Mysteries of Modernism at Schindler’s Buck House
Cindy Olnick
Today on Save As:
Sam Malnati
I came from a background of not knowing anything about materials, so it was really cool to be able to look at peeling paint or plaster and know what it’s made of and recognize the signs of age.
Cindy Olnick 00:22
Welcome to Save As: NextGen Heritage Conservation, an award-winning podcast that glimpses the future of heritage conservation through the work of graduate students at the University of Southern California. I’m Cindy Olnick.
Trudi Sandmeier 00:35
And I’m Trudi Sandmeier.
So, Cindy…
Cindy Olnick
Yes, Trudi?
Trudi Sandmeier
It’s spring. And there’s lots happening, including massive construction next to the site where we’re recording, so please pardon the hammers and banging in the background. But we are excited, it’s the end of the semester, things are wrapping up for this academic year. And this is an opportunity for us to go out in the field and have some conversations with some of our students doing work in interesting sites around the area. And this episode is focused on that. So you got to go chat with Peyton Hall in his class. Tell us a little bit about that.
Cindy Olnick 01:25
Yes, our loyal listeners will know that at the end of each season, we pop in on the case study site for Payton Hall’s Materials Conservation class. So this is super cool. So the students learn everything there is to know about all sorts of building materials in 16 weeks, and then they go to an actual space. And we’re in Los Angeles where you know, the hotbed of modernism and residential architecture in particular. And so we have, we have quite quite the pool of amazing places to inspect.
Trudi Sandmeier 02:01
This year was super cool, because you got to go see a site by one of your very favorite architects.
Cindy Olnick 02:10
Yeah, it’s Rudolf Schindler, such a badass, he’s my favorite architect. I was very excited. Yeah, I got to go out and visit the Buck House, which is, it was completed in 1935. And it is a little bit unusual for a Schindler house. And it’s, it’s a bit of a puzzle, I gotta say.
Trudi Sandmeier 02:29
The title of this episode is “Mysteries of Modernism.” So what kinds of mysteries did you uncover?
Cindy Olnick 02:36
Well, you’re gonna have to listen to find out. But I will say, it’s, it’s pretty interesting. And the owner of the house, Jocelyn Gibbs, is an architectural historian. So she’s done her fair share of investigating along with the students. So it’s a great example of how houses change over time, even ones by legendary architects. And so the students, instead of really looking at condition, they looked at more about how it’s changed over time. I got to talk to a couple of the students, Sam Malnati and Leslie Dinkin, about what they found and what they think, and also got to, of course, check in with Peyton, and talk with the owner, Jocelyn. So I just want to thank everybody for their time and their insight. And I also want to thank Danielle Armstrong, who is a marvelous, amazing photographer, who has volunteered a couple times to come out on site. And boy, is she good. She shot some really good photos. So thank you, Danielle.
Trudi Sandmeier 03:36
All right. Well, it’s time to actually hear the episode. So take it away.
Cindy Olnick 03:44
All right, and we are here with Peyton Hall. Peyton, for the few people who haven’t already heard you on this fine podcast, please introduce yourself.
Peyton Hall 03:54
I’m Peyton Hall. I am the instructor of the Materials Conservation class in the Heritage Program at USC at the School of Architecture.
Cindy Olnick 04:06
And so much more. But this is only a half hour show, so we can’t get to all of your many accomplishments. So we have had the good fortune of covering this class a couple of times. But for those who haven’t heard those episodes, can you just describe very briefly what this class is about?
Peyton Hall 04:24
This class examines all materials and systems in buildings in a heritage context in 16 weeks. We have a wonderful variety of students who are architecture students, planning students, landscape, building science, museum studies. So that is a particular quality, that they’re not all architecture majors, but they’re all people are interested in buildings and heritage. And so they come at this from different places, and we either open their minds or try to add something to their minds about heritage in all of those contexts.
Cindy Olnick 05:06
Tell me why you chose this house.
