Study House architect). Courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries, University Archives.

36 sign of economic health. In terms of broader indices, though, by the late 1930s Hise

demonstrated that “Los Angeles’ expanding economy and the rise in lower-skilled

manufacturing employment provided an unparalleled opportunity,” for housing

expansion, and this expansion provided an opportunity “for community builders to

advance the ideals and practices formulated during the interwar period.”36

In 1937, funding for Harris Hall was made available, and construction went forward. In 1939, the local Alpha Rho Chi chapter showed signs of good health; at the

Founder’s Banquet, “the rather astonishing report” was made that the active chapter had

“38 actives and 4 pledges.”37 Said to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the school, the

Founders’ Day Banquet was thus described by Alpha Rho Chi members:

Jay Ingles introduced Prof. Clayton Baldwin, perennial “emcee,” who took charge of the meeting. Dean Weatherhead talked briefly and interestingly on the history of architectural education in the United States, his thesis subject for his Doctor's degree at Columbia, concluding by giving us a verbal preview of the new building which will house the College of Architecture on the campus next fall.38

Weatherhead’s announcement of a fall 1939 inauguration for Harris Hall turned out to be overly optimistic. When Harris Hall opened a semester later, in January 1940,

the celebration spanned three days of lectures, exhibits, and events. Open to the public

and covered in a series of articles by the Los Angeles Times, the three-day dedication

appeared aimed at establishing Harris Hall and its College of Architecture and Fine Arts

as the premiere arts center of the extended Pacific Southwest. Lecture topics spanned

“Art and the Public” (by Charles F. Kelley, assistant director of the Chicago Art

36 Hise, Greg G., “The Roots of the Postwar Urban Region: Mass-housing and Community Planning in California, 1920-1950” (PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 1992), 2. 37 Latta, Graham, “Founders’ Day Again—Twenty-Five Have Gone,” The Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XX, no. 4 (June 1939): 36. 38 Latta (1939), 36.

37 Institute), “The Arts of the Pacific Area” (by Arthur Woodward, director of history and

anthropology of the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science, and Art; and Edgar H.

Hewett, director of the Schools of American Research of the Archeological Institute of

America), and “Art in Southern California” (by Arthur Millier, art and architecture critic

for the Los Angeles Times).39 A lecture series on “Contemporary Architecture” was given by three Los Angeles architects: Richard Neutra, long-time USC faculty member

Sumner Spaulding, and Sylvanus B. Marston, Southern California AIA chapter president.

Most remembered, though, was the now-infamous address by Frank Lloyd

Wright, in which he apparently had few kind words for either the building of honor or the purpose it served. Harwell Hamilton Harris recalled,

This was a very amusing talk. And [Wright] manipulated the crowd so beautifully. He had driven up himself from Phoenix that day. He had gone to his son's, Lloyd's house, had bathed, changed his clothes, had put on a dinner jacket and, with his glasses on a black ribbon around his neck, he walked onto the stage in a very jaunty manner. … Wright proceeded to tell the audience that he didn't believe in schools of architecture. And he went on to tell them why. He said things that began to get a little bit under everyone's skin. You could just feel the temperature rising in there. And then, when it got to a certain point, Wright said something, something amusing, that just dissolved all opposition, and everything went back and was fine. And then in a little while I realized that the same thing was building up again. He did it three times, and then he said, “Well, the encouraging thing about this is that I can say what I have said here this evening and not be thrown off the stage.”40

Although unsurprising, given his well-known disdain for formal architectural education,

Wright’s remarks were such that Architect and Engineer’s coverage of the skirted the

issue of what Wright actually said, referring to the architect’s address as “original in

thought and word, blunt and at times caustic,” and instead devoted a majority of the piece

39 “Art Center to Be Opened, New $200,000 Studio Building at S.C. Will Be Dedicated Today,” Los Angeles Times, 18 January 1940. 40 University of California, Los Angeles, Oral History Program, The Organic View of Design: Harwell Harris (Los Angeles, CA: Regents of the University of California, 1985), 94.

38 to a celebration of Wright’s contributions to “the American Expression in

Architecture.”41

With Wright’s speech part of college history, Harris Hall opened in January 1940.

The building was designed by Ralph C. Flewelling, accented with a 185-foot intaglio painting by Barse Miller, depicting “the history of culture in civilization.”42 In terms of the facility’s plan, Harris Hall reflected the multidisciplinary college it housed, with spaces tailored for industrial design, as well as ceramics, jewelry, design, painting, and sculpture for fine arts, and drafting rooms, shops and equipment for architecture.

(Figures 12 and 13, Harris Hall, Plan and Exterior Photograph, 1940.)

Milestones: The Transitional Years, 1939 to 1945

In spite of this expression of faith in the future of the College of Architecture and

Fine Arts, and the relative health of the local economy, the professional prospects for

graduates of the class of 1939 remained mixed. While the strength of the film industry is

often cited as one factor that buoyed the local architectural profession during the Great

Depression, the number of USC graduates working in the film industry remained

relatively small. In 1939, among a sample of 123 USC College of Architecture

graduates, only 13 percent worked in the film industry, whereas nearly two-thirds, or 59

percent, worked as practicing architects.43 The film industry did provide the second most

fruitful path for graduates, however, as governmental work (including on behalf of New

41 “Harris Hall of Architecture Dedicated,” Architect and Engineer, vol. 140, no. 2 (February 1940): 8 and 10. 42 Ibid. 43 “Partial List of Graduates of the College of Architecture and Fine Arts, with Their Present Positions as of December 1, 1939,” Southern California Alumni Review, December 1939, 20-21. USC Libraries, University Archives.

Figure 12. Plan of Harris Hall, USC College of Architecture and Fine Arts. Source: Architect and Engineer, February 1940.

Figure 13. Exterior, Harris Hall, USC College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1940. Source: Architect and Engineer, February 1940.

41 Deal agencies such as the Federal Housing Administration, Farm Security

Administration, and Works Progress Administration), contracting, and interior design

sectors employed only 5 percent each. The remainder worked as secondary-school

educators or with utility companies or in private industry.

As the 1930s came to a close, the school’s focus again shifted with the outbreak

of World War II and subsequent US entry into the war. In 1941, before the attack on

Pearl Harbor had taken place, the fall semester initiated coursework on defense-related

architecture, including camouflage strategies and the design of “bomb shelters, airports,

hospitals, and other war projects.”44 In addition, following the establishment of the

Lanham Act in 1940, the early 1940s brought a massive infusion of federal funds for war-

related construction to Southern California (as well as the extended southwest, which

received “a disproportionate share of jobs and job seekers”).45 Expansive undertakings in

defense-worker housing created new communities, such as Linda Vista, a community

spanning 3,000 residential units whose ground-breaking commercial center was designed

by USC graduate Whitney Smith (USC 1934), and Westchester, just north of the present-

day Los Angeles International Airport (with 3,230 residences constructed for 10,000

families).46 Recognizing Southern California’s central role in war-time construction, the

AIA chose Los Angeles as the headquarters for its 1941 convention. Among the long-

time USC advisors and lecturers participating on the convention committee were David J.

Witmer (who along with partner Loyall F. Watson would have recently completed the

44 “S.C. Course in Architecture Altered to Fit Defense Needs, Students Will Learn to Design Bomb Shelters, Airports, Hospitals and Other War Projects,” Los Angeles Times, 7 September 1941. 45 Hise (1997), 118. 46 For expanded discussions of federal defense-related construction and its effects on Southern California, see Hise (1997) and Dana Cuff, The Provisional City (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000).

42 Wyvernwood Garden Apartments, one of Los Angeles’s first large-scale garden

apartment complexes aimed at providing affordable housing) and Reginald D. Johnson

(who would have been working at the time on another landmark garden city in Los

Angeles, Baldwin Hills Village, designed by Johnson and Clarence Stein).47

In 1941, the US Corps of Engineers had forecast for the United States an

“increasing shortage” of architects; as a consequence, in December 1941, the US

Selective Service, acting upon these findings, began expanding the program for offering

service deferments for architecture students.48 By the fall of 1942, the College of

Architecture and Fine Arts initiated a “three-semester, all year-round program…to

facilitate the grinding out of students in as short a period as possible.”49 Describing the

war-time atmosphere on campus in 1942, Harold Basker of the USC Alpha Rho Chi fraternity wrote that

News from Andronicus chapter is varied in text and interest. The most important of all is, of course, the present world crisis. Its effects were deeply felt here on the West Coast the first week of the war when ritual curtains were pressed into service as black-out drapes, air raid precautions were broadcast over the radios when they were transmitting, we had one complete black-out, and one was called off before it started. Since that time the only connection we have had with the war has been through visits from brothers graduated and in the service, and one of the active brothers has joined and been accepted in the U.S.C. Flying Escadrille of the Navy Air Corps. The draft is far-reaching but most of the brothers so far have been fortunate in securing deferments until graduation… .50

In spring 1943, Weatherhead diverted his attention from the College of Architecture to

help organize an accelerated course in Occupational Therapy Aide training, run in

47 “Huge Defense Program Lures Architects' Convention Here, A.I.A. Delegates to Be Escorted on Inspection Tours of Projects Involving $160,000,000,” Los Angeles Times, 20 April 1941. 48 Dean, Norman D., Corps of Engineers, 5 December 1941, “Bulletin No. 135-41, Deferment of Military Service of Students in Architecture and Graduates in Architecture,” State Headquarters Selective Service, St. Paul, Minnesota. Cited from The Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XXIII, no. 2 (February 1942): 17. 49 Basker, Harold, “Andronikos,” The Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XXIII, no. 2 (February 1942): 36. 50 Ibid.

43 conjunction with the School of Medicine. Assisted by the College of Architecture’s

renowned ceramics professor, Glen Lukens, Weatherhead loaned the Harris Hall

auditorium for a demonstration course for the occupational therapy program.51

The academic year 1943/1944 marked Weatherhead’s final term as dean. Besides a line in his obituary that, after retiring, Weatherhead pursued research in industrial design, no other sources have been located to shed light on the reasons for his resignation or his post-1944 pursuits.52 USC course bulletins omitted his name for the first time in

1944. In September 1945, the course bulletin inaugurated a new chapter, announcing the appointment of Arthur Gallion as dean, the separation of the fine arts and architecture

curricula, and the inauguration of a dedicated and expanded Department of Industrial

Design (leading for the first time to a Bachelors in Industrial Design). The 1945 College of Architecture bulletin opened with Gallion’s clear statement of the college’s new chapter: “The challenge of the postwar world is here.”

With the foundation set by Weatherhead, Gallion led the College of Architecture, which still offered the region’s only professional degree in architecture, during a period of rapid expansion, not only of the college’s enrollment but the region’s built environment. Six years later, in July of 1952, the Los Angeles Times announced the death of Arthur Weatherhead, “founder and former dean of architecture at the University of

Southern California,” at the age of 63.

By the time of his death, Weatherhead would have watched as the program he nurtured from a few classes, headquartered in a corner of the music department,

51 Wilson, Bess M., “Occupational Therapy Training to Be Given, S.C. Offers Educational Course to Meet Wartime Demand for More Workers,” Los Angeles Times, 29 January 1943. 52 “Funeral Today for Former SC Architecture Dean,” Los Angeles Times, 19 July 1952.

44 blossomed into the region’s most influential training ground for architects and a hotbed for modern thought in planning and architecture. Although it was not recognized at the time, and not even widely recognized now, the curriculum he launched also converted the

USC College of Architecture into one of the country’s first modern collegiate schools of architecture. This chapter, however, has only attempted to sketch the major administrative milestones for the school and career milestones for Weatherhead. The next chapter will detail the primary project to have occupied Weatherhead during his professional life, architectural education, and how it shaped the program at USC.

Chapter 2

The Transition from Beaux-Arts to Modern: Weatherhead’s History of Collegiate Education in Architecture, in Context

This chapter serves the dual purpose of sketching the results of Arthur

Weatherhead’s research on architectural pedagogy, as well as the emerging debate on educational reform. Beginning in the post-World War I era, the debate pitted champions of the Beaux-Arts educational system against those arguing for a more pragmatic approach in the classroom. The Beaux-Arts’ focus on classicism and design problems at an increasing remove from social realities triggered concerns that the old methods would only serve as a path to obsolescence for young architects. While American educational reform was heavily influenced by the European work of Gropius and Mies at the

Bauhaus, by the time of their arrival in the United States, the German émigrés joined a conversation about modern pedagogy that was already underway. As this chapter argues, the exigencies of the Great Depression and the advent of World War II provided the decisive push toward reform.

When it comes to pedagogical reform in 1930’s Los Angeles, Weatherhead emerges as the most instrumental figure. The scope and detail of his book, The History of

Collegiate Education in Architecture in the United States, illustrate the extent to the topic dominated his professional focus. Encyclopedic in scope, the book aimed to provide a comprehensive study of US colleges of architecture because, as Weatherhead wrote, no similar study existed.1 Dividing schools into three chronological periods, the book

1 Weatherhead cites just two other studies, both written in 1932 after his research was underway: F.H. Bosworth, Jr. and Roy Childs Jones, Study of Architectural Schools (1932), and Thomas Larrick, “A

provides micro-level histories for each school in existence as of approximately 1939,

detailing pedagogical features and techniques, as well as introducing school leaders and

faculty. Introductions to each period provide macro-level contexts for trends, issues, and

conflicts in the profession and in architectural history.

While this chapter draws liberally from Weatherhead’s book, the dean’s views on,

for example, the Beaux-Arts system are intended less as a primer in traditional methods

than as a window onto the type of program he intended to establish at USC. Following a

brief sketch of the Beaux-Arts system, this chapter introduces early US experiments in

modern pedagogy, beginning in 1919 through the mid-1930s. The concluding section

offers an overview on the national debate on architectural education, with a focus on the

transitional era from circa 1919 to 1940.

The Beaux-Arts: A Brief Sketch and Early Critiques of the System

A brief sketch of several of the principal features of the Beaux-Arts system will help place the departures from it in context. On one side, proponents of the École des

Beaux-Arts argued that its time-tested theories of design and history would raise educational standards and, with them, the beauty of American architecture. On the other side, those who opposed the Beaux-Arts argued that the best way forward for American architectural education was through the autonomous innovations of the schools themselves, responding to local conditions and the realities of the profession.

Modern School of Architecture,” unpublished Master of Art’s thesis, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas.

With American architectural education in its infancy, the Beaux-Arts system, as

promoted by the New York-based Society of Beaux-Arts, provided a ready-made

response to concerns over inconsistent educational standards. In 1902, these concerns

had prompted the AIA to amend its by-laws to include the requirement that only

graduates of approved schools, or students passing a special examination, were eligible to

apply for AIA membership.2 For its part, the AIA Committee on Education supported the standardized system, stating that the goal of American schools should be to educate students as “‘gentlemen of general culture with special architectural ability.’”3 The AIA also commended the emphasis on classicism, claiming that “Of prime importance are the classic orders, not for what they are in themselves, but because they are the terms, the language, in which a very large part of our architectural heritage is expressed.”4

By 1912, the Society of Beaux-Arts system had been widely adopted by US

schools. According to the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, by this time

the Beaux-Arts’ “standard had become a groove systematically moulding nearly all

projected schools.”5 Indeed, in 1912, 80 percent of US schools of architecture, or 16 out of 20, maintained a connection with the Society of Beaux-Arts.6 To help handle the

demand, the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design (BAID), an extension of the society, was

2 Draper, Joan, “The Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Architectural Profession in the United States: The Case of John Galen Howard,” in Spiro Kostof, ed., The Architect: Chapters in the History of the Profession (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 209-237; quoted here p. 216. 3 Ibid, 217. 4 “Report on the Committee on Architectural Education,” 40th Annual Convention, American Institute of Architects (Washington, DC: Gibson Brothers Press, 1907). Cited from Weatherhead, Arthur Clason, The History of Collegiate Education in Architecture in the United States (Los Angeles, CA, 1941), 152. 5 Weatherhead, The History of Collegiate Education, 88-89. 6 Ibid, 157.

created in 1916 to teach architecture and further the society’s goal of creating a national

school of architecture.

Weatherhead acknowledges that the Society of Beaux-Arts and BAID provided

the means for much-needed standardization in the profession’s early years. From the

perspective of 1939, as he finalized his book, he wrote that the traditional approach had

outlived its usefulness. He argued for a contemporary, pragmatic approach drawn from

and reflecting “present-day conditions,” his oft-repeated leitmotif through the years. The

dean’s summary of the Beaux-Arts or “Eclectic Period” reads like a litany of

shortcomings and highlights well what he sought to avoid at USC: apart from an

overemphasis on Academic Classicism, traditional methods emphasized “unreality” and

gave “little encouragement of creative ability…lack of integration among the subject

groups…lack of instruction in the business phases of architecture…lack of a transition

between the school and the office.”7 In Weatherhead’s view of the Beaux-Arts system,

the emphasis on Academic Classicism and “unreality” meant that

very little consideration was given to the increasing number of important requirements of common American life, nor to the architectural possibilities of modern science, materials and structural processes. The education of Eclecticism was chiefly concerned with the aesthetic expressions of an ancient profession rather than with present-day realities.8

The use of artificial design problems and the exclusion of professional practice,

Weatherhead reasoned, left students ill-prepared for the realities of the field. Although this could be mitigated through organized collaboration between practicing architects and students, to ease the “transition between school and office,” overall Weatherhead found

7 Ibid, 171-172. 8 Ibid, 172.

“very little organized effort to provide this valuable early contact with the offices.”9 The

lack of integration or continuity in the subject areas, as well, made for a disjointed

education.

Weatherhead reserved his strongest criticism for Beaux-Arts-modeled design

instruction, which in his view reduced architectural expression to “complete plagiarism”

and gave students “little opportunity…for the development of creative ability.”10 Given

his conviction that design problems should reflect local conditions – not only with respect

to regional character but also to social need – the prospect of having a central authority

write design programs for colleges was particularly untenable. The fanciful problem sets were hopelessly removed from contemporary practice, Weatherhead wrote. Citing several of the 1911 BAID-authored problems—“Theological Seminary, An Island

Pavilion, A Reception Room for the President, A Supreme Court Building, A Conclave

Building for the Election of a Sovereign pontiff”—Weatherhead observed that “It would be impossible to choose subjects that were much farther removed from the life and comprehension of an American college junior and senior.”11 Thus liberated from the

constraints of actual sites, and disassociated from local context, the BAID problem sets

represented “purely a pedagogical device and often omitted elements of function without

which no designer in practice would attempt to plan a building.”12

Proponents of this approach, on the other hand, celebrated the fantasy written into the problems as setting free the designer’s creativity and imagination. As architect

9 However, as Weatherhead wrote, “all schools advised summer office experience and three made it a requirement” (with USC being one of the three). Ibid, 173. 10 Ibid, 172. 11 Ibid, 154-155. 12 Ibid, 154.

Richard Wallace Tudor reflected on his Beaux-Arts education, realism did not often

intrude in the classroom:

Occasionally there was a short excursion into the field of reality, but this was considered by our teachers and ourselves as a humdrum, uninspiring sort of place, for, seemingly (and as a matter of fact), it had little to do with the goal for which we were striving. On and on we were led into that region of dreams, the land of the great monumental baths, the pantheons, the great establishments for the reception of royal guests, into the land of unreality.13

John Galen Howard, the founder of the West Coast’s pioneering architecture program at the University of California, Berkeley, struck a similar tone. Following a disappointing trip in the late 1880s to Southern California and unsatisfying stint working in the Los

Angeles office of Caukin and Haas (which he regarded as crassly profit-driven), Howard travelled to Europe, he wrote, “not primarily to attend any school…but to come into contact with the noble monuments which other ages have bequeathed our own. … I, an architect, turn to Europe, that vast library of architectural knowledge and accomplishment.”14 The Piranesian tone of course provided an easy target for criticism

(especially in the wake of the Progressive Era and social reforms of the 1920s), as the

realm of architectural design and education became increasingly disconnected from the

“humdrum” (but increasingly pressing) needs of the profession and society at large.

13 Tudor, Richard Wallace, “The Circian Shadow,” Journal of the American Institute of Architects, vol. 6, (May 1918): 225. 14 Howard, John Galen, Correspondence dated 10 July 1888. Cited from Draper, “The Ecole des Beaux- Arts,” 219.

Pioneering American Departures from the Beaux-Arts System, 1919 to 1935

While the changes ushered in by the Great Depression signaled the decisive but

slow-moving end for the Beaux-Arts system, World War I brought its own language of

caesura and calls for reform in the academy as well as the profession.15 As William

Littmann observed,

Architectural education at American universities entered a particularly contentious and dynamic period between the First and Second World Wars. Universities such as Columbia and Harvard began to abandon the educational methods associated with the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and revamped their curricula to reflect the aims of the modern movement.16

Launched in 1930, Weatherhead’s “experiment” at USC actually pre-dates those undertaken by Joseph Hudnut at Columbia University (in 1934) and Harvard University

(in 1935). But as dean of an architecture department in 1919, Weatherhead confirms the climate described by Littmann. World War I, Weatherhead writes, “brought about a period of almost complete inactivity in architectural education,” and with the end of the war, “a general re-evaluation in architectural education was inevitable.”17 Summing up the self-reflective mood of the time, Clarence H. Blackall, a 1877 graduate of the

University of Illinois School of Architecture, wrote in 1919 that, when it came to the architect,

15 Several studies exploring the question of professional reform and modernization in the early twentieth century include Bentel, Paul Louis, “Idealism and Enterprise: Modernism and Professionalism in American Modern Architecture, 1919-1933,” PhD Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA: 1992); Hyungmin, Pai, The Portfolio and the Diagram: Architecture, Discourse, and Modernity in American (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); and Bannister, Turpin, The Architect at Mid- Century, commissioned by the American Institute of Architects, Commission for the Survey of Education and Registration (NY: Reinhold, 1954). An architectural historian, Bannister was one of the founding members of the Society for Architectural Historians. 16 Littmann, William, “Assault on the Ecole: Student Campaigns Against the Beaux Arts, 1925-1950,” Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 53, no. 3 (February 2000): 159-166. 17 Weatherhead, The History of Collegiate Education, 175.

[w]e know what he was before the war: an idealist, an individual whose mission was to make over the world in what he considered the most beautiful guise, a man entrusted with large opportunities coming in often faster than he could master them and striving his best to keep up with the tremendous increase in the requirements and the possibilities of modern construction, a dream and strictly a professional man. It was a splendid ideal and all honor to those who strove so nobly to uphold this exalted plane, but that the architect of after the war is a different man is evident on every hand. The point of view is changed not only because of the war but because it was in the process of changing before.18

At the same time, the socially conscious modernism taking root across Western Europe

had become known in the United States. In Weatherhead’s book, he presented his

version of a primer on modernism, describing the work of architects such as Otto

Wagner, H.P. Berlage, and August Perret in Europe and Frank Lloyd Wright and Eliel

Saarinen in the United States. He also described as the “second generation” of European

modernists Peter Behrens and the triumvirate of Charles Édouard Jeanneret (Le

Corbusier), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius, all of whom had passed

through Behren’s office. With a cursory pass over the US developments of the “tall steel

building,” the transitional work of Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue and Eliel Saarinen, the

focus of his primer, though, related to architectural education. Weatherhead reserved

glowing passages for the Bauhaus, calling it the “great German school” with the foresight

to see “art and technique as a new unity.” Indeed, in the passages on modernism,

Weatherhead’s devoted more time to the Bauhaus educational method than he did to the

nascent avant-garde in Los Angeles.

The earliest American experiments in architectural education grew out of this era.

In 1919, the School of Architecture at the University of Oregon (Weatherhead’s former

18 Blackall, Clarence H., “What Is an Architect?,” American Architect (1919). Cited from Hyungmin (2002), 74.

college) became the first American school to abandon the Beaux-Arts system and adopt

an alternative approach. The new teaching methods used at the School of Architecture,

which was established in 1914 by Ellis F. Lawrence, emphasized the allied arts and “an

entirely non-competitive, individual approach” to design.19 Weatherhead broke from his

usual dry, academic tone in his descriptions of the Department of Architecture at the

University at Oregon, in which his obvious admiration for Lawrence came through.

Indeed, given the book’s tone overall, the fact that the author himself was one of the

educators described in its pages could easily escape the casual reader. With Lawrence as

a “guiding spirit,” Weatherhead wrote, the University of Oregon School of Architecture

had become “one of the outstanding institutions in the country” and “the first school in

the United States to adopt, completely and successfully, these two basic elements of the

modern movement in architectural education,” a close affiliation between the allied arts

and a noncompetitive approach to design.20

Lawrence’s program at the University of Oregon provided the template to follow

for Weatherhead, who spent the academic year 1918/1919 at the University of Oregon,

during the university’s transition. How closely Weatherhead modeled the USC approach

on that of the University of Oregon is apparent when considering Lawrence’s comments

on his school’s philosophy vis-à-vis design projects – which, he stated, should be

the vehicle for teaching sociology, politics, education, economics, and ethics, as well as the structure, hydraulics, illumination, and the laws of design. … Architecture is a projection of the society it serves. To teach it well it cannot be separated from the ideals and standards of society.21

19 Weatherhead, The History of Collegiate Education, 193. 20 Ibid, 127. 21 Lawrence, Ellis F., “President’s Address, Twenty-first Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture,” May 14-15,1934, Washington, DC. Cited from Weatherhead, The History of Collegiate Education, 212.

By 1935, among the 45 American schools of architecture, eight had launched

what Weatherhead termed to be “significant” experiments in modern architectural

pedagogy. Although differing in execution, the shared basic features included an

emphasis on “realism,” whether in design classes, field experience, or both, and the close

integration of architecture with allied arts. In 1919, this latter feature was introduced at

Yale University by Dean Everett V. Meeks (in 1943, Meeks offered William Wurster his

first teaching position, after the Californian architect had moved east to pursue a

doctorate in planning at Harvard University).22 In 1922, the University of Cincinnati

Department of Architecture aligned the architecture and allied arts departments and

launched a cooperative program balancing coursework and apprenticeship. As led by the

head of design, Ernest Pickering, the department divided students into two groups, which

alternated between the classroom and field. Working alongside practicing architects,

students undertook a

carefully arranged sequence of types of experience from labor on construction jobs, through various contacts with materials and the allied crafts, to practice in an architect’s office. In this manner, the two necessary branches of the complete training for the practice of architecture, the foundation in school theory and the office experience, were…coordinated and integrated.23

Pragmatism at Cornell University, in 1929, took the form of rewriting first-year design to

encompass “the design for a complete building instead of the traditional elements of

architecture” and a gradual de-emphasis on “external decorative phases of architecture.”24

22 Peters, Richard C., “W.W. Wurster,” Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 33, no. 2 (November 1979): 36-41, cited here p. 38. 23 Weatherhead, The History of Collegiate Education, 195. 24 Ibid, 195.

In 1930, the fifth “experiment” was launched at University of Southern

California, “under the general direction of the author,” Weatherhead wrote.25 His description of the program reflects the close alignment with the University of Oregon initiatives. At USC, Weatherhead writes,

A prolonged experiment has been conducted in an attempt to discover a more successful modern approach to the study of design in which the beginning projects were based upon very familiar situations that lower division students were able to comprehend.

The basic contours of this approach included a design program tailored to realistic, “local situations,” with Southern California as the canvas for study; a de-emphasis on paper presentations and focus on three-dimensional modeling and visualization; and pragmatic, hands-on coursework in materials, building sciences and technologies, and professional practice. In this way, as Weatherhead explained, “Comprehensive projects are evolved out of everyday, physical and technical reality.”26

All of these features figured prominently in the three other experiments from the first half of the 1930s: the first in 1932 at the University of Kansas under Joseph M.

Kellogg, and the latter two at Columbia (1934) and Harvard (1935) Universities under

Joseph Hudnut. As at USC, Kellogg at the University of Kansas rewrote lower-division design courses to de-emphasize paper techniques and focus on three-dimensional visualization through the use of modeling and perspective studies. At Columbia

University, Hudnut fashioned a contemporary alternative that emphasized pragmatism, technical skills, and collaborative work. As Jill Pearlman demonstrated, the approach was steeped in the educational theories of early twentieth-century philosopher and

25 Ibid, 196. 26 Ibid, 245.

Columbia University professor John Dewey.27 Although no sources have yet been

identified confirming a direct debt to Dewey’s theories on the part of the other educators

discussed here, such as Lawrence or Weatherhead, the parallels are unmistakable and

appear part and parcel of evolving progressive views on education and social reform. As

Sachs pointed out,

In proposing alternative pedagogies, architects looked to a wide range of sources, and the resulting programs are in some cases strikingly different from each other. Many architects, however, drew on the educational theories of John Dewey and his insistence on ‘real life’ situations and a balance between individual and social development. This emphasis coincided with the architects' effort to make the economic and social conditions in the United States - or more specifically, the practical knowledge that developed in response to these conditions - an inherent part of architectural education.28

Although Hudnut had served as acting dean as of 1933, coming to Columbia

University at the invitation of his former instructor and dean, William Boring (as

Pearlman pointed out), Hudnut did not remake the curriculum until Boring had departed

and Hudnut assumed the deanship in 1934. In the curriculum launched by Hudnut, a

noncompetitive atmosphere was encouraged in which students worked collaboratively on

“practical design problems that confronted the exigencies of contemporary life” and

considered “the demands of an actual site, economy, and function;” presentations were

carried out “in a straightforward way, in simple sketches, models, and working

drawings.”29 Pearlman claims that this marked “the first time in an American

architecture school” that the “elaborate and conventionalized renderings of the French

27 Pearlman, Jill, “Joseph Hudnut’s Other Modernism at the ‘Harvard Bauhaus,’” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 56, no. 4 (December 1997): 452-477. 28 Sachs, Avigail, “Research for Architecture: Building a Discipline and Modernizing the Profession” (PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2009), xix. Sach draws here from Anita Cross’s 1983 article “The Educational Background to the Bauhaus,” published in Design Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 43-52. 29 Pearlman, “Joseph Hudnut’s Other Modernism,” 457.

system” were not employed in design presentations.30 This might not have been the case, however. The de-emphasis, and in some cases full-scale abandonment, of the Beaux-Arts system by several of the schools described above—including the University of Oregon,

USC, and the University of Kansas—and the fact that these experiments predated

Hudnut’s assumption of the deanship at Columbia University, call for further clarification.

Pearlman joins Sachs and Littmann in the critique about the overemphasis on heroic émigrés, observing that the literature on Harvard GSD has focused so exclusively on Gropius that Hudnut, who in fact founded of the school and launched its modern

experiment, has been largely ignored in the literature. However, some of the article’s

statements show Pearlman falling into the same trap she criticizes. In addition to the

claim that Columbia University was the first American school to fashion a

straightforward, non-Ecole des Beaux-Arts approach for presentations—which seems

unlikely, given the extent and character of the experiments already underway by 1934—

she also claims that Hudnut was the first American educator during the Great Depression to “attack the French system in a decisive way.”31 Given that, fifteen years before Hudnut became dean at Columbia in 1934, Lawrence had already broken decisively with the

Beaux-Arts at the University of Oregon (and other educators were either following suit or writing their own programs), this claim appears overstated. Further research would help

clarify Pearlman’s argument. However, given that it is driven by the question of who arrived where first, in an era in which many locally-driven alternatives to the Beaux-Arts

30 Ibid, 457. 31 Ibid, 457.

system began emerging throughout the United States, arguments about who got where

first are ultimately of limited value.

In Weatherhead’s estimation, the underlying principles of the Columbia

University experiment were “those of the German movement,” with a design program

tailored to the conditions of “present-day practice” and a classroom environment re-

creating the atmosphere of an architect’s office. Technical coursework in modern

materials, building finance, and building sciences were balanced out by an underlying

philosophy that “beauty was to remain the transcendent aim of architecture.”32 At

Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design (GSD), Hudnut expanded these ideas in

a five-year graduate course unifying the fields of architecture, planning, and landscape

design (though Garrett Eckbo, who graduated from GSD in 1938, complained that, while

“architecture was ‘going modern’…landscape architecture and city planning clung to

tradition”).33 In the architecture department, however, Hudnut took decisive steps, including divesting the library of all books on history and stripping features from the

1904 McKim, Mead, and White-designed building the school occupied, in his attempt to purge the school of all pedagogical and physical traces of the Beaux-Arts.

For his part, while Weatherhead criticized the Beaux-Arts system as unresponsive to the needs of contemporary society, he struck a tone of evolution, not revolution. Given the social shifts from the 1910s through the 1930s, Weatherhead seems to have regarded

32 Weatherhead, The History of Collegiate Education, 198. 33 Eckbo, Garrett, “Autobiography of a Designer,” 1974, Garrett Eckbo Collection, Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley, Project/Folder, Autobiography, c. 1974, I.1. Studies on Eckbo include, for example, Treib, Marc, and Dorothée Imbert, Garrett Eckbo: Modern Landscapes for Living (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), and Alofsin, Anthony, The Struggle for Modernism: Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning at Harvard (New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002).

modernization and educational reform as inevitable. Providing the final push for reform,

Weatherhead wrote, the crisis and changes provoked by the Great Depression—which

triggered a drop in enrollment at American schools of architecture—prompted a

“healthy” re-evaluation of teaching methods among the colleges, with the early

experiments serving as templates for reform.

