Schindler House

This landmark West Hollywood residence by R.M. Schindler is the birthplace of Southern Californian Modernism. Designed and built in 1922, it is now the site of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture— the California satellite of the MAK – Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna.

The architectural critic Reyner Banham once described Schindler as an architect who “designed as if there had never been houses before,” working to minimal budgets with complex, three-dimensional volumes. Contested from the start, the Austrian-born architect struggled for planning permission for his novel, tilt-up concrete structure.

Schindler House emerged from a range of references: Japanese vernacular absorbed via Frank Lloyd Wright, Pueblo architecture from New Mexico, and European Modernism from his native Vienna. Conceived as a shared office and living space for two young families—Schindler and his wife, Pauline, together with their friends Clyde and Marian Chace—the house was imagined as two connecting L-shaped apartments, using the basic layout of the Curry Village campsite Schindler had visited in Yosemite the year before. And like a campsite, it was enclosed by canvas and redwood, with tilt-up concrete panels cast on site to contrast the sliding canvas panels and “open” walls of glass and redwood.

To further its unconventionality, it had no strictly defined living room, dining room, or bedrooms. Connected by a shared kitchen, each apartment had two large studios and a bathroom, set around a private garden. Instead of bedrooms, each apartment had two “sleeping baskets”—redwood frames couched in stretched canvas that could be accessed by a tight staircase, offering eye-level views of the surrounding trees. Dissolving the boundaries between exterior and interior, its open floor plan set a precedent for Californian architecture—in particular, its garden-facing layout went on to define postwar-housing in California, where a patio became a stand-in for a living room.

The three intermediary decades that followed saw the house take full advantage of its flexible potential. Although Schindler and Pauline separated in 1927, a decade later they found themselves reunited, living under a shared roof as a divorced couple—each taking one of its wings from the late 1930s until Schindler’s death in 1953. In these years, the house found itself at the centre of the social map, drawing guests including architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Neutra, photographer Edward Weston, composer John Cage, and poet Sadakichi Hartmann.

When Pauline Schindler died in May 1977, the house passed to the Schindler family, until the Friends of the Schindler House—an organisation founded by Pauline in 1974, made up of architects, historians and family members—purchased the property from the California State Office of Historic Preservation in 1980, with the aid of a grant. The first phase of the house’s restoration was completed in the mid-1980s. In 1994, the Friends then entered into a cooperation agreement with the MAK, retaining ownership of the property while establishing the MAK Center for Art and Architecture to take up the task of preserving the house and running its public programming. A garage at the property’s edge has since been converted into the MAK Center’s central office, while a small nursery has been incorporated on the Chace side of the house.

Having passed its centenary, Schindler House has seen countless earthquakes and a century of relentless LA development. It has existed in a state of flux, been repainted, carpeted, dismantled and reconstructed. And today, as the MAK Center continues to use it for a varied exhibition programme—with shows in recent years featuring sculptures by Helmut Lang, paintings by Yves Klein, and works by Nancy Holt, Félix González-Torres, and Richard Prince—the house has largely become the symbol of the iconoclastic architect.