INTRODUCTION
BEVERLY HILLS, E. L. CORD HOUSE, CORDHAVEN, 1932 (PAUL R. WILLIAMS, ARCHITECT)
Los Angeles architects, including Gordon B. Kaufmann, Sumner M. Spaulding, and others who had designed Mediterranean Revival houses, responded to the demand for a new American house by blending eastern, mid-Atlantic, and southern colonial elements into houses that evoked the spirit of the American past without being archaeologically specific. Their designs incorporating low-scale volumes and modern elements in traditional materials provided a bridge between the historicism of the first two decades and the advanced works of modernism. With the rise in maintenance costs and the end of a servant class, commissions for lavish residential projects declined at the end of the 1930s and the era of the large estate house came to an end. The loss of work in the 1930s motivated established Los Angeles architects to participate in national competitions for single-family or model houses, contests that had begun in the 1920s during that period’s housing boom. Roland E. Coate, H. Roy Kelley, F. H. Palmer Sabin (1892–1956), Ralph C. Flewelling (1894–1975), and
others won medals for designs submitted to The House Beautiful, Architectural Forum, and national and regional housing organizations. Shelter exhibitions promoted new building materials and the work of regional architects in both modern and traditional styles. By 1940, Los Angeles architects were focusing on the war effort in work for both private corporations and the federal government, which funded public housing projects for the first time since World War I.
T H E GA R D E N S The advent of landscape schools at the end of the 19th century produced a generation of trained landscape designers. Before coming to California to benefit from the land-development boom of the 1920s, these young designers apprenticed in established offices in the East and Midwest, often with the Boston firm founded by the father of American landscape design, Frederick Law Olmsted. These new arrivals, exposed to American and
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