Peyton Hall 05:09
This year’s case study is the Buck House, designed by Rudolf Schindler—reason enough. In all these years of teaching this particular course, we as a class in the school had not visited a Rudolf Schindler house.
Cindy Olnick 05:31
We’re very lucky to be with the owner of the house.
Jocelyn Gibbs 05:35
I’m Jocelyn Gibbs. I’m trained as an architectural historian, and my husband and I have been in the house since 1995.
Cindy Olnick 05:46
How would you as an architectural historian do like a description of this house in a nutshell?
Jocelyn Gibbs 05:54
It’s one of Rudolf Schindler’s 1930s houses, plaster skin houses, similar to say the Oliver House, 1934, this house was completed in 1935. It’s perhaps unusual for Schindler, because it’s on a flat lot. A lot of his houses were built on cheaper lots which are hillside lots. It’s a rather large house for Schindler as well. And he did design a number of duplexes; it is a duplex. There’s an apartment over the garage. So this is maybe 2,100 square feet and the apartment’s 750 square feet. It was meant to be like a mother-in-law unit, something like that.
Peyton Hall 06:41
One of our students, when they saw a building that maybe on a first pass looks a little bit white boxish, asked if this was in the International Style. And Jocelyn in her forever, very polite way said, Well, yes, but Schindler would be spinning in his grave.
Cindy Olnick 07:00
Absolutely. And I can see it, I can see it from the outside, it is very boxy. It’s very white, multiple roof lines, giving it this floating quality and it’s large, very horizontal. So the floor is covered with a dark linoleum, and the walls are white, but there’s angles everywhere, right angles, windows, picture windows, light up in the soffits, you know, overhang.
Peyton Hall 07:35
Mr. Buck hired Mr. Schindler to design a house for him. Mr. Buck had already laid out a house to his preference. And Rudolf Schindler redesigned that floor plan layout to meet the program. But, and this is what moves me, is not just the aesthetics of the house, but the fact that Schindler’s house worked so well, on the site, on a major street, on a corner, using outdoor spaces, using sunlight. This is actually a really good house. It’s not just a Schindler house. I don’t know as much as I would about Mr. Buck. But I understand that he was sort of more, if I can paint him into a corner, more interested in Deco than Schindler. So they’re, they’re actually some things that he finished in the house that are Decoish. But it’s still mostly Schindler, and very much. That’s I think that’s part of the interesting story is that our architecture is seldom really unitary, and pure. But there are other little bits and pieces that can tell part of the story of the owner and the construction.
Jocelyn Gibbs 08:56
One of the things that’s unusual about this house is that, from my research anyway, it seems as though the client had a great deal of influence on the inside, much to Schindler’s chagrin. So during his lifetime, he did not want the interiors published. So that made research very difficult, because there weren’t any published images of the inside. There are a lot of mysteries in this house, you know, there have been changes, and it’s hard to know where to begin. I know what some of the changes have been and what we ought to do. Some changes, I don’t know if we should change them back or not, because some changes have made the house much more livable.
Cindy Olnick 09:45
And they’re part of the story. Yeah. All right. And you have a rendering of the house, right, from its early days? A copy. so Schindler was known for for making changes on site, right, deviating from the actual plans occasionally. So what did you, What do you see there on the rendering?
Jocelyn Gibbs 10:08
Well, on the rendering, it shows a door to the exterior, which doesn’t exist now.
Cindy Olnick 10:12
Yeah. So the kitchen, has the big kitchen been completely redone? Yeah. Yeah, not a surprise. And what other changes?
Jocelyn Gibbs 10:19
A hallway was, was inserted at the back of the house so that there’s direct access to the back courtyard, which is really nice for us. In order to do that, they made changes, they had to put in the hallway, they changed the bathroom, they changed the third bedroom. So there are quite a number of floor-plan changes in the back of the house.
Cindy Olnick 10:45
All right, what are some of the mysteries?
