Trudi Sandmeier 00:00
Today’s wide ranging conversation on Save As: We go from mid-century modernism to the Civil War to … gravel?
[Music]
Trudi Sandmeier 00:18
Welcome to Save As, the podcast that glimpses the future of heritage conservation through the eyes and work of the graduate students at the University of Southern California. I’m Trudi Sandmeier.
Cindy Olnick 00:28
And I’m Cindy Olnick.
Trudi Sandmeier 00:29
Happy New Year Cindy.
Cindy Olnick 00:31
Welcome back, Trudi. So, Trudi, who are we talking with today?
Trudi Sandmeier 00:35
Well, I had a delightful conversation with our alumna, Sian Winship, who is a friend and a colleague. And it was really a fun conversation. quite wide ranging. We covered a lot of topics in the course of our conversation. It was sort of hard to narrow it all down. She’s done some really interesting stuff.
Cindy Olnick 00:53
She is a Swiss Army knife of architectural history.
Trudi Sandmeier 00:57
This was a really great conversation, in part because we talked about mid-century modernism, which hasn’t gotten a lot of play on the podcast so far, but is a really important part of what we do in the Heritage Conservation Program at USC because Los Angeles has such amazing modern architecture as part of its historic fabric around the city.
Cindy Olnick 01:17
That’s actually one of the reasons I moved here, for the modern architecture and the people who love it. And Sian has done some really great work, you know, bringing modernism to the masses. So, she’s done some great work and she’s talked to some of the greats who’ve done it.
Trudi Sandmeier 01:34
Yes, this is clearly a personal passion for Sian and she was able to translate that into her studies at USC, but also in the work that she’s done since and in not only her professional work, but her volunteer work and all the different ways that Sian gets involved in heritage conservation across the board.
Cindy Olnick 01:53
Well, let’s get to it. Here’s Trudi’s conversation with Sian Winship.
[Music]
Trudi Sandmeier 02:01
So I want to welcome Sian Winship to Save As. Welcome Sian and thanks for joining us today.
Sian Winship 02:08
I’m excited to be here today.
Trudi Sandmeier 02:10
This is one of our special Where Are They Now episodes where we’re talking to some of our alums who have gone on to do really amazing and interesting things. So that’s what we’re here to hear about today. You have taken a somewhat non-traditional path to come into the world of heritage conservation. What were you doing before you came back to grad school?
Sian Winship 02:29
So I had already had kind of two careers at that point. My first career was in traditional advertising. I was a strategic planner for Chiat/Day and worked on, amongst other accounts, Nissan and other large accounts there. And then at one point, I was also growing tired of that, and I sort of shifted my career interests into social issue marketing. Basically, I took all of the things that I had learned in traditional advertising and started applying them to issues of social justice or corporate community partnerships, or poverty or financial literacy. And it was really fascinating, fascinating work and very stimulating, feeling like, you know, rather than selling peanut butter and luggage, I was doing something more important in the world and advancing civil society. And it was right about 2008 when I decided that I was going to form my own business, and I left the firm I was working for, and about an hour and a half later, the economic downturn was upon us, and there was no work.
Trudi Sandmeier 03:39
Timing is everything Sian.
Sian Winship 03:40
Timing is everything. Yes. And so you know, foundations weren’t giving out any money. Those were significantly my clients at the time. And I decided I needed to reinvent myself a little bit. And by then I had already spent 15 years serving on the board of the Society of Architectural Historians, Southern California Chapter doing architectural tours, curating programs, writing brochures, and it was sort of my hobby that I loved. And it seemed to make sense to me to try and take the thing that I loved, and reinvent myself using it. So it all kind of made sense at that point to seek out a program where I could take the experience I already had formalize it, professionalize it and hopefully launch myself into a new me,
Trudi Sandmeier 04:25
Which happily for all of us happened. So now let’s turn to your thesis. Why don’t we start with the title?
Sian Winship 04:33
The title of my thesis was Quantity and Quality: Architects Working for Developers in Southern California 1960 to 1973.
