HomeMy WebLinkAboutKen Schwartz Master List 1
Master List Applications | Peter and Carol Andre House • 1801 Woodland Drive
Pimentel-Orth House • 198 Paso Robles Drive
Kenneth and Martha Schwartz House • 201 Buena Vista Avenue
Page-Selkirk House • 2424 Sunset Drive
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CONTENTS
Introduction
Summary Conclusions of Eligibility Under Master List Criteria
Mount Carmel Lutheran Church
Peter and Carol Andre House
Pimentel-Orth House
Ken and Martha Schwartz House
Page-Selkirk House
Timeline
Ken Schwartz as Architect
Influences: Calvin Straub and Garrett Eckbo; Gregory Ain and Richard Neutra; Mies
van der Rohe; Buckminster Fuller
Design Approach
Exterior Environment
Use
Resources
Materials
Construction
Interior Space
Interior-Exterior Interplay
Ken Schwartz as Politician
Peter and Carol Andre House
Period of Significance
Eligibility Under Master List Criteria: Significance
Eligibility Under Master List Criteria: Integrity
Pimentel-Orth House
Period of Significance
Eligibility Under Master List Criteria: Significance
Eligibility Under Master List Criteria: Integrity
Kenneth and Martha Schwartz House
Period of Significance
Eligibility Under Master List Criteria: Significance
Eligibility Under Master List Criteria: Integrity
Page-Selkirk House
Period of Significance
Eligibility Under Master List Criteria: Significance
Eligibility Under Master List Criteria: Integrity
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INTRODUCTION
A few weeks before his death in the fall of 2019, I talked with Ken Schwartz about the
buildings he had designed that he thought worthy of San Luis Obispo’s Master List of
Historic Resources. By then he was living at The Villages, so our conversation was
removed from the dramatic spaces and views of the Modernist aerie he built on Buena
Vista Avenue to house his own family; host his students, colleagues, and friends; and
demonstrate his ideals of aesthetics and comfort. Yet all five buildings he named were
clear in his mind’s eye, despite the fact that he had designed them fifty to sixty years
earlier. Also clear in his mind’s eye—and still irritating him—was what had been
altered subsequently without his permission. Ken Schwartz was a perfectionist.
The five he named were Mount Carmel Lutheran Church, designed with George
Hasslein (1957–58), and the Andre House (1959), Pimentel-Orth House (1962),
Schwartz House (1962), and Page-Selkirk House (1966). Mount Carmel is a
masterpiece lost under subsequent changes, but the four houses, each loved by their
occupants, retain their integrity. They embody movements that changed the world’s
way of understanding buildings and the Californian way of seeing, experiencing, and
extending into the natural environment. Far from the resources and cultural context of
big cities, they altered not just the fabric but the mindset of a small town.
The Context for Ken Schwartz’s Architecture
Wright’s Master List Kundert Clinic
Morgan’s unlisted Zegar Playhouse
San Luis Obispo has a history of attracting rare works of major twentieth-century
architects, built to small-town scale: Julia Morgan’s Federal Revival Monday Club, in
Spanish materials and a Minimal Traditional aesthetic, and her American Craftsman
Zegar Playhouse (the latter a favorite of Ken’s); Charles Lee’s Streamline Moderne–
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Greek Revival Fremont Theater; Frank Lloyd Wright’s Kundert Clinic, his only Usonian
office building; Richard Neutra’s National Youth Administration Center at Cal Poly;
Warren Leopold’s cantilevered Santa Rosa Medical Clinic and tent-like 661 Oakridge.
Our town has also attracted work inspired by the major architects, like the 1907 Leroy
and Isabel Anderson House at 1318 Mill Street, modeled by an unknown designer on
Wright’s turn-of-the-century work in the Midwest, and the 1914 Barneberg House,
designed by Charles McKenzie after Wright’s residential work from the late 1910s.
Lee’s Master List Fremont Theater
Leopold’s unlisted 661 Oakridge
Nestled in the confluence of the Chorro, Osos, and Edna Valleys, San Luis Obispo is
characterized by a high degree of eclectic architectural in a compact space of
geographic variety. As Palm Springs is distinguished for Mid-Century Modern and
Santa Barbara for Spanish Colonial, Mission, and Moorish Revival, we are distinguished
by Eclecticism, which may be why we have long been certain that San Luis Obispo has
a special architectural character but have struggled to define it.
