Modernism arrives in the South Bay
In decades past, the South Bay was known more for its utter lack of architectural significance than for anything actually built here. It was a disconcerting experience for architects who came to Los Angeles to explore the cutting-edge inventiveness of places like Venice Beach and Pacific Palisades to drive south of Marina Del Rey. Architect Pat Killen recalls arriving here in 1980 and discovering what seemed to be an invisible demarcation line.
“It was like, holy shit, what happened? I mean, is there a fence here that says you can’t practice architecture south of that?” Killen remembered thinking.
There were a few pioneers. Architect John Blanton, an understudy of the famed modernist Richard Neutra, opened up an office here in 1964. At the time, he was the only architect listed in the phone book. When architect Dean Nota arrived here a little more than two decades later, little had changed. He saw it as an opportunity, an architectural market about to bloom.
“That’s one of the reasons I thought I should set up shop here, because I think that this is going to happen,” he said. “I was only about 20 years off, that’s the problem. I was 20 years too soon.”
A handful of other architects joined Nota, Killen, and Blanton, including Manhattan Beach natives Grant Kirkpatrick and Michael Lee. A few significant projects were completed in the late 80s and the 1990s. Nota’s Marsh Residence in Hermosa Beach, for example, garnered international attention, while Kirkpatrick’s 17th Street walkstreet residence in Manhattan Beach – with its clean modern lines and generous use of wood, heretofore mostly avoided near the beach – was a harbinger of things to come. Killen was particularly prolific, dotting the landscape with boldly modern designs, perhaps none more iconic than an 1,100 sq. ft. glass and steel “Beach House” on the Manhattan Beach Strand that blurred the lines between inside and outside like nothing before it, locally.
This small group of architects made their stand in the South Bay. They won awards and earned a steady trickle of commissions, but it often seemed like a losing battle.
“I’ll tell you flat out, the South Bay is — and I’m born and raised in the South Bay, so I’m speaking of my own hometown — but the reality of the South Bay is there is a distinct lack of understanding of the value of good architecture, and it’s pervasive,” Kirkpatrick said in 2002. “It’s frustrating. And it’s also our challenge.”
It was a challenge well met. In the last decade, the practice of architecture blossomed at the beach. More homes designed by architects were built in 10 years than in the rest of the South Bay’s combined history. The dominant trend was still of a decidedly traditional yet artificial bent – enormous Mediterranean-influenced homes, with fake pillars and decorative tile roofs – but ambitious modern architecture has become increasingly common.
Kirkpatrick said that an awareness of the importance of good design has pervaded the South Bay. Clients now have a different set of expectations.
“The bar has been raised,” Kirkpatrick said in an interview last week. “Definitely, the interest is there in wanting to go through the experience of coming up with something very genuine and timeless. It’s been really great. I used to say everything that went up in the South Bay or Manhattan Beach was a Manhattan-terranean or Man-Hampton, take your choice, one or the other. But it’s not the case anymore.”
“It’s a whole different world,” Nota said.
Nota completed a home on the Strand in Hermosa Beach in 2000 that, in retrospect, served as an announcement of sorts, a symbol of a dawning and decidedly local design aesthetic. The Reyna home, which would be published in 20 journals around the world and win an American Institute of Architecture honors award, borrowed architectural language from nearby lifeguard towers. It was steel and glass and stucco, starkly modern yet a natural part of the local environment.
“It was really something,” Nota said. “That house allowed me to really explore and do a lot of things really important and interesting to me. I think the building has kind of a strong contextual element, but also really explored the space inside, and in the way it looks out.”
Nota, a former understudy of the revered architect Ray Kappe and a member of the very first graduating class of the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), has been described by fellow architect Michael Lee as “an architect’s architect.” His two-person studio has produced a relatively small body of work – less than 40 homes, mostly in the South Bay – that has been influential all along the Southern California coast. As architectural photographer Russell Abraham noted in his book California Cool, “…Nota designed modern beach houses that turned people’s heads and provided the impetus for a small design revolution in Southern California beach towns. Working with a palate of simple forms, glass blocks, and steel-rail detailing, he created a style that has been widely imitated throughout the region.”