Trudi Sandmeier 4:41
You focused in your thesis on three different architects, modernists who were known for their individual practices, but also worked in multiples. Give us just an overview of kind of the idea behind your thesis.
Sian Winship 04:58
Well, I was interested in looking It’s sort of the nexus between avant garde modern architecture and developer housing, you know, tract housing, which was, of course, such an important part of the built environment in Southern California during the post-war period. So I focused on three different architects: one was Ed Fickett, one was Richard Dorman, and one was Bill Krisel, who all worked in slightly different aspects of developer housing.
Trudi Sandmeier 05:23
How did you decide on these three architects to focus on?
Sian Winship 05:27
Well, there were a variety of factors. One of them was that I actually live adjacent to a Richard Dorman house, and I was quite interested in his architecture of all types. Then there was also Ed Fickett who has literally designed tens of thousands of tract homes in Southern California. And his papers and archives had fairly recently been acquired by USC. So there was opportunity to gain access to that, you know, unused material. And then also, you very graciously recommended that I should contact Bill Krisel, whose archives were, I believe, being processed to go to the Getty. But at the time Bill was, you know, still with us, and was a really great resource for understanding what his journey was like in the world of developer housing.
Trudi Sandmeier 06:13
How do you define developer housing?
Sian Winship 06:15
I think, as we tried to define it in the thesis is tract houses that are multiples, they may have different elevations, but they’re usually confined to a fixed number of floor plans. That could be three floor plans, ten floor plans, depending on how large the tract is. And then very often combined with a similar or more complex number of front facades, so that it looks like there’s a bunch of individual houses, but they’re really very easy to manufacture because they’re all very standardized.
Trudi Sandmeier 06:47
There’s a lot of sort of bad press out there about tract housing. And these architects really took it to the next level. What sets them apart from typical cookie cutter tract housing that we might disparage?
Sian Winship 07:03
The thing that really sets these three guys apart is that they used post and beam construction techniques, and therefore the open plan, in order to drive the plans for the houses. And that frees up the interior spaces to be much more flexible, much more spatially interesting and interconnected, and to be able to connect with their exteriors in ways that, you know, typical framing cannot do. And it also freed them to again, put these different, you know, front facades on there in ways that often made the tracts have a significant architectural cadence. So, for example, if you look at the tract homes of Bill Krisel out in Palm Springs, and you look down the street, what you’ll see is you’ll see a varied streetscape of different roof lines, whether it’s a butterfly, a flat roof, a shed roof, a traditional gable. And that architectural cadence makes it feel like it’s a special place. And not just the kind of cookie cutter homes that are so often thought about when it comes to tract housing and typically developments like Levittown on the East Coast.
Trudi Sandmeier 08:09
Why did you in particular focus on the period 1960s to 1973?
Sian Winship 08:15
Well, because that was a real boom period for this type of developer housing. And the cut off period, actually, of 1973 coincided with an economic downturn, as well as the oil embargo and a lot of other economic disadvantages that were happening at the time. So that was really effectively kind of the end of the big tract developments. There was also definitely a movement away from single family residential housing at that point too, you know, more condominiums, multifamily, even high-rise residential, because all of those families who had raised their children directly after the war, were typically becoming empty nesters. And, so their needs were also a little bit different by the time 1973 rolled around. One of the sort of remarkable things that happened to me as a result of writing this thesis was getting to know Bill Krisel. And when the time came for there to be a book on the Palm Springs work of Bill Krisel, he reached out to me and asked me to write two chapters, one of which was basically the biographical chapter, which is almost a direct lift of my thesis. So it was a real opportunity to put all that hard work into action, and get paid for it. And then I also wrote a chapter of my own choosing on his Palm Springs work, which is about his condominium work out in the desert. That in and of itself has yielded other opportunities, you know, to speak at Modernism Week and to do other Bill Krisel related work that I am certainly most grateful for.
Trudi Sandmeier 09:42
Well, I also have to say that I think you have continued your work with the career of Richard Dorman as well.