The first steps toward reform were often tentative, however. One example of this

is seen in a 1930 article by Ohio State University professor Herbert Baumer. Published in

the national Alpha Rho Chi newsletter, the article captures the transitional moment of the

early 1930s in its cautious endorsement of modern educational methods. In his article,

Baumer wrote that

something more than five years ago [architectural educators] began to be uncomfortably jolted out of the quiet tenor of their ways. They began to realize that a certain spirit of revolt, that boded ill for them, was loose in the land. For years this spirit had been gathering force under the guidance of a few widely scattered leaders-under the Perret brothers and Frank Lloyd Wright and various able Scandinavians and Germans…

I have heard many reasons advanced as to why this modern should be banished from our schools and ateliers-it has no grammar and is therefore incapable of expression-a student when he cribs in this modern is of necessity a plagiarist whereas when he cribs in the past he is, I suppose, nothing worse than an archaeologist…

For the general good, there is today, I believe, less confusion in the subject of architectural design…and in my opinion [this has] been brought out largely by the fact that in dealing with this thing called modern that has no tradition or weight of precedent or sentimentality connected with it both teachers and pupils have been obliged to judge things more on their fundamental qualities and less on their superficial ones. I believe that this modern is…a much better medium for the teaching of design than any historic style could possibly be and this for the very shortcomings--lack of tradition, lack of grace, lack of whatnot--that its opponents charge it with.34

34 Herbert Baumer, “The Professor Says, ‘Say It with Modern,’ A Better Medium for Teaching Design Than Any Historic Style,” The Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XII, no. 1 (October 1930): 2-3.

Baumer is quick to qualify this endorsement, however:

In this I wish not to be misunderstood. Although I have an opinion on the matter I am not here stating that this modern brand is better architecture for today than some other brand might be. I am a teacher and like the shoemaker am sticking to my last. I am only saying here that, for teaching purposes, it is better.

While Weatherhead did not equivocate in his support of modern educational methods, he, like Baumer, skirts the issue of modern style (though possibly for different reasons). While evolution, not revolution, led to a contemporary approach, Weatherhead believed, the idea that all paths led to a given stylistic mode does not enter into the narrative. In his writing, Weatherhead presented modern architecture as a social rather than stylistic movement and focused infrequently on the art of architecture; his initiatives at USC reflect these views.

By 1939, Weatherhead argues, these early experiments had produced a “distinctly

American type of education,” representing a middle-ground between the Beaux-Arts and the more “radical” approach advocating a total break with tradition. His summary of this national “readjustment” in education included, unsurprisingly, many of the features he launched at USC: an integrated, sequential program of study, emphasizing pragmatism

(as seen in coursework on materials and processes, building construction, equipment, and costs estimating, and professional practices). In the service of “sociological development,” Weatherhead observed an improved “foundation for some understanding of present-day civilization” and the “study of conditions…inherent in present-day needs of human beings.” He argued that the architectural profession itself was increasingly seen through the lens of the “larger problems of the community.” Of the nine features of modern pedagogy Weatherhead detailed, only one related to design: “The plagiaristic

methods of study of Eclecticism are being abandoned,” and the “more artificial devices of

the Beaux-Arts system are being supplanted or, at least, suppressed.” The ultimate

widespread modernization of schools of architecture would depend upon some degree of

national oversight, he wrote, “to insure…coordination and control of the different

element which make up the complete preparation for practice.”35 In other words, though the early experiments documented in his book approached reform in a variety of ways,

Weatherhead foresaw the need for ultimate standardization.

In spite of Weatherhead’s faith in evolution, a certain degree of revolution was necessary, as, for example, Littmann’s work on the University of California, Berkeley, demonstrated. The basic educational philosophy outlined by Weatherhead in 1939 reflected, by the postwar period, conventional wisdom about American architectural education. The fact that these ideas had already shaped US pedagogy and were in place by 1939 shows the importance of the transitional but relatively under-researched decade of the 1930s.

Art versus Pragmatism: The Debate on Architectural Education

The character of the early USC College of Architecture reflected the national debate about architectural pedagogy. As the debate gained momentum in the 1920s and

1930s, two primary arguments emerged. In addition to the ongoing controversy on

Beaux-Arts Classicism (whose influence had begun to falter around 1910, with the

35 Weatherhead, The History of Collegiate Education, 244-245.

decline of the White City Movement),36 a primary point of contention was the role of

“realism” in the classroom (as reflected in the list of technical and professional practices courses recommended by Weatherhead in the synopsis above). Advocates for more pragmatism believed that students needed to graduate with a working knowledge of the realities of office practice. Opponents of this approach argued that students would have

ample time to learn about everyday practice, under the tutelage of a working, licensed

architect. The more pressing issue for education, they argued, was imparting the art of

architectural design.

It is unclear if, prior to the publication of his 1941 book, Weatherhead

participated in this debate on a national scale (though his writing in the Los Angeles

Times suggests a high degree of local involvement in raising public awareness and

acceptance of modernism). On the national scale, however, William Boring, a founding

member of the Society of Beaux-Arts and, as stated above, dean of the Columbia

University School of Architecture from 1915 to 1934, articulated the views of those

favoring the status quo. In a 1924 speech delivered before the International Congress on

Architectural Education, Boring declared that architects were not merely craftspeople but

“men of culture, of science, of good taste” who “move in the highest intellectual circles,

as they did in Greek times;” thus, schools of architecture had little time to waste time on

the technical and practical aspects of architecture as a profession:

The time we have to instruct pupils is too valuable to devote to petty details of the business of an office. It seems better to inspire students to work for an ideal of beauty than to equip them to take positions as technical assistants.37

36 Mumford, Lewis, Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization (New York, 1924), 62; cited from Bentel (1992), 61. Bentel’s dissertation includes an in-depth study of the Beaux-Arts system and modern movement from the profession’s perspective, circa 1919 to 1933. 37 “Expert Declares Planning Is Basis of Architecture,” The Washington Post, 5 October 1924.

In his 1941 book, Weatherhead countered the argument against pragmatism by writing that

It has…been the universal experience at the institutions which have attempted this emphasis that a broad foundation in reality interfered with neither freedom nor imagination. It tended to direct the student during his successive projects to a consistent idealism and a vital scholarship in design.38

Hudnut, Boring’s successor at Columbia University and then-dean of Harvard

University’s GSD, was less sparing. Declaring before the AIA in 1935 that the “laxity of technical education,” in which students emerged unprepared for professional practice, had created a dynamic in which

the competitor for an architectural award is not able to build even a part of the structure which he has designed. Hocus pocus is especially prevalent in that quaint activity which we call architectural education. For example, in New York City the processes of architectural education are controlled by a most enthusiastic society of architects who have imported from Paris a collection of ingenious conceits and conventions so formidable that no one has even dared to ask what it is all about.39

How this early debate played itself out among students in Los Angeles or at USC is difficult to trace. On a broader scale, however, warnings had begun being raised in the

1920s that the social and professional disconnect of the Beaux-Arts educational system would only provide a path to obsolescence. This unease was fully confirmed by the

Great Depression. With the backdrop of deprivation and social problems, the BAID- authored problem sets seemed distastefully removed from the realities of daily life. As

Littmann observed, in the case of the College of Environmental Design at the University

38 Weatherhead, The History of Collegiate Education, 212-213. 39 “Lax Architects Scored, Dean Hudnut Assails ‘Hocus Pocus’ Technical Education,” New York Times, 13 October 1935. The editors of the New York Times appear not to have read Hudnut’s comments in detail, given that Hudnut’s talk of course “assails” the lack of technical education in architecture schools.

of California, Berkeley, the onset of the Great Depression left “many students

disillusioned with the Ecole approach” and mobilized them to “advocate for a more leftist

version of modernism.”40 Describing the design problems assigned to his class in 1937 at the University of Pennsylvania, Joseph Esherick recounted that

I can think of no better way to give a feeling for the way the BAID saw the world from its Olympian heights than to list the titles of the projects and esquisse- esquiesses given that year: A Summer Hotel, A Public Garden for Refreshments and Music, A Banquet and Ballroom, A Building to Enshrine the Chalice of Antioch… I cannot avoid the feeling that at least one of the reasons for our disenchantment lay simply in the kinds of problems we were given. It is impossible to understand now and it was difficult to understand then how anyone could, in 1937, become deeply concerned about a building to enshrine the chalice of Antioch.41

Throughout the 1930s, the advent of New Deal programs and initiatives further altered the professional landscape, and gave students and educators new reasons to protest the gulf between the classroom and office practice. The problem of the

“Minimum House,” for example, had become a focal point for new housing construction by the mid-1930s, yet students and practicing architects complained that the profession appeared slow to stake claims on this territory. In 1935, an editorial in the national Alpha

Rho Chi newslettter complained that

by far the greatest field for architecture in this country is the designing of houses costing from three to five thousand dollars. How many American architects are engaged in this enormous - field? Scarcely a handful. Most architects disdain it because they have never formulated ways and means to do such work on a profitable basis. … How many architects are inspired to work out the most economical methods of building and save their clients money instead of lavishly spending it? Scarcely any. As a consequence the architect is generally regarded as a luxury.42

40 Littmann, “Assault on the Ecole,” 161. 41 Esherick, Joseph, “Architectural Education in the Thirties and Seventies: A Personal View,” in Spiro Kostof, ed., The Architect: Chapters in the History of the Profession (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 238-279; quoted here p. 272-273. 42 “Meditating beneath the Keystone,” vol. XVI, no. 3 (February 1935): 9 and 11.

Given Los Angeles’s single-family housing expansion, as noted in Chapter 1, this issue

would have been especially salient for students at USC.

Whereas such openly critical stances had been uncommon in the 1910s and 1920s

in the Alpha Rho Chi newsletter (in particular in articles about the AIA, which usually

sounded a much more reverent tone), throughout the 1930s students issued increasingly

open critiques not only of the universities but also the AIA. In 1934, for example, an

Alpha Rho Chi editorial states that

A great deal has been said, and somewhat less has been written, about the efficacy of the American Institute of Architects as the only national organization purporting to provide leadership for the architectural profession. Most of the criticism is decidedly adverse and, in the writer's opinion, is generally justified. After years of apparent lethargy and indifference to the problems of the average practitioner, the institute within the past few years has seemed to become conscious of its shortcomings and action taken at the last annual convention was very encouraging to those who believe that the Institute should play a larger and more significant role in the profession.43

During the 1930s, the social shifts that began determining the direction of the

USC design curriculum also began changing the profession’s focus. When it comes to the AIA, the organization did address in some fashion the possible impact of the social and economic crises of the 1930s. In 1934, AIA president E.J. Russell declared that the architect likely to survive the Great Depression was the architect “who had sufficient imagination and fortitude…to adjust himself to the new conditions.”44 Throughout the mid- to late 1930s, the organization’s attempts at adaptation are reflected in the topic

chosen for annual AIA conventions. These included, in 1935, a primer on the “Minimum

43 Taylor, Walter A., “Does the Future of the A.I.A. Rest In Our Hands?,” The Archi of the Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XVI, no. 1 (October 1934): 2. 44 “Architect’s Welfare Told, Head of American Institute Sees New Opportunity in Practice of Architecture,” Los Angeles Times, 30 September 1934.

House” and how to negotiate the new governmental agencies, with FHA officials in

attendance to explain the “various phases of the Federal housing, building, and work

relief programs.”45 In 1937, the “Minimum House” became the focus of the AIA’s

annual meeting.

In apparent response to the 1937 Housing Act (the Wagner-Steagall Act), by

which federal subsidies were provided for low-cost public housing, the centerpiece of the

AIA’s 1938 meeting was a discussion on the housing shortage. The association proposed

the creation of a coalition of builders, manufacturers, city planners, and architects – as

well as the Association of the Collegiate Schools of Architecture – to attack the housing

crisis as a unified front. The AIA focus included small residences, low-cost housing, and

the issue of “slum clearance”—though the conference documents carefully distinguished

between slum clearance/low-cost housing and privately financed small-home

construction, the latter of which was seen as an economic engine and therefore the priority.46

While each of these initiatives directly impacted the USC curriculum, it is unclear

how far this social responsiveness extended to AIA attitudes about architectural education. For its part, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture had changed

45 “U.S. Architects Meet Tuesday at Milwaukee, 67th Annual Convention of American Institute to Last through Friday,” The Washington Post, 26 May 1935. 46 “Architects Plan to Spur Building,” New York Times, 17 April 1938. Parallel to the new mortgage structure, the HOLC assessments of “security risk” had begun in this period; driven by the now-notorious system of racial profiling and “red-lining,” the HOLC survey maps might deem an entire neighborhood a high investment risk for the presence of any ethnic minorities. The HOLC security maps institutionalized racist lending practices by mortgage lenders but also exacerbated problems of urban decline, subsequently identified for “slum clearance.” The 1938 AIA conversation about slum clearance, for example, references the “serious situation” of neighborhoods deemed to be deteriorated for which residents could not obtain mortgage insurance. For extended comments on HOLC redlining practices and public housing initiatives in Los Angeles, see Dana Cuff (2000) and Becky Nicolaides, “‘Where the Working Man Is Welcomed’: Working Class Suburbs in Los Angeles, 1990 – 1940,” The Pacific Historical Review, vol. 68, no. 4 (November 1999): 517-559.

gears by the late 1930s, updating its earlier embrace of BAID standards and instead

“encouraging experimentation.”47 In 1938, the same year he presided over the AIA convention on the housing crisis in New Orleans, AIA President Charles D. Maginnis addressed the graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of

Architecture. The topic of his address seems surprising, coming from the leader of the nation’s professional association of architects in the context of the time. Maginnis largely ignored the problems facing the profession and, as the Christian Science Monitor reported, made a “plea for beauty in architecture”:

The new order in architecture, built around modern steel construction, “is without eloquence” and “in its individual enterprise and under the sole government of mathematics can arrive at the ugliness of railroad bridge.”

“If architecture is still an art and not a by-product of engineering, beauty cannot be a dispensable interest. Is it conceivably beyond the scope of the new materials? …[S]teel has little genius for romance, for with all its sinewy capabilities it cannot make for interesting ruins, and ruins have their eloquent importance. …One can only speculate on the degree to which national individuality will permanently submit to a uniformity which makes no acknowledgment of race or clime or geography. …The architecture which is impending is without eloquence and its meager geometry will presently appear a poor exchange for the arches and vaults of the old masonry.”48

While Maginnis emphasized art over employability, one of the earliest figures at

MIT to address the issue of the “transition from student to jobholder” was university

president Karl T. Compton. Several months after Maginnis’s speech, in October 1938,

Compton issued his own statement on the direction he expected for the MIT School of

Architecture. As Elizabeth Finch noted, Compton stated that while “‘design’ would

always be ‘the central theme of all good architecture,’” he added, in apparent response to

47 Weatherhead, The History of Collegiate Education, 249. 48 “Tech Class Hears Plea for Beauty In Architecture,” Christian Science Monitor, 7 June 1938.

Maginnis’s address, that “the techniques of its application must continually adapt

themselves to the evolution of the technical and social environment.”49 The MIT School of Architecture began actively heeding this call in 1939, when Walter R. MacCornack

(William Wurster’s predecessor) became dean.50 As of 1939, as Finch observed,

MacCornack identified “two major deficiencies” for MIT’s educational approach: “‘the almost complete absence of training in the fundamentals of the practical economics of the building industry field and the failure to appreciate the basic problems involved in the economic, social, physical, and political decay of our cities.’”51 The year 1939 appears to have been a turning point for MIT. That same year, John Ely Burchard, then director of housing research for the Bemis Foundation (and co-author of the 1933 installation of

Albert Bemis’s influential series, The Evolving House) invited Alvar Aalto to MIT, as

Stanford Anderson noted, “to conduct his own research on housing and settlements.”52

(During Wurster’s tenure as dean in the late 1940s, he invited Aalto once again to MIT.

By the postwar period, MIT had become one pole in what Anderson described as a “Bay

Region axis,” linking UC Berkeley, MIT, and the work of Scandinavian architects such as Kay Fisker and Alvar Aalto in the pursuit of “alternative modernism.”53)

49 Compton, Karl T., MIT Bulletin, President’s Report, 1937-1938, vol. 74, no. 1 (October 1938), 20. Cited from Finch, Elizabeth, “Languages of Vision: Gyorgy Kepes and the ‘New Landscape’ of Art and Science” (PhD Dissertation, The City University of New York, 2005), 197-198. 50 Finch, “Languages of Vision, 198-199. 51 W.R. MacCornack, “School of Architecture,” MIT Bulletin, President’s Report, 1942-1943, vol. 79, no. 1 (October 1943): 123. Cited from Finch (2005), 198-199. 52 Anderson, Stanford, “The ‘New Empiricism-Bay Region Axis’: Kay Fisker and Postwar Debates on Functionalism, Regionalism, and Monumentality,” Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 50, no. 3: 197- 207, quoted here p. 205. 53 Given the degree of exchange and affinity between the Bay Area and Los Angeles architects and academies, further research might consider the role in such a network of the USC School of Architecture and Southern Californian regional modernists, who were also preoccupied with an “alternative modernism.” These architects shared not only a common architectural heritage (of the broader California Arts and Crafts movement) but also an admiration for the work of Harris, Wurster, his fellow dean at MIT,

While the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture had shifted positions

by the late 1930s, conservative educators held onto the Beaux-Arts system in the face of

calls to modernize. Increasingly, calls for reform issued from the students themselves.

Littmann demonstrated how a student movement from below, rather than administrative

changes from above, had finally propelled change at the University of California,

Berkeley, in the 1940s. On the topic of students’ awareness of the problem, Sachs

provides insights from Serge Chermayeff. Observed Chermayeff,

It is the student body itself which has realized that the old education was less conducive to employment than merely a good family or business connection, a thick skin, the ability to hold large quantities of liquor, or a repertoire of good stories, and certainly less useful that a professional integrity flexible enough to allow one to take a hand in what was quaintly known as “honest building.”54

In 1938, the Alpha Rho Chi newsletter published the extended—and in its words

“particularly timely”—comments of a recent graduate reflecting on the education he received at the University of Michigan. The student’s comments – on the importance of

“actual conditions,” the social scope of architecture, the problems of housing and planning, and practical aspects of office practice – reflect the degree to which these ideas had come to embody the ideas of contemporary educational alternatives. In an article entitled “Does the Future of the AIA Rest in Our Hands,” the student, Frank Lee

Cochran, wrote that during the final two years of college,

Oregon architect Pietro Belluschi, and Scandinavian architects such as Aalto. Further research could clarify this north-south exchange; Wurster for example corresponded with many of the USC faculty, including Drake, Troedsson, and Gallion, for whom he wrote in support of Gallion’s 1957 advancement to fellowship in the AIA. This points suggest a more complicated “axis” than the three poles described by Anderson. 54 Chermayeff, Serge, “Present Position of Architecture or Architectural Crisis,” April 1940, Serge Ivan Chermayeff Architectural Records and Papers, 1909-1990. Department of Drawings & Archives, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University. Box 33 Folder ID Administrative 1947, “President's Report,” 11 March 1947. Cited from Sachs, “Research for Architecture,” xxxvi, footnote 14.

it became more and more apparent to the writer and many of his classmates that there was something wrong with their attitudes that might reasonably be laid at the door of their education. …

It is true that the depression brought with it a different attitude toward life in general, and that some of the apathy of our class was caused by his change. But there was something more fundamental than the depression at work on our minds. We were, consciously or unconsciously, becoming aware that some of the things we were learning did not check with actual conditions. Not that the conflict was over matters of mechanics, or even over design, but rather over the role of the architect in society, and how a living was earned. These were questions never taught in class, except by inference, and as a result we all had a picture of the practice of Architecture in our minds which was made up of a few half-truths and a lot of pure fancy. But things were heard about the world outside, and there was much speculation as to what it was like out there. … We were more concerned with what was to become of us when we had left school than we were about the wranglings over design problems which seemed to have characterised [sic] our forebears. …

In the modern world, there is ample space for the architect, if we mean by the term, men trained in the techniques of building. And these techniques must be considered in the broadest sense as including the resolving of basic architectural problems in a way complementary to the problems of society in general. If we mean by the term the traditional picture of the impeccable professional man, trained in the superficial solution of architectural "problems," then the signs all point to his rapid obsolescence… The problems in housing and widespread planning are not going to be solved by the traditional professional man, because he rarely understands that there are such problems, or if he does, he sees them in their academic aspects.55

Cochran argued that the schools had failed to grasp or teach the “social scope of architecture,” in particular with respect to housing and planning, and instead perpetuated the idea of the architect as a remote “professional man, much like the doctor” – and of architecture as the design of only “specific buildings, preferably big ones.” Similarly, a

student commenting on the 1942 congressional hearings on the Lanham Act expressed

displeasure that several congressmen still thought of architects as the “facelifters” or

“beauticians,” and not

55 Cochran, Frank Lee, “Reflections of a Recent Graduate upon His Education,” The Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XIX, no. 3 (April 1938): 19.

experts in basic planning and construction of buildings, adapted to particular conditions. This is not a reflection upon the intelligence of the gentleman from Texas, but upon the whole architectural profession, which has, in large measure, failed to ‘sell’ the more important aspects of our services.56

By the early 1940s, when Weatherhead’s book was published, calls for reform

had gained momentum. The lessons of the Great Depression had become impossible to

avoid – and, in fact, prepared the profession for another round of adjustment with the

advent of World War II. While just emerging in the 1930s, Weatherhead’s ideas (about

the study of social conditions, a diversified curriculum considering planning, housing,

and building technologies, collaboration rather than competition, and creative design

drawing on but not copying historic precedent) had become conventional wisdom on

modern architectural education by the early 1940s.

While students had long since heeded the call, the AIA appears to have been

slower to modernize. An exchange of letters published in the Journal of the American

Institute of Architects in 1947, between Walter Gropius and Joseph D. Leland, then director of the AIA New England District, reveal something of a generation gap between

the opposing sides. Accusing the AIA of conservatism, Gropius commented that

At present the professional training is very uneven throughout the States... Intelligent integration of the social, technical, economic and formal problems of design into a consistent entity—so indispensable for the betterment of our physical surroundings—is rarely taught, though it seems to be of so much greater importance than the training of any special skill or knowledge.

The greatest deficiency, however, is the utter lack of field experience. For instance, of the many mature students coming into my Master course at Harvard, the great majority had never seen a building being built. All the training they received was at the platonic drafting-board only. But flashing and roofing, of course, as well as methods to straighten out the usual frictions between

56 “Architecture Makes Congress,” The Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XXIII, no. 2 (February 1942): 36.

subcontractors working together on a job, can be learned in the field only. At Harvard, evidence has shown that a young architect who has had opportunity to work at lease for a summer as an assistant to a foreman or a supervisor in the field, during the first or second year at school, is able to absorb further training faster, since he is now in a position to relate it to actual experiences of his own.57

In a April 1948 announcement, which had the effect of making the AIA sound like someone arriving to a party at least a decade too late, the organization announced that a “reappraisal of the aims and objectives of architectural education” was needed:

According to preliminary findings, the architects of the future will face a task far more complicated than any of their predecessors. Because of scientific and technical achievements in the field, they will have to coordinate the various skills of the building industry and also keep abreast of changing concepts. Just how the schools can help architects meet these responsibilities will be detailed in the study.58

By the late 1940s, widespread educational reform was a fait accompli. By this time, after nearly twenty years of shaping its curriculum according to societal shifts and needs, the College of Architecture could offer its students a set of skills that allowed them to participate fully in all aspects of postwar urban expansion. Late hold-outs in the

Beaux-Arts system, such as the University of California, Berkeley, ceded to pressure from the student body, which by the late 1940s included returning GIs who “demanded to be taught skills they could put to use in office practice.”59 Interest in the Ecole des

Beaux-Arts as a whole on the part of US students had declined enough that, in 1949, the

Ecole des Beaux-Arts announced a new policy with respect to the admission of American

students to the Parisian atelier:

57 Gropius, Walter, “A Frank Letter and Its Answer,” Journal of the American Institute of Architects (April 1947): 198-203; quoted here p. 199. 58 “Architectural Education Subject of National Study,” New York Times, 11 April 1948. 59 Littmann “Assault on the Ecole,” 164.

In a step intended to revive interest on the part of American students of architecture in courses offered at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris…an agreement has been reached whereby selected graduates of American schools will be admitted by the well-known French institution without examination.60

The “almost negligible numbers of enrollments by American students at the Beaux-Arts” were attributed by the official to the “great progress in architectural education” in the

United States, to which, he added, the French had even begun looking “for new construction methods.” “The new agreement reflects international recognition of the high standing of architectural education in the United States.”61

Like Maginnis, Weatherhead criticized what he termed the “ultra-modern” in

architectural design for its rejection of historic precedent and for a presumption (which it

shared with the Beaux-Arts system) of a set of universal aesthetics. He criticized the

Beaux-Arts system for “plagiaristic” methods that discouraged creative thought and

design. But the heart of Weatherhead’s program, as the next chapter shows, was a focus

on pragmatism, contemporary design inflecting regional identity, and an emphasis on the social context of modern architecture.

60 “Architects Revive Beaux-Arts Studies,” New York Times, 2 October 1949. 61 Ibid.

Chapter 3

The USC Experiment: Core Ideas behind the Curriculum, 1930 to 1944

According to Arthur Weatherhead, a “disciplined sense of realism” should drive

modern pedagogical reform.1 During his tenure at USC, “realism” was shaped by nothing more decisively than the Great Depression, programs and policies of the New

Deal, and a shift in the national conversation about architecture, in particular with respect to planning house (both small-house design and multifamily). Weatherhead’s success in fashioning a socially responsive curriculum, both reflective of and shaped by present-day conditions, is seen in the consistency of the college’s philosophy through the tumult and readjustment of the 1930s and the about-face brought by World War II.

This chapter examines publications of the College of Architecture (including departmental bulletins, course listings, and yearbooks), as well as local press coverage, in order to characterize the type of program Weatherhead intended to build at USC.

Beginning in 1919, as the Department of Architecture was founded, the Los Angeles

Times began publishing articles on the department that seemed part public service announcements (usually coinciding with the start of each semester) and part self- promotion for Weatherhead and his staff. The frequency of the newspaper coverage, as seen in Chapters 3 and 4, also reflects the increasingly pivotal role played by the USC

College of Architecture in introducing and establishing contemporary ideas about architecture and planning in Southern California.

1 Weatherhead, Arthur Clason, The History of Collegiate Education in Architecture in the United States (Los Angeles, CA, 1941), 196.

The Philosophy behind the USC “Experiment”

A visual depiction of the College of Architecture’s evolution toward a modern curriculum, at least in terms of its evolving sense of graphic style and self-promotion, is seen in USC’s El Rodeo yearbook (Figures 14 through 27, College of Architecture, El

Rodeo Yearbooks, 1930 through 1958). While Weatherhead did not use the term

“modern” in the department’s statement of purpose until 1931, the ideas of hands-on pragmatism, including technical coursework in modern materials and processes, began shaping the curriculum as early as the 1920s. The notion that the classroom should build ties to office practice appears to have been in place since the department’s inception in

1919. While a summer-long internship in an architect’s office had required for graduation as early as 1919,2 in 1922 Weatherhead announced a related initiative:

To establish a closer relation between the students of the architectural department of the University of Southern California with the practicing architects of the city, Prof. A.C. Weatherhead, head of the department, is arranging for his students to do practical work both on plans and models for architects and to have well known architects criticize their work as well as deliver lectures before the students of the department.3

By the academic year 1923/1924, Los Angeles architects “acting as guest patrons” had begun teaching design courses and offering project critiques alongside faculty members.4

This initiated the long-term collaboration between USC and Los Angeles architects such as Sumner Spaulding and Carleton Winslow, Sr. and created professional networking possibilities for students (many of whom went to work for their former instructors). In

2 USC Yearbook 1919-1920, vol. XV, no. 1, 146. USC Libraries, University Archives. 3 “Architects to Aid University Classes,” Los Angeles Times, 15 October 1922. 4 USC Yearbook 1923-1924, vol. XIX, no. 1, 60. USC Libraries, University Archives.

Figure 14. School of Architecture, 1930, El Rodeo Yearbook. Kudos for Weatherhead and mention of the Vagabond Tour to Europe. Courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries, University Archives.

Figure 15. College of Architecture, 1933, El Rodeo Yearbook. In the new integrated curriculum, after exterior and interior studies of the buildings are done, “Complete working drawings of the construction are then made just as would be done in professional practice.” Courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries, University Archives.

Figure 16. College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1934, El Rodeo Yearbook. “Sensitive to the fact that a new era is opening in the field of architecture…, the College of Architecture and Fine Arts is preparing its students for the advent of a post-depression architecture.” Courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries, University Archives.

Figure 17. College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1935, El Rodeo Yearbook. “Dean Weatherhead’s policies have been enthusiastically supported by the fraternal organizations and the entire student body.” Courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries, University Archives.

Figure 18. College of Architecture, 1936, El Rodeo Yearbook. Praise for Weatherhead, who “has been responsible for the remarkable national standing of this SC branch” and announcement of new Industrial Design courses, led by Paul Frankl, “nationally known modernist.” Courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries, University Archives.

Figure 19. College of Architecture, 1937, El Rodeo Yearbook. “Southern California is rapidly developing into the art center of the west, not only in Fine Arts, but in modern industrial design.” Courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries, University Archives.

Figure 20. College of Architecture, 1938, El Rodeo Yearbook. “One of the most progressive schools of its kind in the country,” the College of Architecture offers students “a practical rather than an historical approach to the work in their chosen profession.” Courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries, University Archives.

Figure 21. College of Architecture, 1939, El Rodeo Yearbook. “With a new building in the process of construction…and with a course of study which permits practical working contact with the newest movements in the profession, the College of Architecture…continues its development as one of the most progressive schools in the country.” Courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries, University Archive.

Figure 22. College of Architecture, 1940, El Rodeo Yearbook. The College of Architecture “endeavors to prepare students for practice under present-day conditions. Being situated as it is in a metropolitan area, the college enables the students to observe and student contemporary achievements in all of the branches of the subject.” Courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries, University Archives.

Figure 23. College of Architecture, 1941, El Rodeo Yearbook. The College “continues its aim to prepare students for actual practice under present-day conditions.” Courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries, University Archives.

Figure 24. College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1943, El Rodeo Yearbook. “Bomb defense buildings, airport layouts, and bomb proofing instruction was the curricula sign of the times in the College of Architecture. Fine Arts students studied the intricacies of war camouflage. Embryo architects emphasized model cities planned for a peaceful future.” Courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries, University Archives.

Figure 25. College of Architecture, 1946, El Rodeo Yearbook. Dean Arthur Gallion, 1945 through 1961: “The challenge of the postwar world is here.” This marks Harwell Hamilton Harris’s first and only appearance in the yearbook at a faculty member. The year 1946 also brings the split between Fine Arts and Architecture and introduces a separate Department of Industrial Design. Courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries, University Archives.

Figure 26. College of Architecture, 1947, El Rodeo Yearbook. “To meet the challenge of the postwar world the College of Architecture was streamlined this past year. … Undergraduate studies give the student a practical rather than exclusive historical approach to the work in his chosen profession.”

Figure 27. School of Architecture, 1958, El Rodeo Yearbook, Gallion, Straub, and Waldo Kirkpatrick. “Headed by Arthur Gallion, the faculty includes some of the prominent practicing architects in the city. The dean, who believes in progressive and practical building, has been at SC since 1945.”

1924, this network expanded with the program of collaboration launched between the

Allied Architects’ Association and USC, including the core advisory committee group of

architects David Witmer, Edwin Bergstrom, Sumner Spaulding, W. Templeton Johnson,

Windsor Soule, and Henry Nickerson. During the first semester of its involvement, the

Allied Architects’ Association estimated that the advisory committee, as well as members

such as Myron Hunt, S.O. Clements, R.E. Coate, and Pierpont Davis had devoted

“considerably over a total of 100 hours” to the Department of Architecture, primarily in

the preparation, direction, and critiques of upper-division design.5

In 1923, the department took a tentative step away from historical methods and

introduced the idea of “present conditions.” While hardly striking a revolutionary tone,

the phrase (and variations on it) would become Weatherhead’s oft-cited leitmotif,

signaling the social responsiveness of the curriculum, through the 1930s and early 1940s.

