Nuestro Pueblo: Hollywood

July 17, 1939: Nuestro Pueblo stops at the Lasky barn on the Paramount lot, where it's being used as a gymnasium.

Julius Shulman Q & A

Los Angeles Times Interview Julius Shulman Capturing the Essence of California Architecture October 9, 1994 By Steve Proffitt, Steve Proffitt is a producer for Fox News and a contributor to National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" and "Morning Edition." He spoke with Julius Shulman at the photographer's home in the Hollywood Hills In 1960, Julius Shulman took a photograph that, perhaps more than any other single image, conveys the style, grace and allure of postwar Los Angeles. Inside a steel-topped glass box balanced lightly on a hilltop, two young women in white cotton chat, while the City of Angels sparkles below. It is a picture both nostalgic and modern, the work of a self-taught photographer who truly invented himself. In 1936, Shulman used a vest-pocket Kodak to snap a shot of a Hollywood home designed by architect Richard Neutra. A brash 26-year-old, he showed the picture to Neutra, and a career was born. Neutra hired him to photograph some of his other projects, and introduced the young photographer to such other leading West Coast architects as R.M. Schindler, Raphael Soriano and Gregory Ain. Shulman's dramatic prints played an important role in establishing an international reputation for these and other Southern California architects, especially during the '50s, a period many consider the golden age of Modernism. More than any architect of that era, he created a public image of the California style of design. Perhaps because he never had formal training, Shulman worked intuitively, eschewing light meters and fancy light-reflecting umbrellas, and relying on nature. Yet, he was a master manipulator, often working at twilight, creating long exposures, opening and closing the lens, while turning lights on and off, to create texture and contrast. His clients often expressed surprise when seeing his images, for Shulman created a vision even they, as the creating architects, had never seen. Shulman, who turns 84 tomorrow, lives with his wife, Olga, in a steel-frame house designed, in 1949, for them by Soriano. Long walls of glass contrast with corrugated sheet-steel siding. The house is hidden within two heavily wooded acres in the Hollywood Hills. In 1986, Shulman announced his retirement, in part as a way of expressing his distaste for post-modernist design. But the lure of the lens was too strong, and now, back at work, he's busier than ever. A retrospective of his early photographs is currently on view at the Craig Krull gallery in Santa Monica, and a biography, "A Constructed View: The Architectural Photographs of Julius Shulman," by Joseph Rosa, has been published by Rizzoli. Inside his studio-office, Shulman shows off prints and publications, bouncing around the room with the energy of a teen-ager, promising not to retire until he hits 120. * Question: What were the elements that came together to make the 1950s so robust in terms of architecture in the Los Angeles area? Answer: I'd say, first, the economy. The '50s were glorious years . . . . The population was booming--people were coming to Los Angeles from all over the world. And architects were given free rein. They were allowed to experiment, not in the way that is being done today--these horrible monstrosities being made in the name of post-modernism--but with integrity. The architects of this period, people like Richard Neutra, Pierre Koenig, Gregory Ain--they respected the client. Every line they drew was drawn with the client in mind. Those were the great years and the result was that, throughout the world, there was a recognition of these architects' work. I was lucky to be doing the right thing at the right place at the right time. So anytime, anybody wanted a photograph of a modern house, Uncle Julius provided the picture. Q: Can you describe the essence of the design philosophy of these '50s Californian architects? A: I have to backtrack a little to answer that. In the 1930s, it was the heyday of what we call the International style. Architects like Richard Neutra, Raphael Soriano--these men were following a very austere, Bauhaus kind of practice. The result was that many architects who followed people like Neutra began to edit that style of architecture, by doing things like literally raising the roof. They said, "We don't have to have just a box, let's add a little character to the design." And that was one of the things that happened during the '50s, and right up to the '60s. Soriano, for example, who did my house, used an all-steel framework. During the earthquake--it was a shattering, powerful quake--we had not a crack. I am indebted to Soriano for his discipline in using those steel frames. The earthquake has proven this type of architecture is completely successful. Yet, Soriano didn't have a client for 25 years. The public didn't recognize his work; they didn't buy it. But other architects modified the austerity, began to create more space with higher ceilings, sloping roof lines, and created some character. Q: So would you say that, in the 1950s, California architects held on to the framework of the Bauhaus, and humanized it? A: Yes. The dominant feature of contemporary architecture in the '50s was glass. My house has two window walls, which are 30 feet long. That's great for us, because we are on a large piece of property, surrounded by a jungle. But, as my wife has always said, put this house on a 50-foot lot on a city street, and it would be a disaster. Soriano once built a house in Long Beach on a normal, city-street lot. The bathroom faced the street, and he walled it with obscure glass--textured glass. He told the owner she didn't need draperies because of the obscure glass. She moved in, had a open house to meet her neighbors, and one of them said to her, "I hope we can be friendly and tell you this. We admire your figure when you take a shower." The obscure glass provided a perfect view of her silhouette. The next day she got draperies. So the