Apr 08 2025
Richard Neutra helped create one of the defining images of modern California: a low horizontal house of glass and steel, apparently floating between a swimming pool, a garden, and an enormous landscape beyond. Born in Vienna on April 8, 1892, Neutra carried the radical ideas of European modernism to Southern California, where sunlight, hillsides, desert …
Feb 13 2025
Imagine entering a room where the distinction between furniture, floor, walls, ceiling, lighting, and sculpture has almost disappeared. The carpet climbs into upholstered platforms. Curving forms rise from the floor like strange geological formations. Lamps glow inside fields of saturated red, orange, purple, and blue. There may be no conventional chair at all, because the …
Feb 05 2025
“There it is, Wendy! Second star to the right and straight on ’til morning.” Peter Pan On February 5, 1953, audiences were invited to leave London behind, think happy thoughts, and fly toward the second star to the right. Walt Disney’s Peter Pan transformed J. M. Barrie’s enduring story of the boy who refused to …
Dec 18 2024
Few buildings capture the optimism of the Jet Age as perfectly as the Theme Building at Los Angeles International Airport. With enormous white arches sweeping over a circular glass structure, it looks like a flying saucer has landed in the middle of LAX—or perhaps like a spaceport designed for a future that people in 1961 …
Jun 12 2024
Few restaurants capture mid-century Southern California quite like Bob’s Big Boy. There is the towering neon sign glowing beside the boulevard, the smiling Big Boy mascot holding his double-decker hamburger, the sweeping roofline, the expanses of glass, and the parking lot filled with automobiles. Add a chocolate shake and a plate of fries, and the …
Jun 10 2024
Perched high above the Hollywood Hills like a spacecraft that has stopped briefly on its way across Los Angeles, the Chemosphere House is one of the most instantly recognizable homes of the mid-century era. Its octagonal living space appears to float above a steep hillside, balanced improbably on a single narrow concrete column while broad …
May 29 2024
Palm Springs looks a little like someone dreamed up the perfect mid-century vacation town and then placed it beneath a wall of mountains in the California desert. Tall palms line streets filled with low-slung modernist buildings, swimming pools shimmer behind privacy walls, vintage signs survive beside stylish hotels, and the San Jacinto Mountains rise so …
