Features
As with many of Wright's residences, it has an "introverted" exterior with small windows, and is not easy to decode from the outside. The house is arranged around a central courtyard with one side open to form a kind of theatrical stage (never used as such), and a complex system of split levels, steps and roof terraces around that courtyard. The design features exterior walls that are tilted back at 85 degrees (which helps provide a "Mayan" appearance sometimes referred to as the Mayan Revival style), leaded art glass in the windows, a grand fireplace with a large abstract bas-relief, and a moat. Water is meant to flow from a pool in the courtyard through an underground tunnel to this inside moat, and out again to a fountain.
The front doors are stepped similarly to the entryway. The split doors rest on pins and swing open easily despite their massive weight. The keyhole is concealed with a decorative flap.
The hollyhock is used as a central theme to the house, with many symmetrical decorations adapting the plant's general appearance. Planters are decorated with the motif and filled with the plants themselves, and Wright's stained glass windows feature a highly-stylized hollyhock pattern. An interesting feature is the glass corners, an early Wright idea later used at Fallingwater.
Hollyhock House features an entertainment room immediately to the right of the entrance. This room contains possibly the first built-in entertainment center, complete with LP-sized cabinets along the floor. Other notable rooms include a child's play area as well as a modernist kitchen, which long housed the museum gift shop.
Like many houses designed by Wright, it proved to be better as an aesthetic work than as a livable dwelling. Water tended to flow over the central lawn and into the living room, and the flat roof terraces were conceived without an understanding of Los Angeles' rains. The cantilevered concrete also has not stood up well to the area's earthquakes.
There were a considerable number of revisions. Two smaller structures, called Studio Residence A and B, were built on the grounds. Residence A still stands. The client also commissioned a private kindergarten which was never built.
Read more about this topic: Hollyhock House
Famous quotes containing the word features:
“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times—the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie—seem attractive by comparison.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)
“Art is the child of Nature; yes,
Her darling child, in whom we trace
The features of the mother’s face,
Her aspect and her attitude.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)