do my reading home work

12

tioners had long been developing alternative modes

of inquiry. Theoretical projects, as opposed to com-

missioned buildings, had become widespread vehi-

cles of disciplinary innovation, and a rift had opened

between those committed to viable commercial

practices and those dedicated to seemingly antithet-

ical disciplinary pursuits and personal ambitions.

Much of this latter work addressed what

many understood to be a “loss of center” in the cul-

tural milieu, the apparent result of critical attacks

on the foundational tenets of Western humanism

by proponents of post-structuralist theory and de-

construction.4 Critics from inside and outside the

field called the unifying dogma of Modernism in

question,5 and architects set off in pursuit of wildly

divergent agendas. Simultaneously in the mid-

1960s, the Archigram group attempted to recuper-

ate Modernism’s links to technology, Robert Venturi

waxed poetical about his taste for complexity and

contradiction, and Aldo Rossi sought refuge in sym-

bolic forms and collective memory. Within a few

years, Venturi and his partner Denise Scott Brown

had made their way west to learn from Las Vegas

and other Pop and vernacular phenomena. Taking a

more academic approach to signs and signification,

critics such as George Baird and Charles Jencks

sought to establish a new ground for architectural

production in language. By the late ’70s, Léon Krier,

Colin Rowe, and Fred Koetter had made compel-

ling cases for the appropriation of historical forms

alongside equally impassioned pleas for a renewed

attentiveness to architecture’s irreducible essence

from the likes of Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind,

and Bernard Tschumi, among others.6 Each of these

varied agendas drew strong and devoted followings

whose output atomized the unified approach of

Modernism into an unruly constellation of compet-

ing alternatives for a postmodern world without a

center.

Los Angeles architects of the period were

not immune to this widespread suspicion of ortho-

doxy, and at the Architecture Gallery and elsewhere,

they pursued radical new trajectories. But where

their counterparts on the East Coast and in Europe

tended to characterize the loss of center as a burden

or tragedy, the predominant reaction among South-

ern California architects was a sense of liberation.

Such a response might have been expected in Los

Angeles, which for generations had made a virtue of

its peripheral status with respect to more established

(and establishment) centers to the north and east.7

Since at least the 1880s, Los Angeles architects had

exploited the city’s distance from established cen-

ters to develop idiosyncratic variations on imported

styles, as evidenced by the Newsom brothers with

Queen Anne, the Greene brothers with Arts and

Crafts, and Schindler, Neutra, and the Case Study

group with orthodox Modernism. In the late 1970s,

the city that had perfected the periphery was the

ideal place to speculate on how to organize a world

suddenly bereft of the notion of center.

Concentrating primarily on younger prac-

tices operating outside the commercial mainstream,

the Architecture Gallery showcased fringe mem-

bers of an already peripheral disciplinary culture.

But where like-minded apostates to orthodoxy in

other parts of the world tended to band together in

groups such as La Tendenza in Italy or the Institute

for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York,

architects in Los Angeles eschewed such collective

endeavors in favor of the individual pursuit of per-

sonal and idiosyncratic agendas. In his lecture for

the Architecture Gallery series, Eric Owen Moss

articulated his view of the situation: The problem that we face in doing architec- ture and in defining ourselves for ourselves is, finally, a personal and individual one. There have been many, over eons of time, who have attempted to deal with that kind of fundamental irrationality in a collective sense, to try to develop an order, an under- neath, a platform which seems to make the finitude of the individual a little bit more palatable and coherent and intelligible, to define a context which is broader than the individual and which will support and in fact ameliorate the problem.8

Though he observed that the Pythagorians

and, later, the Russian Constructivists had man-

aged to find a sense of order collectively, Moss saw

no such option available to his own generation: “It

A CONFEDERACY OF HERETICS todd Gannon

A Confederacy of Heretics examines the explosion

of activity associated with the Architecture Gallery,

Los Angeles’ first gallery dedicated exclusively to

architecture. Instigated by Thom Mayne in the fall

of 1979, the Architecture Gallery staged ten exhi-

bitions in as many weeks by both young and estab-

lished Los Angeles practitioners, featuring the work

of Eugene Kupper, Roland Coate, Jr., Frederick Fish-

er, Frank Dimster, Frank Gehry, Peter de Bretteville,

Morphosis (Thom Mayne and Michael Rotondi),

Studio Works (Craig Hodgetts and Robert Manguri-

an), and Eric Owen Moss. Another young architect,

Coy Howard, opened the events with a lecture at the

Southern California Institute of Architecture, which

hosted talks by each exhibiting architect. In an un-

precedented move by the popular press, the events

were chronicled in weekly reviews by the critic John

Dreyfuss in the Los Angeles Times.

Commonly understood today as a set of be-

liefs or practices in conflict with prevailing dogma,

the word “heresy” derives from the Greek αἵρεσις, meaning “choice.” In classical antiquity, the term

also signified a period during which a young phi-

losopher would examine various schools of thought

in order to determine his future way of life.1 These

inflections neatly capture the ambitions and at-

titudes held by the architects at the center of this

presentation. Some had grown weary with what they

viewed as the stale orthodoxies of the establishment,

and saw their work as a distinct challenge to the

status quo. Others were less strident, and experi-

mented with a diverse range of historical sources

as potential platforms from which to develop their

individual idioms. Others still struck out in bold new

directions, drawing inspiration and techniques from

the art world, literature, and other sources. Such

wide-ranging activities defy any attempt to portray

these architects as members of a coherent group

or “L.A. School.”2 More correctly, the Architecture

Gallery constitutes one of many loose, temporary

confederacies into which these architects entered

during their formative years. Here, the heretics

found strength in numbers, and the impact of their

efforts was felt across Los Angeles and around the

world.

Gathering an array of original drawings,

models, photographs, video recordings, and com-

mentary alongside new assessments by current

scholars, A Confederacy of Heretics aims neither to

canonize the participating architects nor to con-

secrate their unorthodox activities. Rather, the

exhibition re-examines the early work of some of

Los Angeles’ most well-known architects, charts the

development of their most potent design techniques,

and documents a crucial turning point in Los Ange-

les architecture, a time when Angeleno architecture

culture shifted from working local variations on

imported themes to exporting highly original dis-

ciplinary innovations with global reach. Taken to-

gether, the exhibition, symposium, and catalog that

comprise A Confederacy of Heretics offer a unique

lens through which to analyze a pivotal moment in

the development of late 20th century architecture.

The Architecture Gallery opened in October

1979, a time when the continued viability of ortho-

dox Modernism was being contested in Los Angeles

and around the world. Not only had architecture by

then witnessed the passing of most of its Modern

pioneers,3 but the tumultuous socio-political events

of the 1960s had shaken the field to its core. By the

end of the ’70s, architecture’s most advanced practi-

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Figs. 5 & 6: Morphosis, 2-4-6-8 House, 1978. Parts and Assembly axonometrics.

will finally be my opinion that any sort of effort, on

a collective level, is, at least for us, at this point in

time, impossible. These kinds of searches have to be

carried out on an individual level.”9

The wide array of approaches on display at

the Architecture Gallery attested to each architect’s

commitment to his own personal ambitions, and

underscores the inability of any collective label to

adequately account for their activities. Nonetheless,

certain shared tendencies can be discerned. Most do

not encompass the entire group, but rather loosely

organize the participants into overlapping clusters

of interest. A majority of these architects, for ex-

ample, shared a distinctly pragmatic frame of mind

and a willingness to take on commissions, such as

garage renovations and small residential additions,

which more established practitioners might have

considered economically unfeasible or intellectually

irrelevant. Several, including Eugene Kupper, Frank

Dimster, and Roland Coate, grounded their endeav-

ors in disciplinary fundamentals such as archetypal

forms, functional performance, and attentiveness

to the exigencies of the building site [Figs. 2-4].

