Amongst Los Angeles’ relentless grid of single-storey dwellings carpeting the landscape, there are some beautiful and celebrated landmarks of modern architecture. These buildings often don’t shout their presence to the sidewalk, with many such properties – designed by architects including Frank Lloyd Wright, Irving Gill, Richard Neutra, or Pierre Koenig – secreted and sometimes hidden behind hedges, discreetly set back from the street.

The Schindler House is one such home. Arguably in the canon of modern architecture, it can be found on a West Hollywood side road otherwise populated by perfectly pleasant but unremarkable homes across the gamut of Californian vernaculars. With a garden and mature planting buffering it from the tarmac, once approached its unique, particular architecture begins to show itself.


Designed by Austrian émigré Rudolph Schindler, and designed as a (two) family home, the timber-framed building was built between 1921 and 1922, with a form based upon a campsite the architect had seen in Yosemite national park. In its design, Schindler was creating a unique form of modern living, but one rooted in a timeless connection to nature and the elements: two interconnected L-shaped apartments were designed for two semi-co-living families, each featuring unexpected sleeping arrangements.

The household who would live in the property after construction consisted of Schindler and his wife, Pauline, alongside Clyde and Marian Chace. Each couple’s side of the home had two large studios, and a bathroom set around two gardens, with a shared kitchen accessible from both sides abutting a guest bedroom and bathroom. There was also a small nursery in the Chace side, and an externally accessed garage which now serves as the HQ of custodians MAK Center for Art and Architecture.

“No bedrooms,” you may be thinking. Schindler didn’t include bedrooms in his design but – in its biggest nod to the campsite inspiration – featured two “sleeping baskets” accessed through tight staircases, offering eye-level vantage of surrounding trees from a four-posted redwood pod protected by stretched canvas on each side. Not all LA architecture is bling.


As well as looking after the architecture (which is delicate and constantly in need of preservation), MAK keep the space alive through events and exhibitions. Also managing two other LA Schindler buildings – Mackay Apartments as an artist residency space, and the Fitzpatrick-Leland House for intimate programming – when recessed.space visited, MAK were using their main space for an exhibition of works by artist and former fashion designer Helmut Lang. Curated by Neville Wakefield, Lang’s works were positioned carefully around the spaces to celebrate not only the soft, glowing materials of the artist, but how they play with and the wood, insulation board, glass, concrete, canvas, copper, and light that make up the surrounding architecture. Schindler referenced traditional Japanese vernacular (though not through visiting the country, but after spending time at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin), Pueblo architecture of New Mexico, and the rules of modernism which, like Schindler, travelled from Europe to the US.

There is an attention to detail that adds to the place’s simplicity, despite requiring an intelligence and deep knowledge of material and space to design. Sliding partitions and canvas panels break the threshold between inside and out, with both garden and interior treated as a whole rather than separate spaces. The planting carries on spatial divisions, forming external rooms and expanding the liveable area of the site, including external fireplaces facing each courtyard.

Architecturally, the Schindler House was as much an experiment as it was a home (in both construction and programme) and as such, that a place made so intuitively of wood, canvas, and soft materials has remained in place for over a century in a city of earthquakes, property development is remarkable in itself. It does, however, require constant care, and the various buckets, water ingress barriers, slight cracks, and overgrown nature speak to this need for maintenance. It is not about to fall down, but this sense of showing its age through its architectural skin is perhaps played against by Lang’s sculptures which also carry their own distortions, transmutations, growths, and seeming seepage.


While the work and house is now marked with a ghostly, spare quietness, when a home it was busy and the centre of cultural activities. Regularly hosting soirees, gatherings, and conversations attended by the likes of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, composer John Cage, photographer Edward Weston, poet Sadakichi Hartman, and model Betty Katz Kopelanoff amongst a coterie of academics, artists, activists, and occultists. As well as conversation, it would be a space for all kinds of cultural events, from dance performances to left wing political meetings, concerts to lectures.

It is fitting, then, that MAK Center for Art and Architecture use the property for talks, performances, and exhibitions. The sculptural works by Helmut Lang were carefully positioned around the softly lit, nature-tone imbued rooms in a careful curation by Neville Wakefield. The materials both play with and push against those the house is made of – tonally they subjects and context speak in harmony, but the sculptures incorporate items not found in Schindler’s design, including latex, foam, resin, shellac, and steel.


Lang started his career in fashion design, using in his clothing designs the kinds of unfamiliar materials as found in his sculptures here, including rubber, metal fabric, latex, and feathers. In 2005, six years after selling 51% of his fashion house to Prada, Lang retired from fashion to solely concentrate on sculpture, though there is still a connection to the body, albeit perhaps in directions Prada would not have been OK with the artist going: the works comprise upwards, thrusting constructions all titled “Fist”, and bulbous, collapsing forms all titled “Prolapse”. Like the Schindler House in its state of ongoing maintenance and upkeep, these works sit between rational, controlled order and slow decay with precarious tension.

Previous exhibitions in the house have included artists such as Edmund de Waal, Alex Katz, and Andrea Fraser, a diverse range of creatives but all curated to speak to the history, fabric, and poetry of the place. MAK oversee a very healthy form of preservation, one which not only maintains and takes care of the fabric – though not in a heavy-handed way – but also the purpose and meaning of the House and Rudolph Schindler’s ideas around it and how it could be at once domestic and public, indoors and outdoors, modern and traditional, present and discreet.