Taking a first step in this direction, Weatherhead wrote that the USC Department of

Architecture was designed

to give a broad understanding of the various phases of architecture, and to develop the student by this fundamental training so that he may have the ability to solve the problems of the architect. Great care is taken to inform the individual of the problems of the past, with their solutions, impressing him at the same time with the facts that our present conditions are different, and that the problems of history should form merely a basis of inspiration.6

By “present-day conditions,” though, Weatherhead did not mean a general Zeitgeist to be intuited. Rather, “present-day conditions” implied that behind every architectural problem lay a set of social, economic, and architectural conditions that needed to be

5 Allied Architects Association, Bulletin of the Allied Architects Association of Los Angeles, “Report of the President Concerning the Activities of the Allied Architects Association for the Year 1924,” vol. I, no. 4 (February 1925). 6 USC Yearbook 1923-1924, 60.

analyzed and considered in design solutions. Throughout his tenure as dean, Weatherhead

relied on this idea to promote a Department of Architecture that could adapt to the needs

of contemporary society and prepare its students for everyday office practice.

One also sees in this preliminary step the beginning of the school’s cautious

relationship with architectural history and stylistic precedent. Although the curriculum included an exploration of “the problems of the past,” the basis of the approach was that the needs of contemporary society had changed and that “the problems of history should form merely a basis of inspiration.” In 1935, Weatherhead explained that the design philosophy at USC sought to include “the rich heritage of the past as a general inspiration rather than as a system of outworn conventions to be revered and imitated.”7 Throughout

Weatherhead’s term as dean, the college’s design philosophy continued to rely on this

balance; in 1939, Weatherhead said that “We need a modern art to reflect our own age,

but at the same time to show a consciousness of other ages.”8

Regional identity was key in this philosophy. The idea of a nexus between

regional identity and artistic expression had its roots in California’s late nineteenth-

century Arts and Crafts movement, locally seen in the “Arroyo” culture out of which the

College of Fine Arts had been founded by William Lee Judson.9 (Figure 28, William Lee

Judson, circa 1910, College of Fine Arts founder.) A native of England, Judson was a

stained-glass artist steeped in the philosophy of the Arts and Crafts Movement (Judson

7 USC Bulletin, College of Architecture, 1935-1936, vol. XXIX, no. 21 (1 January 1935), 40. USC Libraries, University Archives. 8 Harrington, Johns, December 1939, “Southern California—An Art Center,” Southern California Alumni Review, 16-21 and 24. USC Libraries, University Archives. 9 Two books by Jane Apostol explore the Arroyo Arts and Crafts culture and Judson Studios: El Alisal: Where History Lingers (Los Angeles, CA: Historical Society of Southern California, 1994), and Painting with Light: A Centennial History of the Judson Studios (Los Angeles, CA: Historical Society of Southern California, 1997).

Figure 28. William Lee Judson, circa 1910, painting on the banks of the Colorado River. Judson, a painter and stained-glass maker, was the founder of the Arts and Crafts-inspired Judson Studios and the USC College of Fine Arts. Source: University of Southern California Libraries, Special Collections, Digital Archive, California Historical Society, image CHS-4237.

was born in 1842, in fact, eight years after William Morris). In 1897, Judson founded the

family studio for handcrafted stained-glass at 200 South Avenue 66, in present-day

Highland Park, a community located between Los Angeles and Pasadena along the banks

of the Arroyo Seco.10 When Judson founded his studio, he chose a location just two miles away from El Alisal, Charles Fletcher Lummis’s Arts and Crafts homage to

Southern California. The stained-glass creations of Judson (whose slogan “Only the best is worthwhile”11 served as the motto for the College of Fine Arts throughout the 1910s)

adorned ecclesiastical, commercial, and residential buildings throughout Southern

California, including the designs of Greene and Greene and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Continuing this tradition, an explicitly Pacific Southwestern identity (rather than universal applicability of the Beaux-Arts system) shaped the design ethos at the new USC

Department of Architecture:

By studying the monuments of the countries whose geographical and climatic conditions are similar to ours, the department hopes to aid in the development of an architecture in Southern California, harmonious with the location, without being provincial in its scope.12

In February 1924, Weatherhead announced that the Department of Architecture was

“writing its own program,” tailored to regional conditions and the realities of

architectural practice.13

10 Judson Studios, located at 200 South Avenue 66 in Highland Park, was designated a Historic Cultural Monument (HCM No. 62) in the City of Los Angeles in 1969 and listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1999. 11 Apostol, Painting with Light, 1. 12 USC Yearbook 1923-1924, 60. 13 “Architect Prizes Are Announced, Awards Being Offered to Students of University of Southern California,” Los Angeles Times, 17 February 1924.

In the early 1920s, collaborative efforts had begun between the Department of

Architecture and Allied Architects’ Association. In these early years, one sees hints of

disagreement on the part of some association members and Weatherhead, with the points

of contention mirroring the debate on the Beaux-Arts system. Whereas Weatherhead’s

focus had already become pragmatism and the conditions and characteristics of the

“Pacific Southland,” comments by several Allied Architects’ Association members

reflect a desire for a local school of architecture capable of competing with the “great

eastern universities”14 and, closer to home, the University of California at Berkeley,15 a

Beaux-Arts modeled department established by John Galen Howard in 1903. This focus on East Coast institutions and architectural firms had preoccupied the Allied Architects’

Association from its early days. Indeed, the 1921 establishment of the association coincided with the controversial awarding of the Los Angeles Public Library commission to the “eastern” firm of Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, a commission for which the Allied

Architects’ Association had also vied.

Shortly after the University Board of Trustees accepted their proposal, the Allied

Architects’ Association invited Howard to offer a lecture on architectural education before the association’s 24 October 1924 group meeting. Several months later, in a special issue of the association bulletin devoted to the USC Department of Architecture,

Howard expressed his views on architectural pedagogy, arguing that architects are born, not necessarily taught, and education can stymie creative impulse. However, he wrote, artistry in design draws from, and depends on, an encyclopedic knowledge of historic

14 “Architects to Open Library,” Los Angeles Times, 7 December 1924. 15 “Plan Architects’ Building,” Los Angeles Times, 7 September 1925.

precedent. While this field of knowledge is vast, Howard admitted, “some professions,

including that of the architect, must be so.”16 Imparting that vast field of knowledge,

Howard said, “is where the universities come in.” In terms of evaluating the “specific

attainment” of students, Howard said, one must establish “the facts” with regard to

consistent standards – but, he wrote, with the help of the Beaux-Arts standards, this challenge was “by no means insuperable”:

Take architectural design, for example. The school faculties can easily establish the academic value of work done for the Beaux Arts Institute of Design. This function of establishing the facts as to adequate attainment is one for which the university is peculiarly fitted and it should be recognized as one of its greatest privileges and services to the community.

The faith Howard places in the Beaux-Arts system as a standard against which design could be measured contrasts with Weatherhead’s own contribution to the same issue of

the Allied Architects’ Association bulletin. Rather than highlighting the “vast, unwieldy

accumulations” of the past, Weatherhead wrote that the challenge of architectural

education (which he characterized as an emerging “modern experiment”) lay in

addressing, as he put it,

the lack of connection…between the design problems of the school and the actual building programs represented. Within the seclusion of the classroom, the student has often acquired only a bookish knowledge of the problems of architectural design, having been prone to regard his drawings and matters of presentation as an end in themselves, rather than to conceive of them in terms of the final mass in which the spirit is to be embodied. A young man trained entirely in this manner is certainly not properly equipped to become of much immediate value to his employer nor to enter any phase of his professional career without a prolonged period of office practice.17

16 Howard, John Galen, “Degree Or No Degree,” Bulletin of the Allied Architects Association of Los Angeles, vol. II, no. 5 (March 1926). 17 Weatherhead, Arthur C., “The Value of Criticism by Practicing Architects in the School,” Bulletin of the Allied Architects Association of Los Angeles, vol. II, no. 5 (March 1926).

In highlighting the “lack of connection” between a “bookish” design curriculum and

actual architectural practice, Weatherhead takes clear aim at the Beaux-Arts system.

Weatherhead also criticizes the classroom dynamic in which paper presentations are

regarded as “an end in themselves.” However, in terms of emphasizing paper

presentations, association member and USC faculty C. Raimond Johnson does just that in the article following Weatherhead’s. Based on his evaluation of student drawings,

Johnson wrote, he felt that efforts to “maintain a higher standard of work” at USC had been successful (the projects he described included a Country Club, an outdoor swimming pool for the estate of Harold Lloyd, and a church interior adopting either an

Italian, Gothic, Romanesque, or Byzantine ornamental style).

However, if a philosophical difference of opinion existed, it appears to have been a gentleman’s disagreement. Not only did Weatherhead and Johnson teach together for twenty years, but Weatherhead had high praise for both Howard (whom he described as

“a brilliant young New York architect”)18 and the school of architecture he founded at the

University of California, Berkeley. John Galen Howard, Weatherhead wrote,

[t]hrough his educational background, the refinement of his architecture, and his devotion to the highest ideals of his profession…created a school in the extreme West that was recognized as comparable in every respect to the better schools of architecture in the East. …The school at the University of California was definitely a product of the architectural philosophy of the Eclectic Period at its best.19

Sounding the tone of evolution, not revolution, Weatherhead commented that at the

University of California, Berkeley, as run under Howard, “Little attention was given to the fine old architectural traditions of California,” but, Weatherhead added, “this was to

18 Weatherhead, A History of Collegiate Education, 113. 19 Ibid, 116.

be expected during the period of Eclecticism.”20 In Berkeley the “fine old architectural traditions” would have included the work of Bernard Maybeck, one of the earliest masters of what Esther McCoy called the “California school” of architecture, with its search for an indigenous architecture expressive of site, environment, and local materials.

(Maybeck’s contemporaries Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene, among others, led the Southern Californian response to these same questions and exerted a strong influence in the work of early twentieth-century modernists in Los Angeles.) As

Littmann observed, however, the UC Berkeley faculty emphasized European travel for students, to view the monuments of antiquity and the Renaissance, and “placed for less emphasis on the importance of Bay Area architects, despite the presence of works by

Julia Morgan, Bernard Maybeck, and Willis Polk.”21

As the 1920s progressed, though, the USC Department of Architecture moved decisively toward contemporary architecture. The year 1924 introduced the department’s first annual “Vagabond Tour” of Europe, with a maiden voyage in the summer of 1924 to

Britain, France, Italy, and Spain. Led by Weatherhead, the six-unit study tours served as a means of introducing the currents of European architecture to students and faculty; while including sojourns to the American Academy in Rome and Paris’ École des Beaux-

Arts, the buildings of the modern movement provided the main attraction. Announcing

USC’s 1930 trip, Architectural Record wrote that the “latest trend in modern architecture will be studied by the students in various cities and countries, emphasis being placed on

20 Ibid, 116. 21 Littmann, “Assault on the Ecole,” 160.

American work as contrasted with that of other nations.”22 In addition to this surprising national coverage for USC, the quantity of local coverage reflects a heightened profile for the fledging department and its program of study. In the summer of 1931, the “traveling class in modern architecture” visited “England, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and

Holland.”23 An Alpha Rho Chi member commented on the 1931 tour:

Dean A.C. Weatherhead's vagabond tour was a big success this summer and all of the fellows and the girl (there was one) that followed the Dean all over Europe were very well pleased with the trip. Special emphasis was placed on the study of modern architecture in the different countries that were visited.24

While the tours continued throughout the 1920s and into the early 1930s, the 1932 tour

was cancelled in deference to events planned around the Los Angeles Summer Olympics;

after this point, announcements of the annual study tour in the Los Angeles Times, as well

as Architectural Record and the Alpha Rho Chi newsletter, cease appearing, suggesting that the yearly European trip became a casualty of the Great Depression.

While European modernism remained a touchstone, the need to imbue

architecture with regional, and increasingly “American,” character remained essential.

But in this era, the stance did not merely reflect an act of rebellion against the formalistic

understanding of the International Style. Rather, it represented a continuation of the

“quest for a national style” rooted in the American (and in particular, Californian) Arts

and Crafts movement, as well as contemporaneous meditations on regional identity such as the Spanish Colonial Revival or southwestern architecture (more ornamental, but also

22 “Notes in Brief and Architects’ Announcements,” Architectural Record, vol. 68, no. 2 (August 1930): 154. 23 “What Architects Are Talking About,” American Architect, vol. 139, no. 2596 (June 1931), 112. 24 G.E. Hoedinghaus, “Andronikos,” The Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XIII, no. 5 (October 1931): 7-8.

reflecting the desire to express local identity in architecture).25 The divide between

indigenous architecture on the one side and universal aesthetics on the other was

recognized, but Academic Classicism (not the “International Style”) represented the

approach to avoid.

Although Weatherhead criticized the unrootedness of the ultra-modern in either

historic precedent or place, he believed that the idiom represented a fresh expression of

contemporary life rather than the “fossilized” Beaux-Arts. This idea comes across in a

1928 Los Angeles Times article, in Weatherhead’s article about Western European

modernism:

Many lovers of architecture have welcomed the freshness and originality in the inspirations of the so-called modern style. From a dry thing of crystallized and over-refined columns, and molded stone arches as interpreted by the French Beaux-Arts of the last decade, architecture has been rejuvenated and brought into line with a natural expression of this day. The results are at least virile and full of life, which is a quality always to be preferred to the cut-and-dried, fossilized condition of a dead style which has ceased to be pertinent or representative.26

In this way, “virile” European modernism offered an up-to-date alternative to the irrelevant French Beaux-Arts. The new idiom frankly expressed contemporary

conditions, Weatherhead wrote, and the “function of steel and reinforced concrete as it is

used in modern building.” He parts ways with the “ultra modern” on the question of

historic precedent. Without naming architects or buildings (though Corbusier’s early writing and work certainly come to mind), Weatherhead criticizes as “unlovely and

25 Wilson, Richard Guy, “American Arts and Crafts Architecture: Radical through Dedicated to the Cause Conservative,” "The Art that is Life": The Arts & Crafts Movement in America, 1875-1920, Wendy Kaplan, ed. (Boston, MA: Museum of Fine Arts, 1987), 101-131, quoted here p. 109. 26 “Modern Design Spreading, Western European Countries Produce New Type of Architecture Linking Old and Present Day,” Los Angeles Times, 15 July 1928.

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discordant” the ultra-modern, arguing in favor of a design idiom that reflected

contemporary life without discarding the past entirely:

To claim…as many ultra-modernists persist in doing, that we should abhor that which savors of precedent is foolish. The best that has been done in the past must always have its influence upon the present.

This country, with its system of great architectural schools…will never recognize or be fully satisfied with the unscholarly and unlovely forms depicted in much of the so-called ultra-modern design.

Weatherhead’s view reflected the larger debate on “organic” modernism,

reflecting place as much as time, versus a history-free machine-age aesthetic. As

Kenneth Frampton pointed out, in Europe in the early 1910s, this divide between

normative design/mass production versus individuality/artistic expression dominated the

debate over the Werkbund’s direction during the organization’s first years and mirrored

the later debate in the United States.27 In the 1920s, then, the goals of European

modernism to express present-day conditions, and the integrated, multidisciplinary

approach of the Bauhaus, provided touchstones for the program at USC—but with an

injection of regional character and history.

In his 1928 article “Architecture and Life,” addressing modern vocations for

young people, Weatherhead strikes a booster’s tone for both the profession and Southern

Californian architecture, stressing how regional setting shapes architecture, and how few

settings rival that of Southern California:

Can one deny that the New Englander who has lived in a severely formal, white colonial house is a different person from his brother who has built for himself a gaily colored ranch house on a sunny hillside in California? Perhaps it can be

27 Frampton, Kenneth, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 4th edition (New York: Thames and Hudson Inc., 2007), 111.

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argued that the house represents the man, his tastes and his social or economic status, but eventually in the interplay of influences, the man comes to reflect the house in which he dwells.28

The “California, land of opportunity” tone brings to mind late-nineteenth-century

advertisements by Southern California business concerns, in particular the railroads,

aimed at boosting tourism and settlement. Much like the boom of the 1880s, the roaring

1920s had indeed transformed Southern California, and as of 1928 there were few signs

that it would stop. Driven by the optimism of the era, Weatherhead promoted in this

article the ideas of a regionally-inflected architecture expressive of “present-day

conditions” and of a multidisciplinary profession that was viable and expanding:

In few parts of the world is it possible for architects to play such an important role in the social life of man as in Southern California. Here is offered the supreme opportunity to create freely and beautifully…few physical obstructions have had to be conquered, while the climate offers every encouragement to freedom in design and variety of material. …

Just as California is taking the lead in the development of a distinctive and beautiful type of architecture, so it is advancing the art of community planning through the development of some of its great subdivisions and townsites, and the art of landscape architecture through the transformation of once-barren hillsides and sun-baked valleys into broad terraces and beautiful gardens.

Given Southern California’s “strategic position as the capital of the motion-picture

world,” Weatherhead adds in the 1928 article, trained architects could also enjoy the

“vast” professional opportunities offered through the film studios (Figure 29, USC

School of Architecture Goes Hollywood):

Without its proper architectural background no motion picture can create in the minds of its audience the desired atmosphere, or clearly and successfully interpret the historical period it seeks to portray. …The creation of a proper architectural

28 Weatherhead, Arthur C., “Architecture and Life,” Los Angeles Times, 22 April 1928.

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Figure 29. USC School of Architecture Goes Hollywood: “Students of the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California present the first results of their work in fitting themselves for motion-picture work as directors and designers of stage sets and costumes.” Professor Clayton Baldwin appears in the photo, fourth from the right. Source: Los Angeles Times, 1 January 1928.

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setting is one of the important factors in the success of any picture and the average spectator fails to appreciate the wealth of attention that has been expended upon this phase of the production. Again, this entirely new field of architectural endeavor is of particular importance to this community.

Sixteen months following the publication of this article, the roaring twenties came

to an abrupt end with the October 1929 stock market collapse. The socioeconomic crisis of the Great Depression, as Weatherhead argued, triggered a national re-evaluation of teaching methods among American schools of architecture. While it is unclear whether the crisis played a role in the timing of the changes made at USC, by offering the latitude for experimentation, Weatherhead launched the new curriculum in 1930 and, by January

1931, the revised program had been accepted and published. Weatherhead thus introduced the new College of Architecture in the 1931 catalog:

The present trend of architecture is unmistakably towards a more vital and creative expression of present-day conditions, and in this movement Southern California is taking an important place. With its old Spanish traditions, its colorful environment, and its freedom from the extremes of heat and cold, the Southwest offers an excellent field for the development of modern architecture, including the closely related fine arts. In many respects this art is rapidly becoming distinctive of the locality.29

Throughout the 1930s, the ideas transforming the new College of Architecture

mirrored the local and national conversation about architecture – a conversation that

focused on modernizing residential design (both small-house and multi-family), planning

for the neighborhood and city, and the rise of scientific research and technology as the

means to both. This shift in focus was of course fueled by the myriad programs and

policies of the New Deal. Although the landmark National Housing Act, passed in 1934,

and subsequent creation of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) were not

29 USC Bulletin, College of Architecture, 1931-1932, vol. XXV, no. 18 (15 January 1931), 11. USC Libraries, University Archives.

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specifically designed to trigger “a revolution in homebuying,” as Greg Hise observed, the

restructuring of mortgage instruments to include government-guaranteed loans, along

with longer terms and lower interest rates, did indeed facilitate “home ownership to a

new demographic and income stratum.”30 The new focus at the College of Architecture

and Fine Arts reflected these changes, in particular FHA forays into codifying standards

for the small residence. In addition, with heightened awareness of regional and

community planning issues, triggered by the work of Catherine Bauer, Lewis Mumford,

and Clarence Stein, as well as the FHA’s attempts to standardize planning ideals (as

promulgated in its bulletin series beginning in the 1930s), regional and community

planning issues became a staple of USC design courses as early as 1934.

While the conversation was national, California played a prominent role in its

early evolution. In 1964, James Marston Fitch participated in Columbia University’s

second biennial Symposium on Modern Architecture, which was devoted to “an historical

reappraisal of the architecture” of the 1930s.31 For his conference presentation, Fitch undertook a survey of architectural trade magazines from 1929 to 1939, looking for patterns in how the press “reflected, reacted to, the rise of modern technology.”32 During

this period, Fitch, who in the 1930s worked as an editor at an architectural trade

magazine, observed a “great shift in editorial positions” after 1929, as the field came “to

recognize the role of modern industrial technology as making possible the new

30 Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles, 40-41. 31 Collins, George R., and Adolf K. Placzek, “Introduction, MAS 1964: The Decade 1929-1939,” The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 24, no. 1 (March 1965): pp. 3-4. 32 Fitch, James Marston, “The Rise of Technology, 1929-1939,” The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 24, no. 1 (March 1965): 75-77, quoted here p. 75.

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architectural idiom. The same issues of these magazines were full of new buildings

which illustrated what visible forms this new idiom would assume.”33 Fitch writes that

we editors had, of course, to prove that this new movement was thoroughly “American.” I remember very clearly that on the magazine on which I worked there were always sharp limits as to how much foreign material we dared include. Each month it was a struggle; each month we tried to present a picture of evenly balanced progress right across the country. Actually, there were about three states in the whole nation – New York, Illinois, California – which gave any evidence of this progress. So we were continually trying to juggle eight houses from California, one from the east coast and then, if possible, a bowling alley or a drive-in of something from the Middle West to afford at least the pretense that we were reporting on a national movement.

Yet none of us doubted for a moment that there was a national movement, that its future was assured and that technology was the means whereby it would be accomplished.34

The philosophy developing at USC reflected these concerns. While the 1934 course bulletin strikes the familiar chord of a new architecture that is “distinctive of this locality,” in 1935 modern architecture was described as signifying “an unmistakable movement toward a new American art and architecture.” In the Los Angeles Times, long- time USC design instructor Clayton Baldwin also framed the department’s design philosophy in terms of the nation, rather than the region:

The glories of the past should be used only as stepping stones. By all means we should develop a style truly American, that is alive to the present needs, and not continue to build tombstones to an age that is dead.35

Given the timing, Baldwin and Weatherhead’s evocations of an “American” architecture seem aimed at addressing objections to the “foreignness” of the Museum of Modern Art’s

33 Ibid, 75. 34 Ibid, 75. 35 “American Development of Architecture Urged,” Los Angeles Times, 1 April 1934.

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1932 International Style exhibit. (Local receptions of the exhibit, which travelled to Los

Angeles in July 1932 in conjunction with the Tenth Summer Olympiad in Los Angeles’s

Exposition Park, are described in the next section.)

Given Weatherhead’s reticence about discussing style per se, or individual architects to emulate (or not), discerning his views on avant-garde modernism requires a fair amount of conjecture. While he rejected the prescriptive ideas about style of the

Beaux-Arts educational system, he avoided idealizing avant-garde modernism. This reticence extended to commenting on the work of the region’s modernist architects or events such as the 1932 Museum of Modern Art exhibit on the International Style in New

York and, that same year, Los Angeles.

While Weatherhead’s engagement in the local community of avant-garde architect and artists appears to have been fairly limited, his sympathies lay with the modern movement. In the 1930s, the dean initiated and taught coursework in modern architecture and shifted the architectural history curriculum to post-1900 work. Since the late 1920s, Weatherhead’s public lectures had covered topics such as Californian modernism, innovations in residential design, and the effect of the skyscraper on the architecture of the west. In 1933, Weatherhead and several members of his staff

(including the German architect and designer, Kem Weber) participated in a lecture series on “the American home,” in a six-week series covering the “architecture of the home, interior design and furnishing, financing the new home, landscaping the home, and the

California home of the future.36

36 “American Home Lecture Topic,” Los Angeles Times, 15 October 1933.

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In addition, when Pauline Schindler guest-edited an issue of Architect and

Engineer, devoted to California’s modern architecture, she invited Weatherhead to

contribute an article on the USC curriculum. In 1936, Weatherhead, along with Richard

Neutra and Rudolph Schindler, offered several public lectures on California’s

contemporary architecture. Organized as a local response to the 1935 Museum of

Modern Art exhibition “Contemporary Architecture in California,” the lectures were

sponsored by the Los Angeles Art Association.37 In addition, in 1942, according to

Thomas Hines, the USC College of Architecture and Fine Arts invited Raphael Soriano

(a USC alumni, but from what Weatherhead called the “eclectic period” of the 1920s) “to

become a part-time lecturer, an experience he enjoyed.”38

However, even when Weatherhead commented on the art of architecture, he avoided citing architects either to follow or reject. As for USC students in the 1930s,

Weatherhead wrote, they had become “intensely conscious of a new American architecture” but “[t]he word, modern, is now seldom mentioned. When designs develop logically out of living situations, they lead automatically to a sound modern expression.”39 Although Weatherhead claimed that students no longer needed to utter the word “modern,” the college’s rejection of traditional methods and aesthetics had become a calling card for potential students. According to USC alumni and architect William

Krisel, the atmosphere at the USC College of Architecture by the early 1940s was actively “anti-traditional,” and the students indeed admired the range of heroes of the

37 Millier, Arthur, “Art and Artists,” Los Angeles Times, 5 January 1936; Cage, Crete, “Program Repeated on Architecture,” Los Angeles Times, 31 January 1936. 38 Hines, Thomas H., Architecture of the Sun: Los Angeles Modernism, 1900-1970 (New York, NY: Rizzoli, 2010), 439. 39 Weatherhead, Arthur C., “Note on Education in Architecture,” Architect and Engineer, ed. Pauline Schindler, vol. 123 (December 1935): 69.

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modern movement such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Marcel Breuer.

Commenting on his decision to attend USC rather than Cornell University (to which he

had also been accepted), Krisel said:

What I liked about Weatherhead was that he completely threw out the Beaux Arts, and of course I hated the Beaux-Arts and if that’s what they were going to teach, that isn’t what I was going to do. So I really appreciated SC’s approach to the Bauhaus and modernism.40

Commenting on his first visit to USC, Krisel said,

I knew about USC and its [approach to] modernism when I visited the School of Architecture in my senior year [of high school]. I saw the projects that the students in architecture were doing and was most impressed with the various techniques of presentation but mainly that each project I saw was in the modern language.41

This, according to Krisel, helped win him over to USC, which he entered in 1941 and,

after serving in World War II, graduated from in 1949. In terms of design instruction,

though, Krisel recalled, “I didn’t find SC pointing or leading or teaching you any specific

style of architecture. You defined your own self.”42

Weatherhead’s focus remained on the social aspects of modern architecture. As

he wrote in 1941 on the reform of US architectural education, a shift in style alone

“would have been insignificant if it had not inaugurated a much more comprehensive

movement.”43 Pragmatism, and preparation for the everyday realities of office practice, formed the heart of pedagogical reform at USC. Introducing the new College of

Architecture in 1931, the dean wrote that the program aimed to “prepare students for the many grave problems with which they will be confronted in modern practice. Basic

40 Krisel, William, interview with author, 22 February 2010, Los Angeles, California. 41 Krisel, William, Personal communication with author, 15 July 2010. 42 Krisel, interview. 43 Weatherhead, The History of Collegiate Education, 175.

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principles are stressed in the present-day methods of drawing, construction, building

finance, and professional practice.”44 By 1935, the program had crafted a balance between design (focused on “original expression”), building sciences and technical coursework, and professional practices, covering the details of working drawings and

“the economic forces that control and challenge the designer’s ingenuity.” Also emphasized by Weatherhead in 1935 was the “three-dimensional product rather than the pictorial qualities of the sketch.”45 This balance as of 1935 captures the essence of the school’s approach and philosophy through the early 1960s.

As reform began at USC, one sees a corresponding shift in tone throughout the

1930s in the USC El Rodeo yearbook and also in student publications. The character of the changes reflects the Great Depression’s imprint on the college’s philosophy, as the

Beaux-Arts system was phased out. In the early 1930s, acknowledging that a “new era” had begun in the field of architecture,46 yearbook updates and descriptions of the college focused less frequently on social functions and sporting events (topics described in the yearbook as well as the Alpha Rho Chi newsletter in the 1920s) and far more on the challenges of “preparing students for the advent of a post-depression architecture.”47 The

1933 El Rodeo Yearbook described the new approach of the College of Architecture:

“Due to a new policy, the architectural courses in design, construction and professional

44 USC Bulletin, College of Architecture (15 January 1931), 11. 45 USC Bulletin, College of Architecture (1 January 1935), 15. 46 University of Southern California, El Rodeo Yearbook, “College of Architecture and Fine Arts,” 1934, 75. 47 El Rodeo Yearbook, 1934, 75.

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practice have been correlated. …Complete working drawings of the construction are

then made just as would be done in professional practice.48

Signs of discontent with the new curriculum, in particular with respect to the elimination of Beaux-Arts problem sets, were initially expressed by students. In the

newsletter of the national architectural fraternity, Alpha Rho Chi, USC architectural

fraternity members voiced their disapproval, albeit gingerly, of the direction of the design

courses:

This year the students are going to have a chance to compare their work with that done at other institutions, due to the fact that they are taking the Beaux Arts problems. The Beaux Arts program does not comply with that of the University, but the students have agreed to give up some of their vacations to take the problems.49

It is worth pointing out that not all architecture students would have belonged to the

Alpha Rho Chi fraternity (but the fraternity newsletter offers one of the few sources from the students themselves). Nevertheless, the subtle complaint was that students felt disconnected from colleagues at other universities, since they lacked the opportunity to compete in BAID-written problem sets—and they were willing to sacrifice vacation time in order to participate.

Several years later, in 1934, an assertion of student support for “Dean

Weatherhead’s policies” had the unintended effect of drawing attention to initial unhappiness with his changes to the curriculum. In 1935, the El Rodeo yearbook reasserted that the dean’s policies “have been enthusiastically supported by the fraternal

48 University of Southern California, El Rodeo Yearbook, “College of Architecture and Fine Arts,” 1933, 291. 49 Miller, George A., “Andronicus,” The Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XII, no. 2 (December 1930), 11.

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organizations and the entire student body;” the yearbook went on to describe the

environment in the school:

To realize an atmosphere of sincere cordiality and friendliness is to work and study among the students of the College of Architecture and Fine Arts. The lack of formality accompanied by the serious desire to create new things…has definitely established this school as the leading Architectural and Fine Arts College of the West.50

In 1935, Weatherhead summed up a ten-year period at USC, admitting that the

“readjustment in architectural education is a large order.”51 However, he also suggested that, when it came to the modernization of architectural pedagogy, widespread national reform was inevitable and the early “experiments” in how to get there had come of age.

His article, “A Note on Education in Architecture,” appeared in the special issue of

Architect and Engineer, guest edited by Pauline Schindler and devoted to West Coast modernism. Covering the points he’d been developing for over a decade—on present- day conditions, a pragmatic, integrated curriculum, and contemporary design not as a style but a response to “living situations”—Weatherhead began the article by describing

the 1925 “advent of the modern,” which he said initially sparked “very little change in

architectural education in this country”:

The schools merely adopted the shell of so-called modernism; and the resulting architecture was often very superficial. The criticism which followed forced educators to take stock of their methods, and a thorough readjustment has been taking place.52

In Weatherhead’s estimation, based on this readjustment, schools of architecture had

begun returning to a “fundamental principal” that had been the basis of “every great

50 University of Southern California, El Rodeo Yearbook, “College of Architecture and Fine Arts,” 1935, 30. 51 Weatherhead, “Note on Education,” 69. 52 Ibid, 69.

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period of the past”: “architecture must grow out of the conditions existing in the civilization which it serves and that training for the practice of this architecture must be governed by the same approach.” After nearly five years of watching how students adapted to the new approach, Weatherhead observed that

It is quite impossible to train architecture students also to be engineers; but they may be taught from the first to think structurally in their designs and to begin to appreciate the character of contemporary materials. School designs were never so brilliant and creative as they are today. The natural qualities and limitations of modern materials and the varied and complex functions of modern buildings when carried even to details are proving to be no hindrance to the student. On the contrary.

Throughout the remainder of the 1930s and into the early 1940s, the college’s

success in fashioning a pragmatic, socially responsive curriculum is evidenced in the

consistency of its philosophy in spite of the social shifts of the era. By the late 1930s, the

idea of the “experiment” appears to have become part of the college’s self-image. In

1938, the entry in El Rodeo proclaimed that the College of Architecture and Fine Arts

had become “One of the most progressive schools of its kind in the country,” offering

students “a practical rather than an historical approach to the work in their chosen

profession.”53 (In 1947, Gallion used the same language, describing the USC program as

offering “a practical rather than exclusively historical approach to the work in his chosen

profession.”)54 The late 1930s brought a construction boom to Southern California,

triggered largely through New Deal programs and defense-related construction. In an

apparent reflection of this, in the early 1940s the College of Architecture began

promoting the idea of Los Angeles itself as an extension of the classroom (an idea that

53 University of Southern California, El Rodeo Yearbook, “College of Architecture and Fine Arts,” 1938, 25. 54 University of Southern California, El Rodeo Yearbook, “College of Architecture,” 1947, 44.