Lee, who worked as Nota’s understudy and later as the builder of several of his projects, co-designed another AIA honor award winning project with Nota. The Swedish Pro-Tech building at 2100 Pacific Coast Highway in Hermosa Beach stands as one of the few truly bold commercially designed buildings in the South Bay; the design’s unexpectedness and pure invention merged Nota’s deft austerity with Lee’s sense of fun. The resulting unlikelihood was an auto repair shop that doubled as a local landmark. Lee later would likewise create landmarks with two exuberantly playful mixed-used buildings on either side of Highland Avenue, at Marine Street, in Manhattan Beach.
Lee, however, would make his own mark by developing an architectural language that was often less strictly modern. Lee, who also graduated from SCI-Arc, took modern design principles – open floor plans, the use of light and volume – and combined them with traditional elements. A home he built in El Segundo, for example, was a quietly innovative design – a modern take on the shingle house. Lee, a surfer, loved the little beach cottages he’d grown up surrounded by (and still is); he has completed 30 homes in his hometown and has helped redefine the local design aesthetic.
“I can do hard as nails, but it’s not really me,” he said in a 2006 interview. “Maybe it has to do with my background. I’m much more a beach person.”
Grant Kirkpatrick has similarly had a significant impact on his hometown. His KAA Design Group, is a 30-person firm that has had success far afield, with divisions in landscaping, interior design, and even a line of furniture that will be featured nationally by Design Within Reach next year. But nowhere has his work been more meaningful than in Manhattan Beach.
As architect and writer Morris Newman wrote in Architecture Week, “Grant Kirkpatrick is not one of L.A.’s architecture fire-breathers, and he hasn’t made headlines by designing futuristic blobs. Instead, the architect has done something far more useful: raised the visual standards and the civility of a waterfront neighborhood in Manhattan Beach.”
Kirkpatrick designed several homes this decade along the Hermosa and Manhattan Beach waterfront and walkstreets that featured wood. His use of mahogany, teak, and Spanish cedar was extremely influential locally.
“Going back a decade, I was explaining to people the merits of using natural hardwoods in architecture in the marine community, and there was a general disbelief that it was a good idea,” Kirkpatrick said. “People thought it was going to cause a lot of headaches, that wood was not a low maintenance material. But it is an essential material to do modern architecture in a more sincere way….And if it’s finished correctly and maintained correctly, it’s like owning a great piece of furniture, providing years and years of enjoyment and pride.”
Rather than sealing the wood, Kirkpatrick learned that it could be maintained better by letting it breathe and instead oiling the wood regularly. His resultant designs echo Frank Lloyd Wright’s Japanese-influenced architecture, but perhaps more directly grow from a pair of modern architects who studied under Lloyd Wright and practiced in California, Rudolf Shindler and Richard Neutra. Like the other architects practicing in a modern style in the South Bay, Kirkpatrick’s larger aim was to dissolve the indoor/outdoor divide. His own home in the Tree Section of Manhattan Beach took the notion to its logical conclusion, with floating walls and large doors that open both the front and back of the house entirely to the elements.
“This architecture is not meant to be heady, cerebral, or overly philosophical,” Kirkpatrick said. “It’s just meant to engage the soul, and make people happy.”
But Kirkpatrick completed a house on the Manhattan Beach in 2009 that was part of another South Bay trend, towards largeness, that not everyone was entirely happy about. The design received a controversial City Council exception to the restrictions against lot mergers and was built on three merged lots on the Strand. Kirkpatrick, however, said that home is less about square footage and more about designing a home that adheres to the way the client wishes to live. Only a few years prior to the triple lot home, for example, he designed a 1,100 sq. ft. home on Monterey Avenue in Hermosa Beach.
“The new client asked, ‘You do these huge homes. Why do you want to do our house?’” Kirkpatrick said. “For us, it’s not about size.”