architects who came down the line refined the architecture. They designed with less glass, more solid walls, more space. And the result was an architecture that became popular throughout the world. You could almost say it was an evolution in design, to fit the needs of more and more people. Q: What happened in the '60s and '70s? Why did modernism in architecture fall into disfavor and disuse? A: One of the reasons was that the public-at-large still didn't buy the work of contemporary architects. And by the '70s, a new breed of architect came on the scene--represented by men like Frank Gehry and Michael Graves and even Charles Moore--who introduced a sloping, high-cathedral-ceiling kind of design. People began to say, "Hey, this is good," because these designs didn't have the walls of glass like the '40s and '50s designs did. The result was that they began to accept what I call "weird architecture." And, right now, we are in still another transition. Even architects like Gehry are beginning to reform their designs. He admits that he is an experimenter, and his work is often not well-received by the public. Nowadays, the elite--the people who can afford it--they want something "different." They are getting it. And they are paying for it. Q: Let's turn back to your career, and the way you use the camera. You've said the camera is not important when it comes to taking a picture. What do you mean? A: The camera is the least important element in our work. Photography is dependent on the eye, the mind, the heart and the soul of the photographer. Many times, even architects aren't aware of the presence of their structures, and they will ask, "How did you get this picture?" In 1937, the architect Stile Clements, one of the old-timers, had done the Coulters Department Store on Wilshire (razed in 1980). The building faced north. He called me--it was late in June--and asked me to photograph it. But he said there was a problem: Because it faced north, he thought I wouldn't get any sunlight on the face of the building. I didn't say anything other than that I could photograph it. Well, being a good Boy Scout, I knew that the sun rises in the summertime in the northeast and sets in the northwest. Architects often don't know these things. And so I went down early one Sunday morning--I do most of my public buildings on Sunday when there is less traffic, especially in those days. I set up my camera across the street, the sun was beaming across the north face of the building, and I made an 8x10 photograph. I gave it to Clements the next week and he said, "How did you do this, I thought the sun didn't hit the north side of the building?" And I said, "Oh, it was easy Mr. Clements, I just turned the building to face the sun." The point is that I have always tried to be conscious of the site, the direction of the sun--by the minute. I learned to look at a building and know exactly what time of day to photograph, to best reflect and define the quality of the architecture. It has nothing to do with snapping a shutter. My photography is based on the quality of my vision, my feeling for nature, the site and location of a building and what was around the building. Q: You almost always include people in your photographs, something fairly unique to you in architectural photography. Why people in a picture of a building? A: For scale, and also to create a feeling of occupancy. When I photograph, for instance, a university building, I will round up some young people and put them in places where they fill in voids in the space. Without the people, you would get a flat, vacant, austere photograph. Sometimes, I will tell people, "OK, that's it, we're all through"--and just as they start to move and walk away, that's when I actually take the picture. Q: Your photograph of the Pierre Koenig house is, to me, an almost perfect expression of the optimism of the 1950s--the house cantilevered over the city below, and the two women so breezy and sleek and sophisticated. Did you know how dramatic this photograph would be when you took it then? A: Well, people just love to see that picture. It represents a quality of architecture and photography that is not very well-observed. But the ironic thing is that when I took the exposure in my 4x5 camera, I honestly didn't know what I had. I saw something--a mood and a scene. But I didn't realize I had made what would literally be one of my masterpieces. Q: It seems silly to ask, but who are those two women? A: Pierre Koenig, the architect, told me he wanted to bring some of his students when I photographed the house, and I told him to have them bring their girlfriends; I'll use them as models. I never imagined this picture, though--we were doing photographs of the interior of the house. Then I happened to step outside, and I saw the view, and the girls in the house, chatting. I thought, "Wow, this might make a fine picture!" So I set my camera up outside, turned the lights off in the house, and exposed the film for about seven minutes, to capture the lights of the city below. Then we set off a flash inside the house to get the girls on film, and that was it. Q: So it's a composite--an image the human eye itself could never experience in reality? A: Exactly. And can you believe that until I read the title of the new book about me by Joseph Rosa--"A Constructed View"--did I understand that is exactly what I was doing for these 59 years: I construct my view of a building. My wife has always said that I capture a moment which can never be reproduced. No photographer could go back to that Koenig house and reconstruct that photograph--no matter how hard he tried. It was a secret, wonderful moment in my life. It almost makes you feel religious--thank God, I'm an atheist! You know, I've never used an exposure meter. I often use natural, reflected light. I rely on nature, and the picture comes out because I know the value and quality of the film I'm using. I feel blessed that I've been ordained, if you will, to do this kind of photography and not only make a success out of it, but to create a success for the architects as well.*

