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Pacific Palisades and its surrounding neighbourhoods, which have burned so ferociously over the past three weeks, happen to be the location of some beautiful and magnificent 20th-century architecture. Or were, as the fire has taken a terrible toll.
Houses by the émigré Austrian modernist Richard Neutra have gone, as have most of the Park Planned Homes of 1948, an idealistic experiment in affordable modern living by the architect Gregory Ain. Stone chimney stacks are all that remain of the scaled-up cabin that was Will Rogers’ ranch house. His 30-horse stables, in their centre a rotonda like an equine chapter house, are ashes.
These were works of grace and skill, sometimes of fantasy and excess, born of prosperity, sunlight and optimism, the dream homes of actors, singers, scriptwriters and seekers after a good life, as well as churches and shopping arcades. They were made with craft and imagination, promiscuously embracing styles running from Spanish colonial to brutalist, and with relish for the sheens and weights of hardwoods and ceramics and cast iron. They exploited the balmy climate to create easy flows from inside to outside through sliding glass walls and loggias, their balconies and decks projecting over cliffs and ravines in the crumpled terrain. Their destruction is a devastating, irrecoverable loss.
Concrete poetry
Most things they say about Canada (which I visited last month) are true. People there are astonishingly welcoming and friendly. It is a successful multiracial society. It looks dazzling in the snow and offers a quite wonderful outdoors life. It is largely clean and well ordered. Things are mostly done properly – because, one imagines, the cold could kill you if they’re not.
The worst thing most people say about it is that it’s slightly dull, which, while not really accurate, is in any case an increasingly attractive feature in a world too interesting by half.
I was less prepared for the fact that Montréal is a wonderland of reinforced concrete. Its metro stations layer and curve the material into grand, shadowy compositions reminiscent of the visionary Italian architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Its projects of state-sponsored futurism – the Habitat housing complex built for Expo 67, the white and elephantine stadium for the 1976 Olympics – are misguided and splendid in equal measure. The textured concrete of the Hotel Bonaventure, bashed with hammers into abstracted tree bark, is unparalleled.
Snap out of it, people
Accused as I sometimes am of not always being a ray of sunshine, I try to look at the upsides of progress. But, after a visit to the last days of the stupendous Van Gogh exhibition at the National Gallery in London, I can only marvel at the inanity and insanity of the current habit of taking pictures of pictures.
In the crowded galleries, victims of this cult interrupted your view of paintings of sunflowers with phone screens with views of paintings of sunflowers. The internet is awash with photos of these works, of much better quality than you can get with a handheld snap, so what actually is the point?
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It would be good to think that the pleasure of going to an exhibition like this is to witness the things that can’t be experienced on a screen – the presence of the artist in brushstrokes and thicknesses of paint, the intimacy or scale of a canvas. Or just to look, without filters, at marvels. But evidently not. Reality, for screen addicts, is not real unless it is reframed and digitised.
