Los Angeles is choked with traffic while many have to live on the streets thanks to the city’s archaic planning laws. Could modernist apartment blocks built a century ago make LA liveable again?
in Westwood, designed by the Austrian émigré modernist Richard Neutra, in 1937. On a steep hillside plot, which would these days usually be occupied by one or two inflated McMansions, Neutra developed a scheme of eight remarkable homes.
“It’s the perfect blend of privacy and sociability,” says architecture writer Michael Webb, who has lived here for 44 years, renting the very flat where the designers Charles and Ray Eames once lived . The stair provides a sociable spine for neighbourly encounters, but there is also a back path so that residents can creep home unnoticed.
– would be anathema to most floor-area-hungry developers today, but it is what now makes living here so desirable, like camping out in a treehouse., designed by an even earlier modernist pioneer, Irving Gill, in 1919. Here, on another plot that would now usually hold one or two homes, he designed four little cubic houses, arranged around a cruciform pathway, each with their own secluded outdoor space.
Stripped of ornament, Gill’s conception of “the simple cube house with creamy walls, sheer and plain, rising boldly into the sky,” was radical for its day, but it has stood the test of time. Its enduring influence can be witnessed in nearby Venice, where a new supportive housing scheme for formerly homeless youth takes its cues from Gill’s approach.
The tragedy is that, for decades, building the kinds of projects featured in the book has been forbidden across much of Los Angeles, due to restrictive zoning measures and onerous parking requirements. In the 1970s, limits were placed on the construction of apartment buildings, bungalow courts and fourplexes , in a bid to curb population growth. While the city had once been zoned for 10 million people, by 2010 the zoning envelope had been squeezed to accommodate just 4.
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