Nuestro Pueblo

On July 15, 1939, Jane Seewerker, wife of Times writer Joe Seewrker, died in Long Beach. Joe Seewerker and Charles Owens had been producing three features a week, but after Jane Seewerker's death, their schedule went to once a week.

Artist's Notebook -- The Huntington Gardens

Watercolor by Marion Eisenmann

Marion stopped by the Huntington on Friday and did this before we went on a sketching expedition to Grand Central Market. (More on that in a later post).  She says: Here is the bench at the Huntington I have been wanting to capture for a long time. I was sitting in the shade of a large tree across from it, where squirrels dropped all kinds of things at me. I felt very connected with their habitat. As we talked about her watercolor on our walk down Hill Street, she mentioned as a footnote that she would be teaching a class at the Huntington this fall on plein-aire painting. (Me: "Do you do plein-aire painting, too?" Marion, as if I were asking whether she could drive a car: "Oh, yes."). I hope to feature more of Marion's art on the Daily Mirror in the future as a modern counterpoint to Charles Owens and Joe Seewerker's Nuestro Pueblo. In the meantime, you can contact her here.

Found on EBay -- Batchelder Tile

This piece of Batchelder tile has been listed on EBay. Bidding starts at $4.99.

Architectural Rambling -- Ray Watt

Oct. 10, 1963: The Times' real estate section features an 80-acre tract on Sepulveda Boulevard in Torrance being developed by Ray Watt, who died July 7. View Larger Map

The condo development was called New Horizons--South Bay and was praised by Times Real Estate Editor Tom Cameron for a 10,000-square-foot clubhouse and recreation building, a nine-hole golf course, putting green and swimming pool. Cameron also noted that the project had underground utilities and a wall around the perimeter that eliminated "interior streets, which makes the community completely pedestrian-oriented." But it wasn't for everybody: "Residence is limited to families in which one spouse must be 35 years old or more or to single persons that age or above. No children under 18 years of age may be permanent residents."

Found on EBay -- Charles Mulford Robinson

A plan for Honolulu, 1907

In the early 20th century, Charles Mulford Robinson wrote a series of books on beautifying cities and developed specific plans for such places as Detroit and Los Angeles. Robinson proposed that Los Angeles build a Union Station, straighten Spring Street and plant jacarandas. He also advocated a scenic drive from downtown to Pasadena and a large library on 5th Street. Sound familiar? A copy of his plan for Honolulu has been listed on EBay. It's priced at $85, a bit expensive for an ex-library book, but it's hard to find. Luckily, many of Robinson's books are available at archive.org. But not the plan for Los Angeles.

Nuestro Pueblo: Long Beach

July 10, 1939: Joe Seewerker and Charles Owens go down to Long Beach and visit Shorty Orr.