Many, including Frank Gehry, Frederick Fisher, and

Thom Mayne and Michael Rotondi of Morphosis,

experimented with vernacular elements and ma-

terials, particularly in their residential projects. A

critical reassessment of disciplinary conventions

also colors much of the work on display. With the

2-4-6-8 House, for example, Mayne and Rotondi

took a small project as an opportunity to perpetrate

a wholesale reinvention of the conventions of con-

struction documentation. In now iconic drawings,

they outlined the building’s tectonic elements and

construction sequence in excruciating detail, care-

fully delineating even the simplest connections in

an almost comically thorough sequence of axono-

metrics [Figs 5, 6]. In this, the architects slid from

reimagining fundamentals to another common

tendency—the expenditure of unreasonable, even

unnecessary, effort. Craig Hodgetts and Robert

Mangurian’s voluminous production of drawings

and models for the South Side Settlement House

are another case in point [Fig. 7], as are many of the

artifacts in the present exhibition. As Ray Kappe re-

Fig 2: Eugene Kupper, Nilsson House, Bel Air, 1979.

Fig 3: Frank Dimster, Kelton Avenue Condominiums, Los Angeles, 1980.

Fig 4: Roland Coate, Jr., Alexander House, Montecito, 1974.

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when the city’s architectural community had been

working diligently to raise the level of public dis-

course and to make its activities known to broader

national and global audiences. Through the 1970s,

architectural exhibitions, lectures, and conferences

occurred in Los Angeles with increasing frequency.

And while many of these early efforts would not

broach significant influence beyond the city limits,

their increasing volume and sophistication brought

important attention to highly original new work,

and would prove a crucial catalyst for the Architec-

tural Gallery.

Events often were sponsored by one of the

three new schools of architecture that recently had

been launched as alternatives to established pro-

grams at the University of Southern California and

Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. The UCLA department of

Architecture and Urban Planning opened its doors

in 1964 under the direction of Henry C.K. Liu, and

from the start took a distinctly anti-orthodox tack.

By the late ’60s, Archigram members Ron Herron,

Warren Chalk, and Peter Cook were teaching in the

program. In 1970, the school launched a Master’s

program directed by Tim Vreeland. Formerly an

associate with Louis Kahn in Philadelphia, Vreeland

brought with him close ties to East Coast architec-

tural personalities and debates. By the early ’70s, he

had recruited Kupper, Hodgetts, and Howard, a re-

cent graduate of UCLA’s planning program, as facul-

ty members. Charles Jencks, at the time a rising star

on the international scene, began making regular

visits to the school in 1974.

In 1968, Ray Kappe was invited to lead

an architecture program within the newly created

School of Environmental Design at Cal Poly Pomo-

na. A victim of his own success (the program grew

from 25 to 200 students in just three years), Kappe

soon came into conflict with the dean over the size

of the program.15 In 1972, Kappe left Cal Poly with

six of its faculty members and roughly fifty of its

students. Twenty-five additional students joined the

group and in September, “The New School,” official-

ly the Southern California Institute of Architecture

(SCI-Arc), was opened in a Santa Monica warehouse.

In addition to founding faculty members Ray and

Shelly Kappe, Ahde Lahti, Thom Mayne, Bill Simo-

nian, Glen Small, and Jim Stafford, Architecture

Gallery participants Eric Owen Moss, Roland Coate,

and Frank Gehry were soon teaching at this unorth-

odox “school without a curriculum.” Michael Roton-

di, who would later assume the directorship of the

school, was a member of the first graduating class in

1973 and joined the faculty the following year.16

These new institutions quickly amplified

the volume of architectural discourse in Los Ange-

les. In 1973, SCI-Arc launched its Wednesday-night

Design Forum lecture series, which drew local as

well as national and international personalities from

the outset.17 The following year, UCLA convened

an important conference designed specifically to

insinuate a West Coast presence into ongoing East

Coast debates. “Four Days in May,” also known

as “White and Gray Meet Silver,” was conceived by

Vreeland in collaboration with Hodgetts, Kupper,

Anthony Lumsden, and Cesar Pelli. The group in-

vited representatives of the well-known ‘White vs.

Gray’ debates, with the five Los Angeles architects

acting as counterparts to the five core representa-

tives of the opposed East Coast factions.18 The Los

Fig 7: SCI-Arc Student Presentations, c. 1974.

marked, “the drawing…almost became a thing in

itself for a lot of these guys. …Robert and Craig

were just drawing the hell out of projects. Obviously,

[this was] not necessary for construction; obviously

not necessary, even, to understand the building.”10

Kappe’s observation is valid, but fails to recognize

the more radical proposition, widely espoused by

younger architects of the period, that buildings were

not always necessary to understand the architecture.

Rhetoric such as this, though part and

parcel to East Coast architecture discourse, was

rare in Los Angeles, where production typically

trumped polemic. Hodgetts, Howard, and Rotondi

later recounted that much of the motivation for their

elaborate drawings and models had to do with the

sheer pleasure of making them.11 Love of the game

notwithstanding, these labor-intensive artifacts

had an additional benefit: they made for arresting

publications. A widely shared ambition among these

architects was a dogged pursuit of local and national

design awards. Particularly prized was recognition

by the P/A Awards, the annual competition held by

Progressive Architecture magazine. Each of the archi-

tects in the exhibition devoted significant effort to

P/A Award submissions, and their projects were

consistently found among the winners from the

mid-1970s onward. Coy Howard later elaborated on

his method:

The way you won P/A Awards is you would

draw like you were a maniac. …All these young peo-

ple were obsessive, and they’re just going to draw

this thing and draw this thing and draw this thing.

They’re so totally passionate about architecture that

[the jury] just has to give you an award.12

As with the theoretical significance of their work, most of the architects downplayed the promotional aspects of their activities. Howard’s recollections are typical: “…every- body probably saw it differently. I didn’t do [drawings] for the P/A Awards. I mean, I did them and then used them in the P/A Awards, but I didn’t do them for the P/A Awards.”13 For Howard as for all of the participating ar- chitects, architecture was much more than a career. It was a way of life.14

** It is important to recognize that the Ar-

chitecture Gallery did not occur in isolation. More

symptom than cause, the events took place at a time

Fig 7: Studio Works, South Side Settlement, Columbus, Ohio, 1976-80. Posters.

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ments, sensitively knitted to their sites and inflected

by Modernism’s hallmark suspicion of capitalism,

remained the norm, and the radicalism of projects

such as Pelli’s Pacific Design Center, Lumsden’s

scheme for the Lugano Convention Center [Fig.

