"The Palm Springs School" vs. "The Sarasota School"

Frey house II, Albert Frey 1963

Two current events highlighting Modern architecture: Modernism Week in Palm Springs, CA, ended last weekend, and DOCOMOMO's "Modernism Matters" conference in Sarasota, FL, convenes April 18. Both small cities can boast about their Modern architecture. Both were vacation communities where second homes encouraged experiment and progressive designs; both were towns that gave their architects work designing the buildings of everyday life: schools, retail stores, and churches. The main difference was that in the 1950s there was a well publicized "Sarasota School," but no "Palm Springs School." Why? In Sarasota, the most famous name among that group, Paul Rudolph, encouraged the attention among the New York-based architecture press, and the east coast schools. No one in Palm Springs bothered -- or was noticed. 

Even at this late date, it's time to officially anoint the "Palm Springs School." The new Edwards Harris Pavilion of the Palm Springs Art Museum (actually the 1957 Santa Fe Savings Bank by E. Stewart Williams, now being repurposed as the Architecture and Design Center) will only solidify Palm Springs current role in documenting and explaining what Modernism was all about.

But there's still an imbalance in telling the full story of Modern architecture in the midcentury. The "Sarasota School" meme proved what riches could come even from a small, out of the way town. To balance the facts, we need the "Palm Springs School" meme.

Desert Hot Springs Motel, John Lautner 1947

In fact, remarkable innovative designs exploring structure, climate control, spatial complexity, and cultural expression came out of both Sarasota and Palm Springs. Paul Rudolph explored concrete systems for Sarasota schools; Donald Wexler explored prefab steel systems for Palm Springs schools. Victor Lundy explored original organic forms for churches and motels in Sarasota; John Lautner explored original organic forms for homes and motels in Palm Springs. Actually, Sarasota never really explored mass production of houses, while Palmer and Krisel's Modern tract homes for the Alexander Company are models of Modern concepts applied successfully and creatively to mass production -- score a point for Palm Springs.

If we don't put the unique designs of Palm Springs on the national design map, we're just not telling an accurate story of Modernism.

In the midst of the crowds at Modernism Week in Palm Springs (it grows in popularity each year), it's difficult to imagine that the names Albert Frey, William Cody, Donald Wexler, or E. Stewart Williams are still met with a  "Who?" in other parts of the country.

Steel house, Donald Wexler 1964

But the discovery of the Palm Springs' architectural bonanza is, after all, only about fifteen years old. Back then few people realized that an architect who worked  with Le Corbusier had holed up in Palm Springs for sixty years building houses, schools, churches, and whatever else he could. Albert Frey may have been known around Palm Springs, but outside Palm Springs he was virtually invisible.

The same was true for Don Wexler, Stew Williams, Bill Cody and the rest. Out of sight, out of mind. None of them had national ambitions like Rudolph did. Only the Kaufmann house was known outside the Coachella Valley -- and that was because Richard Neutra was so good at promoting all of his buildings.

City National Bank, Victor Gruen Assoc. 1959/Gruen Assoc. photo

Today Palm Springs is also leading the nation in fighting to preserve these buildings. An ordinary day in Palm Springs becomes extraordinarily pleasurable when it includes lunch at the Ace Hotel's renovated Armet and Davis-designed Denny's coffee shop, lounging poolside at Bill Cody's Horizon hotel, and cashing checks at Victor Gruen’s City National Bank (now Bank of America.)

But those pleasures shouldn't make us miss the forest for the well-designed trees. Step back and look at all of Palm Springs' rediscovered treasures together and they paint an extraordinary picture: nothing less than a redefinition of twentieth century Modernism itself.

Robinson's department store, Pereira & Luckman 1958/Pereira Assoc. photo

The conventional narrative about Modernism has grown creaky over the years. It focuses almost exclusively on a superficial image of "Modern" as austere flat-roofed boxes of steel and glass furnished exclusively with Eames and Barcelona chairs. That story was concocted largely by critics standing in Berlin, New York, or Harvard who looked around to see what new architecture looked like. But if you're standing at the corner of Palm Canyon and Tahquitz, it's a very different view. 

These examples from the Palm Springs School stake out a revised -- and more accurate -- story about mid-century Modernism in general: Modernism includes custom-designed craftsmanship for the wealthy, but also ingenious mass-produced designs for the masses. It is richly diverse, from International Style minimalism to Organic architecture's opulence. It is fervently devoted to modern technology, but equally devoted to modern pleasures. It draws nourishment from sublime nature, but can also celebrate the liveliness of commercialism in town centers and along the roadsides. It also tells the story of remarkably talented architects building happily and fruitfully in one small region for their entire careers, instead of building their national fame. 

tract home, Palmer & Krisel c 1958

This new narrative of Modernism is by no means exclusive to Palm Springs; it was once widely practiced, west of the Hudson River. Today, however, Palm Springs offers the most concentrated and best preserved examples of Modernism’s extraordinary quality, variety, and spread through the general culture.

