ArtForum Revenue and Competitors

Hollyhock House, a temple-like home on top of Los Angeles’s Olive Hill, marks not only a sharp divergence from the architect’s previous Prairie School period but the starting point of all that came after it. Wright’s first foray onto the sun-soaked LA landscape and the radical leanings of the client, Aline Barnsdall—oil heiress, anarchist sympathizer, single mother by choice—synthesized into an experimental architectural program. Wherever possible glass doors, rooftop terraces, and outdoor counterparts to indoor spaces join the building to the open air of the site itself, introducing Japanese concepts of uniting interior and exterior, which were to become a future hallmark of airy California modernism. Early inklings of Mayan Revival show in references to Pre-Columbian architecture, including the ornamented clay tile façade; canted walls and flat mansard roofs; and forebodingly tomb-like entrance. Hollyhock house curator Jeffrey Herr describes the multilevel floorplan as a series of “deviations from normal domestic needs” that implicitly made way for the California Ranch-Style house.