12], or Kupper’s UCLA Extension Building [Fig. 13]

went unacknowledged. Yet in their abandonment of

traditional part-to-whole coherence for ambiguously

scaled figures and open-ended systems, these proj-

ects signaled far more aggressive moves away from

orthodoxy than concurrent work by Stirling, the

Grays, or even—Eisenman’s and Hejduk’s polemics

notwithstanding—the Whites. Unfortunately, the

Silvers would not continue to meet after the 1976

conference, their later corporate works failed to live

up to the promise of early achievements, and the

episode was soon largely forgotten. Nonetheless,

the Silvers made a lasting impact on architectural

discourse in Los Angeles by generating significant

architectural debate—and whetting an appetite for

further conversation—in a city that previously sim-

ply hadn’t had any.24

The following month, another group of

Los Angeles architects debuted in an exhibition at

the Pacific Design Center. Twelve Los Angeles Ar-

chitects was initiated by Bernard Zimmerman and

organized by students at Cal Poly Pomona. The ex-

hibition featured the work of established local prac-

titioners Roland Coate Jr., Daniel Dworsky, Craig

Ellwood, Frank Gehry, Ray Kappe, John Lautner,

Jerrold Lomax, Tony Lumsden, Leroy Miller, Cesar

Pelli, James Pulliam, and Zimmerman himself. Like

the Silvers, the L.A. Twelve had been assembled as

a local response to out-of-town groups (specifically

the New York Five and the Chicago Seven), and its

organizers saw in the Twelve a similar commitment

to mainstream, as opposed to vanguard, practice.25

With projects ranging from elegant Miesian assem-

blages by Ellwood [Fig. 14] to stripped down com-

mercial facilities by Zimmerman and Lomax [Figs.

15, 16] to exuberant residential projects by Kappe

and Lautner [Figs. 17, 18], there was little formal or

stylistic commonality across the group.26 A series

of twelve monthly lectures was staged at the Pacific

Design Center in 1978, but the group had ceased to

meet regularly the previous year.27 Ultimately, like

the Silvers before them, the L.A. Twelve never de-

veloped beyond a parochial phenomenon.28 While

many of the participating architects continued to

produce significant projects (the bulk of them in an

Fig. 10: Frank Dimster for William Pereira and Associates, Houston Center Tower, Houston,Texas, 1975.

Fig. 12: Anthony Lumsden for DMJM, Lugano Convention Center [project], Lugano, Switzerland, 1972-75.

Angeles participants, dubbed “the Silvers,”19 did not

present any work at the conference, which focused

on the ideological and stylistic differences between

the neo-Modernist Whites and the post-Modernist

Grays. According to Hodgetts, the event “was more

about putting UCLA on the map, I think, than trying

to identify a group.”20 The Silvers put their own work

center stage two years later when UCLA convened a

sequel with “Four Days in April.” Hodgetts did not

participate, but the group swelled to six members for

that presentation, adding Frank Dimster and Paul

Kennon in his place.

Contrasting their White and Gray coun-

terparts, who pursued highly formalized agendas

through small private commissions, the Silvers

directed their efforts primarily toward large-scale

commercial projects. Major achievements, such as

Pelli’s Pacific Design Center [Fig. 8], Lumsden’s

Manufacturers Bank building, and Dimster’s Hous-

ton Center tower [Fig. 10], for example, each were

completed under the auspices of large corporate

firms (Gruen, DMJM, and Pereira, respectively)

where each architect functioned as design director.21

These and other projects were characterized by slick

glass envelopes reminiscent of recent projects by

Japanese architect Kisho Kurakawa as well as Nor-

man Foster’s groundbreaking corporate facilities for

Willis Faber and Dumas [Fig. 11] and IBM. A vague-

ly English attitude was further signaled by Vree-

land’s invocation of the group’s use of a pragmatic

“style for the job,” a catchphrase previously associat-

ed with the work of James Stirling in the 1960s.22

The Silvers’ unapologetic commitment to

the mainstream brought pointed criticism from

invited respondents at the 1976 conference. Charles

Jencks noted the ironies of what he labeled “sil-

ver-plated capitalism.” Esther McCoy, Charles

Moore, and David Gebhard each questioned the lack

of regional specificity to the work, and John Hejduk

worried that in the presented projects, “high tech-

nology is generally wrapped up in high romanticism,

with the danger that it could lead to totalitarianism.”

Stirling, for his part, saw the work as little more than

“chic packaging,” to which Pelli demurred, “All of

our projects are way below the level of people such

as Stirling.”23

Such criticism, as well as Pelli’s feeble re-

sponse, demonstrates the continued hegemony of

orthodox values over architectural culture in the

mid-1970s. Carefully tailored compositions of ele-

Fig. 8: Cesar Pelli for Gruen Associates, Pacific Design Center, West Hollywood, 1975.

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unapologetically orthodox idiom), their collective

activities generated little of lasting influence.

Two additional exhibitions warrant specific

mention. In January 1978, Otis College of Art and

Design hosted America Now: Drawing towards a

More Modern Architecture, a condensed re-presenta-

tion of exhibitions held at the Cooper-Hewitt Muse-

um and the Drawing Center in New York the previ-

ous year.29 In a polemical catalog essay, curator Rob-

ert A.M. Stern argued that Modernism had favored

“polytechnicians” over poets and had dissipated the

power and importance of drawing by, among other

reasons, favoring conceptual axonometric projec-

tions over perceptual perspectival renderings. For

Stern, the recent renewed interest in architectural

drawing coincided with a waning adherence to the

tenets of Modernism and signaled a shift away from

“the poverty of orthodox modern architecture” to a

far richer postmodern poetry.30

Though Stern’s critique was baldly tilted

toward his own stylistic predilections, his belief

that architects sought to advance beyond the stric-

tures of orthodox Modernism through drawing was

widely shared. That same January, Coy Howard as-

sembled a collection of drawings by local architects

at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art.

Architectural Views: Physical Fact, Psychic Effect fea-

tured works by Richard Aldriedge, Frederick Fisher,

Eugene Kupper, Studio Works, and Howard himself

that went well beyond the representation of build-

ings to mine the medium of drawing for untapped

potential. Howard remembered his own motivations

as follows: It basically grew out of [a feeling that] ‘I don’t know if what I’m doing here is of any value, but let me test and see if I can come to under- stand what I’m trying to do architecturally in terms of the drawing.’ So the drawings be- came this incredible vehicle…I would study them and study them and study them, and try to invent different techniques to try to discover the sensibility that I wanted in the buildings which I wasn’t sure was there. So, doing those drawings was absolutely pivotal for me in developing my aesthetic.31

Fig. 14: Craig Ellwood, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, 1976.

Fig. 17: Ray Kappe, Kappe Residence, Pacific Palisades, 1967. Fig. 18: John Lautner, Silvertop, Los Angeles, 1963.

Fig. 16: Jerrold Lomax, ACDC Electronics Building, Oceanside, California, 1973.

Fig. 13: Eugene Kupper, UCLA Extension Building, Los Angeles, 1976. Earth and Sky axonometrics.

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bition demonstrated the radical potential of alterna-

tive techniques being developed in Los Angeles.