Jocelyn Gibbs 10:48
Paint color. And the mystery is really, for me, what would Schindler have done? What would Schindler have wanted to do? Not so much, what did the client do? I believe, I’m not positive, but I believe that the exterior, and the interiors, were always painted white, or a light, a very light color. But Schindler would not have used white. So the mystery to me is what would Schindler have wanted.
Cindy Olnick 11:17
Now, did you actually discover some original paint colors or older paint colors?
Jocelyn Gibbs 11:22
We do see older paint colors. I don’t know how original they are. We recently did a little bit of work in the apartment upstairs. And behind the refrigerator, there was a very interesting, yellowish greenish—Schindler colors were always what someone called “ish” colors. And it looked like a Schindler color. So perhaps he had his way more in in the apartment than he did down in the house. I don’t know if that’s original, but it looks like it’s pretty well down to the bone. In the house here, I’ve chipped away and found a deep rose color, and dark green. Former tenants who lived here also said that the house had been painted very bright colors, sunshine, yellow, rust. So it has been there for a long time, there have been a number of tenants.
Cindy Olnick 12:29
So, Peyton, what do you hope students will get out of this class?
Peyton Hall 12:36
The primary objective of doing a case study is learning how to plan a survey and an assessment. And in the process, take a very close look at a building and see what you can learn from it in the field, to supplement what you’ve learned in the classroom. Our particular case here is not what we usually do, which is to look at more the condition. Say we have we have a leaky roof, or rotten wood, or salt in our bricks. But more about, this is a house that’s been changed. Subtly. It’s very much still a Schindler house. So the students are sorting out from original drawings, early photos, narrative, what is original and what isn’t. So their work, which is deconstructing a house into very granular little bits, is to put down on paper, for the sake of its own knowledge, but also maybe for future owners, if you were to restore this house to Schindler’s original design, what would you do? What about that wall, that window, this doorknob, that toilet fixture? We want it all down on paper. The supposition is not that there, there needs to be a restoration, but rather, how do you figure that out? Based on documentation, including sight observation, and that information itself teaches you something about this house and its history. And if someone should want to do it, we’d like to think that our class has given them great tools to do it with.
Cindy Olnick 14:31
So I’m here with heritage conservation student Sam. Sam, please introduce yourself for the Save As audience.
Sam Malnati 14:37
Hi, I’m Sam Malnati. I’m a dual degree master’s student in urban planning and heritage conservation.
Cindy Olnick 14:44
Great, great, so why why the two degrees? Are you an overachiever? Like all the rest of us?
Sam Malnati 14:50
It seemed like the two degrees went perfectly together. That planning and conservation go hand in hand.
Cindy Olnick 14:56
I love that. How did you come to heritage conservation and urban planning?
Sam Malnati 15:01
So I came from Boston, I studied architecture in undergrad, and I focused on rehabilitating old buildings and digitally reconstructing destroyed structures. And then I came to USC to do heritage conservation. And it’s been really fun getting to apply my skills to LA buildings and buildings that still exist, which is nice.
Cindy Olnick 15:25
Let’s talk about what you’re doing here. What’s your assignment?
Sam Malnati 15:28
So my assignment is to study the windows, and the Buck House is full of windows.
Cindy Olnick 15:34
We’re standing in the living room, which is pretty spectacular. And there are windows everywhere. Can you talk a little bit about what what you’re seeing?
Sam Malnati 15:42
Yeah, so one of the walls is a complete window facade. And then the other two, three walls have windows placed in strategic locations to kind of mimic other architectural elements. I really like how some of the small cutouts mimic this weird little cutout.
Cindy Olnick 16:04
We’ll call it a niche or a nook. But yeah, so there’s a like a ribbon of clerestory windows, those rectangular windows going across the top of the room. So you still get the light in, but the neighbors can’t see you. And then there are other like little picture windows, I guess, that frame specific elements. All right, and what have you, what have you found, what do you think of these windows?
