Ellwood Blues

I ceased my project of the intellectual interlocking with this group because I believed that all the views had been entirely exchanged. But now I realize that I was wrong, and there is something more to be known as in this conversation.

It is the question of the Modernism of southern California. In north, as we saw, the great spirit Eichler created the modernism for the masses, bringing designs advanced to the ordinary house of area.

But in the south Modernism was different. Its aesthetic achievements cannot be denied - houses of case study, larger projects inspired, moments of transcendent beauty - all command of respect. But they are held invariably in insulation, always neighbors of lesser work, alone in an arbitrary urban landscape ('junkspace').

Perhaps it follows that the great expert of the southernmost modernism of California was himself a cipher:

I cannot say to you much about him, because not much is known. His name was not really Craig Ellwood. He was nobody to start, the child of a migrating hairdresser, working as estimator of building. He changed his name, he made some houses, he bought Ferrari, and put “VROOM” of the license plate. He spoke at Yale. If you were rich in L.A. you do not accept second-best - you called his number. And he made houses as delicate and terrible as phantoms:

Ellwood did not play another man’s game. He built modern materials, he was the first builder to frame out of steel, always a stage ahead. And this guy is right - Ellwood taught us houses are machines for dreaming in.

And then he was gone like the Cheshire Cat (was he ever there?), to Tuscany to paint, and then dead. We are left with the houses and the buildings, we can wonder whether we are like the people in The Master and Margarita, who awoke to find their roubles turned to scraps of paper. Was it all a dream?

It is the bill of indictment of LA: The dreams can guide our vision, but they can never replace it. If we fall in love with them too much, our fascination and introspection will destroy us. L.A. is a junkie, haunted with imaginations of its own creation, the victim of its own pitiless ideological principles, the most powerful drug of all. It is regrettable, but also beautiful. As we say in France, “every junkie’s like a setting sun.”