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Influential modern icon Bernard Judge has passed away in Los Angeles aged 90

2021-11-24T13:08:00-05:00

Leading modernist Bernard Judge passed away in his Los Angeles home last week at the age of 90.

The LA Times’ Carolina Miranda has an excellent write-up on the man who once designed a home for Marlon Brando on an atoll in French Polynesia.

Judge was in many ways the living definition of a “champion of modernism,” pioneering the geodesic dome form exhibited in his Triponent House and working to restore Rudolph Schindler’s then-eponymous West Hollywood home after taking out a personal ad in the Times in the early 1970s.

Judge was born in New York City to an artist mother and architecture professor father. He went on to study at USC at a time when the school was dominated by prominent residential designers like Gregory Ain and Conrad Bluff III.

Section drawing of Judge's Triponent House project. Source: Southern California Architectural History.

Judge designed a number of resorts and inexpensive and easy-to-construct homes through his firm Environmental Services Group. He was a lectur...

Christopher Hawthorne's Frank Lloyd Wright documentary “That Far Corner: Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Angeles” to air next week

2018-03-01T19:19:00-05:00

Why focus on Wright, American architecture’s equivalent of Abraham Lincoln, the giant who casts a shadow over his field big enough to blot out smaller and underrepresented figures? [...] Because the architect’s brilliant if forbidding Southern California houses, the most important of which were designed in a burst of creative energy during the first few months of 1923, remain mysterious, their meaning and inspiration as opaque as their heavy, richly patterned concrete-block facades.

Christopher Hawthorne's documentary, “That Far Corner: Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Angeles”, focuses on aspects of the infamous architect's work which remain enigmatic. Filming inside eight Wright buildings, the project interviews around 20 people to present new insights around these mysterious works.

Hawthorne explains, "My overarching goal was to bring some new, sustained attention to a group of houses that have lingered too long, given their importance to the American architectural canon, in the relative shadows." The title “That Far Corner" originates from a phrase Wright used to describe Southern California in his autobiography.

As part of a new ARTBOUND season, the documentary airs next Tuesday March 6, at 9 p.m. ET/PT on KCET-TV. The episode will also stream online at KCET, as well as on Amazon, YouTube, Roku, and Apple TV following its broadcast. Tune in and decide what you make of Hawthorne's theory. As a bonus, several of the interviews occur inside residential designs by ...

Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler meet for one last time in new play, "The Princes of Kings Road"

2015-09-15T17:28:00-04:00

Midcentury modernist architects Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler may have been good friends when they studied together in Vienna, but by the time they ran into one another one last time in a Los Angeles hospital in 1953, they were bitter enemies. Ensemble Studio Theatre/L.A.'s production of The Princes of Kings Road, now playing at the Neutra Institute in Silver Lake, imagines what it might have been like in the hospital room they shared

‘The Princes of Kings Road’: Neutra and Schindler the subject of a new site-specific play

2015-06-10T18:47:00-04:00

Next September, the historic Neutra Institute and Museum in Silverlake will host a new play by Tom Lazarus entitled ‘The Princes of Kings Road.’ Based on a true events, the production imagines a reunion between the two iconic figures of LA modernism, Rudolf Schindler and Richard Neutra.

The architects have a storied history, which was recounted in a Vanity Fair article from 1999. After building his West Hollywood home (now the MAK Center), Schindler and his partner invited Neutra and his wife to live with them. The house was originally intended as a communal living space for two couples, with open-air "sleeping baskets" rather than bedrooms. But after five years of cohabitation and professional partnership – the two architects collaborated on an entry for the the League of Nations palace in Geneva – their relationship turned sour, transforming into a bitter rivalry.

Lazarus' play imagines Schindler and Neutra reunited in a room at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital (now the bright blue Scien...

This modernist Rudolph Schindler church in South LA could be yours for $1.85M

2015-03-26T19:01:00-04:00

Prolific Los Angeles Modernist Rudolph Schindler designed dozens of timeless duplexes, apartments, houses, and office buildings, but he only ever designed one church. Bethlehem Baptist Church in Central-Alameda was built in 1944 for a small, black church congregation. Now, just after a much-needed restoration to what was for many years a pretty rough-looking building, the architecturally significant church—an official Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Landmark—is up for sale.

Schindler Lab Initiative recounts intricate process behind Schindler House artistic interventions

2015-03-24T10:20:00-04:00

This publication documents an exhibition-oriented initiative that prompts artists and architects to develop installations highlighting Rudolph M. Schindler’s domestic experiment...Visitors often ask detailed questions. They are curious about Schindler’s thought process when designing and constructing the house; how the house has been used, understood, and canonized throughout the decades; and how the house is holding up today.

For years, the Schindler House in West Hollywood has served as a cultural backdrop for a multitude of MAK Center exhibitions that have -- in turn -- continuously reinvented the experience of the house and also uniquely demonstrate the ongoing need to preserve the house. Whether engaging with the house itself, examining its use as a domestic space, or reflecting on its 93-year-old history as a modernist icon, every one of these artistic interventions resulted from a meticulous process of discussion, debate, and creative problem solving -- all of which the MAK Center chronicles in an online publication known as the Schindler Lab.

First initiated in 2011 by MAK Center consultant and cultural producer Sara Daleiden, the Schindler Lab is divided into sections that starts off with the Schindler House's architecture and history. The publication then goes on to present the variety of perspectives, proposals, and after-thoughts that architects, designers, artists, curators, and administrators...

Historical homes that helped influence modernism

2012-11-28T12:28:00-05:00

Separated by about four centuries and the Pacific Ocean this pair of houses may seem on paper to have little in common. One was an imperial villa in Kyoto, the other a suburban villa in West Hollywood. One is built on Zen principles for the Japanese emperor, the other was built by a central European architect for himself.

Edwin Heathcote discusses the historical relevance of Rudolph Schindler's Schindler House and Kyoto's Katsura Imperial Villa, and how they helpef influence the modern movement.

Side-by-side Schindlers

2012-10-14T23:11:00-04:00

On a quiet street in Inglewood, twin 1940 homes by midcentury legend Rudolph M. Schindler have been renovated by owners intent on making the most of the two-bedroom, one-bath floor plans. The goal: Respect the historic architecture while updating the spaces for modern living.

From Freewayland to the Garage

2012-05-21T13:03:00-04:00

Space International's renovation of Rudolph Schindler's Mackey Apartments is both pragmatic and sublime. Choosing to honor the existing architecture through contrast, the studio designed a cantilevered, 75-square metre counterpoint to the original building. An architecture report from Los Angeles by Mimi Zeiger

Laurelwood Apartments Renovation

2012-01-18T18:54:00-05:00

The Laurelwood Apartments, designed by R.M. Schindler in 1946, recently underwent a complete exterior restoration after years of neglect and disrepair. The 22-unit hillside housing complex, located in Studio City California, is Schindler’s largest completed work and a designated Historic Landmark. It demonstrates the innovation and experimentation of the last phase of his career. Constructed in the “Schindler Frame”, a modular construction system Schindler developed during WWII, it was built with inexpensive and efficient building materials and methods, such as exposed framing used as screens and trellises or grape stakes used as fencing. Schindler was an early critic of the International Style, and here its prevailing principles were challenged through the use of rotated, staggered forms built from common or low materials and adapted to site-specific conditions.

From the street, the carports create a buffer and point of entry. A central walkway connects the two halves of the...