Seminal Schindler - The Museum of Contemporary Art - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, June, 2001 by Raymund Ryan

The Museum of Contemporary Art, designed by Isozaki on glittery Bunker Hill, is a less obvious venue for this major exhibit than the same institution's Geffen Contemporary, the garage/warehouse refurbished a decade and a half ago by LA's current star Frank Gehry. Certainly Gehry's manipulation of space and -- at one stage -- of ordinary materials, the empiricism and contingency of that architecture, has much in common with the innovative buildings realized by Schindler in Los Angeles half a century earlier. Strangely, however, the taut skin and vaguely pharaonic interiors of the Isozaki museum may just about hint at Schindler's formative academic milieu (the Secession and Wiener Werkstatte) before the First World War. In the course of this essentially straightforward display, the Austrian emigre's work is seen to undergo transformations more radical than those of that other European transplant, Schindler's one-time colleague and subsequent rival Richard Neutra.

This compendium and invocation of Schindler's architecture starts in a difficult cubic chamber topped by the largest of Isozaki's glass pyramids. The exhibition's designers Annie Chu and Rick Gooding have dropped a low ceiling across much of this threshold space. Lighting is reduced to such low levels that the visitor is required to pause. On the wall, a film is projected showing a blade of sunlight moving slowly across the concrete floor of Schindler's seminal home (now open to the public at 833 N. Kings Road). Much of the museum's floor surface is lined in low parallel strips of Homasote board, a geometric motif derived from an industrialized building product. On a very modest budget, Chu Gooding use partitions also made from Homasote (with one 'window' opening to entice transverse views) and broad table surfaces to order the chronological display of drawings, models and both period and recent photographs into comprehensible groups.

In initial drawings by Schindler of mostly unrealized projects for Austria and Chicago, the extended foreground plane and lineal facade tectonics reveal the architect's Viennese heritage. The visitor then discovers the Kings Road and Lovell Beach Houses, those distinctive revolutionary structures built soon after Schindler moved to California in 1920. This profound rupture, a radically new architecture achieved in relative obscurity before the famous villas of Mies and Le Corbusier, is perhaps better sensed from the catalogue than from the exhibit itself. One real surprise at MOCA is the reconstruction of a prototypical hut for the A. E. Rose Beach Colony envisaged for Santa Monica in 1937. This ludic Siedlung for functionalist sun-and-sand worshippers was never realized; it nevertheless exudes that spirit of social experimentation and constructional play particular to Schindler.

For the lay person, The Architecture of R. M. Schindler may be both unchallenging and a delight. For the initiated, it is rather the culmination of several decades' re-evaluation of Schindler's legacy in Southern California. It is certainly useful to see so many projects documented and to see Schindler's own large-scale plans and sections many with scribbled notes and doodles in the margins (these were working drawings, not self-advertisements for the gallery or magazine). His ingenious use of roof forms -- De Stijl-like fronts/ranch bungalow behinds, often to facilitate local planning codes -- and of clerestoreys determined by issues of construction resulted in volumes animated by the calibration of natural light. It is these new domestic environments -- difficult to reproduce in the museum setting -- that continue to make Schindler's houses and apartments such a pleasure to inhabit.