By the late 1970s, such wide-ranging

activity had begun to draw attention from local,

national, and international audiences, with in-

creasing interest going to younger practitioners. In

addition to coverage in the P/A Awards, projects by

Architecture Gallery participants such as Coate’s

Alexander house, Morphosis’s Villas Florestas, and

Moss’s Morganstern warehouse received extended

reviews.33 Peter de Bretteville, Hodgetts, Mangurian,

and Howard were included among the “Forty under

Forty” list of significant young architects Robert

A.M. Stern compiled for the Japanese journal A+U

in 197 7.34 In 1978, A+U dedicated the bulk of its April

issue to a survey of young Los Angeles architects

assembled by Michael Franklin Ross.35 As with pre-

vious group presentations, this collection was stylis-

tically and programmatically diverse, held together

by little more than a common desire to move beyond

the International Style toward what Ross tentatively

referred to as a “possibly-post-modern” interest in

“indulgent complexity.”36 Unbuilt projects predom-

inated, though recently completed buildings such

as Helmut Schulitz’ high-tech residence in Coldwa-

ter Canyon [Fig. 24], Moss’s Playa del Rey triplex

[Fig. 25], and Morphosis’ small Delmer addition in

Venice [Fig. 26] demonstrated the viability of alter-

native approaches. For Ross, the work represented

Fig. 20: Coy Howard, Scythian Gold, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1976.

An array of techniques was on view at the

exhibition. Studio Works hung a neat row of tiny,

carefully mounted pen-and-ink sketches that clear-

ly enumerated the functional and organizational

elements of their scheme for Nicollet Island in Min-

neapolis [Fig. 19]. Across the room, a series of evoc-

ative collages of their South Side Settlement House,

assembled in part from Mangurian’s meticulous

construction documents, offered little in the way of

technical clarity but an abundance of emotional im-

pact [see plate section]. Howard’s work displayed a

similar breadth of investigation. Two carefully inked

images of his exhibition design for the 1976 Scyth-

ian Gold exhibition at LACMA [Fig. 20] contrasted

an enormous and highly expressive perspective

drawing of his Rinaldi house mounted directly to

the wall with long, dynamically arrayed strips of

masking tape [Fig. 21].32 Kupper hung a series of six

axonometrics of his UCLA Extension project [see

pp._ _ _] as well as ink and colored-pencil studies

of his house for Harry Nilsson [Fig. 22]. Fisher’s

large-scale rendered site plan of his scheme for Ma-

chu Picchu also was fixed directly to the wall with

tape [Fig. 23], while Aldriedge’s careful perspective

drawings in ink and watercolor were fastidiously

mounted. In each case, the work on the wall went

far beyond the mere representation and planning of

a future building to stand as self-sufficient works of

architecture in their own right. Far more emphati-

cally than previous presentations, the LAICA exhi-

Fig. 19: Studio Works, The River and the City, Minneapolis, 1976. Sketches.

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glass, galvanized metal, unfinished plywood, and

chain link. Inside, he stripped away finishes to

reveal the bare studs and lath beneath. Formerly

exterior surfaces were recast as unlikely interior

elements, and typical interior spaces such as kitchen

and dining were placed outside the original house,

with an asphalt floor amplifying the ambiguities of

the new enclosure [see. plate section]. The house

represented a bold departure from both modern and

postmodern orthodoxies and marked a significant

breakthrough in Gehry’s development. With it, the

architect established a line of exploration he would

develop over the next decade.

Gehry also used the house to take aim at

prevailing tendencies on the East Coast. In his lec-

ture for the Architecture Gallery series, he joked

that a model of the house made for a 1979 exhibi-

tion in New York was assembled with a deliberate

lack of traditional craft with the express purpose

of “upsetting the people in New York, who are very

precise about architecture” [Fig. 28]. He went on to

articulate a more serious statement of his personal

interests: There is a certain fascination with some- thing not looking designed. I feel that a lot of buildings, a lot of architecture, a lot of work, has that ‘designed’ look—that everything is in place. I am really trying to get away from that, to look more like it was less contrived. Now maybe, in fact, it ends up being more contrived, but I hope not. 42

Gehry’s taste for ‘carefully careless,’ frag-

mentary compositions executed in straightforward

vernacular materials would become a hallmark of

Los Angeles architecture through the 1980s and

’90s, leading many critics to see the architect as a

trailblazer and father figure for the younger gener-

ation. In truth, the relationship was much more of a

two-way street, and Gehry clearly drew off the en-

ergy of his younger colleagues.43 But few would dis-

agree that the house marked a spectacular achieve-

ment for Los Angeles architecture. With it, Gehry

was launched into the international spotlight, and a

parade of onlookers soon descended on Los Angeles’

West Side for a closer look.

Fig.24: Helmut Schulitz, Schulitz Residence, Los Angeles, 1976.

Fig. 25: Eric Owen Moss, Triplex Apartments, Playa del Rey, 1976.

Fig. 26: Morphosis, Delmer Residence, Venice, 1977.

“a restless desire to do something more, something

special, something that isn’t just another repetition

of what has gone before, but in some small way

expands the realm of possibilities for architecture

and for the people who experience it.”37 This widely

read presentation drew significant attention to the

younger generation from outside Southern Califor-

nia, and, despite Ross’s attempts to disprove any

collective ambitions, established the notion of a co-

herent group of young Los Angeles architects in the

minds of many observers in the city and beyond.

By the end of the decade new local journals

such as L.A. Architect, the monthly newsletter of the

AIA’s Southern California Chapter, and Archetype,

an independent effort launched by San Francis-

co-based architect Mark Mack, brought additional

coverage and provided important platforms from

which to broadcast activities and ideas. But it was

the writing of Los Angeles Times architecture critic

John Dreyfuss (1934-2004) that would prove partic-

ularly significant to the Architecture Gallery. Drey-

fuss, the son of the noted industrial engineer Henry

Dreyfuss, joined the Times in 1966 and became its

architecture and design critic ten years later. Of-

ten critical of the city’s Downtown architectural

establishment, he devoted significant attention to

new projects by unorthodox Westsiders in the late

1970s.38 Eric Moss remembers a “genuinely interest-

ed, genuinely supportive guy. …he was open and he

was sympathetic, and he didn’t come with an ideo-

logical perspective. As far as I could tell, he was just

looking for ideas, looking for new stuff, looking for

interesting characters.”39

Dreyfuss took particular interest in the

house Frank Gehry built for himself in Santa Moni-

ca in the summer of 1978, and in a long article in the

Times carefully outlined the architect’s unorthodox

intentions and design process, the house’s basic

organization strategy, and described salient effects

such as the perspectival illusions created by varied

wall heights along the building’s south façade.40

Setting up his readers for a positive response, Drey-

fuss also described a number of skeptical neighbors,

including Santa Monica’s mayor, who had been won

over after visiting the house and learning of the ar-

chitect’s intentions firsthand. Dreyfuss’s article was

the first sustained treatment of Gehry’s house in ei-

ther the popular or professional press, but it was far

from the last. The house was soon featured across

the architectural literature and national newspapers,

and even found its way into People magazine and a

cover story on American architects in Time.41

Drawing inspiration from the work of local

artists Charles Arnoldi [Figs. 27] and Ed Moses,

among others, Gehry wrapped his unassuming

Santa Monica house in a complex assemblage of

Fig. 21: Coy Howard, Rinaldi Residence, Los Angeles, 1978.