Sam Malnati 16:29
There’s like an interesting window feature. A lot of the windows are on this hanging mechanism so that they can slide. And Jocelyn was telling me that there’s another Schindler house around the same age that has the same sliding feature.
Cindy Olnick 16:42
Oh my gosh, oh, my gosh. So it is a hanging window. But I mean, it’s like six feet tall. Three feet, two feet [wide], whatever, you know better than me because you’ve measured everything. But it’s a big, it’s a big window and it’s hanging. Wow, that’s crazy.
Sam Malnati 17:01
Jocelyn was saying that, you know, in the summer, you can move the whole panel and then have like an indoor-outdoor type of space, which is good for parties or ventilation. It seems like most of the windows are original to the first iteration. There are a few in the kitchen that might have been changed. And then a few skylights that seem new. There’s one over the main bathroom, and one over the guest bathroom that are really beautiful skylights, but seem like they weren’t in the original design, so [one] might have to take those out.
Cindy Olnick 17:39
Ah, well, let’s go look. I’ve been standing in this beautiful room. I haven’t even seen the rest of the house. Okay. All right. So we’re in the bathroom. And you know, it’s a bathroom, but it’s got this amazing walk-in shower that’s got a skylight on it. And you’re saying that was not here originally?
Sam Malnati 17:58
Yeah, I think this is one of the newest windows that Jocelyn was telling me about. It’s a really beautiful shower. But it’s not in the original plan.
Cindy Olnick 18:07
You can see the age on these windows in the bathroom. And so what are they, are they aluminum?
Sam Malnati 18:14
Most of the windows are steel, I believe.
Cindy Olnick 18:17
Okay. But they’ve been painted. And you can see the paint sort of expressing itself. And then the bottom half of the windows is frosted.
Sam Malnati 18:25
Yes. Seems like a good bathroom decision.
Cindy Olnick 18:28
I agree. I agree. No curtains. So what have you learned in this class? What do you know now that you didn’t know then?
Sam Malnati 18:37
We learned about a lot about material properties. And I came from a background of not knowing anything about materials. So it was really cool to be able to look at, like peeling paint or plaster and know what it’s made of and, you know, recognize the signs of age.
Cindy Olnick 18:54
Yes. And they’re not always bad. Speaking as someone of a certain age. All right. Well, Sam, thank you so much for talking with us. And good luck with the project.
Sam Malnati 19:06
Yeah. Thank you for having me.
Cindy Olnick 19:13
All right, and we are here with another heritage conservation student. Leslie, please introduce yourself briefly for our Save As listeners.
Leslie Dinkin 19:20
Hi, everyone. I’m Leslie Dinkin. I am a dual master’s student at University of Southern California in landscape architecture and heritage conservation. I grew up in Los Angeles and then I was away for a long time in Colorado and Wyoming and then came back to go to grad school.
Cindy Olnick 19:36
Terrific. What drew you to landscape architecture and heritage conservation?
Leslie Dinkin 19:41
So I worked in outdoor education for a long time, in Leadville, Colorado and Jackson Hole, and loved it. It was the best like to take students out in the mountains. Sometimes we’d go for three weeks at a time and you could just use what you carried on your backs, and we would have these like amazing conversations about wilderness and William Cronon and stewardship and like, what it meant to like live on the land. But like that connection to nature was kind of what I was most excited about. And I felt like the more I was in the most inaccessible places, the more I was drawn back to the city, to be able to create places that like more people would have access to. I applied to landscape architecture, and then went to USC, and then a year in, when I was asked to design places, I had a really hard time adding anything new if I didn’t know everything that had been there before. And then I started talking to Trudi, and then they started the dual degree program. So I’m one of two students who are part of the first class.
Cindy Olnick 20:39
Right, the founding. Yes, I remember. All right, so tell us what your assignment is for this spectacular house.
