The FBI’s surveillance of the LA-based architect Gregory Ain began in 1944 and continued for another two decades.
For a while, Ain was on Director J. Edgar Hoover’s Security Index, a list of particularly subversive individuals. As the red scare grew during the 1950s, he lost major contracts and, in a process hard to detail, was sidelined. He had the world at his feet.
Apprenticed under the great designer of signature LA homes, Richard Neutra, he was then the chief engineer in the studio of Charles and Ray Eames, developing the plywood moulding machines that would result in the famous Eames chair, which he made the first model of. In 1950, Phillip Johnson commissioned him to design and construct a model home in the gardens of MoMA and although previous model homes were sold on, Ain’s strangely disappeared.
What is left though is striking. His commitment to low-rise, suburban housing was remarkable. The Mar Vista Tract, on the west side of Los Angeles, between Venice Beach and Culver City was completed in 1948. The original plan envisioned 100 houses on 60 acres, but just 52 were ultimately built on three streets after sales progressed slowly. Marketed as ‘Modernique Homes’, the development promoted its progressive design, flexible interiors and strong indoor-outdoor connections.
Although they cost more than nearby speculative houses, Ain cut costs by using a single plan with a modest square footage, but added variety and nuance to the street through shifting the placement of the garage and rotating the plan. Although delivered with exactly the same tools, Mar Vista is a million miles away from the dreaded ranges of identikit suburban housing.
'Architecture and landscape merged into a single vision of modern suburban life'
Porch and entrance of a home in West Los Angeles by Gregory Ain.
There is so much subtle stuff going on in this lushly planted site. Mar Vista is effectively a collaboration with the landscape architect Garrett Eckbo. Together the pair conceived the neighbourhood as a park-like environment without fences, with homes set back from the road. Eckbo, who had designed camps for migrant agricultural workers in California's Central Valley, planted different fruit trees — mulberry, plum and guava trees — in each yard to encourage neighbors to trade and thereby socialise. And whilst he created a lush integrated landscape of Lombardy poplar, olive and dwarf eucalyptus trees elsewhere across the site, he gave each street a unique character by adding ficus on Beethoven Street, melaleuca on Moore Street and magnolia on Meier Street. Architecture and landscape merged into a single vision of modern suburban life.
The homes were for a middle class buyer. Prices were higher than nearby developments and are much higher now. The typical house is not big, measuring just 100sq m, excluding the double garage. However, folding partitions allowed living spaces to expand or divide as families changed. The number of bedrooms could be expanded from one to three using sliding panels, maximizing flexibility. Using a colour scheme devised by the chemist Wilhelm Ostwald, Ain applied coordinated palettes inside and out, with each wall in subtle variations of a dominant tone. Influenced by the ideas of pediatrician Benjamin Spock, he opened the kitchen toward the living room and yard so mothers could watch children while working, while movable blinds and panels provided privacy when needed. Cabinetry separating rooms became both functional storage and organizer.
Mar Vista became Los Angeles’s first postwar Modern historic district, in 2003, an example of how thoughtful design and landscaping can be inspired by subtle ideas about how to constitute a community that go far beyond politics.