A bookful of pretty pictures of goofy houses, mostly small West Coast imitations of romanticized rural Old World houses; half-timbering, tiny turrets, pointy roofs, etc etc. They complement 's basically modernist small, efficient, utilitarian houses, although I don't think Susanka's fans would find the Storybook houses intellectually respectable. could mount a better defense.
Hot-country traditional styles make at least as much sense in most of California as glass boxes do. The sublime goofiness of the style doesn't just transplant architectures but translates them; Seattle has some surviving Spanish/Moorish 1920s architecture that looks both subtly wrong and subtly right, because the eaves and so forth have been altered to deal with our rainfall and seasonal solar angles. I suspect the adorable Berkeley and Carmel cottages have rather more windows and outdoor porches than would have been comfortable in the originals.
There's a surviving silent film of Hollywood's improbable architecture, "Hollywood the Unusual", which I found as an extra on a DVD of "The Garden of Eden" (which the SPL has, Seattleites). It has a wider range than Storybook...; not just the half-timbered 'village shops' and Graumann's Chinese Theater, but imposing pseudo-ancient-Egyptian architecture and 'Moorish' gas-stations. Also, there are people in 1920s plus-fours or tea-gowns dancing through the gardens to a new piano score. This is the sort of record that current copyright law puts at risk.
The movie "The Garden of Eden" was charming, and its star very pretty, although the plot was half-slapstick half-sensation and not very intellectually respectable. The heroine wasn't just a feeble Imperilled Pauline, either, she's as active as a comedienne usually is. In other serendipity, we get some truly delightful combinations underwear, villains in lipstick - usual in the silents; why? - and what may be the earliest filmed scene of a concert audience waving lighters in the dark.
ISBN: 0670893854 (Storybook Style)
So wrote clew in Art. , Cities. | TrackBack