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persists to the present). The 1940 El Rodeo stated that the College of Architecture

“situated as it is in a metropolitan area…enables the students to observe and study contemporary achievements in all of the branches of the subject.”

By the early 1940s, Weatherhead’s innovations at USC and research in architectural pedagogy had garnered national attention. In 1940, the dean presented the keynote address at the annual meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of

Architecture in Louisville, Kentucky; the same year, at the American Institute of

Architects’ meeting, he presented a talk on the “program of architecture training at

Southern California.”55 In 1941, Weatherhead again discussed the modern USC curriculum before the AIA, in a report presented before the group’s 73rd convention held

that year in Yosemite and Los Angeles. In this report, offered just three years prior to his

retirement, Weatherhead described his career-long project at USC for a national audience

of architects and educators in characteristically low-key fashion, reiterating the points in

development since the 1920s:

The courses are for the most part very realistic, with programs based upon vital local situations and usually with actual sites which the students visit. Los Angeles and its environs afford an ample and varied supply of such material. In most of the projects we now are providing either one or two weeks of preliminary investigation, both in the library and in the field. There is always a one-week preliminary sketch with criticism and a judgment before the final study period is attempted. Our thought is to stress good, practical planning and at the same time to develop a sense of structure.56

Even with the 1941 advent of World War II, as the College of Architecture and Fine Arts

(among other schools in the region) began offering courses in camouflage and defense-

55 “Weatherhead Attends Parley,” USC Daily Trojan, 17 May 1940. 56 “S.C. Architecture Class Uses City as Laboratory,” Los Angeles Times, 27 April 1941.

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related design and construction, the philosophy remained the same. Explaining the war-

time changes to the curriculum in 1941 to the Los Angeles Times, Weatherhead said that

It has always been our plan to make the teaching of architecture practical, using fundamentals in design and structure in making them apply to the modernization of community or the improvements of city areas. …And with today’s defense programs offering untold opportunities for practice design, we are adopting our class projects to fit current needs.57

In Weatherhead’s writing throughout his tenure as dean, he remained so consistently on message that one wishes for an extended manuscript or interview in which he expresses uncensored opinions on the aesthetics of the modern movement. As stated earlier, the emergence of the modern movement in Los Angeles paralleled the development of a modern design curriculum at the College of Architecture and Fine Arts, and both shared central design concerns and principles. In the context of Weatherhead’s era, though, style became a second-order concern because of the need to distance the college’s design philosophy from the style-prescriptive 1920s and staid traditions of the

Beaux-Arts. An alternative window onto Los Angeles’s emerging movement in contemporary architecture and housing (and the mainstream reception and co-optation of these ideas) is provided through local press coverage. The following section explores the

1930’s coverage of contemporary architecture and the emerging housing movement, as seen in the largest mass-market newspaper of Southern California in the 1930s, the Los

Angeles Times.

57 “S.C. Course in Architecture Altered to Fit Defense Needs, Students Will Learn to Design Bomb Shelters, Airports, Hospitals and Other War Projects,” Los Angeles Times, 7 September 1941.

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Contemporary Architecture and “California Living”: Local Press Coverage

The character of 1930’s and early 1940’s coverage in the Los Angeles Times

mirrors the issues shaping the USC College of Architecture in its formative years,

especially in terms of the housing movement and interpretations of modern architectural thought and design. In particular, the columns of arts and architecture critic Arthur

Millier show a close affinity with the views of Weatherhead and the USC approach and design philosophy, especially vis-à-vis regional identity and the emphasis on the social aspects of modernism. This section considers this press coverage, which reflected a growing awareness and acceptance of the new ideas, and sketches their development through the decade.

Beginning in the early 1930s in the Los Angeles Times, architectural coverage had begun to be dominated by contemporary trends in domestic design, as seen in the latest demonstration house exhibits or ready-made house plans. Whether a high-end modern residence or a replicable house planned for a 50-foot-wide lot, a common vocabulary evoking the good California life promoted a range of approaches to contemporary residential design. So omnipresent was the topic in the Los Angeles Times that it was not uncommon to find entire articles devoted to trends such as the elimination of a formal dining area (reflecting a growing desire for informal living spaces and the rise of the servantless home), repositioning the living room away from the street and toward a landscaped garden (reflecting both the taste for indoor-outdoor integration and the rise of the automobile on the street), or rethinking the wisdom of an adjacent driveway and garage. While promoted or discussed interchangeably as “modern” and “contemporary,” the character of this press coverage serves as a reminder that a growing appetite for

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modern convenience and innovations in residential design did not necessarily translate into a taste for modern forms.

Indeed, as the notion of “modern” became the signifier for contemporary living

(though not necessarily avant-garde design), commentators of the era, such as Pauline

Schindler in the issue of Architect and Engineer cited above, for example, sought to distance “true” modernism from the superficially modern. Of interest to this study, however, is the shared vocabulary invoked by a variety of actors in the 1930s to express how residential design should reflect a cultural backdrop regarded as categorically different from that of the 1920s. The character of this press coverage brings to mind what David Smiley termed the “overlapping modernisms” of the US “domestic culture industry;” in his 2001 study, Smiley examined the “combined efforts at interpreting modernity” by “a vast array of cultural actors including architects, builders, professional magazines, real estate organizations, museums, and schools.”58 The “domestic culture industry” emerging in 1930’s Southern California fits this description.

The most common feature used to brand contemporary living, though, became

Southern Californian identity itself. In newspaper coverage of housing exhibits, plans, and new construction, expressing regional identity became synonymous with the good life in a changed, modern age. Figuring prominently in this coverage was the notion that contemporary architecture (in particular residential design) should be “suited” for and stamped by Southern Californian identity (even as the work shared central principles with the larger national movement in housing, such as an increased informality in the plan and

58 Smiley, David, “Making the Modified Modern,” Perspecta, special issue on “Resurfacing Modernism,” vol. 32, (2001): 39-54.

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indoor-outdoor integration).59 Although the period-eclectic styles of the late-nineteenth

and early-twentieth century also relied on Southern Californian branding for their

promotion (in particular, the Mission Revival, Spanish Colonial Revival, and quasi-

Mediterranean spin-offs), in the early 1930s expressing regional identity in design came

to signify a fresh alternative to the cut-and-paste period-revival styles of the 1920s (and

increasingly formulaic expressions of the Streamline Moderne and Art Deco, as seen in

particular in Los Angeles’s commercial architecture).

One layer in Southern California’s “overlapping modernisms” is seen in the work

of Los Angeles Times arts and architecture critic Arthur Millier. Just as Weatherhead

launched his experiment in modern architectural education, Millier appears to have

launched a largely one-man battle against period-revivalism. Although his Los Angeles

Times columns throughout the 1920s focused primarily on the arts, in the late 1920s and

early 1930s Millier began commenting more frequently on architecture, taking issue with

Spanish Colonial and Mediterranean revival styles, as well as the emerging Art Deco and

Streamline Moderne. In June 1929, Millier criticized the proliferation of Art Deco in

commercial design, describing its monotony of “vertical and horizontal bands of artificial

stone where previously one saw stucco. …Instead of Academie des Beaux Arts we must

now read L’Art Moderne. Either way we are still lisping bad French.”60 But the late

1920’s reinvention of the Spanish Colonial Revival, as seen in William Mooser’s 1929

Santa Barbara County Courthouse, also failed to inspire Millier. Responding to a colleague’s comment that the Santa Barbara Courthouse was “the prettiest building in the

59 In addition to the comments by Fitch (1965), Elizabeth Mock’s 1944 Built in USA offers a contemporaneous comment on the national scope and pre-1945 roots of the movement toward a regional variations on, and interpretations of, modernism. 60 Millier, Arthur, “Arts Working Together,” Los Angeles Times, 2 June 1929.

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West,” Millier wrote in 1930 that, while the building did indeed make “a pretty

picture…pictures are not buildings”:

California’s orgy of imitative Mediterranean architecture may sober up eventually in a style but that will not come until the fundamental law of building is once more obeyed. Style—whether it be Mediterranean, Californian or anything else— does not come from imitating the shapes of buildings or their details in entirely different materials. Style comes from using certain materials in accordance with their natures and the purpose for which you are using them. …

If young architects, instead of being educated by drawing the picturesque details of old European buildings, were taught how to cut and lay stone, to figure strains and loads while mixing and pouring concrete, to build with wood and steel and brick instead of passing the buck to the engineer and contractor…we might get somewhere in this matter of California style.61

Here Millier, evoking the Arts and Crafts notion of defining a native style, captures the

essence of what Weatherhead sought to establish at USC. (Although Millier spoke at the

1940 inaugural ceremonies for the USC College of Architecture’s new building, Harris

Hall, no evidence has yet been located to suggest more than an acquaintanceship between

the two.) As an art critic, Millier engaged the topic of style more directly than did

Weatherhead (and therefore his writing offers a valuable glimpse into the growing

mainstream awareness of contemporary architecture). Like Weatherhead, though, Millier

rejected the idea of style as the architect’s driving motivation, emphasizing instead

regional identity:

An architect should be an artist who has mastered the science of building. If he is an artist he will scorn to misuse materials and will be so happy making them work according to their nature and the purpose for which he is building that he will forget to be “Spanish,” “Norman,” “Moderne,” or any of the other meaningless things that, at the moment, pass for styles. Thus immersed in his problem he would unconsciously and inevitably be Californian.62

61 Millier, Arthur, “Architecture and Style,” Los Angeles Times, 31 August 1930. 62 Ibid.

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In this way, Millier shares Weatherhead’s emphasis on what is “Californian” as a driving force in design. Millier also articulates here several basic ideas about modernism but frames them as representing a local issue and a local (rather than national) movement.

Indeed, when Millier saw reason for hope in 1929, it arrived in the form of Parkinson &

Parkinson’s Bullock’s Wilshire building (Figure 30, Bullock’s Wilshire Building,

Parkinson & Parkinson, 1929). Although this design evokes Bertram Grosvenor

Goodhue’s iconic (and nationally influential) Nebraska State Capitol, Millier wrote that

the Bullock-Wilshire building was “unusually well suited to and expressive of Southern

California.”63 In the article, entitled “Building Reflects Region,” Millier wrote that

now that the trend toward “modern” styles in business architecture has so definitely come to town, the architect and designer have on their hands the responsibility of developing an architecture for Southern California which is at once modern structurally and in matters of light, air, heating and convenience, and harmoniously related to the region it springs from and serves.64

In the climate of the 1930s, even marketing for ready-made house plans relied on notions of the contemporary good life and regional identity, in particular in descriptions of plan innovations, plentiful air and light, and indoor-outdoor integration (features that are also described later as unique to Southern California regional modernism as practiced by USC graduates and faculty). The rhetoric of regional exceptionalism also extended to the emerging historicist styles of the 1930s. Southern Californian branding was applied to the use of balconies and courtyards, quoting the Spanish heritage, seen in the Monterey

Style popular in the 1930s, or the low-slung horizontality, informality, and openness to and integration with the landscape seen in the emerging Ranch House. At the Architects’

63 Millier, Arthur, “Building Reflects Region, New Bullock’s Structure Held Step Toward Architecture Harmonious with Southern California,” Los Angeles Times, 30 June 1929. 64 Ibid.

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Figure 30. Bullocks-Wilshire Building, Parkinson & Parkinson, 1929. Los Angeles, California.

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Building Material Exhibit in downtown Los Angeles (established in 1914 as a showcase

and permanent exhibit for emerging products in the building trades), regular displays

introduced the public and practitioners to “trends in modern residential design.”65 As

happened with the USC design curriculum (as Chapter 4 shows), site-specific design and

integration with landscaping and the outdoors became a method for injecting regional

character. This is reflected, for example, in a five-room, $5,300 proto-Ranch House,

meant to reflect “the early California style of architecture,” whose low-slung horizontality, “built close to the ground,” gave a “feeling of belonging to its natural setting.”66 (Figure 31, “Home Nestled Amid Foliage,” J. Robert Harris’s Proto-Ranch

House, 1931.) Harris’s use of a central landscaped patio, onto which the home’s primary

rooms opened via large-panel glazing and French doors, reflected the trend of using

outdoor spaces as a “livable part of the house” (another feature that is later characterized

as a unique signifier for Southern Californian modernism).

In July 1932, MOMA’s International Style exhibit premiered in Los Angeles at

Bullocks Wilshire. Millier’s coverage of the event also mirrored to a surprising degree

the movement and approach at USC. In a month-long series on the exhibit, Millier

focused less on Hitchcock and Johnson’s style-driven tour of the machine-age than the

companion contribution on modern housing by Lewis Mumford and Catherine Bauer.

Millier highlighted Mumford and Bauer’s essay on modern social housing, site and

65 Such articles appeared regularly in the Los Angeles Times throughout the early 1930s. For example, see “Efficiency Stressed in Home Plan,” Los Angeles Times, 18 October 1931, “Plan Depicts Modern Trend to Rear Living Room,” Los Angeles Times, 8 November 1931, and, quoted here, “Designs of Residences on Exhibit,” Los Angeles Times, 21 June 1931. 66 “Home Nestled Amid Foliage,” Los Angeles Times, 28 June 1931.

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Figure 31. “Home Nestled Amid Foliage,” J. Robert Harris’s Proto-Ranch House, 1931. Exhibit at the Architects’ Building Material Exhibit, Los Angeles. Source: Los Angeles Times, 28 June 1931.

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neighborhood planning, and prefabrication as a means to economy (ideas also of central

concern in the design curriculum and emphasis at the USC College of Architecture):

[T]he really important thing the exhibit accomplishes is to demonstrate that the international style is not in its intentions, just a “style”—as in hats or shoes, but an attempt to solve a problem which the nineteenth century neglected—the problem of minimum cost housing for low incomes. …

The real aim behind the “international style”…is to give the necessities of modern life in their most economical form consonant with good structural methods. …The trend…is to make good modern living possible to all, in the interest of the whole community.67

In aesthetic terms, Millier portrays the basic ideas of the International Style as adaptable to the region and argues that, in Los Angeles, such an idiom already existed:

The structural basis of the international style is that of steel supports and cantilevering, making possible all the openings and glass desired. Walls are then just sheathes. Orientation gives sun and light to every room. Given these essentials, the architect arranges them to look well. Where planting has been developed one sees these simple ingredients can make a very satisfactory effect— once the eye has stopped preferring extraneous ornament or sentimental historical effects to clean, plain building. …

Perhaps this is not an “international style.” One can look about in California and see many simple houses obeying similar principles. Certainly different regions would evolve different effects. But the principles are sound, similar to those on which we conduct our modern enterprises.

Millier’s comment about the “many simple” California houses already reflecting these principles brings to mind Fitch’s observation about the state’s leadership in residential design. In California, north and south, the move toward defining an informal, indigenous residential design, expressive of site, environment, and the “simple life,” had a long tradition stretching back to the late-nineteenth century. Sally Woodbridge

67 Millier, Arthur, “New Architecture Analyzed: Simplified, Unornamented, ‘International Style’ Called Solution for Minimum Cost Housing Adaptable to Low Incomes,” Los Angeles Times, 31 July 1932.

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observed that this early fascination was fueled by the widespread promotion of the

idyllic, healthful California lifestyle, by railroad concerns in particular:

As portrayed by sincere apostles and hired evangelists, California Living had become, by the end of the 19th century, synonymous with the American vision of the Good Life. California’s architects have aspired ever since to build the “ideal” home for the citizens of this new Eden.68

As Woodbridge observed, the ideal of “California Living, with its implicit assumption of leisured affluence in a lush natural setting, is as far from the daily experience of as many people in California as it is in New York.”69 This fact, however, did not diminish the

enthusiasm for the ideal when it came to residential design.

Architects such as Bernard Maybeck in the Bay Area and Greene and Greene in

Southern Californian proposed some of the earliest and most influential examples of an

indigenous Californian architecture, expressive of the “simple life” (though, in most

cases, initially for elite and/or well-educated clients). In Berkeley, as Maybeck’s simple,

brown-shingled homes emerged in the Berkeley Hills, a group of residents formed the

Hillside Club in the 1900s to celebrate their love of the good life as conferred through

residential design; the group motto stated that “‘Hillside architecture is landscape

gardening around a few rooms for use in case of rain.’”70 Woodbridge added that

Maybeck, “ever determined to fuse indoor and outdoor living,” was the first architect to develop the sliding glass door.

In Southern California, Greene and Greene’s high-style Arts and Crafts spawned a national movement, of course, in affordable “California Living” as embodied in the

68 Woodbridge, Sally B., “The California House,” The Wilson Quarterly, vol. 4, no. 3 (summer 1980): 83- 91; quoted here p. 83. 69 Ibid, 91. 70 Ibid, 91.

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Craftsman Bungalow. Craftsman kit-houses spread the gospel of informal, woodsy living,

in an affordable, replicable version of the typology. By 1910, “bungalows were ubiquitous and, while known at times as peculiarly southern Californian, they appeared in suburbs all across the country.”71 Even then, commentators emphasized that “bungalows

were not an architectural style but a housing type…adaptable to different regions and

styles.”72 The work of the early practitioners in this movement, as well as the link

between the work of 1930’s intermediaries such as Harwell Hamilton Harris and William

Wurster, has of course been well documented.

In the progressive 1920s, as the Craftsman Bungalow had fallen from favor in

deference to a wide menu of period-revival styles and the Spanish Colonial Revival, the

national housing shortage fueled the fascination with “homes of the future.” As Hise

argued, in the wake of the Great Depression, even as building slowed nationally, this

fascination “only intensified during the 1930s,” as demonstration houses and advertising

promoted the latest in modern residential design: “For the majority of Americans the

dissonance between material conditions and the promise of improved housing and better

living conditions only increased throughout the second half of the 1920s and the 1930s.73

In Southern California, population expansion helped fuel the housing shortage and

demand, as Los Angeles County’s population grew more than tenfold between 1900 and

1930, from approximately 170,000 to 2,208,000.74

71 Wilson, “American Arts and Crafts Architecture,” 115. 72 Saylor, Henry H., Bungalows (New York: McBride, Winston, 1911), 40-41. Cited from Wilson, “American Arts and Crafts Architecture,” 115. 73 Hise, “Roots of the Postwar Urban Region,” 30. 74 Forstall, Richard L., “California, Population of Counties by Decennial Census: 1900 to 1990,” Population Division, US Bureau of the Census, Washington, DC.

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A notion of California’s leadership in innovative residential design prevailed in

much of the local coverage. As Fitch observed, and Elizabeth Mock confirmed in the

1944 Museum of Modern Art exhibit and 1945 book, Built in USA, California indeed

produced a disproportionate share of the modern residential design earning national

attention for its mediation between the avant-garde and regional character and precedent.

However, while many of the features of Southern California’s emerging idiom mirrored

national trends (for example, indoor-outdoor integration, site-specificity, a closer

connection to nature and landscaping, and informality of plan), certain characteristics

came to be understood as singular to the region.

By 1941, Millier observed a growing popular awareness (if not wholesale

acceptance) of the contemporary architecture. In an article entitled “You Can’t Stop the

Modern Trend,” Millier described the shift in attitudes toward modern architecture that

he had observed unfolding throughout the 1930s. Southern California, he wrote, had

become a “proving ground” for the debate between the “followers of tradition and those

who like to break rules.”75 Illustrated with images of the work of Harris, Millier appeared to aim the article at those still concerned that modernism lacked “charm” and was not suited to residential design. Millier posed a series of theoretical questions for his readers:

How permanent is this “modern” style in architecture? How good is it for homes? Does a “modern” home cost more or less than a period one? Let’s get one thing clear… Aside from all the argument about this or that detail of “modern” architecture, ours is veritably a new age in history and the kind of building style which we call “modern” is the architecture that is being born of our age.76

75 Millier, Arthur, “You Can’t Stop the Modern Trend,” Los Angeles Times, 16 March 1941. 76 Ibid.

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In order to illustrate the shift in attitudes that had taken place in the 1930s, Millier tells

the story of a well-respected local architect who, the year before, had been named an AIA

fellow. When the architect (whom Millier does not name) went to the podium to accept

the honor, Millier wrotes, he made a “most unusual speech of acceptance,” saying

“something many of his colleagues felt in their hearts, but carefully suppressed”:

Throughout my career I have aimed at this highest honor an architect can receive—a fellowship in the American Institute of Architects. To win it I sent to the national council in Washington a selection of photographs and drawings of buildings I have designed during many years. When these were returned to me, with the news that I had won, I studied them with a critical eye. I was ashamed of them. They were not architecture. They were mere imitations of architecture. I thereupon said to myself, “You have received a fellowship in the American Institute of Architects for what? For tacking an imitation French window onto an imitation English house? For stealing a Spanish doorway and faking it onto an imitation Venetian palace?”

Gentlemen, I am through faking. Architecture is a simple matter. Given a complex purpose for which a building must be erected, architecture is the art of choosing the right materials and so combining them as to serve that purpose well. That is all there is to architecture. There isn’t any more.77

Millier describes the architect as returning to his seat “amidst a profound sensation.”

Although Millier never names his source, based on the two biographical details provided about him (he was the one-time president of the Southern California American Institute of Architects and advanced to AIA fellowship in 1940), the architect was Pierpont

Davis,78 a lecturer in upper-division design at the USC Department of Architecture in the

1920s and one of the founding members of the Allied Architects’ Association. Davis’s story not only reflects the context of the transitional 1930s, as modern ideas about

77 Ibid. 78 According to the records of the American Institute of Architects, and the organization’s Southern California chapter, Pierpont Davis was the only former president of the local chapter whose advancement to AIA fellow occurred in 1940.

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architecture began taking root, but also offers one glimpse into the evolving ideas of the faculty and advisors of the USC College of Architecture.

The literature often describes an overall optimism, in the postwar era, that modern technology and materials, as well as new ways of thinking about aesthetics and lifestyle, would lead to a higher quality of life. As we see in this overview of the 1930s, both from within academia and outside of it, the pre-war period shared a sense of optimism based on the same ideas (though the resources to implement the new ideas were lacking).

Weatherhead’s faith in present-day conditions to guide the profession to a brighter future appeared unwavering through his 30-year term as dean. Millier, in closing his 1941 article, expresses a similar level of faith in the movement’s future, writing that the modernism of circa 1941

is more genuinely modern and less modernistic than it was 10 years ago. And whether it extends to the whole house or creeps in via modernizations of individual rooms, it is increasingly favored by home builders. Time, popular taste and regional differences will modify modern architecture. But, because it is a true child of this mechanical age, it will eventually dominate the field of home design.79

While postwar architects shared this idealism, the average consumer ultimately preferred housing with some degree of direct historical quotation. Weatherhead’s

“experimental” curriculum at USC, though, did take hold. By 1941, when Weatherhead published The History of Collegiate Education in Architecture in the United States, the architectural program he launched in 1930 had come of age. The program’s basic contours had responded to the readjustments of the Great Depression and New Deal, and advent of World War II. Chapter 4 will illustrate how Weatherhead’s philosophy

79 Millier, “You Can’t Stop the Modern Trend.”

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translated into a program of study that became one of the United States’ earliest experiments in modern architectural pedagogy.

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Chapter 4

The USC Experiment: Curriculum, Faculty, Projects, 1930 to 1960

As of 1930, among the 45 American universities offering a professional

curriculum in architecture, just five had begun to break decisively from the Ecole des

Beaux-Arts educational system. With an eye toward the first four, Weatherhead launched a curriculum in 1930 based around a core group of ideas: (1) an emphasis on

contemporary design, focused on “creative expression” and regional identity as much as

the honest expression of function, materials, and structure; (2) pragmatism and an

emphasis on technical proficiency and the realities of office practice, in order to build a

bridge between the classroom and office; (3) a socially responsive curriculum, reflective

of “present-day conditions,” including changes in the profession of architecture and the

needs of the society it served; and (4) an association with allied fields, such as planning,

landscape architecture, and industrial design.

Once established in the late 1930s, the USC architecture curriculum remained

largely intact, in terms of class content, sequence, design projects, and methodology, until

the early 1960s. Through this period, the program’s philosophy reflected the balance

Weatherhead sought to achieve (and Arthur Gallion maintained) between “original

expression” and regional identity in design, a hands-on understanding of construction

techniques and materials, and present-day conditions, both in terms of the architectural

profession and the needs of the society it served.

This chapter includes six sections: Section 1, Pre- and Postwar Snapshot,

Comparison of 1937 and 1957; Section 2, Design Curriculum; Section 3, Traditional

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Methods and Historical Precedent; Section 4, Pragmatism and Bridging the Gap between

Classroom and Office; Section 5, Social Responsiveness: The Great Depression, New

Deal, and World War II; and Section 6, Allied Fields: Industrial Design.

Pre- and Postwar Snapshot: 1937 and 1957

A brief comparison of 1937 and 1957 course catalogs illustrates the level of continuity in the pre- and postwar Bachelor of Architecture curriculum (though similarities extend beyond these years). In 1937 and 1957, students would have spent a majority of their lower-division coursework attending basic design and a range of graphics classes (including freehand drawing, graphics, and descriptive geometry/shades and shadows). The design sequence in both 1937 and 1957 spanned each year of the five-year program. Design and graphics coursework, supplemented by general education classes in subjects such as English, mathematics, economics, and sociology, preceded coursework in architectural history, a change implemented by Weatherhead to encourage creative expression rather than faithful emulation. Upper-division coursework introduced students to a technical core of classes (including Building Equipment Engineering,

Modern Materials/Materials and Processes, Mechanics and Strength of Materials, and

Estimating and Construction Costs), a concentration that remained the heart of the technical coursework from the 1930s through the early 1960s.

In 1937 and 1957, a three-year series in professional practices anchored each student’s upper-division studies. Forays into landscape architecture had begun in the

1930s but appear to have been curtailed by the advent of World War II (when the wartime curriculum began). Students in 1937 could take landscaping and plant identification

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courses, whereas by 1957 a separate emphasis in landscape architecture was offered through the School of Architecture. Initiated in the postwar period by Gallion, the landscape architecture program was designed and led by Garrett Eckbo, whom Gallion hired in 1946.

The continuity in the pre- and postwar faculty, and the predominance on the roster of USC graduates, suggests that consistency in the educational approach was intentional.

As of 1947, two years into Gallion’s term as dean, 10 of the 18 faculty and instructors in the newly christened School of Architecture had graduated from USC (8 of these from the prewar period): Clayton M. Baldwin and C. Raimond Johnson from the 1920s, as well as Henry C. Burge and Roy Johnston (1935), George Brandow (1936), Gordon C.

Drake (1941), Calvin C. Straub and Byron Davis (1943), Robert Schoenberner and

Norwood Teague (1946). Among the instructors on staff since the 1920s, Baldwin, who joined USC in 1920 and became the de facto press liaison for the College of Architecture in the 1930s, continued to teach lower-division design and architectural history through the 1950s, until his death in 1958. Johnson, on staff since 1924 and a 1926 USC graduate, and Verle Annis, on staff since 1928, also continued to teach under Gallion.

As the roster expanded and evolved through the postwar years, reflecting both

Gallion’s leadership and the rapid expansion of the school, the common thread remained the prominent presence of USC graduates on the faculty roster. In 1955, for example, even after Gallion had led the department for a decade, among instructors for whom biographical information is available, more than one-third of the faculty and visiting critics (14 out of 39) graduated from USC. Alumnae who taught classes or led design critiques in 1955 included Thornton Abell (1931), John Rex (1932), Whitney Smith,

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Alfred Boeke, and Raphael Soriano (1934), Henry Burge (1935), Carl Mastopietro, who

later changed his last name to Maston (1937), Calvin Straub (1943), as well as postwar

graduates Walter Dorwin Teague (1946), Emmett Wemple (1950), Arthur O’Leary

(1951), Conrad Buff III (1952), and Randell Makinson (1954).

Design Curriculum: Out with Classicism, in with Pragmatism, Planning, and “Creative Expression”

Classes

Between circa 1930 and 1960, the most substantial change in the design

curriculum, as reflected in course catalogs, occurred during the first five years of

Weatherhead’s experiment, between 1930 and 1934. During this period, descriptions of

design classes gradually shifted from a focus on classical orders to “original creation”

and rational, practical solutions, tailored to the particulars of the site. Beginning in the

early 1930s, in order to foster “creative expression,” the study of “any reference to

traditions” was postponed until “the more advanced years.”1 This change was reflected in the design curriculum as well as architectural history classes (which were shifted from

lower to upper division). In design class descriptions, between 1929 and 1934, references

to the classical orders were initially scaled back, then shifted to second-year design, and

finally eliminated. Throughout this time, the increasingly common catchphrases

describing the design philosophy were “original expression” and “sociological

development.”

As of 1929, lower-division design included a “study of the classic orders,” as

applied to buildings planned for contemporary uses, as well as Class B Analytiques of the

1 Weatherhead, Arthur Clason, The History of Collegiate Education in Architecture in the United States (Los Angeles, CA, 1941), 196.

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Beaux-Arts Institute of Design and faculty-written problems.2 By 1931, the centrality of classicism in design had diminished, as first-year design included problems in “some of

the best classic elements” alongside exercises in “original creation based upon the

fundamental principles in design.”3 At the time, though second-year design continued to draw on Class B Analytiques, projects involving the adaptation of classical forms to

modern needs were eliminated from upper-division design courses; instead, upper-

division design classes began to adopt a broader, integrated view of composition and

planning. As Weatherhead launched the “experiment” in modern education, the rewritten

design curriculum for upper-division design from 1931 presented:

Third year: simpler problems in architectural planning and composition, wherein a more detailed knowledge of design and the presentation of drawings must be brought into play.

Fourth year: More advanced problems in planning and composition, wherein the study of important buildings and groups of buildings is undertaken.

Fifth year: A continuation of fourth year, the problems being of an advanced and comprehensive nature. 4

By 1934, Beaux-Arts problem sets had been eliminated from the design curriculum. The only lingering mention of classical precedent was found in first-year design, which included studies of “some of the best classic elements;” second-year design in 1934 presented exercises on “the theory of simple planning, followed by more

2 USC Bulletin, College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, 1929-1930, vol. XXIV, no. 2, 67. USC Libraries, University Archives. 3 USC Bulletin, College of Architecture, 1931-1932, vol. XXV, no. 18 (15 January 1931), 28. USC Libraries, University Archives. 4 USC Bulletin (15 January 1931), 31.

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complete studies in design and the application of rendering techniques.”5 By 1935, the

emphasis on classicism had been replaced by projects written to foster “a broader range

of imaginative and creative expression” and to reflect “the needs of human life and

progress in sociological development.”6

Placing architecture in the service of “sociological development” appears to have

been an idea ahead of its time. Joseph Esherick’s reflections on the differences between

American architectural education of the 1930s (when he attended the University of

Pennsylvania) and the 1970s (when he was a faculty member at UC Berkeley) offered context on this aspect of USC’s “experimental” design curriculum. When comparing the

1930s and 1970s, Esherick wrote,

[T]he greatest contrasts are, on the one hand, the insistence in the thirties that architecture’s primary alliance was with art, and in the seventies that the alliance is with the social sciences; and, on the other hand, the belief in the thirties that design and designing were central and that everything else could and would be picked up by the student on his own as needed, possibly later, and the implicit belief in the seventies that it is perhaps quite the other way around and that it is design and designing that will be picked up.7

These comments by Esherick also provide further context for Weatherhead’s apparent

disengagement with the “art” of architecture, an idea the dean appears to have

consciously avoided.

As Weatherhead directed the USC design curriculum toward “sociological

development,” city and regional planning began to occupy a prominent place in the

5 USC Bulletin, College of Architecture, 1934-1935, vol. XXVIII, no. 21 (1 January 1934), 35. USC Libraries, University Archives. 6 USC Bulletin, College of Architecture, 1935-1936, vol. XXIX, no. 21 (1 January 1935), 40. USC Libraries, University Archives. 7 Esherick, Joseph, “Architectural Education in the Thirties and Seventies: A Personal View,” in Spiro Kostof, ed., The Architect: Chapters in the History of the Profession (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 238-279; quoted here p. 275.

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design curriculum. Beginning in 1934, annual semester-long “field trips” to the cities

and communities of the region introduced students to planning issues such as

redevelopment, modernization, and the mitigation of traffic and parking problems. In

addition to the incorporation of planning into design class projects, by 1942, descriptions

of upper-division design began to emphasize planning explicitly, with fourth-year design

introducing “comprehensive projects in the theory and practice of modern planning; the

social and economic factors and the problems of community and regional planning,” and

fifth-year design continuing in the “broader phases of planning to meet contemporary

social, economic, and industrial requirements.”8 By 1943, the statement of the school reflected what Weatherhead regarded as the shifting professional demands that would be placed on the postwar architect, in particular in “the vital field of postwar planning” in which “the architect should assume an important role.”9 In the postwar period, Gallion

updated but retained this overall emphasis, writing that USC’s diversified curriculum

encompasses the technical and economic aspects of creative building, the cultural relation of architecture to contemporary life, the exacting requirements of the building industry, and the expanding field of planning and urban development. In the architectural design courses, there is continual emphasis upon postwar planning and during the last two years special courses are devoted to urban planning and housing.10

The similarities in the pre- and postwar period extended to design coursework.

