Pacific Standard Time is a sprawling cultural initiative with 68 major museum shows and 125 gallery exhibitions including California Design 1930-1965: 'Living in a Modern Way' at LACMA, which presents a comprehensive collection of objects, artifacts, and ephemera in a variety of scales, materials and forms. The only thing that seems to be missing is a story that contextualizes the objects, so I thought I would go ahead and provide one.
Let's start with the Eames house, given that a full size mock up of the interior is the exhibit's centerpiece. This house is also known as case study house No. 8. The best way to understand The Case Study House Program, is to read John Entenza's manifesto published in Art and Architecture Magazine in January of 1945. He joins the conversation that recognizes the need to build housing for returning soldiers from WWII by commissioning actual houses to be built and studied. The program suggests turning wartime manufacturing capability into peacetime components for low cost, efficient and smart housing. The Case Study Program is an experiment in both building and living. As LA's population grew by almost 1 million residents from 1940-1960 this was a prescient conversation to initiate.
Meanwhile, on the East Coast, on the South shore of Long Island, in a place called Levittown another experiment in residential living proposed a different model of postwar housing. Levittown applied the knowledge of military logistics and wartime barracks building to residential construction.
This model was supported by government policy that funded a nationwide infrastructure that supported automobile development away from urban cores and deductible mortgage interest which encouraged home ownership. The developers also tapped into racial fears by barring colored residents from ownership. Levittown, which becomes synonymous with the word suburbs, wins.
The show doesn't talk about this, why?
Now of course, I am not suggesting that the exhibit fetishizes objects without any curatorial discussion about their underlying ideas so as not to offend Eli Broad, LACMA's largest donor. But let's not prevent what I am not suggesting from letting us enjoy the delicious irony of the situation; That Eli Broad, in addition to being LA's largest art benefactor, is also the founder of KB homes, the country's largest suburban homebuilder. KB homes made a fortune by building the suburbs that displaced what this exhibit is focused on and doesn't address in their curatorial conversation.
Since California, in addition to being home to the entertainment industry, is also home to the aerospace industry, an obvious place to start a conversation about an exhibit founded ideologically as a way to repurpose military factories for peacetime use is to discuss the Military Industrial Complex.
To really see what I am talking about, let's go for a drive. Take the 405 to the Mulholland Drive exit. Head north on Mulholland until it ends and becomes a dirt road. Follow it for 1.2 miles, park and walk a couple of hundred of feet. There, on top of the Santa Monica mountains, just north of Bel Air, you will see a decommissioned Nike-Ajax surface-to-air missile site. This is one of 16 missile sites established in 1954 that used to ring the city to protect it from incoming Russian bombers. In 1958 the missiles were updated to carry nuclear warheads.
Of course in retrospect it seems insane to have nuclear tipped missiles above Malibu and next to Bel Air. But was it ever sane? Even during the Cold War when people thought the Russians might bomb LA? How could exploding nuclear missiles above the city of Los Angeles ever be seen as a way to protect Los Angeles?
President Eisenhower's farewell address to the nation on January 17, 1961 does a pretty good job of answering this question and also explains why Case Study Houses that would be assembled from a kit of manufactured factory parts lost out to suburban houses that were built with manufactured lumber.
...Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations...
What President Eisenhower points out is that war is more profitable than peace. Factories that The Case Study Houses Program envisioned would make components were never converted to peacetime use. We often discuss military spending in economic terms and rarely in societal terms. But how might the money we spent on the military have transformed society if it were spent instead on education, healthcare, culture, and infrastructure? This kind of a question represents a missed opportunity for this exhibit and is an interesting thought to let occupy one's head these days.
The rest of the story can unfold by doing the rarest of things in LA; going for a walk. From LACMA head West to the corner of Fairfax and Wilshire where you will find the Peterson Automotive Museum, a cultural gem in this city that like its massive automobile infrastructure, is hiding in plain sight. The curators there tell not just the story of the history of cars in LA, but also the accompanying narrative of road building that connects place through space. One of the incongruous things about Los Angeles is that while you need a car to get places once you are there the infrastructure of the car disappears. This illusion becomes reality for many residents of Los Angeles. What is also a reality for residents of Los Angeles is that their houses are, for the most part, built by developers and not architects who see the car and the infrastructure that supports it, as a way of getting people to live further apart so they can build on cheaper land. People who bought affordable suburban homes needed cars. Developers understood that they were selling garages that came with houses to people who thought they were buying houses that came with garages.
So yes, there is a story in these objects that still resonates with the public. They suggest a different postwar lifestyle than the one that played out, and perhaps with our nation currently fighting multiple conflicts, the realization that energy is not cheap and abundant, a foreclosure crisis, and declining real estate values that hit the suburbs hard, there is an unspoken yearning to re-open the conversation that The Case Study House Program Started and that this exhibit is fundamentally about.