When Modern Becomes Retro
What Do You Think You're Looking At? #139
Take a look at this little commercial building in LA:
Here’s the side view, pre-pandemic without the outdoor seating:
If you think this is ’50s or ’60s, as I might have guessed, you’d be wrong. It’s quite a bit older: designed in 1936, completed by 1946!
The rear reveals two stories and some window AC units. I wonder if there are or were some apartments back there:
There’s not a whole lot about this building online, which is or was called Modern Creators. I saw it on Twitter, and then found an illustrated blog post. The blog post includes a sketch that is apparently not faithful to the final building, since the author doesn’t think the building has been truncated or severely modified, yet it doesn’t quite match up to the original vision:
What’s notable is mostly just that the building is still standing in pretty much recognizable condition. I read this really interesting thesis paper about strip malls and historic preservation awhile ago, and the author noted that one reason strip malls are neglected in preservation is because they’re rarely fully intact. The buildings themselves are just cheap shells—it’s generally the styling that makes them historic, and most of the time, if the strip is old enough, the style will have been altered.
An LA Times story from 1993 noted the building:
As too often happens, the history of the Modern Creators store has not been a happy one. Schindler finished the development in stages between 1937 and 1946, creating a row of four connected buildings whose lintels, storefronts and eaves interlocked into a commercial block of stunning beauty and complexity.
Since then, much of the glass has been filled in, fake brick has replaced stucco in places, and new coats of paint have trivialized Schindler’s genius with geometry into a play of pinkish and bluish hues. An office building just across Palm puts the structure in shadow with its massive, dumb form, and today the building is as much a relic as it is a shining example of the marriage between art and commerce.
The office building there now—which may not be the one there in 1993, is actually pretty cool!
But at least those 30 years—yes, that’s how long ago 1993 is—haven’t been too harsh to this little bit of early modern whimsy.
Related Reading:
What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #28
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