Sian Winship 09:49
It’s interesting because Dorman is a fascination to me. During the 1960s, one of the most highly regarded modern architects in Los Angeles and no one really remembers his name anymore. And part of that is because he retired fairly early and went to Santa Fe and sold his practice. And so there in selling his practice, he sold all of his papers, there are no archives associated with his work. My fascination has led me to try and locate as much material on him as I can. And slowly but surely, as things come online and mysterious things appear on the internet, I’m finding out more and more and I was able through his son to locate 200 slides, that managed somehow to survive over the years. So I’m hopeful that a Richard Dorman book will be forthcoming in the near future.
Trudi Sandmeier 10:37
That’s great. Everybody works really hard on their thesis and it’s nice when these things have a life beyond just an academic requirement.
Sian Winship 10:47
A really good example of that was that through my thesis that I was able to take the oral history of the Chinese American architect Young Woo because his daughter actually called the USC School of Architecture, and talked about how he had worked for Richard Dorman. And it came around back to me and I was able to interview Young Woo for about 12 hours and hear all about his life as a Chinese American growing up in Los Angeles as well as his his work in architecture and his work with Richard Dorman. So, you never know where it’s gonna lead.
Trudi Sandmeier 11:17
Full circle. All roads lead to Richard Dorman, turns out, which is not totally true, but a lot of them do. Your interest and career have really tended to focus on modernism. So what is it about modernism that is interesting and exciting to you?
Sian Winship 11:39
Well, I think that for me, it comes down to the fact that I grew up in a modern house. And that connection that is inherent in modernism with the outdoors, without actually having to be outdoors was something that I, it became part of my DNA as a kid. I didn’t quite realize it. And only as an adult, and I’ve seen other children running around in modern homes, do you realize that in your standard, you know, punched opening house with smoke coming out the chimney, you know, if you’re only three feet high, you can’t see outside because you have to climb on something to look out the window. But in a modern house, you have that connection from the time you take your very first steps. I mean, I even see it with pets in modern homes. They connect with the out of doors through that floor to ceiling glass. So it’s I think, it’s always just been something that I have never taken for granted and that I appreciate. And as I have gotten older, I’ve come to understand more about the why of why it’s like that. And I find the ideas, and the egalitarian ideas of modernism, the idea of architecture with a manifesto, if you will, to be quite interesting. And so it’s something I’ve enjoyed learning about for the last 25 or 30 years.
Trudi Sandmeier 12:58
And you currently live in a modern home on the Westside. And so that has all come full circle.
Sian Winship 13:05
It has, it has. I mean, you know, for me, I mentioned earlier, the Society of Architectural Historians, Southern California Chapter. I’ve volunteered for them for a couple of decades now. And so the events that that I have chosen to put on typically follow my own interests, and they tend to be events about modern architecture,
Trudi Sandmeier 13:23
But it’s led you to be involved in another organization here in town, which is the Neutra Institute.
Sian Winship 13:31
It has. I am so very grateful to be a part of the Neutra Institute for Survival Through Design. The ainstitute was originally started by Richard Neutra in the late 1960s. And in the last couple of years it has now been sort of re-envisioned by Raymond Neutra, Mr. Neutra’s last living son. And we are working in a couple of areas really at the nexus of preserving the Neutra legacy, but also taking up a bit where Neutra left off in the 1960s by promoting and recognizing design that benefits people in the planet. So it’s kind of taking Neutra’s original ideas about biorealism, and making them contemporary,
Trudi Sandmeier 14:14
Which is particularly germane in our conversations about sustainability and the built environment and the ways in which those two things collide, the continuum between natural conservation and heritage conservation. They’re not very far apart when you think about the guiding principles that go along with those things. And so it’s a, it seems like a great fit for you Sian.
Sian Winship 14:37
I’m one of the few board members that has a preservation background. And so it’s great that I can share that perspective with board members who have other skills and talents and knowledge bases. And you know, it’s also preservation in action, because as part of this, this sort of re envisioning and reconstitution of the organization, Dion Neutra, who passed away two years ago, has willed to the Institute, three buildings: the Neutra office building in Silverlake, the Reunion House, which was where Dion and the family lived shortly after the fire at the VDL House in the 1960s. And Dion lived there until his passing couple years ago. And then also another building, a triplex that Deion himself designed in the late 70s, early 80s. So we have definitely three resources, some from the recent past that we are going to be good stewards of for the foreseeable future. And the goal is to make them accessible and use them for educational purposes.
