West Coast Architecture - A century of building in Arizona and California

Modernism was made for California. Just as it was on the West Coast that the 20th century’s dominant art form, the movie, was to flourish, so Modernist architecture blossomed unencumbered by the concerns and limitations of the Old World.

Here was a climate that adored flat roofs and a hilly topography of brilliant views that called for structural daring, a place with a self-conscious lack of history in which displaced Europeans – and Americans freed from the waspish East Coast – could create whole new lifestyles facing the freedom of the seemingly infinite desert and the Pacific.

Superlatives abound: the ‘cast stone’ of Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute is perhaps the most sublimely generous construction of postwar architecture; while at the beginning of the century, Greene & Greene and Bernard Maybeck’s Japanese-inspired California Arts & Crafts is as vivid a reimagining of William Morris as you could conceive. Equally remarkable are the cities, from the captivating milieu of San Francisco to its unfathomable cousin Los Angeles, the city of Reyner Banham’s 4 Ecologies: Surfurbia, Foothills, the Plains of Id and Autopia.

The chutzpah of patron and architect has not let up in recent years, with Richard Meier’s hilltop Getty Center, Raphael Moneo’s Cathedral of Our Lady of Our Angels – both in Los Angeles – and Herzog & de Meuron’s de Young Museum in San Francisco.

If one looks for a beginning to all this, beyond the fragments of the Pueblo and the Spanish Mission architecture, it is found in Frank Lloyd Wright. His commission for the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo brought him to California where, while moving back and forth across the Pacific, he built some of his most original and regionally specific architecture.

In Los Angeles, beginning with the extraordinary Hollyhock House, he demonstrated a virtuosity on California’s slopes equal to that he’d achieved on the flat expanse of the Midwest. Wright’s approach was extended by his ex-pupils Rudolf Schindler and Richard Neutra who threw away the cloak of their native Vienna to create a series of exquisite, ecologically responsive dwellings that would lead, after the Second World War, to the internationally significant ‘Case Study Houses’.

Wright built his combined home and fellowship at Taliesin West in the desert outside Phoenix. Gradually shaped over 30 years, this complement to his earlier Taliesin in Wisconsin, is Wright at his most successful – and moving. A blurring of building and landscape formed from desert rocks and sand, its inspiration lies in the light touch of the native Sinagua Indians.

Arcosanti conceived by Wright’s disciple Paolo Soleri, lies far out in the Arizona desert. It pays homage to Taliesin and is either a suggestion of an ecologically viable future, or the American Dream at its most indulgent and eccentric.

A number of the buildings in the itinerary are not usually open to the public and it is possible we will not be able to include everything listed.