Other than a shift in numbering to make room for a new two-year planning series

initiated in 1945, the description and scope of design classes remained largely unchanged

8 USC Bulletin, College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1942-1943, vol. XXXVI, no. 16 (1 November 1941), 41. USC Libraries, University Archives. 9 USC Bulletin, Circular of Information, 1943-1944, vol. 38, no. 9 (September 1943), 13. USC Libraries, University Archives. 10 USC Bulletin, Circular of Information, 1945-1946, vol. 40, no. 8 (September 1945), 11. USC Libraries, University Archives.

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through the early 1960s. USC graduates such as Straub, Buff, Wemple, Makinson, Don

Hensman, and Pierre Koenig continued to lead design through the 1950s into the early

1960s.

In addition to the incorporation of planning into the design curriculum,

supplemental courses offered through the departments of Public Administration and

Trade and Transportation had become part of the curriculum by 1937. In 1945,

supplemental coursework in Problems of City Planning continued as a requirement,

offered through the Public Administration Department. By 1946, Gallion had hired

Simon Eisner to lead the in-house planning curriculum, and in 1955, alongside Eisner and

Henry Reining, Jr., dean of the School of Public Administration, Gallion co-founded a graduate program in city and regional planning at USC, jointly administered by the

Schools of Architecture and Public Administration.11

Projects

With the integration of planning into its design curriculum in the early 1930s, the

USC College of Architecture and Fine Arts joined the earliest schools of architecture in the United States to align the two fields. Weatherhead commented on the emerging trend

(which he regarded as the result of “contemporary social needs”) in his study of collegiate architectural education, observing that, as of 1935, just six of the forty-five US schools of architecture had established links with associated departments of city or regional planning.12 In Weatherhead’s view, city and regional planning was of vital

interest to the “modern design project” and “directly concerned with architecture, the fine

11 Gallion, Arthur, and Henry Reining, Jr., “The Planning Curriculum, University of Southern California, 1955/1956,” n.d. USC Libraries, University Archives. 12 Weatherhead, The History of Collegiate Education, 210.

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arts, engineering, economics, law and government.”13 By 1956, associating the two

fields had become an identifiable, though not universally adopted, trend in US schools of

architecture. A 1956 survey conducted by the Association of Collegiate Schools of

Architecture showed that 38 percent of schools responding to the survey (18 out of 47)

reportedly offered a curriculum in city planning (though 59 percent, or 28 of 47, did

not).14 Half of the responding schools reported that “special city planning problems” had been incorporated into architectural design curricula and approximately 75 percent required “at least one course in planning.”15

As mentioned above, beginning in the 1930s, the USC College of Architecture launched annual design projects, referred to as “field trips,” introducing issues in regional and city planning. The inaugural field trip came in the spring of 1934, when fifth-year

design students, led by Raymond M. Kennedy, a 1916 graduate of Cornell University and

assistant professor at USC since 1930, were tasked with the design of a unified city plan

for Elsinore, a city approximately 80 miles south of Los Angeles. (Figure 32, Professor

Raymond Kennedy and Students of the College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1937.) In

the national Alpha Rho Chi newsletter, architectural fraternity members described the

study trip to Elsinore, which included forty students and four faculty members:

Local organizations entertained the group, some of whom lectured on various phases of architecture, especially as it related to Elsinore conditions. This was followed by a clinic on local building problems, replacements and improvements. A planning commission was appointed to work with fifth-year students in developing a city plan. Dean A.C. Weatherhead of the College of Architecture said concerning the trip: “As far as I know it is something entirely new in that it

13 Ibid, 210. 14 Beal, George, “The Place of Planning in the Architectural Curriculum,” Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 12, no. 1, 42nd Annual Convention of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (autumn 1956): 18-24. 15 Beal, “The Place of Planning,” 18-24.

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Figure 32. Professor Raymond Kennedy and College of Architecture and Fine Arts students, 1937. Raymond Kennedy pictured in the center; Carl Maston (nee Mastopietro) and Lee Klein pictured third and fourth from the left, respectively. Courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries, University Archives.

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combines an excellent form of academic education with a program of educating the public.” Similar trips are planned for the future.16

While follow-up study trips continued to generate local press through the 1930s

and 1940s, the 1938 Santa Ana project garnered detailed coverage in Architect and

Engineer, thereby offering a glimpse into the college’s design methodology. The 1938

project focused on the re-design of the early twentieth-century core of Santa Ana, a city

approximately 30 miles south of Los Angeles in Orange County. Characterized by the

instructor, Clayton Baldwin, as a practical experiment in architectural education, students were to propose a redevelopment plan that went beyond suggestions for stylistic upgrades

and focused instead on “the practical needs of the future in creating better business and

thereby helping the employment situation of that community.”17 (Figures 33 to 34, Santa

Ana Downtown Redevelopment, 1938, USC Design Project.) This project shows how

Weatherhead’s ideas about “sociological development” and present-day conditions implied a set of social, economic, and aesthetic concerns to be studied prior to any sketching or modeling.

As described in Architect and Engineer, the course began by separating students into three groups: the “Maps and Statistics” group prepared maps based on historic, current-day, and projected conditions, as well as real estate valuations, parking facilities, and proposed highway lines; the “Drawings” group drafted plans and elevations of

“present and proposed” buildings; and the “Model” group was tasked with depicting “in

three-dimensions the results of the combined efforts of the class.” Providing the ultimate

touch of realism, projected costs were to remain within a fixed budget (an assignment

16 “Andronicus Field Trip,” The Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XV, no. 4 (April 1934): 23. 17 Baldwin, Clayton, “Streamlining in Architectural Education,” Architect and Engineer, vol. 139 (October 1939): 26-28.

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Figure 33. “Architects to Finish Santa Ana Rejuvenation,” Bob Meyers and Mickey Frary of the USC College of Architecture and Fine Arts. Santa Ana Downtown Redevelopment, 1938, USC Design Projects. Source: USC Daily Trojan, 7 April 1938. Courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries, University Archives.

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Figure 34. Editorial Cartoon, “Santa Ana Bound.” USC College of Architecture and Fine Arts, Design Projects: Santa Ana Downtown Redevelopment, 1938. Source: USC Daily Trojan, 4 May 1938. Courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries, University Archives.

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drawing on coursework in estimating and construction costs). Although the plans were

ostensibly for Santa Ana, Baldwin wrote, the results “with proper study” were meant to

be applicable to cities with similar conditions. Amply covered in the local press, the

study trip was kicked off with a banquet, featuring talks by the mayor of Santa Ana and

G. Gordon Whitnall, founder and director of the City of Los Angeles Planning

Commission.

By the early 1940s, the USC planning field trips, still offered through the regular

design curriculum, had branched into issues of traffic and circulation. One such project

took place in 1940, as students took on the re-use and redevelopment of a roughly nine-

block area in Hollywood, near Highland Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard. The

assignment focused on proposing solutions for the mitigation of traffic congestion and

parking problems along Hollywood Boulevard. Students created scale models,

underwritten by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, to illustrate their

recommendations, such as converting underutilized areas behind commercial buildings

into landscaped parking areas.18 (Figures 35 and 36, Planning Hollywood, 1940, USC

Design Projects.) The class project culminated in a day-long event at the Hollywood

Bowl, featuring exhibitions of student drawings, plans, and scale models, and a banquet

and presentation attended by the public, local politicians, the Hollywood Chamber of

Commerce, and Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher C. Bowdon, who gave the evening’s

keynote address.19 The scale-models and plans created by students became the

18 “Students Map New Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, 5 May 1940. 19 “Mayor Bowron Speaks at Architecture Dinner, Model Project of Hollywood Business Area Will Be Exhibited by Students,” USC Daily Trojan, 10 May 1940, 1. USC Libraries, University Archives.

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Figure 35. Planning Hollywood, 1940, USC Design Projects. In this photo, from left to right, Edward Killingsworth, Clayton Baldwin, and Bates Elliott pose above a scale-model of the USC architecture students’ proposed solution for traffic and parking problems along Hollywood Boulevard. Source: University of Southern California Daily Trojan, 22 May 1940. Courtesy of University Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.

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Figure 36. Planning Hollywood, 1940, USC Design Projects. In this photo, Mary Kane “studies a model showing how the backs of business houses can afford convenient access from parking lots” to mitigate parking problems on Hollywood Boulevard. Source: University of Southern California Daily Trojan, 22 May 1940. Courtesy of University Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.

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centerpiece in a campaign on “Hollywood’s Parade of Progress,” led by the Hollywood

Chamber of Commerce to promote improvements planned for the city.

The focus on planning in the early 1940s took on a tone similar to the housing

projects of the Great Depression, in which the curriculum was shaped in anticipation of

the future demands of the profession. In 1934, Weatherhead spoke of preparing students

for the post-Depression building boom, in particular in response to the housing shortage.

By 1942, the dean spoke of preparing students for the post-World War II boom, arguing

for “thoughtful planning” rather than purely profit-driven developments that drained

cities of their vitality. This issue represented what Weatherhead believed to be the

greatest challenge to postwar architects. In an article in the USC Daily Trojan,

Weatherhead explained that USC architecture students consider planning improvements for congested cities because “so many American communities are strangling themselves socially and economically.”20 (Figure 37, Planning Culver City, 1942, USC Design

Projects.) In the 1942 project, for which students prepared a unified community plan for

Culver City, students focused on anticipating and mitigating traffic congestion and

parking shortages. In terms of methodology, Weatherhead again emphasized that

background research preceded design and model preparation, explaining to the Daily

Trojan that the “yearly projects entail many man-hours of work in research prior to the

actual construction of the model.”

While little material exists to illuminate the planning ideas forwarded by students,

descriptions of class projects reflect a tendency to follow the trends of the times,

including, for inner city areas, “redevelopment” driven by “slum clearance” or demolition

20 “Goodbye Traffic Jam,” USC Daily Trojan, 15 October 1942. USC Libraries, University Archives.

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Figure 37. Planning Culver City, 1942, USC College of Architecture and Fine Arts, Design Projects. Basil Pantages and E. Baer Fetzer, USC architecture students, pictured with their plans for Culver City. Source: USC Daily Trojan, 15 October 1942. Courtesy of University Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.

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of deteriorated areas; in the Hollywood project, for example, students concluded that

“many structures” between Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards “could easily be razed to

provide parking space for Hollywood shoppers.”21 Another student project, completed in

1943 by Straub, reflected the ideas of the garden city, with a self-contained urban

community arranged in a circular plan, along radial streets, with traffic and residential

areas separated. At Straub’s 1943 graduation ceremony, he won special honors for this

model “city of future,” planned for Chatsworth, California,

as an urban community for 6500 population, with civic center or “organic design,” separate units for business and social and residential areas together in circular form. Streets are arranged to resemble the spokes of a wheel, without traffic hazards, off the main highway, leading to the business center as the hub.

Divided into segments, the plan provides for a section to house transients whose labors will be required during the harvest seasons. Parks surround the central business district, with ample provision for auto parking. Fanning out from the hub is the residential area, while on the circumference of the circle is located the heavy and light industry section. Subsistence farms are located on the outskirts. The young architect did not overlook the recreational and sports needs of the community, but provided for them in a special locality.22

Within five years, Straub had become a faculty member at USC, where he taught

these same ideas to students. As Greg Walsh (USC 1954) noted, one semester of

Straub’s third-year design class focused on planning. Class discussions drew liberally

from, among other sources, the FHA pamphlet Planning the Neighborhood, which

reflected the ideas seen in Straub’s own 1943 student project. Walsh recalled an emphasis

on the ideal neighborhood size and configuration, including zoning and the “complete

21 Ibid. 22 “Valley City, Chatsworth Ideal Site for Young Architect’s Model Future Village,” Van Nuys News (Van Nuys, CA), 26 October 1943.

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separation of traffic and pedestrians.”23 This interest stayed with Straub throughout his

career. Three decades later, Straub, by then a faculty member at the Arizona State

University College of Architecture, followed Weatherhead and Gallion through his

ongoing engagement in regional planning issues.24

Another USC project in the postwar period demonstrates the continuing

engagement with the field of planning, a research-driven methodology, and also the

ongoing engagement of prewar alumnae in the postwar school. In 1948, USC graduates

and architects Jules Brady (USC 1936) and Edward Killingsworth (USC 1940, and one of

the students featured in the Daily Trojan coverage of the Hollywood planning project, as

seen in Figure 35), approached Dean Gallion with a suggestion

that USC prepare a model of one section of [Long Beach]... Approving of the suggestion, Dean Gallion adopted the idea as a project for all fifth year and graduate classes. However, instead of just concentrating on one section of the city, the college has made a study of all of Long Beach.

For one entire semester, the students concentrated on investigating Long Beach. They made their survey with the help of Werner Ruchti, city planning director, and his staff and prepared maps on zoning, land use, and topography. …Classes in city planning, architectural design, industrial design and landscaping are cooperating in making the scale model.25

The scale model created by the class, which measured 33 feet by 44 feet, was ultimately put on display by Long Beach’s Junior Chamber of Commerce as a model for how “this city might be redeveloped in the future.”26

Design Curriculum: The Aesthetics of Landscape, Site, and Topography

23 Walsh, Greg, interview with author, 29 May 2009, Santa Monica, California. 24 Kornman, Sheryl, “Thoughtful City Planning Called for by Architect,” Tuscon Daily Citizen (Tuscon, AZ), 18 March 1971. 25 “Jaycees to Display Scale Model of City,” Long Beach Independent, 9 May 1948. 26 Ibid.

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While idealized notions of Southern Californian identity continued to promote a

range of contemporary residential design options throughout the 1930s, the understanding

of regional identity that came to influence the design ethos at USC drew inspiration more

fundamentally from the place itself—landscape, topography, and site. While the work of

pioneering architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Rudolph M. Schindler, and Harwell

Hamilton Harris had already begun suggesting directions for avant-garde expressions of

an indigenous architecture, as noted earlier, neither the USC course descriptions nor

faculty articles during this period suggest an explicit look toward the avant-garde (or the

Arts and Crafts movement, for that matter). While Weatherhead believed in using the

best in historical precedent, he rarely cited his preferred sources. Rather, during his

tenure, societal conditions, the problem at hand, and the need to prepare students for

office practice determined problem sets and classroom methodology. This translated into

a focus on the economical, well-designed house, whether for single lots or tracts,

multifamily dwellings, and neighborhood and regional planning.

Three projects ranging from the late 1930s through the 1940s illustrate how the

aesthetics of place and landscape, and a focus on site-specific design, began to influence

the USC design approach. One particular challenge in Southern California, given the

region’s topography, is the hillside lot. In 1941, students tackled this problem in first-

year design. (Figure 38, “Class at S.C. Designs Cabins to Suit Landscapes,” 1941, USC

Design Project.) As described by Baldwin, the assignment began with selecting a small,

sloped hillside lot, on which students were to propose designs for “inexpensive mountain

cabins, tailor-made to become a part of terraced landscapes.”27 As presented by Baldwin,

27 “Class at S.C. Designs Cabins to Suit Landscapes,” Los Angeles Times, 22 June 1941.

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Figure 38. “Class at S.C. Designs Cabins to Suit Landscapes,” First- Year Design, 1941. Source: Los Angeles Times, 22 June 1941. Courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries, University Archives.

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solutions proposed by students showed a focus on site-specific design, with indoor-

outdoor integration now considered essential. Designs incorporated “large areas of glass

for sunlight and views,” as well as “sleeping porches, provision for a car port, barbeque

pits or ovens, and streamlined roofs.”

In addition, the mountain cabins proposed an economy of materials through the

use of native stone “for foundations and wall areas” and plywood “because of its strength

and ease of transportation.” This early use of plywood (in 1941) shows USC students

experimenting with structural applications of a new material within a few years after its

development. Just six years earlier, in 1935, Forest Products Laboratory (a division of

the US Department of Agriculture) had constructed the first “stressed skin” plywood

house, which became “the most widely known experimental house of the period.”28 As

Hise observed, the work of Forest Products Laboratory (in developing plywood and exploring its use as a structural element) and the John B. Pierce Foundation (in, among other things, carrying out residential space-and-motion studies) pioneered ideas in how to place industry and science in the service of better living. In this way, students and faculty at USC participated in the national (but decentralized) movement in the 1930s to

“simplify the house and streamline its construction.”29

A similar class project applied the problem of the inexpensive vacation home to the topography typical of Los Angeles’s periphery, the desert. Leading the project was

28 Hise, Greg, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 128. 29 Hise, Greg G., “The Roots of the Postwar Urban Region: Mass-housing and Community Planning in California, 1920-1950” (PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 1992), 89. In early 1940s, the availability of still-experimental plywood products would have increased with the 1942 establishment of Woodcraft Engineering Company in Los Angeles, said to be the region’s first manufacturing plant devoted to precision molded plywood; while production focused on plywood for aircraft subassembly during World War II, in the postwar era the plant would have presumably been an important developer and supplier of new pressed-wood products.

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Swedish architect Carl Birger Troedsson, whose arrival at USC in 1937 was heralded as

“bringing to the college the latest European movements in architectural design.”30

Troedsson, who remained on staff through circa 1944, attended the Royal Institute of

Technology in Sweden during an era in which Erik Gunnar Asplund served on the

faculty. While a student, Troedsson specialized in architectural construction methods and

modern housing experiments in Europe. During his seven years at USC, Troedsson taught

design and professional practices, and offered public lectures on modern city planning31

and European currents in low-cost housing, such as Sweden’s “successful experiment in

low-cost housing.”32

In an article in the Los Angeles Times describing the project, Troedsson explained

that the assignment posed the problem of an inexpensive desert home “with special

attention given to the problem of outdoor living and recreation.”33 Reporting on the

project, the Los Angeles Times marveled at the “new type of desert home” designed by

students, who proposed “removable roofs and outdoor dining-rooms”:

Varying radically from the conventional “week-end cottage,” the houses are being planned to provide a maximum of fresh air and sunlight, declared C.B. Troedsson, instructor in architecture. Modernistic in design, some of the homes are planned to hug the earth, while others provide second-floor living quarters. All are so arranged that they can be constructed for very little cost. Small cardboard models of the houses, placed on display in the college of architecture and fine arts [sic] of the Trojan institutions, have attracted much attention.34

30 Harrington, Johns, “Southern California, An Art Center,” Southern California Alumni Review, December 1939, 20. USC Libraries, University Archives. 31 Force, Daniel, “Modern Cities Antiquated by Construction Changes, Instructor Contends,” USC Daily Trojan, 27 April 1938. USC Libraries, University Archives. 32 “Troedsson Will Talk at Library,” USC Daily Trojan, 5 April 1938. USC Libraries, University Archives. 33 “Trojan Students Design New Type of Desert Home,” Los Angeles Times, 24 March 1938. 34 Ibid.

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In 1949, four years into Gallion’s term as dean, the problem of the site-specific

desert home was revisited in second-year design. Led by Baldwin, the class again

addressed the problem of an economical desert house with site challenges posed through

either “sloping hills or rock formations.”35 In addition to the similarities in the problem

itself, the method used in the assignment was very similar in both 1938 and 1949.

Baldwin explained to the Los Angeles Times that the objective was to provide pragmatic

training in “true California” design: “The problem of adapting tailor-made home planning

to meet specific conditions in true California style is one faced by most architects, and we

believe that training of students should be practical as well as theoretical.”36 The desert homes, Baldwin said, were meant to be tailored to their sites, both aesthetically and environmentally: in terms of design, the homes were to “portray the spirit of the

California or Arizona desert.” In terms of environment, the designs were to incorporate climatic controls for heat, cold, and “continuous bright sunlight.”

Continuing the tradition of using three-dimensional visualization prior to sketch

work, students in 1949 first created models “to give perspective” and anticipate any

“unforeseen problems of construction as the design progressed.” The 17 class models,

which as in the 1938 class project were exhibited at the School of Architecture, called for

features such as wide roof overhangs for shade protection, generous window spans to

capitalize on the views (but placed at an angle to diminish the heating effects of the sun),

and materials such as plywood panels “for ease of handling” and native rock “to decrease

construction costs.” In addition, students in the class considered cantilevered

35 “SC Students Present Ideas for All-Season Desert Home,” Los Angeles Times, 6 February 1949. 36 Ibid.

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construction as a construction technique allowing for sweeping views “uninterrupted by posts or beams.” The 1949 article offers far more detail than that of 1938, and reflects a broader awareness of and interest in contemporary residential design; but in terms of the

USC design philosophy, one sees here more continuity than change.

Regarding the issue of site-specific design, Esherick provides a point of contrast between USC and the University of Pennsylvania in the 1930s. Esherick wrote that, in spite of a directive from Paul Cret that students carefully consider and study how buildings were used,

Curiously, though, we were never given problems with real sites. The nature of the site, its physical characteristics and general appearance, might be described, but it was never a real site one could go to and look at and stomp around on. That the sites in the programs issued by the BAID in New York should all be hypothetical is understandable because the programs were being distributed all around the country, but such was not the case in Grade C [third year], where the programs were written at the school and worked on only there.37

The focus on site specificity at USC, in combination with technical coursework in architectural engineering and construction, provided students with a method for approaching sites considered unbuildable (an oft-cited characteristic in the work of postwar architects such as Buff, Straub, and Hensman, for example). This resourcefulness toward site planning had become increasingly important in Southern

California because, as USC graduate (1941) and lecturer Gordon Drake pointed out in

Architectural Forum in 1947,

Geographically, many California cities are located upon land so mountainous that they defy the usual gridiron plan; thus, sites have the grace of vista, sun, wind and privacy. … Today, new residential building is forced to the surrounding hills or to satellite cities miles away. Site considerations, then, are most interesting. From

37 Esherick, “Architectural Education,” 264.

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almost any height, a view is given of a sprawling city—particularly magnificent at night—the ranges of mountains, or the sea to the west.38

The occasion for the Architectural Forum article on Drake was the inclusion of his 1947 Presley House, located in the Los Angeles hills, in an article on outstanding postwar residential design throughout the United States. The article title itself, “Modular

House in Pacific Coast Capitalizes on the Area’s Famous Topography, Climate and

Materials,” reflected a growing national awareness of California’s modern residential architecture. In the Presley House, Drake capitalized on hillside views while also providing seamless indoor-outdoor integration, the requisite feature in contemporary residential design. Drake wrote, “there also must be the completely sheltered garden that becomes part of the living area” and landscaping to “interpenetrate the living space and thus relate the garden to the house.”39 (Figures 39 and 40, Gordon Drake, USC Class of

1941, Presley House, 1947, Los Angeles.)

The Presley House would have put to the test Drake’s training in designing for

challenging sites. As Architectural Forum described the Presley House,

Hugging the north side of the Los Angeles’ steepest hills, this house is a compromise in design between the free planning suggested by the ruggedness of the site and the rigidity of an eminently simple construction system. Although its design was also influenced by the rather lush requirements of a well-to-do client, the house is a mock-up of a modular, panelized building which may eventually be prefabricated for the average family and the average site.40

Indeed, a year before completing the Presley House, Drake had already translated

these ideas into his own modest one-room home, sited in Los Angeles mountains. Within

38 Drake, Gordon, “Modular House in Pacific Coast Capitalizes on the Area’s Famous Topography, Climate and Materials,” Architectural Forum, vol. 87 (September 1947): 100-116. 39 Ibid, 110. 40 Ibid, 112.

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Figure 39. Gordon Drake, USC Class of 1941, Presley House, 1947, Los Angeles. “Modular units are the basis of a house built as a working experiment in order to develop plans practical for mass-housing. Architect Gordon Drake designed it for Mr. & Mrs. David Presley, Los Angeles, California, using prefabricated panels wherever possible. The advantages of this system include the economies which result from easy, speedy construction and the flexibility of the plans you can have when you use interchangeable parts.” Source: House and Garden, February 1947.

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Figure 40. Gordon Drake, USC Class of 1941, Presley House, 1947, Los Angeles Plan and Terraces. “Fitted snugly into its hillside, the house has two terraces.” Bottom photos show (on left) the outdoor living room and (on right) the bedroom terrace. Source: House and Garden, February 1947.

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a year of completing the residence, Drake had won first prize for the design in the 1947

Progressive Architecture design awards (one of Drake’s fellow USC alumnae, Whitney

Smith, earned a mention in the 1947 competition). Completed in 1946, the house was one of Drake’s first projects after finishing architecture school; following graduation,

Drake had served in the US Marines until 1945. Upon seeing the “simple richness” of

Drake’s hillside residence, Progressive Architecture editor Thomas H. Creighton later recalled the jury meeting at which the building was considered, writing that “I shall never forget the simultaneous enthusiasm of Eliel Saarinen and Fred Severud when we

‘discovered’ Drake’s first to-be-published house.” 41 (Figures 41 to 43, Gordon Drake,

USC Class of 1941, Architect’s Residence, 1946, Los Angeles.) Progressive Architecture

chose this small residence as the first prize winner in private residential design for its

imaginative contribution as an architectural concept as well as for its brilliant plan. The house is a minimum home—hardly more than a single room… Yet within these modest confines, plus the nicely schemed outside living terrace, it achieves the living amenity of a house many times its size.42

In Drake’s work, the lessons of resourceful, site-specific design, indoor-outdoor

integration, and simplicity in materials and structure found poetic expression. His

treatment of materials and spatial arrangements recalled Harris, whom Drake had taken

as a summer design critic at USC in 1940 and in whose office Drake had worked for

several years. Drake’s interpretation of modular post-and-beam construction was

economical (capitalizing on prefabricated plywood panels) and exquisitely conceived,

striking “a rhythm similar to that which you get from a drumbeat repeated all the way

through a piece of music. Just as the drumbeat will pull together a musical composition

41 “Designer’s Own House, Los Angeles, California, Gordon Drake, Designer,” Progressive Architecture, July 1947, 45-52. 42 Ibid..

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Figure 41. Gordon Drake, USC Class of 1941, Architect’s Home, 1946, Los Angeles. Source: Doug Baylis, The California Houses of Gordon Drake. Source: J. Paul Getty Trust. Used with permission. Julius Shulman Photography Archive, Research Library at the Getty Research Institute (2004.R.10).

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Figure 42. Gordon Drake, USC Class of 1941, Architect’s Home, 1946, Los Angeles. Source: J. Paul Getty Trust. Used with permission. Julius Shulman Photography Archive, Research Library at the Getty Research Institute (2004.R.10).

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Figure 43. Gordon Drake Residence, 1947, Los Angeles. The home “took four months to complete…for the amazing cost of $4,500, which included built-in furniture. The plan was compact but spacious in concept and feeling; the structural system was simplified to be built by inexperienced labor; the results were sensational, since this is what many returning GI’s hoped to buy.” Source: Doug Baylis, The California Houses of Gordon Drake.

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and give it a sense of discipline and order, so Drake’s visible regular module gave his

architecture a sense of discipline and order.”43

In addition to Harris’s obvious imprint, though, Drake cited his former design teacher Troedsson (who arrived at USC the same year as did Drake, in 1937) as a guiding influence in his work. Reflecting on Troedsson’s influence, Drake once told Progressive

Architecture editor George A. Sanderson that “Troeddson taught me that architecture was a thing of the spirit. I still think he was right.”44 In addition, Drake shared with

Troedsson a concern for well-designed, low-cost architecture. In 1947 Drake wrote,

The time has now come when decent living no longer should be the exclusive right of the wealthy or the intellectual, but, rather, must be shared with the great mass of America that cannot afford the luxury of the architect. Realizing the social needs of his time, the architect must accept the responsibility of leadership in this field regardless of a minimum schedule of fees or any other consideration which has heretofore acted as a moral barrier.45

Drake evoked the College of Architecture design philosophy when wrote on another occasion: “Through research arrive at honest planning. Build. Evaluate. Give these ideas and developments to the community as they desire them. Create that desire.”46

For his part, Troedsson reflected on the idealism of Drake and his classmates in the late 1930s, writing that

The class of architectural students to which Gordon belonged at the University of Southern California was an interesting, stimulating one. The years were depression years, the depression-ridden years that so many try to gloss over and forget. To the already restless and searching youth was added the worry of the uncertainty as to their future—work for graduates of architectural schools was non-existent. To the architectural students, at least at U.S.C., they were hard

43 “Gordon Drake, 1917-1952,” House & Home, March 1952, 98. 44 Sanderson, George A., “About This Book,” in Baylis, Douglas, and Joan Parry, California Houses of Gordon Drake (New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1956), 8. 45 Drake, “Modular House in Pacific Coast,” 110. 46 “Gordon Drake, 1917-1952,” 95.

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years—the struggle to find money for tuition and for the daily meal was a very serious one; all of that, however, seemed to be compensated for with the interest that they showed in their study of architecture. …

As in all schools of all times, I suppose, that class showed the individuals who were merely trying to get through…and a more searching minority—and that minority in Gordon’s class was particularly searching and particularly serious about its search and pursued it with great intent. …In that class there were many who were holding their hands cupped to their ears—intent, purposeful, their eyes opening with a new understanding—and one of the most intent, serious and searching was Gordon.47

The slightly elegiac tone expressed by Troedsson for his talented former student was due to Drake’s death in 1952, at the age of 34, in a skiing accident in the Sierra Nevada. In spite of his short career, Drake became one of the architects trained in the pre-1945

College of Architecture who was instrumental in garnering national attention for a residential idiom that came to be seen as distinctly Southern Californian (though Drake continued to develop these ideas in his Northern Californian practice in the late 1940s and early 1950s).

By the time Drake’s Presley House was published in Architectural Forum in

1947, he had joined the faculty at USC as a lecturer in design, at the invitation of Arthur

Gallion. After relocating to the Bay Area in the late 1940s, Drake continued exploring ideas for affordable, modern housing prototypes in his modular, wood post-and-beam

Unit House. Constructed in Hayward, a city approximately 20 miles south of Berkeley, the Unit House capitalized on prefabricated materials and modular design to create an inexpensive ($5,600) home intended to expand in stages along with the family.48 As in

his Southern California projects, Drake expanded the living space and integrated interior

47 Troedsson, Carl Birger, in Baylis, California Houses, 81. 48 “This Home Was Designed to Grow,” San Francisco Chronicle, 18 November 1956.

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and garden spaces through transitional spaces and the extensive use of terraces and gardens, in what House and Home called “five zones for California living.”49 (Figure 44,

“Five Zones for California Outdoor Living,” Gordon Drake Unit House, 1950.) Drake’s

Bay Area collaborator, Douglas Baylis, designed the landscaping for the Unit House, which represented for Drake the realization of his wish to apply good design to middle- class housing.

The ideas driving the Unit House and Drake’s other work mirrored the national movement in modern housing, in particular in the focus on indoor-outdoor living, site- specific design, an informal, expandable program, and prefabrication as a means to economy. This approach also epitomized the mature design approach and philosophy at

USC. One example of the affinity between Drake’s Unit House and the USC approach is seen in the “USC Study House,” a student project published in 1952 in a special issue of the Los Angeles Times Home magazine. (Figures 45 and 46, “Tomorrow’s Architect” presents the USC Study House, 1952.) Eight articles, written by faculty members, presented the results of a student design project centered on the modern, affordable

1,800-square-foot home. The language used to describe the project (which posed to students nothing less than the problem of, “What is the home?”) reflected the era’s sense of possibility and conviction that new ideas would ultimately shape modern middle-class housing. Beyond postwar optimism, though, the USC Study House reflects the school’s continuing emphasis on the social utility of architecture. Gallion writes that USC students, “as representatives of the future architects who will design the homes of

49 “Five Zones for California Outdoor Living,” House and Home, March 1952, 37.

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Figure 44. “Five Zones for California Outdoor Living.” Gordon Drake, USC Class of 1941, Unit House, 1950, Alameda, California.

Planned with landscape architect Douglas Baylis, the expandable Unit House offered “five distinct zones for California outdoor living.” The ideas of the Unit House, such as expanding the living space through the use of terraces and gardens, an economical, expandable plan, modular design making use of prefabricated materials, are all mirrored in the 1952 “USC Study House,” published in the Los Angeles Times. Source: House and Home, March 1952.

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Figure 45. “Tomorrow’s Architect.” USC School of Architecture students demonstrate the “USC Study House.” On the left is USC alumni and faculty member Conrad Buff III. Source: “Tomorrow’s Architect,” Los Angeles Times Home, 14 September 1952.

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Figure 46. Model of USC Study House. “Roof removed, you are looking into tiny model of USC School of Architecture’s ‘House of the Future.” Source: Los Angeles Times, 14 September 1952.

