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Thomas Hines, a professor of history and architecture at UCLA, is the author of Irving Gill and the Architecture of Reform (2000).
Photograph: Daly, Genik literally raised the roof, replacing the earlier house's pitched one with a new, flat top that appears to hover above a glassy clerestory. Cabinetry, designed by the architects, echoes that floating quality within a luminous Modernist interior.
PHOTOGRAPHY: Copyright JOSHUA WHITE (EXCEPT AS NOTED)
Illustration: Floor Plan:
1. Living
2. Study
3. Dining
4. Kitchen
5. New garage
The Ocean Park district of Santa Monica, California, is a small but historically rich neighborhood--one resonant with images from the long, still-vital tradition of Southern California Modernism. Within a few blocks of each other are Irving Gill's pioneering 1919 Horatio West Court and the home of the late critic Esther McCoy, the midcentury doyenne of Los Angeles architectural culture. (Here, she engaged Rudolph Schindler for modest remodeling.) Nearby is the studio where Richard Diebenkorn produced his luminous Ocean Park paintings--a series of abstractions evoking the local coastal landscape.
In this stimulating but demanding context, Kevin Daly, AIA, of Daly, Genik Architects, transformed and enlarged an existing early-20th-century bungalow, creating a house that respects its Modernist context and geographical setting--without any sense of mimetic replication. Genealogically, Daly, Genik's Beverley House recalls the Case Study Program, which sponsored nearby houses by Richard Neutra, Eero Saarinen, J.R. Davidson,...