American Modern: USC Style and Beyond Home Tour
This past spring, along with the garden tour, I also went on the Pasadena Heritage architecture tour called American Modern: USC Style and Beyond.The docent led tour was a drive, shuttle and walk activity and one could visit the privately-owned houses in any order.
Over a 35 year period, leading into the 1960's, USC offered the region's only professional degree in architecture. The graduates of this program heavily influenced their local modernist style.
The Cox House, 1959. Architect: John Galbraith
Key features of this style includes integration with the landscape and integrating the indoors and outdoors. This house illustrates that well, with its open floor plan, windows everywhere, natural materials and complementary landscaping.
The owners of this home heavily participated in it's restoration, closely collaborating with the architect and certain aspects of the house feels very custom.
The house appeared in various movies and TV shows over the years. One of them played on the TV during the tour.
The kitchen was absolutely stunning with a large, oval stone quartz counter in the center, running from end to end, and modern appliances. The back yard felt like another outdoor living room, complete with a kidney shaped pool.
Unfortunately we were only allowed to take photos from the outside curb.
The DeSteiguer House, 1951. Architects: Harwell Hamilton Harris, 1936 & Leland Evison, 1951
This house showed the influences of two well known architects. The first one's aesthetic involved interpreting influences from the Craftsman style, Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Neutra. The home displays many beautiful wood features and some add-on balconies toward the back.
The house was actually moved in 1951 to serve as a home and office for the 2nd architect. The large office area contains incredibly well organized samples of every material imaginable, in transparent drawers.
The bamboo covered, organic looking fences look great from all angles.
The Thomson House, 1957. Architects: Conrad Buff, Calvin Straub and Donald Hensman
These architects, all graduates and instructors at USC School of Architecture, led the post World War II post and beam architecture in the region, with their thriving residential practice.
The fairly small house feels very large and spacious because of it's tall scale and clever use of space. Translucent room divider screens and the 2-story glass windows, seemingly blending in with the mountain and oak tree view. The home features balconies and decks on every side and new native California style landscaping.
The Park Planned Homes, 1947-1948. Architect: Gregory Ain
Gregory Ain is known for bringing modernist aesthetics to tract housing with a focus on affordable housing in multi-unit housing projects. This tract consists of 28 houses in AltaDena.
One of the thoughtful details is the rain gutters covered with metal panels, for a more streamlined look. The modern landscaping complements the house. The interior of this particular home has been renovated in a more current look than that of its original timeframe.
The Zook House, 1951. Architect: Harold Zook
The architect of this home, Harold Zook, lived with his family in this residence, on a private road in Pasadena called Mesita Road.
The colorful landscaping immediately catches they eye when pulling up to this home. Upon entering I found that the interior matches this color scheme completely.
Harold Zook's style highlights are clean spatial design and flow through the house, simple roof lines, multi-purpose rooms, built in desks and storage, pinpoint interior lighting, indoor planting areas and large amounts of glass. The house contained several large windows and glass sliding doors.
By this time some fairly heavy rain set in, and the group waited for the previous group to move through the house before entering.
We walked around to the side of the house to enter, which gave us a breathtaking view of the surrounding mountains as well as a very large pool area and garden. I felt sad only being able to photograph from the curb, because the sliding doors and floor to ceiling glass windows provided beautiful light throughout the house.
Somehow even the copious amounts of bright green and orange in every room did not stand out as much as one would think. I gasped after finding an all-orange office and all-orange master bathroom with an orange sunken tub.
The original stone planter near the front door got converted to an aquarium. The owner explained that they were not able to keep plants alive in that particular spot.
The tour went throughout the house, ending in the back yard and out this also well-coordinated and fun gate.
0 Responses to “American Modern: USC Style and Beyond Home Tour”: