The centerpiece of Aline Barnsdall’s artistic vision remains as vibrant as ever nearly 100 years after she gifted it to the City of Los Angeles.
Hollyhock House may be best known as Frank Lloyd Wright’s first Los Angeles and the city’s only UNESCO World Heritage Site, but if it weren’t for the vision and resolve of Aline Barnsdall, it might never have been realized.
A monumental fireplace featuring a bas-relief sculpture constructed of 17 individual cast-concrete blocks dominates the living room. The reproduction of a Wright-designed rug in the foreground displays a stylized hollyhock motif. As the architect once observed, “Miss Barnsdall wanted no ordinary home, for she was no ordinary woman.”
Photo by Joshua White/ JWPictures.com, courtesy City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs
Kanō School Japanese screens provide a backdrop for an arrangement by architect and ikebana artist Ravi GuneWardena. It’s part of an ongoing installation that highlights the home’s original connections with Japanese art and design as well as Barnsdall’s own floral displays. “The house needs to be in constant dialogue with the art communities here in L.A. and the artists,” says Hollyhock House director and curator Abbey Chamberlain Brach. “It feels more alive than ever when we have contemporary art and design in dialogue with it.”
Photo by Paul Cozzi
The oil heiress met Wright in 1915 and asked him to design a theater. Four years later, she purchased a 36-acre site in East Hollywood for the project. As the design brief evolved to include a private home, artists’ residences, and a cinema, Barnsdall and her famously temperamental architect butted heads.
In contrast to Wright’s earlier Midwestern-inspired Prairie-style designs, the temple-like Hollyhock House exterior was influenced by pre-Columbian architecture, notably Mayan and Aztec styles, though some have also described it as Asian or Egyptian. The result was something the architect described as “California Romanza,” and Wright’s use of hollow clay tile covered in stucco presaged his later textile block residences.
Photo by Stan Ecklund
See the full story on Dwell.com: The Hollyhock House: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ode to California
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