What Sound Looks Like: Stanford’s new Bing Concert Hall, by Ennead Architect

The elliptical yellow dome of Bing Concert Hall is unmistakable rising above Stanford Arboretum's canopy of trees. But the real architecture of this new performing arts center is invisible, literally nothing: the empty space of the concert hall itself. It has been carefully shaped to sing and reverberate like the inside of a cello when the first string is plucked.

But unlike a cello that is used for an hour and then tucked away safely in its case, this enormous musical instrument must also sit exposed to the rain and sun and welcome hundreds of people flowing through it. While the acoustics inside promise excellent results, this "concert hall in the woods" could have gone further to blend with the refrains of its natural setting.

The public will get its opportunity to measure the hall's success for itself with a series of inaugural concerts. Certainly the building's acoustical designer, Yasuhisa Toyota, has an excellent track record. He helped shape Los Angeles' 2004 Disney Hall (with 2300 seats compared to Bing's 842), which has been hailed for its acoustics and intimacy.

For Bing, Toyota worked closely with Ennead Architects, analyzing their initial design with his proprietary software, and refining its acoustics over nineteen revisions. The hall's interior shape was then set in steel, concrete, wood and plaster.

The hall itself is an intentionally irregular shape, which the science of acoustics tells us is the best way to coax and nurture sound waves. What you don't want is a plain box with corners for sound waves to die in, and parallel walls to bounce them around as annoying echoes.

Instead, aided by acoustician Toyota, Ennead architects (formerly Polshek Partnership, who designed Stanford's Cantor Center for the Arts) and partner Richard Olcott created a naturalistic landscape: the seats are on a series of sloping terraces that circle the stage; high above eye level, several large sails billow outwards, and overhead a cloudlike oval passes over. The seats circle the stage, allowing for a pleasurable intimacy between audience and performers. No seat is more that seventy-five feet from the stage.

These forms appear as weightless as clouds passing over a rolling Napa vineyard, but that's an illusion. They are suspended on a hidden frame of muscular steel columns and trusses that position them precisely for the maximum acoustic effect. The whole interior is isolated from environmental noise by a foot-thick concrete shell.

The interior surface of this shell is a riot of shapes and textures. The outward-tipping walls that frame the seating terraces are covered in a layers of horizontal curvilinear wood strips -- their random curves taken from seven different sine curves to create the optimal irregularity. The surfaces of the plaster clouds -- actually prefabricated fiberglass reinforced concrete panels with a nubbly surface -- may look plain, but the walls beneath them are stamped with another pattern that looks like a vision of quantum space, where Newtonian time and space have gone awry. Even the backs of the seats rise and fall in an irregular rhythm. 

The purpose of all this colliding diversity is to create micro and macro surfaces to bounce and spread sound evenly and with fidelity to all parts of the hall.

In fact what we are looking at in this collision of patterns is the complexity of the science of sound itself expressed in architectural form. The jagged patterns of a sound wave on an oscilloscope may seem random to a layperson in the same way -- but functional science underlies it.

The same creative inspiration could have improved the exterior. Set in the middle of the Stanford Arboretum, the diversity and irregularity of biological sciences -- the textures and colors of barks, the angles of branches akimbo, the range of scales from micro to macro, from leaf to trunk -- could have inspired an exterior form as vivid as the hall's interior. It could have been a concert hall both in and of the woods.

The exterior's rectilinear colonnade and elliptical dome primarily a familiar, reductive Modernism. Still, it makes some tentative moves to complement its natural surroundings. The random tilted mullions in the glass walls surrounding the lobby echo the angles of tree branches. The large truncated elliptical cone is set at a diagonal rather than facing straight out to the formal axis of Palm Drive, avoiding the central monumentality of old Stanford Museum facing it. It is a building with many entries and no single dominant facade.

But the dome's oval shape diminishes weakly in perspective, becoming a shapeless, indistinct bulge. The architects attempted to articulate the dome by slicing it into two halves, with an inset plane between the edges of the halves (the perfect place for a tile mosaic mural). Nonetheless it falls short of the vivid organic geometries of the 2009 Menlo-Atherton Performing Arts Center by Hodgetts + Fung, or the great Brazilian Modern architect Oscar Niemeyer (who died last month at 104 years.)

Likewise the flat stucco of Bing Hall's exterior deserved more study. Stucco is a fine and noble California material, used effectively for monumental buildings by architects from Bernard Maybeck (the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco) to Charles Moore (Kresge College at UC Santa Cruz.) But it requires a sure confidence that it can be an expressive material in its own right, not just a budgetary necessity in place of more expensive stone.

Bing Hall's exterior deserved the same attention as the interior hall. This is a major building setting the tone for the campus' cultural sector (including a new art museum and an art and art history building) planned in the next few years. But the current whirlwind of construction should not make Stanford ignore the high standards set by its best buildings (by Wurster Bernardi and Emmons, Edward Durell Stone, John Carl Warnecke  and Shepley Rutan and Coolidge) that balance utility without shirking humanity.