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At that time…Bernard Zimmerman, Ray Kappe, and a group of could-have-been, wanna-be Case Study guys…they owned the city. And we were going, “No, we don’t buy it.” We were going somewhere. It was very much part of the SCI-Arc dialogue. We used to have some fantastic, really robust conver- sations and disagreements about where we were going, about just what we stood for.47

For Mayne, the Modernist project was ex-

hausted. “The people I studied under, Pierre Koenig,

et cetera, that was the end, that was the last group.

…[ours] was a group that was starting to redefine

things.”48 Soon after Mayne’s return to Los Angeles,

an opportunity to publicly stake out alternative posi-

tions presented itself.

Ray and Shelly Kappe took a sabbatical

during the 1978-79 school year, and remained away

through the summer. By the time they returned,

Mayne had organized the fall’s Design Forum

lecture series. His recollection of exactly how the

events came together is vague: “I can’t remember.

It was my turn or they asked me to do the lecture

series—we took turns doing that.”49 Kappe recalled

something more calculated: I was on sabbatical when they put that thing together. …I came back to kind of a surprise.

…I get back and Thom Mayne says to me, “We put together a program with guys who are doing architecture.” He names the peo- ple and I said, “I do architecture, why aren’t I on the list?” So it was a set-up. It was a time when both Eric [Moss] and Thom were just starting to move to a new place.”50

That new place had little room for members

of Kappe’s generation. For the lectures, Mayne

chose younger practitioners with the exception

of Gehry, whose radical new projects aligned him

more with Mayne’s generation than his own, and

Coate, with whom Mayne had collaborated in the

early 1970s. Most were teaching at either SCI-Arc or

UCLA, with Dimster and De Bretteville represent-

ing USC. Mayne drew participants from both the Sil-

vers (Kupper, Dimster) and the L.A. Twelve (Gehry,

Coate), choosing the most idiosyncratic characters

from each previous group. The series’ title, “Current

L.A.: 10 Viewpoints,” foregrounded the individu-

alistic nature of each practice over any notions of

shared methodology. An exhibition to accompany

each of the nine lectures was soon added to the

agenda, with Mayne’s sparsely furnished home and

studio in Venice serving as the venue. Coy Howard,

who would not exhibit his work, was slated to give

two lectures bookending the series. Each of the SCI-

Arc lectures was videotaped, and was screened on a

small black-and-white monitor in the gallery.51

By any metric, it was a heterogeneous as-

semblage, and, despite its lack of approval from SCI-

Arc’s director, it seemed to align with the school’s

experimental mandate. Moss later characterized it

as a natural development of SCI-Arc’s unorthodox

pedagogy—and the failure of its founders to fully

deliver on its initial promise:

If you set something up as a departure and

then try to teach something that was no departure

at all…the opportunity for departure manifests itself.

I would say, in retrospect, that these shows would

be a manifestation—the train had left the station,

you know? First you made the station, and then you

made the train, and then, finally, it took off.52

Howard delivered his opening talk—equal

parts criticism of the establishment and poetic

meditation of the nature of beauty—on October 3rd.

Kupper’s exhibition opened the following Tuesday.

The next morning, two articles by John Dreyfuss

appeared in the Los Angeles Times. The first outlined

the series of exhibitions as a whole; the second of-

fered a specific treatment of Kupper’s installation.53

How Dreyfuss came to write about the

shows is unclear. Mayne recalls the journalist con-

tacting him with a request to see Kupper’s exhibition,

and then insisting, against Mayne’s initial disagree-

ment, that he produce weekly reviews of remaining

shows.54 Rotondi, who worked closely with Mayne to

organize the events, remembers a discussion “to see

if we could get Dreyfuss to write about [the shows],

which he did.”55 Regardless of the motivating cir-

cumstances, Dreyfuss’s contribution was crucial.

With illustrations by Times photographer Mary

Frampton and others, the reviews certainly were

responsible for the steadily increasing—and largely

**

In the summer of 1978, a 34-year-old Thom

Mayne returned to Los Angeles after a year at

Harvard. On the East Coast, Mayne had collected

a graduate degree and “realigned” himself after

a several years of deep involvement at SCI-Arc. 4 4

Michael Rotondi picked him up at LAX and drove

straight to Frank Gehry’s not-yet-completed house

in Santa Monica. For Mayne, “It was just a startle,

I’ll never forget it. I had been in Boston and [it was]

just dead. I was this L.A. kid…it was an enjoyable

year, but there was just no way I could possibly live

in Boston. …I really had a new appreciation for L.A.

and the kind of freedom I had here.”45

Rotondi and Mayne quickly set to work on

two new projects, a garage renovation in Venice and

a small single-family house in Tijuana. In contrast

to the more stringent functionalism of earlier Mor-

phosis projects such as the Sequoia School (which

had begun as Rotondi’s thesis at SCI-Arc) and the

Stirlingesque Reidel Medical Building, the 2-4-6-8

and Mexico II houses were composed of centralized,

symmetrical volumes capped by pyramidal roofs

[Figs. 29, 30]. 2-4-6-8’s iconic progression of four-

square windows was articulated in bright yellow,

blue, and red, with bands of pink concrete block

running through the base. According to Rotondi,

SCI-Arc director Ray Kappe was not pleased with

their swerve away from more orthodox methodolo-

gies: “Kappe was really pissed off at us when we did

that one because it had bright colors. He thought we

were selling out to Aldo Rossi. …Everybody was just

trying things out. And Ray was Ray. He was a Mod-

ernist, but with an open mind—but closed when he

thought we were giving in to Postmodernism.”46

Kappe’s paradoxical stance—open to

change, but committed to orthodox values—was a

key catalyst for the Architecture Gallery. As younger

faculty like Mayne, Rotondi, and Moss developed

their positions, their architecture veered further

from the status quo of Kappe’s generation. By the

late ’70s, a distinctly adversarial relationship had

taken shape. As Mayne recalled,

Fig. 27: Charles Arnoldi, Untitled, 1971.

Fig. 28: Frank Gehry, Gehry Residence, Santa Monica, 1977-78.

Fig. 29: Morphosis, 2-4-6-8 House, Venice, 1978. View from alley.

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ensuing decades. Rather than categorize works

according to individual architects or projects, we

organize the installation according to specific for-

mal criteria which register the range of projective

geometries through which the architecture of the

period was disciplined. Our method re-contextual-

izes individual artifacts as it echoes the mobilization

of counter-intuitive tactics and productive overelab-

oration in much of the exhibited work. Though our

gambit may obscure some aspects of the exhibited

work (including the architects’ intentions), we wager

that any losses will be more than offset by produc-

tive adjacencies more conventional interpretive

schema would be unlikely to produce. Part Three,

introduced by co-curator Ewan Branda, presents

new critical essays by contemporary scholars which

situate the work in current architectural discourse.

Branda introduces the section with themes by which

the 1979 work might be understood from today’s

perspective, particularly in terms of technology. Joe

Day maps the social and professional networks of

which Frank Gehry was a part, while Kevin McMa-

hon places the video documentation of the lectures

within a wider history of video technology in South-

ern California. Patricia Morton positions the work

in the broader context of postmodernism, paying

particular attention to the Architecture Gallery’s

relationship to the 1980 Architecture Biennale in

Venice, Italy, and Paulette Singley looks at Venice,

California as a new locus of creativity. In keeping

with his critical relationship to the original events,

we also include a new assessment from Coy Howard.