Trudi Sandmeier 15:36
At the end of the semester, we’re going to have another podcast featuring Peyton Hall and his students who are doing a project at one of the houses owned by the Institute, in need of a little attention. So that’s an exciting crossover event.
Sian Winship 15:52
And it’s another full circle for me since I took that class 11 years ago.
Trudi Sandmeier 15:56
That’s right.
Sian Winship 15:57
Now I get to be on the other end.
Trudi Sandmeier 15:58
Yes, absolutely, as a client, which is great. You have been since graduating, working kind of as an independent consultant and carving your own path. How do you find your clients? And how have you made this work for yourself in terms of making this a way to make a living?
Sian Winship 16:18
Even prior to going to grad school, I was really working as an independent consultant. So I was comfortable and am comfortable with that lifestyle and effectively been doing that for 25 years, or probably more if I do the math, and I don’t want to do the math at this point. And so it feels like a natural state of being for me. And I’m also a commitment phobe. That helps. But I’ve been very fortunate in that my career has always worked that when, you know, times are good. And companies have too much work that they can’t do, they will reach out, you know, for help. And that was exactly how basically my career started in heritage conservation. I was so fortunate to have Historic Resources Group reach out to me for a project that I’m pretty sure nobody in the office wanted to do. And it was a project about gravel. And while I would say that I did not have any professional experience, either through my formal training or my informal work through the Society of Architectural Historians, I embraced gravel wholeheartedly. And I learned everything there was to know about gravel. And from that exercise, I cannot go past a gravel pit these days without saying out loud to myself, or anyone who’ll listen to me, You know what they say, gravel doesn’t travel. And… Who says that? No one says that. Just you, apparently. Just me, just me. But one of the things I just love naturally is learning about things. It doesn’t matter how inane it might be. And so, so for me, gravel was a great way to jump in and get my feet wet. And ever since then, I’ve been fortunate that, you know, I do the occasional project with Historic Resources Group. And, you know, I’m part of just a great team over there. They make me better, and I’m so lucky to to work with them.
Trudi Sandmeier 18:08
But you also do independent projects, right?
Sian Winship 18:10
I do, I do.
Trudi Sandmeier 18:11
So weird things that come in over the transom.
Sian Winship 18:14
And they come in from a variety of sources. You know, sometimes people just find me online from something I have written. Very often people who know a little something about whatever it is they’re interested in, will recommend me.
Trudi Sandmeier 18:25
That’s great.
Sian Winship 18:26
I’ve had the great fortune to work on a lot of really interesting projects that have that have come along. Probably one of them that I’m most proud of, which was actually a volunteer project for me, was doing the National Register nomination for the Church of the Epiphany in Los Angeles, which not only is an architectural treasure, but is also you know, a cultural heritage site in that you can pretty much you know, pick five of the most important aspects of Chicano history from the 70s and it’ll check the boxes on all of them, whether it’s, you know, the original organization point for the Brown Berets, or whether it was the original site of the Chicano magazine, La Raza, it was a remarkable project. And I’m so pleased to have have worked on that.
Trudi Sandmeier 19:10
Through your work as an on-call consultant with HRG, you’ve had the chance to work on a lot of historic context statements. Talk about a few of those context projects that you worked on.