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tomorrow” offered in the USC study house new ideas that “may provide provocative

material for those who will build those homes”:

As you turn these pages, you will perceive that the home is no longer conceived as a square box surrounded by four walls and a roof. It is a structure enclosing the interior space arranged to serve each function of family life. But it is more than that. The structure is designed in relation to the exterior space which it adjoins.50

Like Drake’s expandable Unit House, the USC Study House featured a three-

stage plan for construction, which would grow as the family (and its income) also

expanded. (Figures 47 to 49, Three-Stage Plan, USC Study House.) Central to the

house’s design were the needs of the family. Straub writes that “the fundamental patterns

of home life, the amount of space a family needs for good living” provided the starting

point for the design; here, as in Straub’s design classes, separate “zones” for living

defined spaces for social activities or seclusion. In an acknowledgement of the new

socioeconomics of postwar housing, Straub wrote that, in proposing a centralized, open

kitchen,

we were aware it was in this area that the greatest changes had occurred. No longer was it only the workplace for servants…neither is it just an efficiency laboratory as in the 20s…now once again we find the family returning to the home and so to the kitchen.51

Site specificity and indoor-outdoor integration remained the textbook features of

the USC Study House. Commenting on site-specific design in his contribution to the

series was visiting critic Edgardo Contini (who would have just completed work on the iconic Mutual Housing Association development in Crestwood Hills, along with Eckbo,

Whitney Smith, and A. Quincy Jones, all Contini’s colleagues at USC at the time). In his article, “Structure: Framework for the Future,” Contini explains that the students’ site-

50 Gallion, Arthur B., “Tomorrow’s Architect,” Los Angeles Times, 14 September 1952. 51 Straub, Calvin, “Plan: A Flexible House for Family Growth,” Los Angeles Times, 14 September 1952.

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Figure 47. Stage 1 of the USC Study House, “designed to meet basic needs of the young family.” Source: Calvin Straub, “Plan: A Flexible House for Family Growth,” Los Angeles Times Home.

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Figure 48. Stage 2, USC Study House. Source: Straub, “A Flexible House.”

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Figure 49. Stage 3, USC Study House. “As can be seen in the plan, the house actually extends into and becomes a part of the total garden space.” Source: Straub, “A Flexible House.”

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specific planning provided the key to balancing between “prefabrication and individualism.”52 Even for tract homes, Contini writes, “The combination of mass

production, good architectural design and sound land planning can create an extremely

desirable environment.” In his article, Eckbo echoed this, writing “The entire lot space must be planned in one continuous operation” in order to avoid “wasted space” and “poor interconnections between house and garden,” resulting in what Eckbo calls “impaired livability.”53

In terms of indoor-outdoor integration, Straub writes, the USC Study House

“actually extends into and becomes a part of the total garden space, the most important extension of the house being the great screened porch that opens from the family room.”54 Straub’s 1949 Sedlachek House illustrates the seamlessness Straub intended for

indoor-outdoor integration. (Figure 50, Calvin Straub, Sedlachek House, 1949.) In the

USC Study House, the t-shaped plan facilitates this integration, with arms extending to

enclose the onsite trees (as in Buff, Straub & Hensman’s Frank House, as shown in

Figure 4, though the home spanned more than twice the square footage). The t-shaped

plan allowed for what Eckbo called “a house with five patios,” recalling the “five zones

for California outdoor living” seen in Drake’s Unit House. “Nearly every room in the

house has a possible supplementary space outside,” Eckbo wrote, a feature that provided

the “most direct and intimate connection” between indoors and out and increased

“livability at relatively small additional cost.”55

52 Contini, Edgardo, “Structure: Framework for the Future,” Los Angeles Times, 14 September 1952. 53 Eckbo, Garrett, “A House with Five Patios,” Los Angeles Times, 14 September 1952. 54 Straub, “A Flexible House.” 55 Eckbo, “A House with Five Patios.”

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Figure 50. Calvin Straub, Sedlachek House, 1949. Source: Courtesy of the Getty Research Institute, Julius Shulman Archives.

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In his introduction to the issue, Gallion places these features in the context

emphasized at USC since the 1930s, that of planning on the level of the neighborhood

unit:

Just as the house itself is planned as an integral part of its lot, so the lot is conceived to be a part of the neighborhood in which it is situated. …The idea that the house and lot are…a part of the neighborhood…anticipates a time when we, as enlightened urban citizens, will insist upon our cities being planning as groups of neighborhoods in which the individual family may retain its identity as effective and responsible citizens.56

None of these articles mentions style as a driving factor in the architectural

solution reached. The only reference (albeit indirect) to style came not from the USC

faculty but rather the Home magazine editor, Jack Lester, who that “using Contemporary

design and available new materials, it is possible to design a house at least 50 years ahead

of the general level of public acceptance.”57 For his part, Straub, though presumed to be one of the authors of the “USC style,” later claimed that aesthetic effect was a second- order concern in his work. Reflecting on the atmosphere of the 1950s, Straub described the basic ideas he would have learned and taught at USC:

My intent was to recognize the unique nature of each client and program, site and orientation, without preconception or following any style or fashion cliché, to produce each individual and direct design solution.”58

As for Drake, even after his death, his ideas continued to influence the USC approach. According to alumnae Greg Walsh, Straub spoke often in design classes about

56 Gallion, “Tomorrow’s Architect.” 57 Lester, Jack, “Your Future Home?,” Los Angeles Times Home, 14 September 1952. 58 Kappe, Shelly, “Idiom of the Fifties: What Really Happened in Los Angeles,” Architecture California (November/December 1986): pp. 15-17.

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Drake, expressing admiration for his work and naming him a key influence in his own

ideas about architecture.59

The Role of Traditional Methods and Historical Precedent

Three-Dimensional Visualization: Shades and Shadows and Descriptive Geometry

With the establishment of the Department of Architecture, the academic year

1919/1920 introduced a staple of the Ecole des Beaux Arts system, a graphics course in

Shades and Shadows. From 1919 until circa 1965, Shades and Shadows and descriptive geometry classes remained lower-division requirements aimed to help meet

Weatherhead’s goal of emphasizing three-dimensional visualization. (Figure 51, USC

Shades and Shadows Course, 1933, Lee Kline illustration.) By 1965, though the USC architecture curriculum continued to require freehand drawing, Shades and Shadows and descriptive geometry courses appear to have been eliminated.

From 1928 through at least 1961, the instructor whose name became synonymous with Shades and Shadows was Verle Annis. Annis graduated from the University of

Pennsylvania, where he likely met Weatherhead when the dean took his 1924 sabbatical.

After completing his Bachelor of Architecture in 1924 and Master of Architecture in

1926, Annis joined the USC Department of Architecture in 1928, where he began teaching lower-division descriptive geometry, first-year architectural design, and (by the late 1930s) classes in Spanish Colonial architecture.60 For many students, the challenging coursework inspired a love-hate relationship; in retrospect, USC alumnae describe Annis

59 Walsh, Interview with author. 60 “Architectural Group Honors SC Professor,” Los Angeles Times, 27 January 1957.

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Figure 51. USC Shades and Shadows Course, 1933, Lee Kline illustration. Marked with Annis’s red-ink stamp, “Received on time.” Courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries, University Archives.

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as a no-nonsense taskmaster who demanded much and, in return, had much to offer. For

architect William Krisel (who entered USC in 1941 and completed his studies after

World War II), descriptive geometry coursework “opened up a world of three

dimensions” and Annis “was just terrific. Nobody liked him, but I thought he was great.

Because I learned so much from him, and it served me so well in life.”61 Eugene Flores

(USC 1962) agreed, recalling that Shades and Shadows was about “learning how to draw, learning how to read drawings, learning how to understand drawing...it really weeded out a lot of people.”62 Flores described Annis as a “drill master,” recalling that the instructor

gave assignments to be completed in class, then would “walk around and see what you

were doing, and he’d put a check on it if it was wrong, but he wouldn’t tell you what was

wrong!” Said Flores,

the biggest advantage of [descriptive geometry coursework] that I find lacking nowadays…since I’ve taught some architecture courses…[is] that the graphics would help you see better, to visualize better. To understand, because you had to go through these revolutions and bring everything back to a two-dimensional paper. It would help you begin to understand spatially… I think Verle Annis was very instrumental in giving people some very technically important visualization skills.63

Throughout this period, descriptions for Shades and Shadows and descriptive

geometry remained fairly uniform, presenting in 1931 “the theory of shades and shadows

as applied to practical methods in expressing the third dimension in architecture, ”

including methods of drawing “architectural perspectives” and the “perspective of

shadows.”64 In 1934, the course was offered as “Graphics,” presenting “the principles of

descriptive geometry as applied to problems of architecture and fine arts. Mechanical

61 Krisel, William, Interview with author, 22 February 2010, Los Angeles, California. 62 Flores, Eugene, Interview with author, 23 June 2009, Pasadena, California. 63 Ibid. 64 USC Bulletin, 1931-1932, 28-29.

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delineation and representation in three dimensions by means of shades and shadows, and

perspective.”65 In the postwar period, descriptive geometry expanded to two years, presented in two classes: Graphics, introducing “technical drawing and descriptive geometry; orthographic projections, revolution, developments; shades and shadows, mechanical perspective” and Shades and Shadows, covering the “application of descriptive geometry to shades and shadows on architectural forms.” From the 1940s through the early 1960s, the course descriptions changed very little.

In Esherick’s comparison of the 1930s and 1970s, he echoed the views of USC alumnae in recalling descriptive geometry coursework as valuable for his later practice, saying that the coursework taught “about light in the kind of rendering that you did, that you simply don’t get if you’re putting something in on the computer and then you push the key that says, ‘Sun’ and then it casts shadows.”66 He added, “it’s kind of an irony that the Beaux Arts education was supposed to be telling you about classical forms. What

I learned from it was not the orders and the classical forms, but how the light fell on those things, because it was a very exaggerated style.”67

For his part, Weatherhead appears to have had mixed feelings about retaining this

feature of the Beaux-Arts system. Although the cornerstone of his experiment was a de-

emphasis on paper techniques (which he believed to be “one of the great weaknesses” of

the Beaux Arts system) and focus on three-dimensional visualization, in his 1941 book

Weatherhead questioned the efficacy of descriptive geometry as a tool for teaching

visualization. Although descriptive geometry taught orthographic projection and

65 USC Bulletin, 1934-1935, 34. 66 Ibid, 42. 67 Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, Joseph Esherick: “An Architectural Practice in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1938 to 1996” (Berkeley, CA: University of California, Berkeley, 1996), 188.

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drafting, Weatherhead wrote, it had “never been proven” that the discipline helped

students learn how to “visualize correctly a three-dimensional situation represented by

two-dimensional orthographic projections.”68 In Weatherhead’s 1935 Architect and

Engineer article on architectural education, however, he wrote that “Many elements of traditional methods have long proven their excellence; and educators are reluctant to discard them until better ones are discovered.”69

Architectural History and International Currents in Art and Architecture

Once the 1930 experiment was launched, Weatherhead’s initiative to postpone students’ exposure to “tradition” meant a reorganization of coursework in architectural history. Whereas in 1929, architectural history and history of ornament classes began in the second year, by 1931 architectural history had been moved to the third year, and the

history of ornament course had been eliminated. In 1929, History of Architecture

covered “the origin and development of the styles of architecture with their historic

backgrounds, beginning with Egyptian architecture and ending with the Romanesque”; a

concurrent year of History of Ornament explored “the origins, developments, and

relations of the styles of ornament; the chief motives employed and their applications in

architecture.”70 In 1931, architectural history had become upper-division coursework,

and the History of Ornament class had been eliminated. The architectural history series

devoted a year each to surveys of “Egyptian, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Early

68 Weatherhead, The History of Collegiate Education, 165. 69 Weatherhead, Arthur C., “Note on Education in Architecture,” Architect and Engineer, ed. Pauline Schindler, vol. 123 (December 1935): 69. 70 USC Bulletin, 1929-1930, 67.

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Christian, Byzantine, and Romanesque architecture” and of “Medieval and Renaissance”

architecture.

The most substantial change made by Weatherhead to architectural history,

though, was reflected in the content. As Krisel noted, Weatherhead “remodeled

the required course, ‘history of architecture’ by shortening the influence of pre-1900

history of architecture…thereby having a greater importance for the history of

architecture after the year 1900.” In this way, Krisel says, “the Bauhaus could be

endorsed as a true architectural movement worthy of study.”71 Toward this end,

Weatherhead introduced in 1931 a new course in architectural history covering

“European and American architecture and allied arts from the French Revolution to and including the so-called modern expression of the present day.”72 This trend continued,

and from 1942 until at least 1961, the final year of architectural history generally covered

the architecture of the “modern period,” beginning with the “Industrial Revolution and its

results, Contemporary European movements and the problems of readjustment in the

United States, Influential architects, their contributions to the development of modern architecture, and important examples of their work.”73

In the summer of 1932, coinciding with the International Style exhibit in Los

Angeles at Bullock’s Wilshire, Weatherhead began teaching a course entitled

Appreciation of Modern Architecture (which by 1934 had been renamed Modern

Architecture). As Weatherhead told the Los Angeles Times, the course introduced the

71 Krisel, William, Personal communication with author, 15 July 2010. 72 USC Bulletin, 1931-1932, 30. 73 USC Bulletin, 1942-1943, 39.

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“important movements in twentieth-century architecture”74 and drew on Weatherhead’s

“study during the past three years of American and European architectural tendencies.”75

Until his departure in 1944, Weatherhead taught a majority of the architectural history

courses. After Weatherhead’s retirement, Baldwin handled architectural history courses,

which still spanned two years in the postwar period, until his death in 1958.

Throughout the 1930s, while the architectural history requirements for

undergraduates had decreased by 1937 from three to two years, the offerings in

architecture’s sister department, Fine Arts, grew more diverse. Part of this diversity grew

out of a renewed emphasis on Fine Arts in the early 1930s; in 1933, a name change, to

the College of Architecture and Fine Arts, reflected this emphasis; in 1934, the college

initiated a new graduate degree in Fine Arts. Given the proximity to the Fine Arts

division, architecture students could avail themselves of expanded offerings in

international currents and traditions. In 1934, University College offered, for example,

Art and Architecture of the Far East (including the arts of China, Japan, Tibet) as well as

a course entitled Further India, offering a “comparative study of the architecture of these

countries.”76 Separate courses on Chinese Art and Architecture and, in 1936, Japanese

Art and Architecture, which continued to provide an important touchstone in the work of

graduates and faculty, rounded out the offerings.

In the late 1930s, Annis drew on his own extensive travels through Latin America

to begin offering a course in Spanish Colonial Architecture. The course, which continued

through the early 1940s in the Fine Arts side of the College of Architecture, was likely to

74 “Summer Class in Designing Opens Friday,” Los Angeles Times, 12 June 1932. 75 Ibid. 76 USC Bulletin, 1934-1935, 41.

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have drawn from Annis’s extended trips to Latin America, including tours in 1933 to

Mexico and in 1938 to Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Panama.77 In 1945, when Gallion separated the disciplines of Architecture and Fine Arts, and the College of Architecture and Fine Arts became the School of Architecture, coursework in international arts and architecture would have been available as electives through the School of Fine Arts.

Pragmatism: Bridging the Gap between Classroom and Office

Technical Core of Classes

In its founding years, the College of Architecture curriculum was shaped by equal parts art and science: art, based on the origins in the College of Fine Arts, and science, based on proximity and association with the USC College of Engineering. In 1919, as the department was launched, the initial program reflects the beginnings of a multidisciplinary program balancing the two:

In the curriculum the essentials of a liberal education are provided with as much specific training in freehand drawing, design, history of architecture, and construction as a four year course will permit. This plan of study recognizes that architecture is essentially a fine art, the practice of which necessitates a broad knowledge of structural and building equipment engineering, and that design is the most essential subject in preparing students for the profession.78

Beginning in the 1910s, in addition to the requirement for a three-month internship in an architect’s office, pragmatism in the classroom was introduced through a series of technical classes. The coursework, which evolved along with technological and material advances of the day, included Building Equipment Engineering and Mechanics and Strength of Materials (both introduced in 1919), Architectural Construction (circa

77 “Editor’s Mail Box,” Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XVII, no. 2 (December 1935): 7. 78 USC Yearbook 1919-1920, vol. XV, no. 1, 145. USC Libraries, University Archives.

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1931), Architectural Engineering (circa 1934), Estimating and Construction Costs (circa

1935), and Modern Materials (which later became Materials and Processes) (circa 1937).

As of 1961, all of these courses remained part of the USC Bachelor of Architecture curriculum.

Given its proximity to the USC Civil Engineering program, the Department of

Architecture offered in its inaugural year a full complement of technical coursework, cross-listed through the College of Engineering. These courses included Materials of

Construction, Contracts and Specifications (one semester), Structural Design (one year, upper division), and Reinforced Concrete (one year, upper division). Throughout the

1930s, technical classes began to be offered from within the Department of Architecture itself that reflected the changing demands of the profession. The first of these, Building

Equipment Engineering, introduced students to the principles of mechanical systems; on the course list from 1919 to at least 1961, the course description evolved through the years as technologies changed for heating, sanitation, ventilation, and lighting systems.

In 1931, the year-long course in Architectural Construction presented “a study of the general principles of structural design from the standpoint of the architect; wood and steel construction and reinforced concrete as a basic element in modern architecture.”79

In order to help architectural draftsmen expand their skills during the Great

Depression, a review course in Architectural Engineering had been introduced at the USC extension, University Park, for “experienced architectural draftsmen who desire to qualify in engineering subjects relating to the practice of architecture;” the year 1935 also introduced the year-long course in Estimating and Construction Costs, which offered

79 USC Bulletin, 1931-1932, 32.

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instruction in carrying out “estimate surveys including costs of labor, materials, and other

elements entering into building construction.”80 (By 1965, Estimating and Construction

Costs had been eliminated from the curriculum.) In 1937, a class in Modern Materials

(renamed Materials and Processes in 1942) rounded out the technical core of classes.

Focused on “elementary construction, the processes of shaping, assembling, and finishing” modern materials, by 1949 Materials and Processes had expanded to two years.

By 1965, the course material appears to have been incorporated into the three-year series,

Structures.

Professional Practices

The keystone in Weatherhead’s bridge from classroom to office, and one of the features that contributed to a perception that College of Architecture graduates were imminently employable, was a three-year series in Professional Practices. Although limited coursework in working drawings, detailing, and “professional relations” had been offered as early as the 1910s, the year 1931 launched the three-year, six-course sequence.

Required for third, fourth, and fifth year students, this course remained intact in the curriculum well into the 1960s (though, by 1965, it had been reduced to one year).

Designed as a continuous sequence, the series aimed to prepare students for modern office practice; the course description itself offers the best illustration of what

Weatherhead intended when he described the “transition between school and office practice” the curriculum at USC aimed to provide. In its introductory year, 1931, the professional practices series aimed to provide a complete portrait of office practice. The

80 USC Bulletin, 1934-1935, 36.

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first year covered “the preparation of working drawings, details, specifications, and

contracts,” as well as “simple plans and specifications of work already executed” and the

onsite “inspection of buildings under construction and their materials.” The second year

brought the “advanced study of the preparation of working drawings,” including “a close

study of building ordinances covering all classes of structures.” In the final year, students attended lectures and discussions on “professional relations, the organization of office management, legal aspects, and building finance as the subjects relate to the profession of architecture.” The staple of the series were visits to the offices of local architects, an initiative facilitated by the long-term collaboration between USC and the city’s architects, who since the 1920s served as design critics and advisory committee members. Between

1931 and 1949, the one significant change in the Professional Practices series was the specification that working drawings would “especially” focus on steel and concrete construction for fourth-year students.

From 1931 through 1945, most of the three years of Professional Practices was taught by C. Raimond Johnson, a former employee in John Galen Howard’s San

Francisco office, a 1926 graduate of USC’s Department of Architecture, and acting dean during Weatherhead’s sabbaticals. Through the late 1930s and early 1940s, those sharing teaching responsibilities included Troedsson and long-time faculty member Sumner

Spaulding. In the postwar period, two USC graduates led Professional Practices; among alumnae interviewed for this study, by the late 1950s and early 1960s, their names had become synonymous with the three-year series: Henry Charles Burge, who led the

Professional Practices beginning in 1947 and graduated from the USC College of

Architecture in 1935 (Burge also served as interim dean of the School of Architecture

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from 1961 to 1963, following Arthur Gallion’s departure). The second USC graduate to

lead Professional Practices, following his own graduation in 1951, was Arthur O’Leary,

who joined Burge as a lecturer in 1953 and remained with the School of Architecture

until at least 1963.

The Professional Practices series appears to have been one of the features of the

USC curriculum that made its graduates employable and the program experimental.

Several points of comparison put this in context. In a 1955 survey of the Association of

Collegiate Schools of Architecture, just under half the schools responding reported that

they required coursework in working drawings that incorporated modular coordination, a

deficiency the author equated with offering “a very fine course in internal medicine, but

no course in pharmacology.”81 While these results were filtered through the sub-topic of

modular design, the subject of instruction in working drawings was revisited during a

question and answer session with the presenter, D. Kenneth Sargent, dean of the

University of Syracuse School of Architecture:

Scheick: From your talk I got the impression that a good many architectural schools don’t even teach working drawings.

Sargent: I’m afraid you’re right. I can’t understand this philosophy, and as you can gather, I don’t particularly condone it. On the other hand I’d like to make it clear that I don’t think that a school of architecture should teach working drawings, just as a subject. I think working drawings should be taught as a means of communication for the other subjects which the student is forced to learn and study, such as the nature of materials and their assembly, which is a very important factor in building, and of course in design. Many schools do not teach working drawings simply because they feel this verges on trade school formation.82

81 Sargent, D. Kenneth, “Educational Programs on Modular Coordination,” in Building Research Institute, The Current Status of Modular Coordination, Publication No. 782 (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council, 1960), 23. 82 Ibid, 30.

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Similarly, a 1958 survey of US architecture schools, conducted by the Construction

Specifications Institute (CSI), showed that fewer than one-third of responding schools (12 of 38) reported that their curricula offered coursework in architectural specifications.83

In addition, at the University of California, Berkeley, as of 1953, the program

curriculum shows that, three years after Wurster became dean, coursework in working

drawings and professional practices remained limited to graduate-level work, though the undergraduate curriculum required a full complement of technical classes.84 Similarly,

Esherick commented that, while the University of Pennsylvania offered a “carefully

coordinated and integrated program,” including coursework in construction, drawing,

rendering, and history, he concluded that “all parts tied together supporting the design

courses which dominated the curriculum.”85 The notion of carrying a project through

from beginning to end, as covered in USC’s Professional Practices series, for example,

did not come into play. “We studied very little of putting all that together,” said

Esherick, since the buildings they designed “were looked on as such impossible, grand

dreams,” not actual projects you would go and build.86 Esherick recalled that, as a student,

I was always yelling at the faculty to tell me how you actually build it. You draw all these wonderful things and put the stone joins in, but I didn’t understand how you kept the water out, and I mean, how you really detailed it and solved all the obvious problems. …The Beaux Arts stuff sort of loaded the building up with

83 “Report on the Building Research Institute, Minutes of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture,” Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 15, no. 3, (autumn 1960): 3- 67, quoted here p. 32. 84 “School of Architecture, University of California,” January 1953, University of California, Berkeley, School of Architecture. Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley, C.W. Moore Collection, Project/Folder, Wurster Advising Curriculum Electives. 85 Esherick, “Architectural Education,” 241. 86 Joseph Esherick: “An Architectural Practice,” 57.

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stone facing—you didn’t really build a stone building, you just made it look as though you had built one.87

Social Responsiveness: The Great Depression, New Deal, and World War II

Transfer Students and Adult Education

With the economic decline of the Great Depression, the College of Architecture expanded its offerings of evening coursework aimed at adults. Some of these courses were offered through the USC extension program, University College, whose open- enrollment policy and relative independence appears to have offered a level of flexibility that might not have been possible in the fixed professional curriculum of the College of

Architecture.

In September 1930, the Los Angeles Times announced the addition of new

evening classes at both the college’s 35th Street facilities and University College, housed

at the time in the Transportation Building in downtown Los Angeles.88 Taught by long- time staff Clayton Baldwin and Verle Annis, the night courses were promoted as adult education, designed as preparation for the California State Board examination in architecture. In January 1932, the Los Angeles Times announced that USC would be

“providing unusual study opportunities” that semester, with “evening adult classes” in a range of fields, including architecture, real estate, journalism, civics, and international relations.89 Striking a balance between the pragmatic and academic, announcements for

University College architecture classes described coursework providing both “a

87 Ibid, 48. 88 “Architectural Courses Open, University Offers Four Night Classes in Design,” Los Angeles Times, 14 September 1930. 89 “College Lists New Courses, USC Providing Unusual Study Opportunities, Evening Adult Classes to Cover Many Fields,” Los Angeles Times, 3 January 1932.

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thoroughly scholarly approach to the modern program” and “special attention…to the

practical needs of students who are already engaged in the professional fields.”90 In the

summer of 1931, the College of Architecture revived its summer program, offered at the

college’s 35th Street site.

During the Great Depression, an increasing number of students appear to have

transferred into the College of Architecture and Fine Arts from junior colleges. By 1932,

the trend had become noticeable enough that the architectural fraternity at USC

commented on the demographic shift reflected in incoming pledges; the change, however, was attributed to the strength of California’s community colleges (which very well might have been a factor) rather than the price of tuition, room and boarding at USC.

In 1931/1932, attendance costs for the College of Architecture ran $285 for annual tuition, as well as approximately $200 for yearly housing and meals. The total of $485 represented almost 30 percent of the average American wage for 1932, estimated to be

$1,500 a year (a 40 percent drop from 1929 wages).91 Commenting in the Alpha Rho Chi

newsletter, an architecture student wrote that

It is interesting to note that the majority of the pledges of the Andronicus chapter this fall are older men. The junior colleges in California have become very strong during the past four years. Consequently the last few years have been rather “lean” for Andronicus men, but now they are starting to get the junior college graduates. Out of the eleven pledges, three are straight freshmen and the other eight have gone to junior college or some other university.92

90 USC University College, “College of Architecture and Fine Arts, Spring Quarter, March 28 to June 11, 1932.” USC Libraries, University Archives. 91 Washburne, Carol Kott, ed., America in the 20th Century, 1930-1939, vol. 4 (North Bellmore, NY: Marshall Cavendish, 1995). 92 “Junior Colleges Strong in the West,” The Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XIV, no. 2 (December 1932), 11- 12.

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In response to this demographic shift, in 1937 the College of Architecture and

Fine Arts added a transitional course in “intermediate” design for “transfers from junior colleges and other institutions.”93 Taught by Baldwin in 1937, the one-year course bridged lower and upper division design for transfer students by covering the “general subject matter” from Architectural Design I and II, with “creative exercises in three- dimensional architectural form followed by problems involving the theory of simple

planning.”94

Federal Housing Administration Policies and Focus on Housing

Small-Home Design

Fueled by the acute housing shortage and New Deal policies (including the 1934

establishment and 1937 expansion of the National Housing Act), explorations in housing,

both small home and multifamily, decisively shaped the college’s design curriculum well

into the postwar period.

Central to the emphasis on residential design was the small, well-designed house.

Beginning in the fall of 1937, in response to the programs and policies of the Federal

Housing Administration, University College began offering “Residential Planning and

Finance,” a class “designed to aid prospective home builders or those planning to

remodel their houses under the Federal Housing Act.”95 Announcing the class in 1937,

the Los Angeles Times wrote that “trends in architecture, planning the small home,

ordinances, and the selection of the site are features of the course, with costs and methods

93 USC Bulletin, College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1937-1938, vol. 31, no 21 (January 1937), 36. USC Libraries, University Archives. 94 USC Bulletin, 1937-1938, 36. 95 “U.S.C. Offering Night Course to Aid Home Builders,” Los Angeles Times, 12 September 1937.

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of finance also included.” 96 The 1941 course catalog described the scope of the class,

which was taught by Baldwin and remained part of the curriculum until 1942:

especially adapted to the needs of those interested in planning or building the small house. Contemporary trends in architectural design. Selection and requirements of the site. Materials entering into the construction and decoration of the home. Importance of landscaping and environment; ordinances as they apply to planning and construction; cost and methods of finance.97

After being discontinued in 1942/1943, Residential Planning and Finance was revived in

1944 as Planning the Postwar Home (in a continuation of the 1930’s emphasis on the

“modern home of the future”). In 1945, the course became part of the professional

curriculum, reflecting an early gearing up for postwar residential expansion; Planning the

Postwar Home was designed as a

nontechnical course in architectural planning for the prospective home owner. Analysis of the site and orientation. The planning of space as related to modern living in single or multiple dwelling types. New developments in the use of materials and methods of construction. Landscaping, cost analysis, and financing.98

Both the pre- and postwar iterations of this nontechnical class show a focus on landscaping, the environment, and site selection and design, ideas that came to characterize contemporary residential design (though they were already considered requisite features of the modern house) well into the postwar period.

By the late 1930s, the national upswing in construction, fueled by liberalized mortgage policies for single-family residences, had translated into a construction boom in

Southern California. As Hise pointed out, the 1939 Annual Report of the Federal

Housing Administration (FHA), which published data on “homes and their purchasers,”

96 “U.S.C. Offering Night Course to Aid Home Builders” (1937). 97 USC Bulletin, Harris College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1940-1941 (December 1940), 37-38. USC Libraries, University Archives. 98 USC Bulletin, 1945-1947, 30.

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showed that Los Angeles led “in the national recovery and in the provision of low-cost

homes for wage-earners.”99 Fueling this construction boom, the FHA expanded its

lending policies in February 1938 to include incentives for homes carrying a mortgage

principal of less than $2,500, as well as the expansion of mortgage eligibility (from 80 to

90 percent of appraised value) and repayment periods (which could span “a maximum of

twenty-five years on owner-occupied homes valued under $5,400”); this policy

expansion resulted in a rapid jump in private-sector residential construction “surpassed

only in the boom of 1923.”100

One local example of the FHA-inspired boom was the newly minted subdivision

of Santa Anita Village, a residential community in present-day Arcadia, east of Pasadena.

Spanning 200 acres of the former Rancho Santa Anita, Santa Anita Village’s “low-priced

residential community” reflected the expanded FHA lending policies (with the model

house, at $5,000, priced to qualify for the new long-term loans) and also the continuing

public fascination with contemporary exhibition housing. In the fall of 1939, Santa Anita

Village provided the laboratory for Baldwin’s second-year design course. In the

assignment, students explored two aspects of residential design that remained central in

the postwar approach: site- and program-driven design, in which features such as

orientation, topography, and landscaping, as well as client needs, served as the point-of-

departure for the architectural solution. (Figure 52, Small-Family Housing, Santa Anita

Village, 1939, USC Design Project.) Santa Anita Village was selected for the project,

99 The FHA figures cited by Hise show that “31 percent of the new homes accepted for mortgage insurance in Los Angeles were valued below $4,000. By contrast, of the largest twenty metropolitan areas in the country, only St. Louis had greater than 10 percent of its FHA homes within that range.” Hise, “Roots of the Postwar Urban Region,” 245. 100 Ibid, 244.

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Figure 52. Small-Family Housing, Santa Anita Village, 1939, USC Design Project. In the Santa Anita Village project, USC architecture students use a three- step process: “first they consider the requirements of a family that is to occupy a house, the best amount of room space and the exact suitability of the dwelling to the site; then they make a model of the home.” Source: “Architecture Students Get ‘Streamline’ Instruction,” 1940, Los Angeles Times.

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Baldwin told the Los Angeles Times, because it represented “one of Southern California’s

outstanding examples” of a planned community of modestly priced homes incorporating

architectural standards.101 Ultimately, the students’ model for Santa Anita Village was to

be incorporated into the demonstration housing. Calling the USC design project “one of

the most significant studies relating to Southland residential design,” the Los Angeles

Times described the project as “stressing ‘three-dimensional thinking’ for architectural

students in the planning of ‘space for living’”:

Nineteen students are being guided by Prof. Clayton M. Baldwin in an experiment which may bring about development of a new approach toward home design to meet not only the requirements of the family that is to occupy a planned dwelling, but also to fit the home to its site with the greatest possible degree of exactness.102

In the project, coordinated with subdivision developer Raymond A. Dorn Company, students drew lots for a given home-site and “proceeded to consult with a family in the role of client.” Baldwin described the class approach to the Los Angeles Times:

Working with the client, each student then was required to study the site and its environment before going ahead with the project… The next step, the making of a preliminary model of the home, was based on a desire to develop three- dimensional thinking by the students. Instead of merely working with two dimensions on the routine drawing board, the student was asked to consider each room in the house as space for living, producing a rough model of the entire home, room by room.