Size mattered at the beach this decade, however, as many of the biggest homes ever erected locally sprouted up throughout the community. Both Manhattan Beach and Redondo Beach enacted design standards meant to combat “mansionization.”
Killen was one of the trends’ staunchest opponents. “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should,” he frequently told clients. And though most of his work was done on the “postage stamp” 30 ft. by 90 ft. lots that predominate much of the beach cities, Killen also considered one of his largest homes a victory against mansionization.
His client had bought a large, corner lot on Circle Drive and Monterey Avenue in Hermosa Beach and hoped to build a 10,000 sq. ft. home. Killen presented him with a design that featured two buildings connected by a glass bridge that cut the square footage in half. “Wait a second,” the client said. “You are telling me that you want to take the fillet mignon of my site and turn it into air?” That was exactly what Killen intended to do. His client assented. When the home subsequently won an AIA award, Killen had his client go up to the podium and accept it.
“More is not always better,” Killen said. “We we were into that big market of 2005, 2006, and 2007, nobody wanted to take the time to think about doing something that would be really thought provoking and really reflect life at the beach. The thinking was how fast can we get it approved, how fast can we get it on the market – instant gratification is not always the best answer. Sometimes we need to labor over things and get a better result, a better quality of life, and a better environment in which you get to live in.”
Killen has become the South Bay’s most outspoken critic against traditional design and advocate for modern design. The Mediterranean homes that are the dominant style locally are inauthentic, he argues.
“You will find so many bad representations of older styles that truly don’t mimic what the intent of that was. When these buildings were built in Tuscany in the 14th century that was the best technology available. That was avant-garde; that was modern architecture….I think you could do a modern Mediterranean style building that does not try to look like this old style by taking some plaster and putting in some fake bricks and sitting there and saying, ‘Well, that looks Mediterranean.’ You might as well go to Disneyland and save yourself the trouble.”
Killen said that modern architecture suits the South Bay because the strength of its materials – steel, glass and concrete – enables the design to do more with less. A 30 ft. wide home tucked into a row of homes can still be oriented to maximize its ability to use natural light, for example, with large open floor plans and an indoor/outdoor aesthetic that fits the Southern California climate.
Other architects have followed the lead of the handful of moderns who have worked here for decades. Architects such as Peter DeMaria and James Meyer have arrived and pushed even harder at the local design envelope – DeMaria, most famously, with the “Container House” he built in Redondo Beach, and Meyer’s (whose firm is called LeanArch) cutting edge, off-the-grid “green” designed homes. Even the most dominant local traditional architect, Louie Tomaro – who has built more homes than any other architect in the history of the South Bay – in the 2000s began to utilize modern designs.
DeMaria said a collective heightening of design consciousness has arrived locally. A critical mass has been reached.
“What you are starting to see is a ripple effect,” he said. “Good architecture hits, and suddenly there is an appreciation for it…It breeds upon itself. And believe me, bad stuff breeds upon itself, too. It’s a Catch-22. But I think we are moving in a positive direction.”
The Container House is an example of how far the South Bay has come in terms of acceptance towards cutting-edge modern design. A decade ago, such a radical design – the home is built out of shipping containers – would have been unfathomable here. The home, which attracted worldwide attention and earned an AIA award for innovation, is believed to be the first design ever constructed in which the entire structure is based on shipping containers. Nine containers were used, eight as rooms and a ninth as a 40 ft. lap pool in the back yard. They form a structure that creates a large high-ceilinged living room with an airport hangar door that opens the entire back of the house to the outdoors.
It is a home that could only have been built in the South Bay, DeMaria said.
“I don’t think that project could have happened anywhere else in the U.S. at that time,” he said. “It took a client that needed to do something bold, it needed a city planning department with a progressive mindset, and it needed the South Bay’s mindset, which is accepting of a little more informality. If you go five miles any direction, it could not have happened – it needed those clients, this city, and this microclimate.”
“It’s almost like jazz music could not have happened in Seattle,” he added. “The South Bay gave life to that project.”