Sian Winship 19:14
Sure. Well, the first one I worked on was the Japanese American context. And Katie Horak, who works at, actually at ARG and Christine Lazzaretto from HRG were brainstorming about who might do the Japanese portion. And I believe Katie was a guest on the podcast to talk about the Holiday Bowl. Through an internship I had in grad school I had gotten to know Katie pretty well. So we rode around together during I think it was group four of Survey LA, which included the Holiday Bowl and she understood that I had a real appreciation for Japanese American history. So that was a really exciting project to work on. That work continues to live on in the fact that I was I was able to secure a fellowship from Friends of Residential Treasures Los Angeles, to pursue my interest in Japanese American architects in post-war Los Angeles. So these things really have a way of kind of building on one another. One project kind of leads you to the next, which is great. The other context that I did for Survey LA with my my colleagues at HRG, was the women’s rights context. And that one is especially near and dear to my heart. But I found such a rich legacy of women and organizations, you know, at the turn of the century, who were working for suffrage. You know, it didn’t stop with suffrage, it went all the way up through second wave feminism, and found a number of resources that, you know, we wouldn’t have found through just a windshield survey in Survey LA, because they typically don’t give up their stories. So, for example, there is one of the first women’s health clinics/abortion clinics on Crenshaw that no one really would have known about just doing the survey work, myself included, until you really start digging into the history and start looking for those resources. So it’s, you know, it’s been very satisfying for all of us.
Trudi Sandmeier 21:07
So that site, in particular, has recently been nominated as Historic Cultural Monument in the city of Los Angeles, which is a very controversial designation, because it’s a very modest building in the middle of a surface parking lot that has been used as a used car sales office. You know, it doesn’t at all look significant or architecturally beautiful. But it’s incredibly important in the history of feminism.
Sian Winship 21:35
Well I think one of the things that’s so interesting about that site that is difficult to understand, is, as part of my research I interviewed Carol Downer, who was the founder of the Self-Help One Clinic and the Self-Help clinic movement across America, actually. And part of the reason they picked that building, because it was a residential duplex in its earlier iteration, was for its residential qualities. They wanted to have women’s health care in a place that was not institutional, that felt like a home where they could have a playground for women with, to bring their kids and the kids could play in the playground while they were seeing to their own, you know, health needs. And so, you know, I think part of the story there that’s being lost, or maybe overshadowed is the very nature of its modesty is why it was selected to be the first self-help clinic in pretty much in all of America. Yeah, so.
Trudi Sandmeier 22:26
Which is amazing. The story has yet to be completely written there. But it is certainly something that many of us are following closely.
Sian Winship 22:34
And one of the really interesting things that has happened in the last five to six years, and I really commend cities for doing this, but as part of typically larger historic context work, they have been asking for work that tells the story of redlining and segregation and race and suburbanization. Definitely reaching out about their ethnic communities in ways that, you know, was previously, you know, not standard in some of these contexts. And I’d like to think that, you know, that the good work that Survey LA did has been kind of leading the way for municipalities to take a look at their own histories, and even the uncomfortable histories and address them. And so that is also been becomes a bit of a niche of mine, which is kind of using what little resources we have, because very often that’s a story that is not published, as you can well imagine, in mainstream newspapers to find out about redlining practices, housing discrimination, and all of that. We’ve been working on a race and suburbanization context for the city of Long Beach, which had a very challenged history, if you will, with housing discrimination, that most of the time, you can find an interesting story, a hopeful story in what can otherwise be kind of depressing work in the Fair Housing Foundation that was founded in Long Beach was, which was really one of the first fair housing organizations in the state of California, and a model for leadership for other types of those organizations. And so you can, you know, take what is a very challenged bit of history, and then, you know, lay claim to hopefully writing those wrongs in in new and interesting ways.
Trudi Sandmeier 24:11
You also were able to do that a little bit in the city of Palm Springs.
Sian Winship 24:15
Yes, again, I commend the city for, you know, wanting to address what is a very challenged history with race and discrimination. It’s kind of Palm Springs’ dirty little secret, although it’s not such a little secret anymore, which is a good thing. But very briefly, Palm Springs, and that whole area is laid out in what they call a checkerboard, which dates back to the 1850s. But, to make a long story short, the area of the desert out there got divided up into literally like a checkerboard pattern, if you if you looked at a chessboard or checkerboard. And every other square is Indian reservation land. We all know that Palm Springs since the teens and 20s has been a resort town and a mecca for, you know, Hollywood to come and play, you know, Hollywood sort of playground. Of course, the natural wonders of the of the desert and such and the resorts that that grew up there. Now, there were a couple of enlightened resorts like the Desert Inn, who actually provided housing for the workers that they employed. But for the most part, people who were not housed by the resorts had to find someplace else to live. And the only place that they could live was on the Indian land. And typically, in this one particular section, they call it Section 14, because all those checkerboard squares have have different different numbers. The odd ones are all privately held, and the even numbered ones are all held by the tribe. So the tribe would actually lease out little bits and pieces of Section 14, where then, you know, people of color in Palm Springs would, you know, maybe pitch a tent, or they would bring a trailer or they would put together you know, vernacular houses, you know, that they would build over time. And so that part of the city became home to the African American population, the Latino population, etc, etc.
