Content area
Full Text
Dating from 1947, Gregory Ain's Mar Vista housing was an innovative, quintessentially Californian synthesis of modular planning, prefabricated components and lush landscaping. In an elegant, contemporary interpretation that enhances the material and spatial qualities of the original, one house has been recently remodelled by the young practice of Daly Genik.
Gregory Ain is one of those Southern Californian architects about whom more should be said. In her 1984 study of The Second Generation Ain,Julius Ralph Davidson, Harwell Hamilton Harris and Raphael Soriano - Esther McCoy devotes some 60 pages to him and the illustrations show crisp, neat, Modernist houses which immediately recall Schindler and Neutra for whom he worked. It is this singularity of vision which makes Ain's Mar Vista housing all the more interesting. Originally planned as a subscribers' community for B. M. Edelman's Advance Development Company in 1947 (when Ain was 38), it incorporated a hundred houses on a 60 acre site close to Venice Boulevard between Culver City and Venice Beach. In the end only 52 were built: broad-fronted, flat-roofed houses of 1050sq ft (94.5 sq m), irregularly spaced and with rotated plans, to introduce variety and privacy. But the uniformity of the design and the regularity of the features (resulting from the modular, prefabricated nature of the construction and fitting-out), gives the neighbourhood an immediately discernible coherence and elegance. This is enhanced by the bold-leafed, sub-tropical landscaping of Garret Eckbo; fig trees line the kerb and provide a counterpoint to the hard geometries of the buildings and palms, banana trees, flax and climbing philodendrons, hide them in their shade. It...