In the Santa Anita Village project, one sees that comprehensive studies “of our present-day order and needs” continued to drive the design approach, as students made

repeated field trips to Santa Anita Village to study construction methods and materials in use on the many homes rising there. Photographs were taken of construction processes and details of structure, as well as of completed homes. A

101 “S.C. Students to Design Santa Anita Village Homes,” Los Angeles Times, 29 October 1939. 102 “Architecture Students Get ‘Streamline’ Instruction,” Los Angeles Times, 4 February 1940.

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thorough study was undertaken of building ordinances and protective architectural restrictions in effect at the property.

The practical experience working with “architectural restrictions” (in this case,

presumably FHA standards) allowed students to “work directly with reality, rather than

with dreams on drawing boards” in the creation of working drawings, cost estimates, and

models; the Los Angeles Times reported that “So widespread has been the interest

aroused in this experiment in architectural education that arrangements are being worked

out by the Santa Anita Village developers to place the home models in display upon their

completion.”103

While no photographic evidence of the 1939 model home has yet been located, a similar student project, in 1948, resulted in the construction of a model home still standing in Los Angeles’s Baldwin Hills (itself home to a landmark Garden City complex constructed in 1941 by Reginald D. Johnson and Clarence Stein). The “Villageaire” home (a name chosen by USC student Bill Hines in a university-wide contest)104 was designed by four fifth-year architecture students, Jerald King, Jack Strickland, Paul Tay,

and Harry Wilson, working under Gallion and USC design instructor and alumni, Henry

Burge. (Figures 53 to 56, The “Villageaire Model Home,” USC Student Project,

1948/1949, Village Gardens, Baldwin Hills, Los Angeles.) Continuing the long USC

emphasis on the “practical study project,” the $16,500 home was financed by California

Federal Savings and Loan Association and constructed on a lot acquired by the developer

of Village Gardens, Walter H. Leimert Company.105 As with the Santa Anita Village

103 “S.C. Students to Design Santa Anita Village Homes,” Los Angeles Times. 104 “SC Model Home Name Selected,” Los Angeles Times, 1 January 1950. 105 “Home Designed by SC Students Nears Finish,” Los Angeles Times, 27 November 1949.

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project, the objective appears not to have been cutting-edge design but FHA backing and

consumer acceptability. The design of the residence, which students dubbed a “Ranch-

type dwelling,” was the result of six months of discussion among the students, faculty,

the funding agency, and real estate professionals, during which students sought to “learn of features preferred by prospective buyers.”106 In this way, the USC Study House would have been a closer representation of the general design philosophy at the school, given that the project proposed an ideal prototype rather than a house guaranteed to win FHA- backed mortgage insurance.

However, the Villageaire home incorporated many of the same design principles as the USC Study House. Consisting of two adjacent wings, oriented away from the street, the interior was planned to make maximum use of its 1,400 square feet while also maintaining “complete separation of living and sleeping quarters.”107 An open dining- living room anchors the one-story wing, which offered the requisite feature of indoor-

outdoor integration through a full wall of large-pane glazing and glass doors, leading onto

the patio and garden. The adjacent wing, elevated over a garage, contained the bedrooms,

bathroom, and den. Open beamed ceilings were used throughout the home, which was

appointed in “informal, modern” furnishings provided by Barker Brothers. USC

promoted the Villageaire model in an illustrated brochure extolling the home’s “comfort, convenience and charm” and modern amenities, such as a “New Freedom Gas Kitchen” provided by Southern California Gas Company. In turn, the manufacturer of the stove used in the “New Freedom” kitchen, Gaffers & Sattler, capitalized on this product

106 Ibid. 107 “The Villageaire Home, Designed by the School of Architecture, University of Southern California,” n.d. (circa 1949). USC Libraries, University Archives.

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Figure 53. The Villageaire Model Home, USC Student Project, 1948/1949, Baldwin Hills, Los Angeles. After opening to the public, a reported 45,000 visitors viewed the two-bedroom, 1,400-square-foot demonstration home. Courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries, University Archives.

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Figure 54. The Villageaire Model Home, USC Student Project, 1948/1949. Village Gardens, Baldwin Hills, Los Angeles. Courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries, University Archives.

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Figure 55. Villageaire Model Home, USC Student Project, 1948/1950, Los Angeles. As the home appeared in circa 1950 (top) and 2010 (bottom). With the exception of an addition on the rear elevation, original exterior features and materials appear intact. Sources: “Villageaire Home, School of Architecture,” courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries, University Archives, and Kenneth Breisch, 2010.

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Figure 56. Plan, Villageaire Model Home, USC Student Project, 1948/1949, Village Gardens, Baldwin Hills, Los Angeles.

Consisting of two adjacent wings, oriented away from the street, the interior was planned to make maximum use of its 1,400 square feet while also maintaining “complete separation of living and sleeping quarters.” An open dining-living room anchors the one-story wing, which offers the requisite feature of indoor-outdoor integration through an extended wall of large-pane glazing and glass doors, leading onto the patio and garden. The adjacent wing, elevated over a garage, contained the bedrooms, bathroom, and a den.

Source: “Villageaire Home, School of Architecture, University of Southern California.” Courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries, University Archives.

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placement in its own advertisements.108 (Figure 57, “See the Gaffers & Sattler at

‘Villageaire’ Model Home in Baldwin Hills.”) According to the agreement with

California Federal Savings and Loan, following the four-month demonstration period, any proceeds from an ultimate sale were to return to the School of Architecture for a

research fund.

The Villageaire opened for public viewing on January 8, 1950. Within a week of

its premiere, 5,000 visitors had reportedly toured the property,109 which was promoted by

USC, the local press, and the manufacturers whose products, including furnishings,

appliances, carpets, and drapes, completed the USC students’ ideas for a consumer-

friendly contemporary home. (Figure 58, “Villageaire, Model SC Home, Draws

Visitors,” Los Angeles Times coverage of Villageaire’s January 1950 debut week.) By

April 1950, when Villageaire closed for public viewing, an estimated 45,000 visitors had

toured the modest two-bedroom residence.110 Based on this success, a similar project,

directed by Gallion and Burge, was launched in 1952 in Monterey Park, for another

1400-square-foot home to be constructed on a lot donated by the companies developing

the subdivision as a whole (Kenbo Corporation and Contempo Homes).111

While modest in size and artistic pretension, the Villageaire model home (as well

as the subsequent project in Monterey Park) represents an example of the continuing

fervor for demonstration housing and the “ideal home of the future.” Constructed for a

cost of $16,500, with an eye toward securing mortgage backing, the home represented an

108 Display Ad 137, Gaffers & Sattler, Los Angeles Times, 26 February 1950. 109 “Villageaire, Model SC Home, Draws Visitors,” Los Angeles Times, 15 January 1950. 110 “Villageaire Home to Close,” Los Angeles Times, 9 April 1950. For estimates of visitors to the demonstration home, see also “SC Student Architects to Erect Model Home,” Los Angeles Times, 18 May 1952. 111 “SC Student Architects to Erect Model Home.”

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Figure 57. Advertisement by Gaffers & Sattler, the manufacturers of the stove in Villageaire’s “New Freedom Kitchen.” “See the Gaffers & Sattler at ‘Villageaire’ Model Home in Baldwin Hills… Designed and built by U.S.C. School of Architecture.” A small sketch of the USC student designed home completes the advertisement. Source: Los Angeles Times, 26 February 1950.

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Figure 58. Los Angeles Times coverage of Villageaire’s January 1950 debut week, during which 5,000 visitors reportedly tour the home. To the right of this photo, the entrance and foyer are shown, separated from the house by a glass partition. Villageaire Model Home, USC Student Project, 1948/1949. Source: Los Angeles Times, 15 January 1950.

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everyman’s Case Study House. In addition, the project reflects the local impact of USC’s

long pedagogical tradition of hands-on student projects and a socially responsive

curriculum (in this case, as seen in the continuing focus on FHA-backed small-house

design).

Continuing this tradition, and following in the footsteps of his former design

instructor Baldwin, Straub, by then a design instructor at USC, explained to the Los

Angeles Times the approach for a 1955 School of Architecture design project focusing on

the small, well-designed house. (Figure 59, Small House Design, 1955, USC Design

Project, Calvin Straub.) Referring to the 1930’s housing movement, Straub claimed that

“In the last 25 years an astounding change has occurred in architecture, a new direction

almost without parallel in the history of building. The trained architect has begun to

participate in the design of small houses.” While this assertion might be overstated, it

reflects a continuation of the school’s 1930’s focus. In addition, Straub’s words on

planning mirror what had become a focal point in the College of Architecture’s design

curriculum for over twenty years:

housing and house design have become one of the most important aspects of the new architectural education. …But even beyond this is a greater challenge, that of the relationships in planning and design between the house, its neighborhood and community. Safe and convenient walks to schools and shopping centers, parks and recreational facilities, reasonable privacy and sociability with one’s neighbors…all these and other concerns of reasonable planning are absolutely necessary for good living. 112

Multi-family Residential Design

112 Straub, Calvin, “Small-House Tracts, A Challenge to Tomorrow’s Architect,” Los Angeles Times, 20 November 1955.

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Figure 59. USC Design Project: Small House Design, 1955, led by USC alumni (1943) and design instructor Calvin C. Straub. Third-year design instructor and USC class of 1943 alumni Calvin Straub presents USC student projects. Source: Los Angeles Times, 20 November 1955.

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In the late 1930s, the 1937 Housing Act (the Wagner-Steagall Act) established

funding mechanisms for federally subsidized, low-cost housing. In response, in the late

1930s, USC design classes began focusing on multifamily dwellings. One such project in

1939 posed the problem of the design of a 16-family apartment house, sited on four

adjacent lots close to USC. (Figure 60, Multi-family Residential Project, 1939, USC

Design Project.) As with the planning project in Santa Ana, prior to design work, student teams prepared economic, demographic, and market studies of the area. Said Baldwin, the approach was meant to give students experience in the collaborative process that architectural practice had become. Modern architectural practice, he wrote, included

“more than just drawing pretty facades,” and every architect should be prepared to participate in “questions that must be solved collectively” and “discussions that should make [the architect] alert to the conditions of today and not, as under the old school regime of the Beaux-Arts Analytique, to adapt problems of ancient Greece and Rome.”113

Offering students a new “perspective of reality,”114 the project posed the problem

of designing “multiple dwelling structures so as to yield maximum income without

sacrificing spaciousness of living accommodations, architectural beauty and outdoor

living requirements.”115 The design solutions show an attempt to incorporate key features of contemporary single-family residential design into multifamily housing. In Los

Angeles Times coverage of the project, the students were said to have reached a

“consensus” that “modern architecture is making full use of sun-decks, patios, glass brick

113 Baldwin, Clayton, “Streamlining in Architectural Education,” Architect and Engineer, vol. 139 (October 1939): 26-28. 114 Baldwin, “Streamlining in Architectural Education,” 26-28. 115 “Class Builds House Models, Actual Construction Methods Studied,” Los Angeles Times, 11 June 1939.

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Figure 60. Multi-family Residential Project, 1939, led by Clayton Baldwin. “Professor Clayton M. Baldwin, USC College of Architecture, explaining model of 16-family apartment house.” This student model, which appears to draw inspiration from the International Style and the 1927 Weissenhof housing exhibit in Stuttgart, was also highlighted in the Los Angeles Times article reporting on this class project, as shown in Figure 61 below. Source: Architect and Engineer, October 1939, p. 28.

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and a profusion of windows.”116 The student project highlighted in press coverage of the

class owes a clear debt to the International Style, in a design configuration and detailing

that recalled contributions to the widely published Weissenhof exhibit in Stuttgart,

Germany, in 1927. (Figure 61, USC College of Architecture, 1939, Second-year design

class tackles problem of modern multifamily housing.)

World War II

With the outbreak of World War II in Europe, prior to the US entry into the war,

the College of Architecture and Fine Arts again shifted gears and launched defense-

related coursework, beginning in 1941 with Fundamentals of Camouflage and Protective

Concealment of Industrial Plants. The curriculum shifts aimed to introduce students to

concepts in the design of defense-related projects such as bomb shelters, hospitals, and

airports. (Figure 62, USC War-time Curriculum, 1942, Dean Weatherhead and student

pose before a design of an airport.) The Los Angeles Times described the changes to the

college’s curriculum in 1941:

Theoretical enemy bombers would have difficulty in locating their camouflaged targets in this area if designs by students in the College of Architecture and Fine Arts…are carried out. For camouflage along with other defense measures of emergency housing, the designing of wartime hospitals and structural protection of civilians against bombardment are to be features of class projects in architecture.

From studies in the experiences of England the S.C. students will be assigned projects in planning bomb shelters—not merely holes in the ground but places of refuge designed to suggest pleasant surroundings and affording relaxation from mental stress.117

116 Ibid. 117 “S.C. Course in Architecture Altered to Fit Defense Needs, Students Will Learn to Design Bomb Shelters, Airports, Hospitals and Other War Projects,” Los Angeles Times, 7 September 1941.

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Figure 61. Multi-family Residential Project, 1939. USC College of Architecture, 1939. Second-year design class tackles problem of modern multifamily housing. Source: Los Angeles Times, 11 June 1939.

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Figure 62. USC War-time Curriculum, 1942: Dean Weatherhead and student pose before a design of an airport. Source: USC Daily Trojan, 24 September 1942. Courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries, University Archives.

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Design classes took on defense-related projects such as large-scale hospitals

“designed to care for large numbers of persons in the quickest possible time” and

“properly camouflaged” factories, “planned for speed in production.”118 Courses in the

“art of camouflage” focused on how to create “false shadows and confusing colorings

and combinations of materials,” partly through “utilizing paints that will not fade and

objects that will not be detected by enemy aerial photographers. A study of optics also

will be included in the class projects.”119 Weatherhead also previewed for the Los

Angeles Times the topics of upcoming design classes:

Population evacuation, emergency housing, the designing of arsenals, airports and the building of emergency communities for workers are lessons to be learned by the S.C. embryo architects who at the same time are given instruction in architectural principles of graphics, engineering, material studies, estimating and construction costs and research.120

In 1943, the El Rodeo Yearbook reflected a College of Architecture fully in war-

mode:

Bomb defense buildings, airport layouts, and bomb proofing instruction was the curricula sign of the times in the College of Architecture. Fine Arts students studied the intricacies of war camouflage. Embryo architects emphasized model cities planned for a peaceful future.121

Other colleges in the region, such as the University of California, Los Angeles, the Otis

Art Institute (run under the auspices of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), and the

Art Center School, responded similarly by instituting a variety of defense-related

construction or graphics projects. In 1943, in response to the need for additional trained

118 Ibid. 119 “S.C. Course in Architecture Altered to Fit Defense Needs.” 120 Ibid. 121 University of Southern California, El Rodeo Yearbook, 1943, “College of Architecture and Fine Arts,” 18. USC Libraries, University Archives.

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occupational therapy aides, Weatherhead, assisted by ceramics instructor Glen Lukens,

diverted his attention from the College of Architecture and Fine Arts to help organize an

accelerated six-month course, to meet the demand for more aides. Courses were taught

by instructors with the medical training (including Lukens, who attended two years of

pre-medical school coursework), and Weatherhead led the effort to organize the

accelerated course.122

Descriptions of the methods employed in USC’s war-time curriculum offer an

example for how the college’s design approach flexed and responded to the needs of the

day and sought to forward “sociological development.” One reflection of its success in

meeting this objective is seen in how little the college’s overarching philosophy, already

rooted in pragmatism and present-day conditions, needed to change, in spite of the

magnitude of the societal shifts and demands.

Close Associations with Allied Fields: Industrial Design

In his 1941 book, Weatherhead observed the modern trend among US schools of

architecture of establishing and strengthening ties with allied fields such as planning,

landscape architecture, and industrial design. As shown in this chapter, an active

engagement with planning had already begun at the College of Architecture in the early

1930s that continued and expanded in the postwar period. While coursework in

landscape architecture debuted in the mid-1930s, the advent of World War II and

defense-related coursework curtailed this initiative until the postwar period. Another

122 Wilson, Bess M., “Occupational Therapy Training to Be Given, S.C. Offers Educational Course to Meet Wartime Demand for More Workers,” Los Angeles Times, 29 January 1943.

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1930’s initiative to expand the College of Architecture’s offerings in the allied arts,

however, that did succeed was the introduction of a curriculum in industrial design.

Whereas in 1931 industrial design represented one of several themes explored in

general Fine Arts’ design classes, by 1934 the College of Architecture and Fine Arts

offered a dedicated three-year series in Industrial Design. From circa 1934 through 1939,

the three-year design courses offered

Design I Creative design in actual materials. Construction of forms in at least ten of the leading fields of the industrial arts and interior design. Development of hand skills for the purpose of acquiring a sensitivity for fine organization in direct use of materials as a basic training in design.

Design II A series of problems involving design for various branches of industry. The designing of furniture and architectural interiors. Field trips to the shops and studios in the city.

Design III More comprehensive problems in industrial design and in the complete architectural interior.123

Throughout the 1930s, two modernist industrial designers, both European-born and trained, served as the College of Architecture’s principal lecturers in industrial design. Leading the series in 1934 was Kem Weber, an acclaimed architect and artist

educated at the Berlin Kunstgewerbeschule (Academy of Applied Arts), where he studied

under Werkbund member and co-founder, Bruno Paul. While at USC, which he joined in

1932, Weber debuted his famous Airline Chair, a work earning him the praise of art critics Sheldon and Martha Cheney as “the first West Coast designer to bring a tradition-

123 USC Bulletin, 1937-1938, 45.

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free, machine-age creativeness to American interior design.”124 (Figure 63, USC

Industrial Design Lecturer, Kem Weber, Airline Chair, 1934.)

By the mid-1930s, the industrial design curriculum featured prominently in the college’s self-promotion, as seen in newspaper articles and the annual yearbook. In 1936, for example, El Rodeo Yearbook expressed kudos for Weatherhead, who “has been

responsible for the remarkable national standing of this SC branch,” and announced new

coursework in industrial design led by Paul T. Frankl, “nationally known modernist.”125

In 1937, El Rodeo Yearbook again highlighted the arrival of Frankl and offerings of the

industrial design program, writing that

Southern California is rapidly developing into the art center of the west, not only in Fine Arts, but in modern industrial design. The College of Architecture and Fine Arts is striving to meet one of the outstanding needs of the community in its courses in ceramics, interiors, fabrics, and pottery work, as well as in other industrial fields which are daily becoming ‘design conscious’.126

A native of Vienna, Frankl studied architecture and painting in Paris before emigrating to the United States in 1914. For twenty years he lived and worked in New

York City, but, after a 1934 visit to California, he decided to love New York from afar and relocate to Los Angeles: “He had found a place where he could enjoy the climate instead of suffering from it. He became a Californian.”127 Two years later, in 1936,

Frankl joined the faculty at the USC College of Architecture and Fine Arts. As Weber before him, Frankl engaged the topic of style more directly than did Weatherhead; but, in

124 Cheney, Sheldon, and Martha Cheney, Art and the Machine: An Account of Industrial Design in 20th Century America (New York: Acanthus Press, 1936). 125 University of Southern California, El Rodeo Yearbook, 1936, “College of Architecture and Fine Arts,” 88. USC Libraries, University Archives. 126 University of Southern California, El Rodeo Yearbook, 1937, “College of Architecture and Fine Arts,” 81. USC Libraries, University Archives. 127 “Studio and Sanctuary, Los Angeles, Paul Frankl, Designer,” Interiors and Industrial Design, vol. CVII, no. 2 (September 1947), 90-91, cited here p. 90.

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Figure 63. USC Industrial Design Lecturer, Kem Weber, Airline Chair, 1934. Featured in 2010 as an auction item on Christie’s, selling for $7,000 to $10,000. Source: “Architonic, The Independent Resource for Architecture and Design,” http://www.architonic.com.

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doing so, he articulated the design ethos of the College of Architecture with respect to

“modern” design embodying not a set of stylistic tropes but “present-day requirements”

and the application of “common sense to our building and decorating program.” Writing

in California Arts and Architecture, in an article entitled “Modern Will Live,” Frankl

wrote in 1938 that

What we are striving for is a new organic architecture, a new conception of building that approaches our present day requirements as closely as possible. The new house is no longer broken up into a lot of rooms with insufficient light and air, but is a house in which space flows into space—every room a “living” room, and every room a “sun” room… That house, like a tree, must be rooted in the soil it springs from, it must fit its environments and serve its purpose. Its floor plan must be clear, clean-cut, logical, and suited to its needs. The intrinsic beauty of the materials used in its construction must be preserved and this house, like a tree even without foliage blossoms, will be beautiful in its stark honesty.

[T]he question is not “Shall we go modern?” but rather “Shall we apply common sense to our building and decorating program?” By applying common sense to your problem, you will help to develop a style of our own quicker, surer, and more convincingly than the talk about Art, Style, and Modernity.128

For Frankl, a common-sense interior combined the craftsmanship and also

Japanese inflection of the California Arts and Crafts with interwar notions of function and reform (through, for example, the use of built-in furniture and storage). (Figures 64 and 65, USC Industrial Design Lecturer Paul T. Frankl, Studio, Los Angeles.) Of

Frankl’s Los Angeles studio, which resembles the work of postwar USC graduates such as Buff, Straub, and Hensman, Interiors + Industrial Design wrote that

It takes courage to design as simple an interior as this. Sliding doors of wood- framed Temlite add to the Oriental effect. Frankl’s color scheme, subdued and also faintly Oriental, was a combination of naturals, pale yellows and golds, with brown trim and occasional accents in dark green plants, cinna bar-red carvings.129

128 Frankl, Paul T., “Modern Will Live,” California Arts and Architecture, March 1938. 129 “Paul Frankl, Designer,” Interiors + Industrial Design, 91.

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Figure 64. USC Industrial Design Lecturer, Paul T. Frankl, Studio, Los Angeles. “It takes courage to design as simple an interior as this. Sliding doors of wood-framed Temlite add to the Oriental effect. Frankl’s color scheme, subdued and also faintly Oriental, was a combination of naturals, pale yellows and golds, with brown trim and occasional accents in dark green plants, cinna bar-red carvings. Frankl used the ubiquitous Temlite screening both horizontally and vertically.” Source: “Studio and Sanctuary, Los Angeles, Paul Frankl, Designer,” Interiors + Industrial Design, September 1947.

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Figure 65. USC Industrial Design Lecturer, Paul T. Frankl, Studio, Los Angeles. “Paul T. Frankl Associates, Bolts of Cloth and Storage, Beverly Hills, CA. Source: Maynard L. Parker Collection, Huntington Library.

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In 1939, the industrial design curriculum was expanded to a four-year course,

leading to a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a concentration in industrial design. Actively

promoting the new program in the Los Angeles Times, at the start of the first semester,

Weatherhead emphasized that the new program made USC one of a few colleges in the

country offering a professional degree in industrial design.130 Leading the new curriculum

was Hudson B. Roysher, a graduate of the Cleveland School of Art and “for many years a

prominent industrial designer” in Chicago; before coming west, Roysher had led the

University of Illinois Department of Industrial Design.131 The goals of the Industrial

Design program reflected Weatherhead’s concern for the realities of everyday practices

and the employability of his graduates. (Figure 66, USC Industrial Design Students,

1939, “They’ll Design for You in Years to Come.”) At the close of the first semester, the

Industrial Design program was thus described in another article in the Los Angeles Times:

These boys and girls, members of the Industrial Design class at the University of Southern California, are preparing themselves for apprentice employment in various manufacturing lines calling for expert designers… They make and study models of radios, furniture pieces, inlaid table tops, lamps, package designs, containers for perfumes—many other articles also closely connected with home and other building equipment.

This four-year course was instituted at S.C. last September; already has a large membership. Prof. Hudson G. Roysher, formerly of the University of Illinois, inaugurated the course; supervises instruction. The training given is seen as powerfully furthering the campaign launched here to place young people in lines of work for which they are adapted, that they like and that will bring them steady employment throughout the years of their work careers after they leave school.132

In a reflection of the expanded industrial and commercial design curricula, the newly inaugurated Harris Hall incorporated equipment and shops for industrial design,

130 “New Courses Planned at S.C., Industrial Design Classes Scheduled for Opening in Fall,” Los Angeles Times, 6 August 1939. 131 Ibid. 132 “They’ll Design for You in Years to Come,” Los Angeles Times, 24 December 1939.

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Figure 66. USC Industrial Design Students, December 1939. “They’ll Design for You in Years to Come.” Source: Los Angeles Times, 24 December 1939.

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which Roysher led until circa 1944. When Gallion arrived in 1945, he established a separate Department of Industrial Design, leading for the first time to a Bachelor of

Science in Industrial Design.

Conclusion

This chapter has demonstrated that, at the USC College of Architecture, pedagogical reform and the establishment of a contemporary, pragmatic curriculum (one that became closely associated with the region’s Mid-Century Modern architecture) had its origins not in the caesura of 1945 but the climate of reform and social upheaval of the

1930s. In addition to the similarities in coursework, class projects in the pre- and postwar periods employed similar methodologies, such as emphasizing three-dimensional modeling and visualization exercises over paper techniques, and a focus on planning and housing. The multidisciplinary program, which was well established by the late 1930s and remained intact until the early 1960s, reflected the balance Weatherhead sought to achieve—and Gallion maintained—between “original expression” in design, a practical, hands-on understanding of the technical side of architecture, and present-day conditions and regional identity.

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Chapter 5

“The Challenge of the Postwar World Is Here”: Continuity and Change in the Postwar USC School of Architecture

By the summer of 1945, Arthur Weatherhead had retired and Arthur Gallion had

accepted the deanship of the College of Architecture. In his inaugural bulletin, published in September 1945, Gallion frankly addressed the new chapter, writing that “The challenge of the postwar world is here…and it demands active leadership by the architect and industrial designer in shaping the future physical environment for the well-being of man.” With the foundation laid by Weatherhead, Gallion led the College of Architecture during a period of rapid expansion of not only the college’s enrollment but the region’s built environment. Whereas the departmental statements through the 1930s and 1940s referred to the future era in which architects would design and plan for a post-Great

Depression world, then a post-World War II world, the postwar statements reflected the sense of possibility that the era of expansion had finally arrived. The strategy for

preparing young architects, according to Gallion, remained a pragmatic, multidisciplinary

approach:

The advanced training in Architecture includes the technical and economic aspects of creative building, the cultural relation of architecture to contemporary life, the exacting requirements of the building industry, and the expanding field of planning and urban redevelopment. In the architectural design courses there is continual emphasis upon contemporary trends, and during the last two years special courses are devoted to urban planning and housing.1

1 USC Bulletin, School of Architecture, 1951-1953, vol. 46, no. 17 (1 October 1951), 11. USC Libraries, University Archives.

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While these departmental statements did not change radically from the late 1940s

through the 1950s, one of the significant shifts brought by Gallion was not one of

philosophy as much as leadership style. Gallion, born in 1902 and a full generation

younger than Weatherhead, was old enough that his career had been shaped by the Great

Depression but young enough that his tenure initiated a more informal environment in

terms of faculty-student relations. USC alumnae interviewed for this study recalled that,

while Weatherhead appeared to be more remote, Gallion sought to erode the traditional

divide between faculty and students, with many of his former students recalling Gallion

as having been accessible and interested in their studies and progress.2

One concrete reflection of this shift is seen in Gallion’s hiring policies. While he

retained a large share of the prewar staff, many of them USC alumnae, Gallion also hired

a number of recent USC graduates, in many cases within a year after completing studies.

Examples include Gordon Drake, Calvin Straub, Byron Davis, Walter Teague, Arthur

O’Leary, Conrad Buff III, Donald Hensman, Randell Makinson, and Emmett Wemple,

who was said to have become the “father confessor” for students.3 The staffing expansion also reflects, of course, the rapid increase in the college’s postwar enrollment. But

Gallion’s specific additions to the faculty suggest an understanding of the school’s philosophy and an intention to continue it.

2 The following USC alumnae, as well as local architects and historians, gave generously of their time in interviews carried out by the author in the course of this study: Rudi DeChellis, Ena Dubnoff, Eugene Flores, Frank Gehry, John Grist, Ray and Shelley Kappe, John Kelsey, William Krisel, Randell Makinson, Carl McLarand, Ed Niles, John Reed, Frank Sata, Dennis Smith, Greg Walsh, Eugene Weston III, and Chet Widom. The results of this ongoing oral history project will be published as a separate volume with transcribed interviews. 3 Timme, Robert, “Preface,” in Steele, James, ed., Buff & Hensman (Los Angeles, CA: USC Architectural Guild Press, 2004), 10.

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While the curriculum and continued focus on residential design, planning,

prefabrication, and economy reflected the pre-WWII program, the postwar manufacturing advances and building boom impacted the school’s approach and the work of its graduates. In the postwar period, economy and prefabrication increasingly translated into

modular design, a movement with roots in the 1930s that took off in the postwar period

following the 1945 adoption of the 4-foot module as the American Standard

Measurement, or ASM, for manufacturers.4 At USC, the ideas of modular post-and-beam construction, diagrammatic planning (to ensure economy of space and functional program), as well as site-specific design and indoor-outdoor integration continued to be developed in the design philosophy. Straub, who became the anchor of the design faculty under Gallion, became one of the strongest proponents for modular coordination, expressed in wood post-and-beam design. (Figures 67 and 68, Greg Walsh, “A Panel

House,” circa 1952/1953. Third-Year Design Project for Calvin Straub.) The emphasis on modular coordination continued into at least the early 1960s; as Eugene Flores (1962) said, the students’ motto at the time was, “When in doubt, modulate.”5

Administratively, Gallion’s first order of business was the separation of the architecture and fine arts curricula. This initiated another name change for the program, to the “College of Architecture,” and the transfer of the Department of Fine Arts to the

College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences. In 1949, one final name change christened the

“School of Architecture,” reflecting the present name. The 1945 split between fine arts

4 Greg Hise describes the origins of the movement for “a new conception of modern houses,” and the work of Farwell Bemis, one of the early authors of the movement to place manufacturing technology in the service of housing. Hise, Greg, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 56-85. 5 Flores, Eugene, Interview with author, 23 June 2009, Pasadena, California.

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Figure 67. Greg Walsh, “A Panel House,” circa 1952/1953. Third-Year Design Project for Calvin Straub. The modular, post-and-beam design featured indoor-outdoor integration and diagrammatic “zones for living.” Reprinted courtesy of Greg Walsh.

Figure 68. Greg Walsh, “A Panel House,” circa 1952/1953. Third-Year Design Project for instructor Calvin Straub. Living room section, shows landscaping and transitional space between indoors and out. Reprinted courtesy of Greg Walsh.

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and architecture was a collegial “Hollywood divorce,” as sculptor and long-time faculty

member Merrell Gage described it: “The School of Fine Arts was separated from

Architecture,” he said, but “we are still on extremely good terms with our spouse, under

the same roof. Very pleasant to see old friends as we pass on the patio.”6

Gallion launched three major initiatives in his first several years: the establishment of a stand-alone Department of Industrial Design and in-house programs in planning and landscape architecture. With the 1945 inauguration of the Department of

Industrial Design, the college offered for the first time a Bachelor and Master of Science in Industrial Design. (The year 1939 brought a four-year program in Industrial Design, but the conferred degree was a Bachelor of Fine Arts with an Industrial Design major.)

While in the 1930s industrial design classes were available as electives, architecture students beginning in 1945 were required to take one year of basic industrial design, covering “three-dimensional studies in form with emphasis upon the physical qualities, possibilities, and limitations of various materials.”7 By 1949, the industrial design faculty

had expanded to include Harry Greene, Hunt Lewis, and Salvatore Merendino, with an

advisory committee led by Raymond Loewy and Walter Teague, in a basic staffing

configuration maintained throughout the 1950s.

Planning remained part of the regular design curriculum but also became the

subject of a required two-year series. In Gallion’s first year at USC, he led the series,

which covered “the effect of changing civilizations and cultures on the form and design

of cities, contemporary urban planning, principles of large-scale planning and housing” in

6 “The Annual Dinner,” Journal of Architectural Education (1947-1974), vol. 12, no. 1, 42nd Annual Convention of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (autumn 1956): 51-52. 7 USC Bulletin, Circular of Information, 1945-1946, vol. 40, no. 8 (September 1945), 33. USC Libraries, University Archives.