Leslie Dinkin 20:48
My job is to look at all the grounds around the house and all the landscaping and figure out how to, you know, recreate the feel that Schindler intended. So I think I’m in a different boat in that it’s not just windows, not just doors, but I’m looking at like hardscaping, soft scaping, the planting palette, and then also just like the general feel of a space. And so I’ve been looking at a lot of old photographs, as well as plans, to find any clues of what it might have looked like and then figure out how to kind of make it feel that way again, but in a way that’s more drought tolerant and using more California natives than might have been then, but to recreate the feeling, but not necessarily exactly what it was.
Cindy Olnick 21:30
Right. Well, I tell you what, it’s not raining right now, why don’t we go out on the porch and take a little look-see? Well, it is still raining. But fortunately, Schindler was kind enough to give us a little overhang.
Leslie Dinkin 21:45
So this is one of four outdoor spaces. There’s the entrance, the main patio, the yard, and the back patio. So right now we’re in the main patio. And I’m looking at a bunch of potted plants. There’s like some pittosporum, which is a Japanese non-native hedge-like plant, there’s some blue gamma grass. And when speaking to Jocelyn, she told me that she put in all of those stones back there to create a little patio space that wasn’t originally there. There’s a lot of bamboo, which grows really quickly, but it’s also non-native. And so a lot has been done to this yard, I think a back entrance was also added. So the yard looks really different than it used to. The hedge quality still exists. But a lot of the hedges are in different places. Like the original photos show that there was a private patio back there that Jocelyn opened up because she said it was too small to actually be useful. But I think if you cut that hedge back a little bit, you can kind of recreate that little private patio space. And then the area where her picnic table is was all hedging before. And so I told Peyton, I was like, I think it’s nice to have a barbecue and a picnic table. And Peyton said, we’re not thinking about use, but like really restoring it to what it was. I think it’s because maybe Schindler was hoping for like more of an enclosed space, potentially like a really private patio. So that space would just be all plants that would block the street a little bit more than it is right now.
Cindy Olnick 23:10
Because even in the ’30s when this was built, you know, this is close to the Miracle Mile. Now the County Museum of Art. And the Miracle Mile was developing. That’s exactly when it was happening. So there was a lot of commercial stuff popping up. So it didn’t look like it was in the middle of nowhere.
Leslie Dinkin 23:25
Right. Yeah. So I mean, it makes sense then, I think, maybe, his emphasis on the hedges. So we could bring the, I proposed bringing some of them back and maybe moving the sort of living area more to this area here. Then restoring sort of the hedge forest that was originally there, and then removing the gravel roof, turning it into like a grassy lawn with Kurapia. What’s Kurapia? It’s a grass that grows with a lot less water than typical Bermuda grass.
Cindy Olnick 23:56
What do you mean by hedge quality?
Leslie Dinkin 23:59
Plants that kind-of grow in lines and tall? You know, they’re maintained to kind of a boxy shape.
Cindy Olnick 24:08
Yeah, I mean, there is a there is a structure to these plants, they are in rows.
Leslie Dinkin 24:14
They almost act like walls.
Cindy Olnick 24:16
Yeah, yeah, I was gonna say that. No, I’m kidding.
Leslie Dinkin 24:20
More like outdoor rooms. Yes.
Cindy Olnick 24:22
Yes. Okay. So while while we have you here, let’s take this opportunity to clarify what landscape architecture really is. It’s not about landscaping, per se?
Leslie Dinkin 24:34
Correct. I think it’s a lot of different things. And you can take it in a lot of different directions. I am really interested in much larger industrial spaces and figuring out how, you know, we can use them on a human scale so that they can serve multiple purposes, not just like one purpose, like flooding, you know, I’m really interested in where like the social, ecological, and kind-of industrial meet. But there are a lot of landscape architects that will work on lawns like this, and design, you know, really beautiful residential projects. So it’s kind of what you want to do with it. All the classes are super multi-disciplinary. And so you kind of get a bit of a taste of everything. And then you can kind of pick your focus.