All told, A Confederacy of Heretics gathers

an array of artifacts across a wide spectrum of me-

dia. Collected here, these objects demonstrate the

breadth of tactics with which progressive young

architects experimented in the late 1970s and com-

prise a unique repository of nascent design ideas

which continue to sponsor innovative architecture

in Los Angeles. Not only does this collection show-

case some of the earliest instances of the formal,

material, and technical innovations that would de-

velop into the hallmarks of Los Angeles architecture

in the 1980s and ’90s, it also maps still-potent lines

of investigation to be developed—or contested—by

contemporary designers wishing to exploit the

promise of the periphery to imagine new possibili-

ties for a 21st-century world without a center.

non-professional—traffic in the gallery as the weeks

progressed.56 The articles also changed the tenor of

disciplinary conversation in Los Angeles. For the

participating architects, they afforded a heightened

sense of significance to their ongoing experiments.

For the city’s architectural establishment—many of

whom had close ties with the paper’s owners—the

attention, which meant a corresponding lack of cov-

erage for their own output, was cause for concern.

Dreyfuss soon found himself in conflict with the pa-

per’s editors, and after 1983 architectural reviews in

the paper would be taken over by Sam Hall Kaplan, a

critic who did not share Dreyfuss’s sympathy for the

younger generation.

Nonetheless, the buzz generated by the ex-

hibitions would continue unabated into the 1980s.

As Dreyfuss put it, they “catalyzed a significant seg-

ment of the Los Angeles architectural community,

precipitating a steamy brew of respect, anger, pride,

jealousy, excitement, and interest.”57 Dreyfuss’s con-

cluding article, which appears to respond directly to

criticism he received from establishment architects,

outlined an accurate prediction of developments in

Los Angeles architecture through the 1980s. As ar-

chitects in the exhibition—particularly Gehry, Moss,

and Morphosis—rose in significance, many estab-

lished practitioners indeed were “left by the wayside

in terms of being movers and shakers in their pro-

fession.”58 With the Architecture Gallery, the young-

sters emphatically put the city’s greying establish-

ment on notice, and their “obscure, theatrical, and

trendy” output would soon become synonymous

with cutting-edge architecture in Los Angeles.59

**

A Confederacy of Heretics offers the first sus-

tained look at this crucial moment in Los Angeles

architecture. Our aim is not to reconstruct the orig-

inal exhibitions, but rather to unsettle prevailing

understandings of this work in order to catalyze new

interpretations and debate. Through the 1980s and

’90s, the “L.A. School” became synonymous with a

visual style of fragmented forms, intuitive composi-

tions, expressive details, vernacular references, and

varied materials.60 As the materials gathered here

attest, such a narrow description fails to account

for the array of individual—and collaborative—ap-

proaches pursued by these architects in the late ’70s

and early ’80s. To further broaden the conversation,

we pay particular attention to lesser known designs

and include several notable projects and artifacts

not exhibited in the original 1979 exhibitions. We

privilege drawings and models over photographic

documentation of built projects not because many

of the exhibited projects remain unbuilt, but rather

because these artifacts demonstrate most dramati-

cally the radicalism at the heart of the Architecture

Gallery. Many of the artifacts collected here have

not been seen since the 1979 exhibitions and are

published for the first time in this catalog.

The Architecture Gallery exhibitions were

small and, in many cases, hastily assembled affairs.

Many of the exhibited projects were underrepresent-

ed, and explanatory texts were often absent. Few

photographs were taken and even fewer records

were kept to document the events. In many cases, a

reliable accounting of exhibited works is impossible,

and a number of original artifacts have been lost or

irreparably damaged. A Confederacy of Heretics cuts

across this incomplete archive in several ways. In

Part One of this volume, original drawings, models,

and other items exhibited in the Architecture Gal-

lery are presented alongside each of John Dreyfuss’s

Los Angeles Times reviews and new statements from

the participating architects. We also include a 1979

review of the exhibitions by Joseph Giovannini, then

architecture critic for the Los Angeles Herald Exam-

iner. A selection of images by Times photographers

Larry Bessel, Judd Gunderson, and Mary Frampton

offers a rare glimpse at the original installations.61

The materials installed in the SCI-Arc Gal-

lery and illustrated in Part Two of this catalog are

assembled with awareness of subsequent develop-

ments and present-day reassessments. As outlined

in co-curator Andrew Zago’s introduction to Part

Two, we include a number of artifacts not included

in the original exhibitions which demonstrate the

unfolding of nascent themes at the Architecture

Gallery into more mature instantiations in the

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The Los Angeles 12,” Architectural Record (Aug 1976), appears to be the lone national publication on the group. 29 The exhibitions, curated by Robert A.M. Stern (at the Drawing Center) and R ichard Oliver (at the Cooper-Hewitt) showcased a diversity of work by Charles Moore, Stanley Tigerman, Michael Graves, Robert Venturi, John Hejduk, Peter Eisenman, Coy Howard, and Frank- lin Israel, among others. 30 See Robert A.M. Stern, ed., “America Now: Drawing towards a More Modern Architecture,” A.D. Profiles 6 ( June 1977): 383. Local critics held similar views. The following year, Anne Luise Buerger remarked, “When the Modern Movement appeared as corporate architecture in the United States, architectural drawing suffered the consequences of a corporate spe- cialization that too often combined division of labor with division of spirit.” See “Art and Architecture: Drawing them Together,” L.A. Ar- chitect (Feb 1978): np. 31 Coy Howard, interview with the author and Ewan Branda. Los Ange- les, 16 May 2012. In a small publica- tion on the show, other participants offered their own observations on drawing. Fisher: “Drawing serves the two aspects of design: analysis and synthesis. It facilitates dissec- tion of a building in abstract or real terms, and replicates the selective focus of thoughtful perception.” Kupper: “Architectural drawings can serve the direct purpose of technical communication, but they can also be an expression of architectural theory. Architecture is a potential of the creative spirit, not another name for real estate or construction.” Aldriedge: “With my drawings I am trying to catch a glance of the moods, emotions, and ancient memories that may exist behind the architecture.” Hodgetts and Mangurian, with tongues firmly planted in cheeks, flatly stated, “Drawings are a minor part of our process.” See “Architectural Views: Physical Fact, Psychic Effect,” L.A. Architect (Feb 1978): np. 32 Curved polycarbonate panels that lay strewn on the floor beneath the image were in fact a framework which could be assembled into a cylinder. The drawing—a 360-de- gree view of the interior of the house—could be mounted inside the cylinder to afford a viewer will- ing to climb inside an immersive, kinesthetic preview of the proposed space. 33 See Thomas Hines, “Coate,” Progressive Architecture (Aug 1976): 58-61; Esther McCoy, “Everyman’s Casa,” Progressive Architecture ( July 1978): 76-79; and David Morton,

