It is what it isn't
Connecting the dots at ‘Drawings and Objects by Architects’
By Joanna Beresford 09/24/2009
The Edward Cella Art + Architecture gallery, located on Wilshire Boulevard across from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, presents an exhibit, “Drawings and Objects by Architects,” that will run through Oct. 10. The exhibit features drawings by some of the 20th century’s most notable architects: Richard Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright, Frank Gehry and Lebbius Woods. The exhibit, like the gallery itself, is designed to explore the intersection of art and architecture, the confluence of form and vision. And by definition, the exhibit highlights a relationship among dimensions: paper, structure, time.architecture in New Design ideals.”
Author Ayn Rand was born in 1905 in St. Petersburg, Russia, but when she was born her name wasn’t Ayn Rand; it was Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum. I can’t spell out her name exactly, actually, because my computer doesn’t contain the Russian alphabet, but when you see the real version of Alisa/Ayn’s last name, in the original, it looks something like P3@6a.m. It seems like a strange sort of symbolism from a very distant land, and that’s what it is. But when she came here, to the United States (after being “purged” from her university for her “non-proletarian” views, and after her father’s business as a chemist and entrepreneur was disrupted by the Bolsheviks), she decided to change, or to simplify, or to synthesize everything. She decided never to go back to her home country, which had become part of the Soviet Union. She decided to live in Hollywood instead and become a screenwriter. And she changed her name — to Ayn Rand.
Rand wrote screenplays, but she’s most famous for her novels, and for her political philosophy. In “The Fountainhead,” which she published in 1943, Rand portrays a high-minded, uncompromising architect named Howard Roark as her hero. The story explores his nearly sacred idealism, and also his torrid love affair with the beautiful and tempestuous heroine, Dominique. Critics of the book, and especially of the relationship between the main characters, describe the lovers’ first intimate encounter as a virtual rape scene, to which Rand responded: “If it is rape, it is rape by engraved invitation.” Snap. Architecturally, Roark is a wanna-be modernist struggling for purity and rebirth among a moribund legion of tradition-worshippers, whom Rand refers to as “Second-handers.”
Ayn Rand figures in the Edward Cella exhibit because there’s been much speculation about the similarities between her character, Howard Roark, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Rand and her husband even commissioned Wright to design a home and studio for them in Connecticut, and his renderings for this never-to-be-completed project are part of the “Drawings and Objects” exhibit. Apparently Rand was keen to befriend Wright, and though he never really reciprocated her interest, theirs is another convergence that energizes the gallery’s collection.
Gallery owner Cella studied architectural history at UC Santa Barbara, mentored by the late David Gebhard, “who inspired me to appreciate the drawing architects use to express their ideas,” says Cella. “These drawings are not just beautiful, but are documents that record their ideas as to how the buildings might function, look and feel. They are a primary means of expressing the architect’s intentions.”
Cella has been assisting private and institutional collectors for years in their search for “primary documents to the development of modernism on the West Coast.” He opened his gallery in Santa Barbara in 2005 and relocated to LA in May. In addition to maintaining a deep architectural archive, Cella represents a select group of painters, photographers and sculptors. “A unifying theme of these individuals is an acute interest in finding visual expression of ideas through the material process of art making in the studio. This idea is perhaps a link between the architectural and art side of the gallery,” Cella explains.
Another project featured in the architectural exhibit is Richard Neutra’s Tremaine Residence in Montecito. Neutra also designed a home for Ayn Rand and her husband. The exhibition also includes color pencil drawings by the visionary architect Lebbeus Woods. “Entitled ‘Underground Berlin,’ the project was conceived of in 1988,” writes Cella, “a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and intended as a rhetorical proposal for unifying the politically divided city via a subterranean metropolis … ‘Underground Berlin’ represents the zenith of a type of architectural rendering that is investigatory and conceptually motivated.”
At a time when the phrase “It is what it is” is starting to drive me crazy, I appreciate this exhibit for proposing that — through unrealized renderings, half formed relationships, and architectural visions that perhaps outshine their manifestations — “It is what it isn’t.”
Contact Joanna Dehn Beresford at truewrite@yahoo.com
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Addendum to previous post: Richard Neutra did not design a home for Ayn Rand and her husband. From 1944 to 1951, they lived in the Neutra-designed (and now-demolished) von Sternberg House, built in 1935 for Josef von Sternberg in Chatsworth.
Joanna Beresford writes that “Apparently Rand was keen to befriend Wright, and though he never really reciprocated her interest.” If anything, the opposite is the case. Not only did Wright praise The Fountainhead in a 1943 letter (“Your thesis is the great one.”), he invited Rand and her husband for a weekend at Taliesin East in 1945, and in 1957, Wright wrote to Rand, wondering “why this long silence.” (see the chapter on Rand’s letters to Wright in Letters of Ayn Rand, Penguin, 1995). On the other hand, Rand reports, in biographical interviews, that she had become much disillusioned by Wright, not for his architecture—which she continued to love—but for his lack of intellectual and personal independence. For an analysis of the relationship of Wright to Howard Roark and, I think, a definitive refutation of the claim that Roark was based on Wright, see the chapter “Howard Roark and Frank Lloyd Wright” in Essays on Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (ed., Robert Mayhew, Lexington Books, 2007).