Holy Barbarians -- Continued

Reading "Holy Barbarians" has turned into a curious case of role reversal. I was a youngster when the book was published and the beats and squares who populate Lawrence Lipton's study of the Venice scene would have been my parents' contemporaries -- although my folks were a bit older. Today, however, although the Beats and squares have remained in their 20s and early 30s, I'm old enough to be one of their parents -- and this shift in ages provides an odd perspective. I'm apt to be a little tougher on them than if I'd read the book when I was younger, and I'm also a bit more charitable toward these earnest, naive angry young artists telling the truth. Even so, I bogged down in Lipton's lengthy defense of smoking marijuana, which may have been dangerously revolutionary in the 1950s but is trite and passe these days. For the record, Lipton didn't even smoke marijuana, which the Beats preferred to call "pod" rather than "pot." But he was "given a pass," which tells you something about the minimum requirements to be a beatnik. And I'll have more to say about that later. In fact, "Holy Barbarians" had just about gotten a one-way ticket to the discard pile when I came across an incident that's absolutely hilarious. I can't guess why Lipton buried it in the middle of the book, but he did. He's describing a reading in Los Angeles by Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso that's interrupted by a heckler. It's some square, of course, who wants to fight. Instead, Ginsberg starts undressing and dares the heckler to take off his clothes.  "Holy Barbarians," Pages 195-198 The reading was to be held in a big old-fashioned house that was occupied by two or three of the Coastline editors, living in a kind of Left Wing bohemian collective household, furnished what there was of furniture, which wasn't much in atrociously bad taste, nothing like the imaginative and original decor of the Beat Generation pad, even the most poverty-stricken. I consented at their request to conduct the reading, "chair the meeting," as these people are in the habit of saying. To them everything is a meeting. In this case they got more than they bargained for. Allen showed up high mostly on wine, to judge by the olfactory evidence and, after an introduction by me, in which I tried to spell out something of the background of this "renaissance," he launched into a vigorous rendition of "Howl." "Launched" is the word for it. It was stormy, wild and liquid. In his excitement he tipped over an open bottle of wine he had brought with him, spilling it over himself, over me and over his friend Gregory Corso who was with him and was also scheduled to read. Allen and Gregory had refused to start till Anais Nin arrived, and now that she was seated in the audience Allen addressed himself exclusively to her. He had never met Anais before and knew her only from Henry Miller's books. She had written the preface to Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" in the Paris edition of the book. He was sure that Anais was one person who would be able to dig what he was putting down. For him there was no one else in the audience but "beautiful Anais Nin ." That she had long ago come to the parting of the ways with Henry Miller and was making her own scene now, a very different scene from the one they had once made together on the Left Bank of Paris, made no difference to Allen. She was still, to him, the Anais Nin of the Henry Miller saga, a fabulous figure out of a still brightly shimmering past. Artistically, he felt, she was his nearest of kin, and Anais very graciously acted out the role he had cast her in that night. The audience, except for Anais and the people we had brought with us from Venice West, was a square audience, the sort of an audience you would find at any liberal or "progressive" how that word lingers on even though the song is over fund-raising affair of the faithful who are still waiting for the Second Coming. Few of them had come knowing what to expect. They never read anything but the party and cryptoparty press. The avant-garde quarterlies are so much Greek to them. Most of them don't even know such magazines exist any more. They associate that sort of thing with the little magazines of the twenties which were swallowed up with the advent of the Movement, the real Movement (capital M), in the thirties and transformed into weapons in the class struggle. The few who had heard rumors of what was going on in San Francisco and Venice West were there as slummers might go to a Negro whorehouse in New Orleans, to be with, briefly, but not of. But even they were not prepared for Howl, or for the drunken, ecstatic, tortured, enraptured reading Allen was giving it that night. A very moving performance, for all his tangle-tongue bobbles and rambling digressions. He was reading from the book, which had just came out, but he changed words, improvised freely, and supplied verbally the obscenities that the printer had in a few cases deleted. As it happened, Allen and Gregory were not the only ones in the place who had been drinking. There was one other in the audience. He was someone who had drifted in, having somewhere picked up one of the pluggers advertising the reading. At first he applauded Allen's reading at all the wrong places and too loudly. Then he took to cheering, the kind of cheers that are more like the jeers they are in tended to be. I watched him and it struck me that he looked and sounded like a brother Elk on the loose, or an American Legion patriot on a