California Built: Sea Ranch & West Hollywood
When this edition of OFTR publishes, I’ll be in the middle of a two week stint in Tokyo, after spending a week in NYC. More on all that at a later date. In the meantime…
This month’s post contains a handful of architectural images from two September California adventures.
Over the Labor Day weekend, the wife and I celebrated our wedding anniversary by renting a house in Sea Ranch, CA.
If you’re not familiar, Sea Ranch is an unincorporated community, basically a private housing subdivision masquerading as a town in rural coastal Northern California, established in the 1960s by a group of architects and developers who banded together to build an aesthetic utopia with really strict design guidelines.
Despite the airs of elitist douchebaggery, the result is a collection of pretty amazing homes that spawned a whole architectural style, covering just over 16 square miles along a gorgeous strip of coastline and up into the redwoods just south of Gualala, CA. (Which I photographed with a Leica M10 Monochrom.)
The other set of images come from a trip the following weekend to Los Angeles to celebrate the birthday of a good friend. We spent our time in West Hollywood, where I was shooting with the Rollei 35S loaded with Kodak Porta 800 color film. WeHo is a pretty old neighborhood, as LA neighborhoods go, with some prime architecture and street photo potential.
I didn’t capture much in the way of street scenes — it was over 100 degrees the whole time we were there, and the streets were pretty deserted — but it just so happened that the little hotel we stayed in was one block away from the MAK Center for Architecture, an exemplary Rudolph M. Schindler house built in 1922, which has been been converted into a museum and gallery, and is open to the public for self guided tours.
Dubbed the birthplace of Southern California Modernism, Schindler both lived and worked out of this house on Kings Road for years, some of that time alongside Richard Neutra, establishing the enduring West Coast Modern architecture style.