Cindy Olnick 25:17
And so what are you learning? You know, how’s this class? What’s the experience like? What do you know now that you didn’t know then?
Leslie Dinkin 25:22
This class is really interesting, because it’s so hyper-focused on materials. And I’m in this other class, in the same classroom, like the night before, that’s global perspectives on heritage conservation. So it’s so interesting to go from like this huge wide lens to like a really focused lens and like, really think about a single site, and so I really appreciate the care that Peyton kind of provides in his class, like how much attention he gives to a single brick. Because in other classes, like we kind-of bypass that, because there’s so much to do. And so I appreciate the focused attention that we’re provided in this class.
Cindy Olnick 25:56
Thank you very much for speaking with us, Leslie.
Leslie Dinkin 25:59
Yeah, thank you so much. I’m thrilled to chat about this whenever.
Cindy Olnick 26:11
Jocelyn, have you lived in other architectural homes?
Jocelyn Gibbs 26:15
No. You know, when I was a graduate student in architectural history, I asked one of the TAs, she was getting her PhD, you know, what does an architectural historian do? Because I wasn’t sure I wanted to teach. She said, You travel to wonderful places, and you live in significant buildings.
Cindy Olnick 26:33
Live in significant buildings! Like that’s part of the job description. Hmm. Well, maybe I’ve got some thinking to do. I think architecture should be merit based. No matter how much money you have, if it’s for you,
Jocelyn Gibbs
You should be able to live there—
Cindy Olnick
At least for a little while, right? Because it changes you, right?
Jocelyn Gibbs 26:51
It does. It really does.
Cindy Olnick
Yeah? How?
Jocelyn Gibbs
Well, I don’t think I could live in a house that didn’t have this amount of light in it. I think it would depress me to live in a more typical, say, East Coast house, although, you know, I love older buildings. But the light is such a spirit lifter.
Cindy Olnick 27:14
It’s unbelievable. And combine that with Schindler’s genius in shaping space.
Jocelyn Gibbs 27:20
He called himself a space architect.
Cindy Olnick 27:23
And yeah, he could have been from space. No judgment. I would admire that. But also, Yeah, he really shaped it. And the thing about that is you don’t really know what he’s talking about until you’re in the space, which is why we need to keep these places standing. Yes. What do you hope to get out of this project? Or or you know, what, what do you find fun about it? Or what do you think about it?
Jocelyn Gibbs 27:47
Well, for one thing, the students are charming. It’s been lovely having them here. And it’s been lovely having Peyton here. Even though I’m an architectural historian, I think because I live in the house and the house is very personal to me, it’s hard for me to be objective in a way about the house. And to watch the students kind of crawl all over it and examine their particular element of the house has been very interesting and enlightening, and in a way has made me see the house differently through their questions and the way they’ve just, the way they’ve examined it.
Cindy Olnick 28:25
So Jocelyn, you are an amazing steward, you and your husband, thank you very much for taking such great care of this house and for talking with us here on Save As.
Jocelyn Gibbs
My pleasure.
Cindy Olnick
Peyton, so as our listeners will know, this program focuses largely on cultural significance, heritage conservation as a tool for social justice and telling underrepresented stories and erased histories. Where does materials conservation fit into this philosophy of heritage conservation?
Peyton Hall 28:59
That’s a really deep question.
Cindy Olnick 29:04
I got plenty.
Peyton Hall 29:09
So in order to treat buildings that are significant, we need to understand the materials that are in them. But the treatment plan is very dependent on the nature of the resource. So the building, we frankly care a lot more about some bricks than other bricks. And we think that it’s meaningful that Mr. Buck worked with Rudolf Schindler to build this house. And that Schindler was hands on with this plaster, and this wood, and these windows, and these doors. We’re not even sure that it was built exactly as it was drawn. And that would be fine. But that goes to the fact that this is the real McCoy.
Cindy Olnick 29:54
Right, right, right. So regardless of why you’re saving it, you still have to know how to keep it standing.