“Look Again: Morganstern Ware- house,” Progressive Architecture ( Jun 1979): 66-69. 34 See Stern, “40 under 40,” Archi- tecture and Urbanism 73 ( Jan 1977): 17-142. The issue also included a synopsis of recent architectural activities in Los Angeles. See Panos Koulermos, “Los Angeles,” ibid., pp. 11-12. 35 See Michael Franklin Ross, “Young, Los Angeles and Possi- bly-Post-Modern, Architects,” Architecture and Urbanism 90 (April 1978): 83-154. The represented prac- tices were Chris Dawson & David Brindle, Ronald Filson, Arthur Golding, Coy Howard, Charles La- greco, Douglas Meyer, Morphosis, Eric Owen Moss & James Stafford, James Porter, Michael Franklin Ross, and Helmut Schulitz. 36 Ibid., 84. 37 Ibid., 85. 38 Cf. “Job Center Does its Job—and Architecture Excels,” Los Angeles Times (23 Jan 1977), on Geh- ry’s UCLA Placement and Career Planning Center; “Pavilion: Crater with a Stage at Bottom,” Los Angeles Times (15 May 1977), on Gehry’s Concord Pavilion; and “An Unlikely Dash of Exuberance,” Los Angeles Time (22 Oct 1978), on Moss’s Mor- ganstern Warehouse. Dreyfuss’ re- viewed both Stern’s Otis exhibition and Howard’s LAICA exhibition in “Architects: Insights into the Sketches,” Los Angeles Times ( 30 Jan 1978): E1, E5. 39 Eric Owen Moss, interview with the author, Ewan Branda, and An- drew Zago. Culver City, CA, 7 Jun 2012. 40 Dreyfuss, “Gehry’s Artful House Offends, Baffles, Angers his Neighbors,” Los Angeles Times (23 July 1978). 41 See Sally Koris, “Renegade Frank Gehry Has Torn Up His House—and the Book of Archi- tecture,” People ( 5 Mar 1979) and Robert Hughes, “Doing Their Own Thing,” Time (8 Jan 1979). 42 Frank O. Gehry, November 07, 1979. “Frank O Gehry Part One.” In SCI-Arc Media Archive. Southern California Institute of Architecture. <http://sma.sciarc.edu/video/ frank-gehry-part-one/>. (October 16, 2012). 43 Coy Howard saw in Gehry’s occasional invitations to younger architects to meet for discussions at his studio deliberate attempts by the older architect to insinuate himself into ongoing conversations among the younger generation. Howard’s reaction to the oft-uttered label, “the Gehry kids,” was unequivocal: “It’s the other way around. Gehry’s our kid, in actual fact.” Coy How- ard, interview with the author and Ewan Branda. Los Angeles, 16 May

2012. 4 4 As Mayne had been involved in running the graduate program at SCI-Arc but did not hold a master’s degree himself, the school granted him a sabbatical to attend the pro- gram at Harvard. 45 Thom Mayne, interview with the author. Culver City, CA, 14 July 2012. 46 Michael Rotondi, interview with the author and Ewan Branda. Los Angeles, 13 Jun 2012. 47 Thom Mayne, interview with the author and Ewan Branda. Culver City, CA, 5 Mar 2012. 48 Ibid. 49 Thom Mayne, interview with the author and Ewan Branda. Cul- ver City, CA, 14 July 2012. 50 Ray Kappe, interview with the author. Los Angeles, 29 June 2012. Shelly Kappe was incensed by Mayne’s move, and in a 2012 con- versation with the author insisted that the exhibitions were a renegade action that should not be considered official SCI-Arc events. 51 Nearly all the lectures are now available online at the SCI-Arc Me- dia Archive. At the time of writing, only Coate’s lecture and Howard’s concluding talk have not yet been located. 52 Eric Owen Moss, interview with the author, Ewan Branda, and An- drew Zago. Culver City, CA, 7 June 2012. 53 See “One-Week Shows by 11 Architects” and “Kupper Employs Dual Process,” Los Angeles Times (11 Oct 1979): C25, 26, 28, reprinted in this volume on pp. xx-xx. 54 Thom Mayne, interview with the author. Culver City, CA, 5 Mar 2012. 55 Michael Rotondi, interview with the author and Ewan Branda. Los Angeles, 13 June 2012. 56 According to Mayne, the come- dian and art patron Steve Martin dutifully checked out the new offer- ings every Saturday. Martin would later purchase Coate’s Alexander House in Montecito. Thom Mayne, interview with the author and Ewan Branda. Culver City, 14 July 2012. 57 Dreyfuss, “Gallery Stirs Up Architects,” Los Angeles Times (12 Dec 1979): E26. Reprinted in this volume, pp. xx-xx. 58 Ibid. 59 Howard offered this description to Dreyfuss in a 1979 interview. Ibid. 60 The best treatments of this period to date are Charles Jencks, Heteropolis, op. cit., and John Morris Dixon’s “The Santa Monica School: What’s its Lasting Contribution?” Progressive Architecture (May 1995): 63-71, 112, 114. 61 Complementing this catalog and the installation at SCI-Arc,

Kevin McMahon has assembled an online exhibition of related mate- rials at the SCI-Arc Media Archive, including the original 1979 SCI-Arc lectures, commentary from the ex- hibition curators, a film by Rebeca Méndez Design commissioned for the exhibition, and other items. See http://sma.sciarc.edu/.

EndnotEs

1 The theologian Heinrich Schlier outlines “the hairesis of the philos- opher, which in antiquity always includes the choice of a distinct bios [way of life]” in Gerhard Kittels, ed., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 1 (London: Eerdmans, 1964): 180-82. For more developed discussions of heresy’s relationship to the construction of the self, see Eduard Iricinschi and Holger M. Zellentin, eds., Her- esy and Identity in Late Antiquity (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008). On the concept’s relationship to mo- dernity, see Peter Gay, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy from Beckett to Baudelaire and Beyond (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008). 2 There were several attempts to bring together these and other Los Angeles architects under a single banner in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Charles Jencks claims the label “L.A. School” was invented by a group of architects that convened a series of meetings at the Biltmore Hotel in 1981. See his “LA Style / LA School,” AA Files 5 (1983): 90. In Heteropolis: Los Angeles, the Riots, and the Strange Beauty of Hete- ro-architecture (London: Academy Editions, 1993): 132, n. 9, he lists the group’s instigators as George Rand, Gene Summers, and himself, and participating architects as Roland Coate, Peter de Bretteville, Frank Gehry, Craig Hodgetts, Coy Howard, Eugene Kupper, Tony Lumsden, Thom Mayne, Robert Mangurian, Charles Moore, Cesar Pelli, Stefanos Polyzoides, Michael Rotondi, Tim Vreeland, and Buzz Yudell. 3 The twenty years preceding the Architecture Gallery saw the deaths of Frank Lloyd Wright (1959), Le Corbusier (1965), Mies van der Rohe (1969), Walter Gropius (1969), Louis Kahn (1974), and Alvar Aalto (1976). Los Angeles also lost a large share of notable personalities, in- cluding A.C. Martin (1960), Welton Becket (1969), R ichard Neutra (1970), Lloyd Wright (1978), Charles Eames (1978), and A. Quincy Jones (1979). 4 Among the most influential of these attacks is Jacques Derrida’s essay, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Scienc- es,” delivered as a lecture at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 and translated into English in Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978): 278-293. 5 Damaging critiques include Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961) and Manfredo Tafuri’s “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology” [1969], in K. Michael

