Content area
Full Text
Afew months ago, Kirk Nozaki, a clothing designer, decided to do something radically out of character: He knocked on 31 doors and invited total strangers to a party at his home in Silver Lake. When he stepped up to the first house, Nozaki worried about how he would be received. "Would it be, 'Who's this dude?' " he wondered, "or 'Come on in.' "
One by one, a widow in Sierra Madre, a mother in Holmby Hills, a Superior Court judge in San Marino and a couple of dozen others agreed to come to dinner last May. People wearing name tags and eating eggplant lasagna on Nozaki's deck broke the ice not by asking the usual questions, like what the others did for a living, but asking what their houses looked like. Although they didn't know each other, at least one thing united them: Their residences were designed by an unheralded Modernist architect, Harwell Harris.
Most of the owners at the party, Nozaki found, were like himself. They knew little, if anything, about Harris when they signed their escrow papers, or even that he had designed their homes. They bought the structures simply because they liked them.
"The most famous architects are not necessarily the best," said Ted Wells, an architect and member of the Southern California Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians, who attended the party. "Harris could be considered the grandfather of California Modernism. He took a look at the climate, terrain and the mythical connection we have with nature and created a California lifestyle architecture decades before what others were promoting in the '60s and '70s."
Harris, who designed houses in Southern California in the 1930s through 1950s, merged elements of Greene & Greene's Arts and Crafts style such as wood, bold roof overhangs and Japanese influences with Modernism's lean lines and liberal use of glass. His small houses showcase walls of windows and see-through doors in every room. One of his homes, a modest 1,350-square-footer built in 1934 in Altadena, has 21 exterior doors.
But Harris' softer approach to Modernism made him less interesting to the architectural press, said Wells. "Everyone's looking for the next new thing to write about, and Harris' work looked like a reinterpretation of the...