Honestly, I think the garden of the Bailey House got forgotten by Pierre Koenig and his clients. Several pieces of Architectural Pottery were planted with sedum and the steel-framed reflective pools where decorated for the early photo shoots with additional rushes. This probably was because of the limited budget. Koenig’s sketches don’t indicate much more regarding the landscape.
Somehow I think that this became the week-spot of CSH #21; different from its successor, the Stahl House (CSH #22) with its spectacular view over LA, this house was built between a sloping neighborhood street and a steep dry mountain-side way up in the West Hollywood Hills. So the focus was kept on the house’s center-patio and its terraces. Over time bushes have overgrown some of the mountain slope and some grass had been planted for presentation purposes and to prevent further erosion. The last owner surrounded himself with a wall of bamboo, which cut the house off the neighborhood in the style of Beverly Hills and a cinder-block retention-wall along the street had been added.
Essentially the guiding principle for a new garden design was low-maintenace. What came to mind was a desert-like climate, you don’t think so much about that when you see the rainforest-like planted neighborhood streets. But succulents take to the dry grounds (oh surprise!) and the sculptural character of succulents complements the straight angled building shell. The fact that they absorb water during the rainy season and then store it means they can last longer during the dry season. This way irrigation can be kept to a minimum, a necessary consideration helped as we found out later that year to get through the ongoing California drought.
Inspired on the one hand by the wild, desert vegetation of the Joshua Tree Park with its randomly spread Joshua trees accompanied by creoste bushes, ocotillos and teddy-bear cacti; and on the other hand by the well-groomed urban succulent garden in San Marino at Huntington Botanical Gardens which looks more like a dense jungle of cacti and agave. We decided for a wide variety of succulents, planted in clusters, and rare Joshua trees from Texas, since the Californian Joshua tree is close to extinction and also is very difficult to transplant (it has to be replanted exactly at the same angle and orientation to the sun in which it grew).
The neighborhood association*, founded even before the house was completed in 1959, eventually set up rules to keep the community alive and open, preventing Wonderland Park Avenue from turning into a gated community. Needless to say, the moment that the bamboo went, happy faces arrived by foot or Porsche, commenting that they are glad to have the building again as part of their community.
At the end, the gardens are the interface between home and neighborhood and provoke public interest more then I ever expected, since they provide a viewable amenity and more so, an identity.
* I was told, the neighborhood association was founded in the mid 1950’s by a diverse selection of working professionals, who got the basic infrastructure built on Wonderland Park Avenue, even working out bank financing at the time. The area was refuge to middle class people who would have been marginalized because of race or ethnicity in the postwar Los Angeles housing market.
Contemporary photographs curtsey of the author.
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After James Turrell bought the 400,000 year-old Roden Crater in 1979 , a 2 mile-wide volcanic crater on the edge of the Painted Desert in northern Arizona, he started to turn it into an observatory with several separate spaces, that will allow the visitor (probably in 2011) to follow celestial phenomena with their naked eye.
In his hour-glass-like crater, Turrell is working with that tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum, called light, which comes in many shades.
‘I also want to say that the senses and gratification through the senses, while it can direct you toward the spiritual, is also something that will hold you from it fully. That’s the limits of art, and so I don’t think that art is terribly spiritual, but it’s something that can be along that way, be a gesture toward that,’ says Turrell about his art-work.
Since then this ring, called Pandora’s Tears has had a spell and caused a chain of bad-luck for all its owners. It cast its spell on Karl when he got his hands on the stones and again made a ring out of it, till he too passed it on as a gift to his book publisher. He too was not spared the curse and had to eventually auction it off in Mumbai to pay his medical bills. No one knows who owns it now…. But soon after, Karl won the long awaited, prestigious 
‘The King’s Ring: Once upon a time there was a powerful king, who owned everything his heart could desire. But this King was unsatisfied with his power and all his wealth. He was afflicted with a strange restlessness and unexplainably longed for something which would fulfill following conditions: It should sadden him, when he would be happy - and should placate him when he would be sad. (..) One day the wise men had found the answer, when they stepped in front of the king, he asked them for their efforts’ outcome. They handed him a ring. And this magic ring had following engraving: “This too, will pass”.
German “Zero”: Heinz Mack, Otto Piene and Gunther Uecker.
I guess not until the late 1960’s did color televisions start selling in large enough numbers to jump start the excessive quest for MORE of everything on a worldwide scale. Which turned into an ever increasing worldwide demand for minerals and energy, which had been up to that point contained within North America. What interests me about these pictures beyond their extreme coloration and the size of the machine-made negative landscapes, is their connecting tissue, which leaves similarly proportioned marks on other types of landscapes.
The opening of Australia’s largest open cut gold-mine located along Kalgoorlie Boulder, called ‘Fimiston Open Pit’, also knows as ‘Super Pit’, is still growing, eventually reaching 3.9 km (long) x 1.6 km (wide) with a depth of 500m. More than 1,550 tonnes of gold have been mined, which means around 15 million tonnes of rock, mostly waste is moved yearly.
In the 1960’s the discovery of rich iron deposits at Mt Whaleback, the resource boom of Western Australia had taken off. A privately-owned railway was built to connect to Port Hedland and Dampier, moving record braking amounts of ore, trains reaching the length of 4.5 miles (7.3 km).
The more I get into R. Buckminster Fuller’s work, the more the modern movement of 20th century European architects (like Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe) starts looking like a fraction of the radical modern concept envisioned and partially built by Fuller. The two words, ‘Synergy‘ and ‘Design Science‘ stand out, suggesting that there can be still individual feats of design even with the bewildering speed of technological advance which gives a limited shelf-life to even the finest manufactures. This is because scientific and technical development is continuous, and every single design must eventually vacate in favor of something cheaper and better, or become part of another composite element, incorporated into a greater whole.
right: BBC World Service Relay Station at English Bay