convention binge. When Allen got to the poem America, the drunken square was visibly aroused. He began to heckle. Allen ignored him and, at one point, interrupted the reading to ask the heckler, very gently, to hear him out and he would be glad to talk to him about it later and listen to any comments or criticism he cared to make. That, and disapproving scowls from some members of the audience who, being squares themselves and sober dislike anyone "making a scene," stopped him for a few minutes. Gregory Corso now got up to read or, rather, sat down to read Gregory, unlike Allen, is the gentle, relaxed persuader rather than the shouter. At least he was that night. When the drunk started heckling him, too, he turned the face of an injured angel to him. When that failed he reversed himself and tried shock therapy. "Listen, creep, I'm trying to get through to you with words, with magic, see? I'm trying to make you see, and understand " The square had an answer for that. "Then why don't you write so a person can understand you, instead of all that highfalutin crap?" "You will understand," Gregory replied patiently, "if you open your self up to the images. Try to get with it, man." You think you're smart, don't you?" Gregory ignored the remark and went on with his reading. Nothing could have angered the drunk more. It brought out the righteous citizen in him. "Think you know it all, don't you? I know your kind. It's punks like you that are to blame for all this -all this " he sputtered, unable to make up his mind which of the crimes punks like this were to blame for were equal to the enormity of the occasion. He tried again, gave up, turned a beet red and, to cover his chagrin, launched into a tirade of uninspired, stereotyped, barroom profanity, ending with, inevitably, an invitation to "step outside and settle this thing like a man!" Gregory grinned. "Yeh, I know, you want to fight. Okay, let's fight. Right here. Not with fists, you cornbalL That's baby stuff. Let's fight with a mans weapon with words. Images, metaphors, magic. Open your mouth, man, and spit out a locomotive, a red locomotive, belching obscene smoke and black magic. Then I'll say:Anafogasta. Rattle-boom. Gnu's milk. And you'll say: Fourth of July, Hydrogen bomb! Gasoline! See? Real obscenities. . . ." The drunk was indignant. He was outraged. When he heard snickering in the audience he started toward the front of the room, menacingly, repeating his challenge to step outside and settle this thing. "You're yella, that's what. Like all you wise guys. You're yella " Ginsberg got up and went forward to meet the drunk. "All right," he said, "all right. You want to do something big, don't you? Something brave. Well, go on, do something really brave. Take off your clothes!" That stopped the drunk dead in his tracks. Ginsberg moved a step toward him. "Go on, let everybody see how brave you are. Take your clothes off!" The drunk was stunned speechless. He fell back a step and Allen moved toward him, tearing off his own shirt and undershirt and flinging them at the heckler's feet. "You're scared, aren't you?" he taunted him. "You're afraid." He unbuckled his belt, unzipped his fly and started kicking off his trousers. "Look," he cried. "I'm not afraid. Go on, take your clothes off. Let's see how brave you are," he challenged him. He flung his pants down at the champ's feet and then his shorts, shoes and socks, with a curious little hopping dance as he did so. He was stark naked now. The drunk had retired to the back of the room. Nobody laughed. Nobody said a word. The audience just sat mute, staring, fascinated, petrified, till Allen danced back to his seat, looking I couldn't help thinking at the moment with inward amusement like Marcel Marceau, the great French mime, doing his hopping little David and Goliath dance. Then the room was suddenly filled with an explosion of nervous applause, cheers, jeers, noisy argument. Our hosts, the editors of Coastlines, had been having a huddle on the sidelines. Now one of them, Mel Weisburd, dashed up front and stood over Allen menacingly. "All right," he shouted, "put your clothes on and get out! You're not up in San Francisco now. This is a private house . . . you're in someone else's living room. . . . You've violated our hospitality. . . . "If this is what you call . . ." He looked over at me as if to say, "You re chairman here, do some thing." I rapped for order like a proper chairman and announced the next order of business. Gregory Corso would read another group of poems and then we would hear from Allen Ginsberg once more with his poems Sunflower Sutra and A Supermarket in California. Corso was all for leaving at once. "We'll go somewhere where we can get good and drunk and take Anais Nin with us."  But Allen shook his head and quietly put his clothes on, one piece at a time, in slow motion, smiling to himself with half-closed eyes. A sly, mysterious, inner-directed Buddha smile. The reading went on amid general approval and with closer, more respectful attention than before. The incident had sobered up the drunk. When the reading was over he approached Allen and said, loud enough for everybody to hear, that he was sorry he had made such an ass of himself and where could he buy a copy of Howl? Through it all Anais Nin, faithful to the role in which the poets had cast her, sat imperiously still, only slightly disdainful of the hubbub, like a queen on a throne.

Nuestro Pueblo: West Pico

July 7, 1939: Nuestro Pueblo stops at 5000 W. Pico, site of a one-room schoolhouse. View Larger Map