Hays, Architecture Theory since 1968 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998): 6-35. 6 See Peter Cook, ed., Archigram (London: The Architectural Press, 1973) which collects much of the material published in the group’s eponymous pamphlet from 1961- 70; Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City [1966](New York: MIT Press, 1982); Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966); Venturi, Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977); Baird, “‘La Dimension Amoureuse’ in Architecture,” in Baird and Jencks, eds., Meaning in Architecture (New York: George Braziller, 1969); Jencks, The Lan- guage of Post-Modern Architecture (New York: R izzoli, 1977); Maurice Culot and Krier, “The Only Path for Architecture,” Oppositions 14 (Fall 1978); Rowe and Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978); Eisenman, “Aspects of Modernism: Maison Dom-ino and the Self-Ref- erential Sign,” Oppositions 15/16 (Winter/Spring 1979); Libeskind, ““Deus ex Machina”/ “Machina ex Deo”: Aldo Rossi’s Theater of the World,” Oppositions 21 (Summer 1980), and Tschumi, “The Architec- tural Paradox,” Studio International (Sept-Oct 1975). 7 Carey McWilliams’ classic study, Southern California: An Island on the Land [1946] (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 2010), provides an excellent account of such activ- ities throughout the city’s history. I offer my own musings about the peripheral nature of Los Angeles ar- chitecture in “Downtown” [2007], Issues-Newsletters, Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design. http://laforum.org/con- tent/issues-newsletters/downtown- by-todd-gannon. 8 Eric Owen Moss. December 05, 1979. “Eric Owen Moss: Armageddon or Polynesian Contextualism, Part One.” In SCI-Arc Media Archive. Southern California Institute of Ar- chitecture. <http://sma.sciarc.edu/ video/1883 _moss_eric_owen_1-00- 00-00/>. (October 09, 2012). 9 Ibid. 10 Ray Kappe, interview with the author. Los Angeles, 29 June 2012. 11 Personal interviews with the author, Summer 2012. 12 Coy Howard, interview with the author and Ewan Branda. Los Ange- les, 16 May 2012. 13 Ibid. 14 Importantly, that way of life was widely understood to be specifically architectural. Though Howard and Frank Gehry both maintained close ties with and drew significant inspiration from the Los Angeles art scene, these and other participating

architects ultimately maintained clear disciplinary boundaries be- tween art and architecture. Eugene Kupper and Roland Coate, for ex- ample, were and remain avid paint- ers, but they operated for the most part independently of the Los Ange- les arts community. While both at- tempted early on to use the medium as a way to inform their architectur- al ambitions, each ultimately saw painting as a distinct alternative to architectural practice. Coate, in the end, chose painting, and closed his architectural practice in 1983 to devote himself to painting full-time. Kupper chose architecture, and largely suspended painting through the 1970s and early ’80s. 15 Kappe had wished to cap en- rollment at 250, but the dean, while Kappe was away, decided to in- crease to 350 students. Ray Kappe, “SCI-Arc History,” unpublished manuscript, collection of the au- thor. 16 Architecture Gallery partici- pants Robert Mangurian, Coy How- ard, Craig Hodgetts, and Frederick Fisher also had joined the faculty at SCI-Arc by the early 1980s. 17 In addition, Shelly Kappe hosted regular panel discussions at the school through the 1970s on topics ranging from “women in architec- ture” to “the role of the large office” to the “construction industry gap.” More speculative topics, such as “Alternative Architectural Practic- es” and “Which Way to the Future?” also were featured. SCI-Arc vid- eo-taped the lectures from an early date and the collection recently has been digitized and made available online. See the SCI-Arc Media Ar- chive, http://sma.sciarc.edu. 18 The White position was held by the “New York Five” (Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk, and R ich- ard Meier) and was galvanized in the influential catalog to their 1969 MoMA exhibition, Five Architects (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972). A collection of critical responses to this work from five “Grays,” Allan Greenberg, Romaldo Giurgola, Charles Moore, Jacquelin Robertson, and Robert Stern, ap- peared in “Five on Five,” Architec- tural Forum (May 1973): 46-57. Par- ticipants at UCLA included Werner Seligmann, Michael Graves, Peter Eisenman, Charles Moore, R ichard Meier, Robert A.M. Stern, Giovanni Pasanella, T. Merrill Prentice, Charles Gwathmey, R ichard Wein- stein, and Jaquelin Robertson, with Colin Rowe (White) and Vincent Scully (Gray) each giving lectures. The event was reviewed in “White, Gray, Silver, Crimson,” Progressive Architecture ( July 1974): 28, 30, 32. A year later, the Japanese magazine

A+U devoted an entire issue to the White vs. Gray phenomenon. See “White and Gray: Eleven Modern Architects,” Architecture + Urban- ism (April 1975). Coy Howard was commissioned to make a film of the event, but at the time of this writing, a copy has not been located. 19 Most accounts claim the name had to do with the slick, glass-and- steel aesthetic espoused by most of the group. According to Charles Jencks, the moniker also had to do with the fact the each of the archi- tects drove a silver BMW. (Charles Jencks, telephone interview with the author, Los Angeles and London, 30 May 2012.) Hodgetts contested this assertion in a later interview with the author. 20 Craig Hodgetts, interview with the author. Los Angeles, 5 Mar 2012. 21 Eugene Kupper, who ran a small private practice, stands as a signif- icant exception to the corporate character of the Silvers. Frank Dim- ster left Pereira to set up his own small practice in 1975. 22 See Reyner Banham, “The Style for the Job,” New Statesman (14 Feb 1964): 261. 23 These quotations, and Vree- land’s above, are from Peter Papa- demetriou, “Images from a Silver Screen,” Progressive Architecture (Oct 1976): 70-77. Stirling had given a keynote lecture to kick off the April events at UCLA. 24 Cf. Jencks “The Los Angeles Silvers: Tim Vreeland, Anthony Lumsden, Frank Dimster, Eugene Kupper, Cesar Pelli, Paul Kennon,” Architecture and Urbanism 70 (Oct 1976): 14. Hodgetts offered a similar assessment in a 2012 interview with the author. 25 “They might be said to exempli- fy the highest ideals of the architec- tural mainstream. Their crusade… is to illustrate their conviction that the profession of architecture can without overthrowing its traditional values successfully serve the inter- ests of the marketplace.” Nicholas Pyle, “Foreword,” in N. Charles Slert and James Harter, eds., Twelve Los Angeles Architects (Pomona: Cal Poly Pomona, 1978): vi. 26 The catalog accounted for this by dividing the architects into four categories: The Expressionalists (Coate, Lumsden, and Pelli), the Constructionalists (Ellwood and Kappe), the Rationalists (Dworsky, Lomax, Miller, Pulliam, and Zim- merman), and the Experimentalists (Gehry and Lautner). See Slert and Harter, Twelve Los Angeles Architects. 27 This inaction drew harsh crit- icism from Los Angeles Times critic John Dreyfuss. See his “Comment,” in Slert and Harter, Twelve Los Ange- les Architects, iii-iv. 28 “And Then There Were Twelve…

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