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the first year and “studies in city and regional planning, urban redevelopment and

housing” in the second.8 In 1946, after Eisner had joined the faculty, he began leading planning classes. In 1955, alongside Eisner and Henry Reining, Jr., dean of the School of

Public Administration, Gallion co-founded a graduate program in city and regional planning at USC, jointly administered by the Schools of Architecture and Public

Administration.9

In addition to the expansion of planning and industrial design, one of Gallion’s

important early initiatives was the establishment of USC’s landscape architecture

program. Gallion’s years with the San Francisco office of the Federal Housing Authority

(FHA) would have coincided with Garrett Eckbo’s tenure from 1939 to 1942 at the Farm

Security Administration (FSA), also in San Francisco. (Eckbo and Whitney Smith also

overlapped at the FSA in the mid-1930s; the two later formed a partnership, along with

Eisner and Wayne Williams, called the Community Facilities Planners, based in South

Pasadena.) While the details of their meeting are not known, Eckbo became one of

Gallion’s first additions to the faculty in 1946. For his part, Eckbo had just moved to Los

Angeles from the Bay Area. “This was heresy for a Bay Area native,” Eckbo later wrote to Esther McCoy, “and the reasons were complex—weather better for my health, south more open and dynamic, more opportunity there.”10

Shortly thereafter, Gallion and Eckbo began discussing plans for a possible

Department of Landscape Design. In June 1947, Eckbo detailed his ideas in a memo to

8 USC Bulletin, 1945-1946, 32. 9 Gallion, Arthur, and Henry Reining, Jr., “The Planning Curriculum, University of Southern California, 1955/1956,” n.d. USC Libraries, University Archives. 10 Eckbo, Garrett, 1984, Letter to Esther McCoy, Garrett Eckbo Collection, Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley, Project/Folder, Correspondence of Esther McCoy 1984, II.10.

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Gallion, including courses, content, and sequence, as well as the justification for such a

program in Los Angeles.11 Eckbo wrote,

There are two professional schools of landscape design on the west coast—one at the University of California at Berkeley and one in Oregon. Thereafter the nearest are in the middle west. Southern California, with is climate, its outdoor living, and its tremendous interest in gardens and landscaping, is the natural place for a professional landscape school of national prestige.12

Yet, with no program in Southern California, Eckbo argued, students went elsewhere:

“The Division of Landscape Design at U.C. at Berkeley has 60 students this year. 20 of

these are from southern California. Before the war 20 was considered a good student

body by the Berkeley Division.”13 Given the points of similarity between northern and southern California, Eckbo envisioned “a sound blend of co-operation and competition” between UC Berkeley and USC (Eckbo of course went on to become chairman of the

Department of Landscape Architecture at UC Berkeley in 1965).

Eckbo’s goal for the USC program – indeed, for the profession in general – was the complete integration of architecture, landscape design, engineering, planning, and the allied arts.14 Eckbo wrote that

the next logical step in the development of modern architecture is for it to expand its design concepts to truly take in the whole site space in a detailed and specific way, and thus release the open plan and the glass wall from their present limitation and frustration. Architecture and landscape design belong together;

11 Eckbo, Garrett, “Memo on the Establishment of a Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Southern California,” 3 June 1947, and Letter to Arthur B. Gallion, Dean, College of Architecture, University of Southern California, 5 June 1947. Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley, Garrett Eckbo, 1990-1 Collection, Project/Folder Correspondence, USC, 1947, III.1. 12 Eckbo, “Memo, USC Landscape Architecture Department,” 1. 13 Ibid. 14 For studies on Eckbo, see for example Treib, Marc, and Dorothée Imbert, Garrett Eckbo: Modern Landscapes for Living (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), and Alofsin, Anthony, The Struggle for Modernism: Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning at Harvard (New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002).

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they supplement and complement each other; each is fragmentary and frustrating without the other.15

He added that he had “begun work on a book developing the various ideas suggested in this memo,” in an apparent reference to his seminal 1950 work, Landscape for Living.

With architecture, engineering, and landscape fully integrated, Eckbo wrote that USC would teach

an expanded concept covering the complete organization, indoor and outdoor, roofed and unroofed, of all the three-dimensional space within the property lines of each specific site, and the graduates of the school would have a clear understanding of the functional, aesthetic, and technical problems involved.16

Even in its initial stages, Eckbo wrote to Gallion, the USC landscape program could have

“greater integration between architecture and landscape design than exists in any other

school in the country.”17

With Eckbo on board, the year 1947 introduced a required one-year course in landscape design. In 1949, two years following Eckbo’s recommendations to Gallion, two new major emphases in landscape design were announced: a Bachelor and a Master of Science with majors in Landscape Design. Reflecting Eckbo’s ideas, landscape coursework became integrated in the design sequence, with classes focusing on design, engineering, construction, plants and botany (each component contributing to Eckbo’s notion of total site design).

The USC curriculum in landscape design closely reflected Eckbo’s recommendations. Landscape design required for architecture students covered site

15 Eckbo, “Memo, USC Landscape Architecture Department,” 2. 16 Eckbo, Letter to Gallion, 2. 17 Ibid, 2.

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planning and the “fundamentals of landscape design and its relation to architecture.”18

Coursework required for the degrees in landscape architecture, launched in 1949,

included Landscape Construction, covering “technical design factors” for hardscaping

elements such as “paving, walls, steps, drainage, screens and shelters,” and Landscape

Plant Materials (cross listed with Botany). Advanced landscape design introduced

“comprehensive projects in the theory and practice of landscape design” and the

“integration of landscape design with architectural design and urban planning.”19

Eckbo remained on staff until 1956, after which point Straub and Wemple began

teaching landscape architecture. USC’s coursework in landscape architecture, including

the year-long requirement for architecture majors, remained intact until at least 1961.

During Eckbo’s time in Southern California, of course, his numerous collaborations

(with, among others, USC alumnae and faculty Ain, Smith, Williams, Buff, Straub, and

Hensman) became icons of the region’s Mid-Century Modernism. As Thomas Hine observed, Eckbo “had work shown so often in popular publications that it became synonymous with the relaxed, indoor-outdoor ‘California living’ they celebrated almost monthly.”20

The Gallion Years, 1945 to 1960

To end this study on this note of Gallion’s contributions to USC (of which this

chapter only begins to scratch the surface) might wrongly suggest, to paragraph James

Marston Fitch, the full “postwar realization of the prewar dream” with respect to USC’s

18 USC Bulletin, School of Architecture, 1949-1951, vol. 44, no. 12 (October 1, 1949), 31. 19 Ibid, 31-33. 20 Hine, Thomas, “The Search for the Postwar House,” in Smith, Elizabeth A.T., Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989), 167-181.

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modern program. A concluding sketch on Gallion’s career will provide closing

comments and a brief context for the College of Architecture in the postwar years, until

the dean’s resignation in 1960.

In the same way that Weatherhead’s career had been shaped by the principal

challenge of his time—crafting an educational alternative to the Beaux-Arts system—

Gallion’s was shaped by the pressing issues of the postwar period, especially in terms of

city and regional planning and redevelopment. Indeed, given Gallion’s outspoken

advocacy for a strong planning program at USC and thoughtful planning policies in

Southern Californian cities, secondary literature has often misstated the dean’s training as

in planning. Gallion in fact was an architect by education and trade. In 1924, he received

a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign,

and by 1929, served as the university’s supervising architect.21 After graduation, he reportedly traveled throughout Europe and was awarded a fellowship to attend the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Following his European travels, he worked for “leading architectural firms in Chicago and St. Louis,” with an emphasis on research in housing and planning,22

before moving west with his wife Pearle in the 1930s.

In the 1930s, after relocating to the West Coast, Gallion turned his attention to

low-cost housing and community development during stints with the Housing Division of

the Public Works Administration (from 1934 to 1936) and the United States Housing

21 As with Weatherhead, Gallion does not appear to have left a collection of papers or archives; biographical information on Gallion has been culled from a patchwork of sources, including public records (census and voter registration records, as well as birth, death, and marriage records), press coverage, and the American Architects Directory published by R.R. Bowker from the mid-1950s through early 1970s. Directories consulted for this study included American Architects Directory (New York: R.R. Bowker, 1956, 1962, 1970). 22 “Dean at USC Named,” Architect and Engineer, vol. 162 (July 1945): 12. See also “Federal Official New S.C. Dean,” Los Angeles Times, 10 June 1945.

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Authority (1938 to 1945).23 His participation in a statewide survey of housing conditions led to the announcement in 1938 by Gallion that the most urgent need was for subsidized low-cost housing (for those earning less than $1,000 a year); in January 1938, Gallion testified before the interim Committee on Social Welfare of the California State

Assembly that the need had become so acute that “private enterprises cannot afford to provide suitable homes for these persons at a rent they could pay.”24

This background would have made Gallion an ideal candidate for the deanship of

USC in 1945, just as the region’s long-awaited building expansion began. In 1950, five

years into his tenure as dean, Gallion was selected to design a public housing project in

Pacoima, one of nine areas in the San Fernando Valley deemed by the Federal Housing

Authority to be “blighted.” One year earlier, in 1949, his colleague Simon Eisner had

been appointed acting director of Los Angeles’s nascent redevelopment agency; in a

reflection of the optimism of the era, Eisner later recalled his initial goals for the agency:

“LA has 60 square miles of blighted area, and we were going to tackle that thing

wholesale. … I was naïve and thought that once you a federal law and lots of money, you

could do anything.”25 As Dana Cuff observed, however, “[u]rban redevelopment, in fact, had demonstrated just how effectively a housing program could undermine affordable housing.”26

The Pacoima Public Housing Project, funded through Title I of the 1949 Federal

Housing Act, reflected the pre-1945 trends observed by Hise and Cuff, respectively, of an

23 American Architects Directory, 1956, 188. 24 “Committee Is Told Need for Housing Facilities in State,” Modesto Bee and Herald-News (Modesto, CA), 10 January 1938. 25 Cuff, Dana, The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000), 301-302. 26 Cuff, The Provisional City, 302.

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emphasis on planning the neighborhood as a stand-alone unit and of placing modernism

(in this case, a modern garden city) in the service of social housing. While Gallion, in

collaboration with Victor Gruen, engineer Edgardo Contini, and landscape architect

Francis Dean, began plans for Pacoima in 1950, the advent of the Korean War delayed

construction, and the project was ultimately not completed until October 1955. (Figures

69 and 70, Gallion and Gruen’s Pacoima Public Housing Project.)

With its self-contained garden apartment complex of 450 “modern dwelling

units,” the example of the Pacoima Public Housing Project is not meant to illustrate the

success of actors such as Gallion in creating a foothold for modern public housing (a goal

pursued at USC since the late 1930s) but rather the school’s continuing emphasis on the

social utility of architecture and good design. As has been well documented in the

scholarly literature, the ultimate failure of public housing in Los Angeles reflected the

complex, highly charged political landscape of the early 1950s.27 In this era, of course, architecture and aesthetics became another weapon in the Cold War. (The now-famous flap over Elizabeth Gordon’s 1953 House Beautiful article, in which she conflated the road to fascism with International Style modernism, offers just one example of the

rhetorical charge that was increasingly assigned to architectural style).28

27 For studies on the ultimate fate of public housing policy in Los Angeles, see, among others, Cuff, The Provisional City, and Cuff, Dana, “Fugitive Plans in the Provisional City: Slums and Public Housing in Los Angeles,” in Looking for Los Angeles, Charles G. Salas and Michael S. Roth, ed. (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2001), 97-132; Sitton, Tom, Los Angeles Transformed: Fletcher Bowron’s Urban Reform Revival, 1938-1953 (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), and Parson, Donald Craig, Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the Direction of Modern Los Angeles” (Duluth, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 28 One recent study of Gordon is found in Penick, Monica Michelle, “The Pace Setter Houses: Livable Modernism in Postwar America” (PhD Dissertation, University of Texas, Austin, 2007). However, Penick’s work would have benefited from a more critical examination of Gordon’s politics. This acritical stance leads Penick to question, for example, William Wurster’s strong rejoinder to Gordon’s 1953 attack

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Figure 69. Urban redevelopment and public housing in Los Angeles, Gallion and Gruen’s Pacoima Public Housing. Source: Progressive Architecture, February 1954, p. 73.

Figure 70. Urban redevelopment and public housing in Los Angeles, Gallion and Gruen’s Pacoima Public Housing. Source: Progressive Architecture, April 1956, p. 120. 236

In this era, though, Gallion began to reengage the topic of aesthetics. Whereas

Weatherhead had argued that architectural precedent should influence contemporary

design, he avoided citing references. With the debate on art versus pragmatism in

pedagogy largely resolved, Gallion appears to have had license to address the topic more

freely. His comments reflect not only his views on the topic but also the degree to which

the issue had influenced progressive educators and architects of Weatherhead’s

generation. In the February 1949 issue of the Journal of the American Institute of

Architects, Gallion wrote that the field of architecture was “perched” on the “horns of a dilemma” regarding the aesthetics of architecture: “Eclecticism drained the substance from the tradition of architecture and imitated the hollow forms that remained. In our search for a substitute there is a tendency to glorify the technology of our day as the moving spirit of architecture.”29 Gallion essentially describes the beliefs of

Weatherhead’s generation when he noted that architects, “[n]aturally reacting against the

empty and artificial esthetic formula of eclecticism, a formula of science and technology

is substituted.” The result, was an understandable but mistaken “reluctance of some

serious artists to accept “esthetics” as part of their professional vocabulary”:

Does it seem probable, for instance, that Ictinus was removed from his society when he worked upon the Parthenon; or can we imagine that Gothic builders were insulated from the social and spiritual character of their time? Was architecture of the past—great or humble—conceived by men working in a social and economic vacuum; were they simply concerned with building as a technical exercise in stone and mortar?

on the International Style. Wurster’s pointed response, as well as his own work for the Case Study House program, though, might have provided reasons for a more critical consideration of Gordon’s politics. 29 Gallion, Arthur, Guest Editorial, Journal of the American Institute of Architects (February 1949): 51-53, quoted here p. 51.

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If we were wiling to face up to reality, we might appropriately identity our dilemma as a cultural vacuum into which technical and scientific phenomena have been drawn—then misinterpreted as cultural itself.

Returning to the topic that most defined his professional life, Gallion argues that the

architect’s search for “human purpose” and “cultural values” lies in “his interest in the

social and economic, as well as the technical, aspects of city planning.” In this way,

Gallion writes, the architect “perceives an active connection with his society.”

A more direct comment on stylistic debts was made by Gallion in 1952, when he

contributed to and oversaw the publication of a guide to Southern California’s

contemporary architecture, compiled by USC students.30 The 1952 project identified architects and movements the authors believed influenced the trajectory of Southern

Californian modernism. The opening essay cited Bay Area architects Bernard Maybeck and Willis Polk as well as the Greene brothers and Irving Gill in Southern California as influences for Los Angeles’s current generation of practitioners. Much like David

Gebhard and Robert Winter’s oft-reprinted guide to Los Angeles’s architecture, the 1952

USC guide divided all buildings by geographical areas, illuminated by area maps.

Spanning residential, commercial, and industrial buildings, the book provided descriptions of each building, including whether visitors could view buildings, and, if so, whom they could call. Alvin Lustig, the art director of Arts and Architecture, designed

the book cover.

Although the heritage of the “California school” of Maybeck and the Greenes was

claimed as part of Los Angeles’s modernist heritage, the tone of regional pride was

30 Harris, Frank, and Weston Bonenberger, ed., “A Guide to Contemporary Architecture in Southern California” (Los Angeles: 1952).

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tempered. For example, the text asserted rather lightly that, what stood out about the

work of early twentieth-century architects in the Bay Area and Southern California was

that their work “had little connection with that which had become the tradition in the

greater United States.”31 The influence of Frank Lloyd Wright, Rudolph Schindler,

Richard Neutra, Gregory Ain, and Harwell Hamilton Harris also played a role in the narrative as having paved the way for modernism’s maturation. The end of World War

II, the book asserted, “seemed to signal the acceptance of this architectural expression as a new way of living.”32 The work of USC alumnae and faculty, such as Soriano, Ain,

Straub, Drake, and Smith were generously represented in the study.

Gallion also discussed the Japanese influence in Southern Californian modernism.

Following a six-month “research study” trip, which took him to Japan, Spain, and India,

among other countries, though, the dean looked right over the top of the Arts and Crafts

(as a line of transmission for Japanese ideas) and directly to Japan itself as an influence in

California’s modern residential architecture:

“The Japanese use of fine wood construction over the centuries, for instance, is an example of their influence on us today, particularly in our residential areas,” the dean said, “California outdoor living as an architectural theme has come to be associated with the west. It is an adaptation of the 15-17th century culture of the Orient.”33

The trip also took Gallion to Chandigarh, where Le Corbusier’s capitol city was in

progress at the time. He struck a similar note as Weatherhead when he explained to the

31 Ibid, 4. 32 Ibid, 6. 33 “Ancient Oriental Architecture Influenced Southland Builders,” Independent Star News (Pasadena, CA), 20 October 1957.

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Pasadena Independent Star News that Corbusier was “a French architect who uses ultra modern themes.”

Of course, Cold War-era architectural discourse went well beyond style and historic precedent, and USC felt the effects, both direct and indirect. Gallion had long advocated for social housing but avoided the harassment that befell his associate in the early stages of the Pacoima Public Housing Project, Frank Wilkinson (who, in 1952, was accused of harboring communist sympathies and fired from the Los Angeles Housing

Authority).34 For his part, Wilkinson recalled Gallion as being “socially-concerned,” as

Anthony Denzer noted.35 Prior to his dismissal from the Los Angeles Housing Authority,

Gallion “brought Wilkinson to USC once a year to take students on slum tours of Los

Angeles.”36 Denzer also described the blacklisting of modernist architect and USC lecturer, Gregory Ain.37 While Ain was not formally called before the House Un-

American Activities Committee (HUAC) during their Los Angeles meetings, his name appeared twice on lists of the politically suspect. The subsequent blacklisting experienced

by Ain was but one in a series of events triggering the architect’s virtual withdrawal from

active practice in the early 1950s and turn toward teaching, first at USC as a visiting

34 Dana Cuff provides detail on Wilkinson’s career and firing, as well as the blacklisting and personal and professional repercussions he suffered as a result of the HUAC accusations. Cuff, The Provisional City. 35 Denzer, Anthony, Gregory Ain: The Modern Home as Social Commentary. (New York: Rizzoli Publications, 2008), 199-225. 36 Denzer, Gregory Ain, 202. 37 Denzer provides additional detail on the consequences of the “red scare” and professional blacklisting on the careers of both Ain and Wilkinson, who were friends and colleagues. Denzer also offers extended comments on this period in Ain’s career, as the architect withdrew from active practice and became increasingly involved in architectural pedagogy, both at USC and, in the early 1960s, the University of Pennslyvania. Denzer, Gregory Ain, 199-225.

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lecturer from 1949 through the early 1960s, then at the University of Pennsylvania as

head of the Department of Architecture.38

Flores recalled Gallion’s defense of Ain, as the blacklisting had led to “some

voices” calling for Ain’s removal:

[Gallion] defended Greg to the administration. …I’ve always credited Dean Gallion for giving Greg that opportunity and taking a chance on him. And I don’t know how he knew what his ability at teaching was, I have no idea how that happened. …But he certainly knew his abilities to be an architectural critic of highest regard.39

Frank Gehry (USC 1954) recalled similar troubles experienced by Eckbo. Gehry

and his classmate (and future partner) Walsh, though, recall Gallion as taking a moderate

position and encouraging his students to do the same. On separate occasions, Gallion

took both Gehry and Walsh aside to explain, as Gehry recalls, that “there are two sides to

the road, and you can see both sides better from the middle.40

In 1950, as mentioned in the previous section, Gallion co-authored the book The

Urban Pattern: City Planning and Design with Simon Eisner.41 While planning issues

preoccupied Gallion, he also continued his private practice in Southern California,

occasionally partnering with recent USC graduates, such as Straub, in order to help

young architects complete commissions prior to being licensed. In March 1956, Gallion

was nominated to advancement to fellowship in the American Institute of Architects

(AIA), an honor that was subsequently bestowed in 1957. In William Wurster’s letter to

38 Ibid, 200-201. Ain’s name first appears in course catalogs as a “visiting lecturer” in 1949. While Denzer observed that Ain was teaching full-time by 1952, the title listed for him in course catalogs throughout the 1950s indicated he was a “visiting critic.” 39 Flores, Eugene, Interview with author, 23 June 2009, Pasadena, California. 40 Gehry, Frank, Interview with author, 19 June 2009, Venice, California. 41 Gallion, Arthur B., and Simon Eisner, The Urban Pattern: City Planning and Design (New York and London: D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc., 1950).

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the AIA Jury of Fellows on behalf of Gallion, Wurster, by then dean of the College of

Architecture at UC Berkeley, wrote:

It is my understanding that the name of Arthur B. Gallion is before you for advancement to Fellowship. I have known Arthur Gallion since 1940. He has a breadth of interest in architecture which includes housing, civic design, teaching and practice. To each of these areas he has made fine contributions and recognition of this will be appropriate and deserved. I feel the Institute will gain by this act.42

In June 1960, Gallion announced his resignation from USC in order to take a

position as the director of planning for the firm Harland, Bartholemew, and Associates, in

Honolulu, Hawaii.43 The same month he announced his departure, Gallion received the

“Silver Scarab” award from USC’s chapter of the national honorary architecture

fraternity, the Scarab Fraternity, “in recognition of his contributions to the growth and

development of architectural education in the United States.”44 (Three years earlier, his

son, Alan, still attending USC and then-president of the Scarab Fraternity, presented the

same award to the Los Angeles Times Home magazine “in recognition of an outstanding

contribution to the profession of architecture and allied arts.”45)

By 1965, Gallion had returned to Southern California, where he began teaching architecture at Long Beach State College. During this period, he continued his academic

and public engagement on the themes of planning and housing, publishing articles and

42 Wurster, William W., 19 March 1956, Letter to the Jury of Fellows, American Institute of Architects, Washington, DC. William W. Wurster Collection, Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley, Box 1, Correspondence, GA-GL. Wurster and Gallion were likely to have met while Gallion lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area during the mid-1930s and early 1940s. Others to have passed through the San Francisco Housing Authority and Farm Security Administration offices at the time would have been Garrett Eckbo and Whitney Smith, who subsequently formed a partnership called Community Facilities Planners, along with Smith’s partner, Wayne Williams (USC 1941), and Simon Eisner. 43 “Pasadenan Takes Post in Honolulu,” Pasadena Independent, 24 June 1960. 44 “Obituary, Arthur B. Gallion,” New York Times, 18 July 1978. 45 “For Home Magazine, A Silver Medal,” Los Angeles Times, 30 June 1957.

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offering public and university lectures on the topic. In the tone of these articles, one sees the arc of optimism, in the 1940s and 1950s, receding into frank disappointment by the mid-1960s. However, even as his tone grew increasingly critical, Gallion continued recommending solutions for the compounding problems of traffic congestion and the aesthetic homogeneity of mass-produced housing. Many of Gallion’s ideas, including

less dependence on automobiles, improved and expanded mass transportation, and higher

building density, still reflect best practices in urban planning and redevelopment. By

1978, when Gallion died, The Urban Pattern had become the standard textbook on urban

planning at forty US universities.46

46 “Obituary, Arthur B. Gallion.”

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Conclusion

This thesis has demonstrated that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the modern

USC School of Architecture has its roots in the 1930s and the shifts and readjustments of

the Great Depression rather than a postwar caesura. An attempt has also been made here

to recuperate a story that has been largely forgotten in the literature, that of Arthur

Weatherhead, and to place the contribution of the postwar dean, Arthur Gallion, in the

context of the time. In spite of the generational divide between them, Gallion and

Weatherhead had much in common, including an emphasis on the social aspects of

modernism over the art of architecture.

Once established by the late 1930s, the curriculum and design philosophy at USC

through the early 1960s continued to be defined by pragmatism (as applied to technical

topics as well as professional practices), social responsiveness, contemporary, site-driven

design, and regional identity. In order to make the argument about continuity, this study

relied heavily on course catalogs. However, the limitations of catalogs should be

acknowledged. While they may have changed little, course descriptions cannot fully account for the content and atmosphere of the classroom. For this reason, articles, where available, on class projects, methodology, and emphasis, helped complete the picture.

Given that the dominant narrative has long held that the pre- and post-1945 Schools of

Architecture were qualitatively different, the fact that the classes changed little from 1937 to 1957 is in itself a surprising discovery.

The introduction to this study quoted observations by Avigail Sachs and William

Littmann about the overemphasis in the scholarly literature on the influence of just “a

handful of architects” who “almost single-handedly” cast out the Beaux-Arts and initiated

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pedagogical reform in US schools of architecture. 1 This thesis offers another case study supporting their argument. The picture that has emerged here is not one of a modern pedagogical approach designed by famous émigrés but rather secondary actors. These individuals were not heroic (not even always eloquent), but they were determined. And the change happened not overnight—as the dominant narrative on USC also asserts—but gradually, since the 1930s.

When USC became the fifth out of forty-five US schools of architecture to begin crafting an alternative to the Beaux-Arts system, Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe had not yet arrived in the United States and Joseph Hudnut had not yet launched reforms at Columbia and Harvard Universities. Gropius’s ideas about pedagogy influenced Weatherhead’s direction at USC, but the dean had his eye on Dessau, not

Cambridge. Chapter 2 suggested that Lawrence H. Ellis’s program at the University of

Oregon exerted the most active influence over Weatherhead’s program at USC. This was based on Ellis’s statements about his program and Weatherhead’s attendance at the school and sabbatical visit in 1918, just as Ellis would have been preparing to launch

Oregon’s Beaux-Arts-free curriculum in 1919.

Of all the unturned stones in this study, the University of Oregon School of

Architecture is among the most important. Not only was its architecture program the first in the United States to abandon the dominant Beaux-Arts model, but Oregon, like

Southern California and the Bay Area, represented another hotbed for indigenous regional modernism. This affinity was recognized by Arts and Architecture publisher

John Entenza, who regularly featured the work of, for example, John Yeon and Pietro

1 Littmann, William, “Assault on the Ecole: Student Campaigns Against the Beaux Arts, 1925-1950,” Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 53, no. 3 (February 2000): 159-166; quoted here p. 159.

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Belluschi (who of course followed Wurster as dean of MIT). Research on the University of Oregon would help clarify the parallels and points of departure between the approaches to both modern pedagogy and architectural vocabulary in both regions.

In terms of other unturned stones, comparative work on other Southern

Californian schools of art, such as the Chouinard Art Institute, would help complete the picture. Although Chouinard does not appear to have conferred a professional degree of architecture, lecturers who passed through in the 1930s and 1940s included Richard

Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, Paul Frankl, and Harwell Hamilton Harris, suggesting a rich source for further context. Similarly, while it was beyond the present scope to provide comparative material on, for example, the Cranbrook Academy (founded by Eliel

Saarinen and firmly grounded in the Arts and Crafts movement) or Black Mountain

College, such a study would help place the USC alternative in the national context of

other schools attempting to chart a path between the history-free “ultra-modern” and

historic eclecticism, or historic precedent, either in methods or style.

This study opened with Esther McCoy’s observation about the “USC style.” The

clear implication in this paper has been that, given the range of concerns driving the USC

curriculum and design philosophy, the label “USC Style” has, at best, limited explanatory

value. At worst, USC alumnae interviewed for this study were universal in their

skepticism that style had ever been the point at their alma mater. Straub’s words, in fact,

about style not serving as a driving force in his work have borne this out.

On the other hand, a USC “approach” seems to have emerged here. But this

approach was defined as much by a sense of social responsiveness as it was by high-style

design rooted in historic precedent. The work of USC alumnae identified as “USC style’

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architects included meticulously crafted, wood post-and-beam construction, “oriented to the mature trees of Pasadena,” as McCoy wrote, drawing a parallel with Greene and

Greene’s work. But so did the Farm Security Administration housing designed by USC alumnae Whitney Smith incorporate economical post-and-beam construction, oriented to the patterns of the sun and landscaping. Garrett Eckbo created site planning and landscaping for both, after all: the “USC style” Frank House in Pasadena, designed by

Buff, Straub & Hensman, as well as Farm Security Administration resettlement housing.

These examples help complicate the picture when it comes to assigning direct lineage and influence (such as the Arts and Crafts), especially when removed from the social context.

They might even suggest the limited utility of doing so.

The presumed divide between the “USC style” and “Case Study House style” mirrored of course the larger ongoing debate over the machine-age aesthetic and

“organic” modernism. While USC alumnae from the 1950s and early 1960s talk about how this divide did shape class discussions about form and materials, the founding years, in the 1930s, offered a glimpse into a transitional time when the lines were not so clearly drawn or politicized. As Weatherhead wrote in 1928, the “ultra-modern” might have been history-free (a path he regarded as extreme) but it represented a “virile” expression of modern-day life and an alternative to historic eclecticism. Moreover, if even the practitioners of regional or “organic” modernism take issue with the divide, it is worth questioning. In 1944, for example, Pietro Belluschi commented on the brewing controversy over style and the schism in modernism in Arts and Architecture:

the key which can dispel much confusion and clear much of the nonsense which has been written on modern architecture. Many realize the abstract qualities of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work, but not to all is it apparent that Le Corbusier, Mies

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Van der Rohe, or Gropius at their sternest are dealing with poetical elements. Poetry may, can, usually does deteriorate in soft sentiment unless the roots are in life itself.2

Belluschi highlighted the shared concerns between the two, writing that “architecture,

without the poetic sense in whatever style, is not really architecture but building

construction.”3

In terms of future study, comparative work on Southern California’s regional, or

“organic,” modernism would help undo the language of regional exceptionalism. As

Mary Corbin Sies noted, such a non-comparative perspective has occasionally led to “a strong provincial flavor,” a la, “We have these remarkable buildings in our state, so they must be distinctively Californian.”4 Commentators of the day obviously recognized the larger movement. Elizabeth Mock’s 1944 Built in USA began describing its scope. In the immediate postwar years, as well, architectural trade magazines abound with references to a new regionally-inflected idiom (in particular, in residential design) throughout the United States; this work embraced qualities often understood as uniquely

Southern Californian in the literature, such as site specificity, indoor-outdoor integration, closer links with nature, and an informal, open plan. The issue of Architectural Forum publishing Gordon Drake’s Presley House in 1947, for example, was devoted to documenting the national scope of the “contemporary school of architecture which has grown and flourished in the U.S. in the past fifteen years,” in particular in the category of

2 Belluschi, “Our Houses.” 3 Belluschi, Pietro, “Our Houses,” Arts and Architecture, January 1944, 28. 4 Sies, Mary Corbin, “Review Essay, Arts and Crafts,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 57, no. 4 (December 1998): 490-493, quoted here p. 492.

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“individually designed, medium-priced” homes. Drake’s Presley House represented

California. Describing the seven houses presented in the issue, the editors wrote:

One threadbare contention which is finally ripped to shreds by the work shown here is the notion that big windows, low-pitch roofs and open planning are all right for California but out of place in other parts of the U.S. It is no accident that the designs chosen for this issue are so evenly distributed across the map. Even more significant is the fact that each of the houses represents the work of not just one architect, but of a regional group of designers all working in much the same vernacular.5

Even as the houses differed in execution, they were “so alike in spirit,” the editors wrote, in their shared “logic of rational design.”

The 1951 comment of Elisabeth Kendall Thompson, Architectural Forum’s western editor, on the “Bay Region Style” also applies to the “USC Style”:

There has been for some time an argument as to whether or not there is a “Bay Region Style” of architecture. The individualism of each architect is almost enough reason in itself for doubting that there is such a thing, and the whole idea of a Bay Region Style should indeed be gravely questioned. It is true that there is a basic similarity not only in exterior appearance, in construction, and in plan approach, but this is due to the greater availability locally of certain materials, to the similarity of the architectural program, and to a basic concept of design. The last is undoubtedly the most important of these considerations because, without ever having formalized a credo, architects of the Bay Region have for fifty years of more, designed buildings—but more especially dwellings—with the same fundamental principles in mind. It was natural to follow accepted construction practice in a mild climate where structure could be simple and, according to Eastern standards, flimsy. Redwood was easily obtained from the nearby forests and it was natural to use it because of its availability and inexpensiveness. Nevertheless, these factors contribute only a surface similarity; there is no “style,” as this is understood in class definition.6

Thompson goes on to suggest one extended region that lends itself particularly well to

future comparative analysis:

5 “Seven Postwar Houses,” Architectural Forum, vol. 37, no. 3 (September 1947): 77-116, quoted here p. 77. 6 Thompson, Elisabeth Kendall, “The Early Domestic Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Region,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 10, no. 3 (October 1951): pp. 15-21; quoted here p. 16.

249

All these factors do, however, contribute to a regional quality that is much more important than is any stylistic quality. It is a quality which can be found, varying with the individual architect and with the location, from the Mexican border to the Canadian line—in other words, along the Pacific Coast.

Comparisons between the work of West Coast centers for regional modernism (including as expressed in wood post-and-beam) in Vancouver, Portland, the Bay Area, and

Southern California would help illustrate what indeed is distinctive about Southern

California’s brand of regional modernism, and what fits within the larger context. Such a study would help continue illuminating the larger “constellation” around the individual stars.

250

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