And after the war, as you can imagine, when Palm Springs really started to boom, in terms of development, the city fathers in the 50s and 60s felt that Section 14 was, frankly unsightly, because it sat right in the middle of town. And they started to issue eviction notices, and to condemn these places. And it turned very ugly. Even though the people of Section 14 fought back, nobody was really there for them. And there was about a 15 year period of forced eviction of you know, forced demolition where people would go to work and and come back in the afternoon and, or evening and find that their house had been demolished. And then ultimately, in 1966, shortly after the Watts Riots when the city fathers felt that there might be a similar situation in Palm Springs, they simply set Section 14 on fire. And all of the residents there, needless to say, were forced to find housing, other places. And so they typically went to Banning, Beaumont and some of the other desert communities at that point, and some farther out into Cathedral City where there weren’t, you know, covenants and restrictions and such. But, we all love Palm Springs for their preservation mindedness and you know, how they preserve their modern architecture. It’s a great story in and of itself, but they’ve been a little more cavalier, I guess, with their cultural resources. And it’s a story that, you know, needs to be told and continue to be told, so that we can all be aware of it.
Trudi Sandmeier 27:34
Yeah, I know you’re working on a really cool and interesting project in Altadena right now. You want to tell us a little bit about that.
Sian Winship 27:43
Yes,Trudi. I’m very excited about this project that I’m currently working on with the author and well-known historian Bill Deverall from USC, and we are working on county landmarks nomination for the gravesite of Owen Brown. So Owen Brown was the son of John Brown, the Liberator as he is often known. He is the famous abolitionist and is best known for the raid on Harpers Ferry, although he actually led a number of other raids, and his son Owen and some of his other sons accompanied him on those other raids. John Brown was captured at Harpers Ferry. He was tried and convicted, and ultimately hung. Owen Brown managed to escape from Harpers Ferry and was a fugitive for years and years and years and years, before he ultimately came west and settled in Altadena with a couple of other members of his family. And so for the last about 10 years or so of his life, he lived with his brother, kind of as hermits up on the top of a mountain. In Altadena they built a little cabin there. And people came from all over the country to visit the Brown boys and to honor them for their their work as abolitionists. And as a result, interestingly, Pasadena and Altadena became sort of centers of abolitionist communities and Union Army communities that came west. And, so ultimately, at Owen Brown’s passing, the community rallied and he was buried on the mountaintop there with a commemorative stone erected 10 years after his passing that has for over 100 years been the sight of community pilgrimage for both the African American and the white communities in Altadena and Pasadena. So, we are hoping to honor that, to increase awareness of that legacy through this nomination. And there’s also plans afoot to create an educational curriculum for public schools so that they can they can teach the site, which is really great. I mean, we don’t really have very many Civil War related sites in Southern California just by virtue of our nature. I just think it’s a great way to make that history tangible and meaningful. And, you know, it’s all about that importance of place that we know heritage conservation can contribute.
Trudi Sandmeier 30:11
That’s super cool. And so people can go visit the site, they can hike up to go see it, although I understand it’s a little precarious on the way up there for some who might have a fear of heights.
Sian Winship 30:23
Wear good shoes. That’s my advice.
Trudi Sandmeier 30:25
Wear good shoes. Excellent. But that’s really important work. And again, sort of telling some of these underrepresented stories of place and people that have had a significant impact on Southern California, I think is really super exciting. Well, I want to thank you Sian for coming and chatting with me about your thesis and about your career and all the fun and interesting projects that you get to explore through your own independent consultancy work and so, thanks for stopping by.
Sian Winship 31:02
It was great to talk, Trudi.