The Schwartzes grew up in South Central LA’s vast gridiron of streets: endless rows of
knockoff California Bungalows and Spanish duplexes giving a dose of local flavor to
the Eastern, Western, and Midwestern immigrants who were their parents. Ken and
Martha soaked up San Luis eclectic in weekend drives through town to enjoy the
views, see what was building, and take Lorraine and Jan to Fosters Freeze.1 In one
drive, among houses in “the Mediterranean style popular in the late twenties and early
thirties,” they found two hillside sites for sale, and Ken would add our regional version
of the International Style—what Neutra called California Moderne—to the mix.
1. Kenneth Schwartz, Memoir, “Monterey Heights” (unpublished, no date).
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From 1959 to 1967 Ken Schwartz served on and from 1962 to 1967 chaired San Luis
Obispo’s Planning Commission. Once he was elected mayor in 1969—the same year
he became program leader for City and Regional Planning at Cal Poly—he was too
engrossed in the greater urban form for further essays in domestic or religious
architecture. He was made a fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1979, his
tenth and final year as mayor, for public service in urban planning and education.
Leopold’s unlisted Santa Rosa Medical Clinic
What San Luis Obispo gained in planning it lost in the minimal, functional, and logical
structures Schwartz excelled in. The buildings he named are five chapters in his
engagement with exterior environment, interior use, and their interplay through
materials and structure, based on profound yet very human thought about twentieth
century architecture. Schwartz’s buildings converse with those of Neutra, Gregory Ain,
Mies van der Rohe, Buckminster Fuller, Charles and Henry Greene, William Becket,
Jack Ouzounian, and even Richard Upjohn, after whose 1851 tweak to a thirteenth-
century Cambridgeshire chapel St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church was designed.
As an assemblage, Schwartz’s buildings serve as a less counterculture but no less
innovative counterpoint to Warren Leopold. Landmarking the work of Schwartz,
Leopold, and other Modernists will allow us to not only preserve and honor but finally
understand the impact of the movement on the eclectic fabric of San Luis Obispo.
James Papp, PhD, Historicities, LLC; Historian and Architectural Historian, Secretary of
the Interior’s Professional Qualification Standards; 27 March 2020
Representing Jim Andre, Pam Orth, Lorraine and Jan Schwartz, and Shirley Selkirk
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SUMMARY CONCLUSIONS OF ELIGIBILITY UNDER MASTER LIST CRITERIA
Mount Carmel Lutheran Church • 1957–58 Ken Schwartz and George Hasslein
designed Mount Carmel Lutheran Church as a multipurpose worship and social hall
with an adjunct classroom and office building. The assemblage at 1701 Fredericks
Street was a stunning embodiment of Minimalism and Functionalism in the California
context, the hall’s verticality referring to ancient ecclesiastical forms in a way that was
not overtly religious, the utilitarian building contrasting strongly with horizontality, and
wood cladding outside and in embodying a unifying California Modernist aesthetic.
Mount Carmel in 1958 and today with attached false-front annex expansion at right.
Extensive alteration to the adjunct building, however, particularly as viewed from the
street, and both buildings’ exterior resurfacing with stucco have caused sufficient loss
in integrity of design, materials, workmanship, and association that neither the
assemblage nor its parts are able to communicate their architectural significance and
hence qualify for the Master List of Historic Resources. While other clients worked with
Schwartz on changes, thus extending the period of significance of their buildings to
the architect’s death in 2019, Mount Carmel’s period of significance ends with its
extensive alterations before the 1970s.
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Peter and Carol Andre House • 1959 The Andre House qualifies for the Master
List as “one of the most unique and important historic properties and resources in
terms of … architectural … significance” as an embodiment of Mid-Century Modern
architecture, representing the work of a master. Its sophisticated treatment of
volumes, axes, sightlines, and materials lends the architectural drama characteristic of
Mid-Century Modernism in contrast with the preceding (and following) Minimalism
and Functionalism of the International Style. Its borrowing from Greene and Greene
also connects the Mid-Century Modern to the California Bungalow.
The Andre House
has virtually
perfect integrity
of location,
design, setting,
materials,
workmanship,
feeling, and
association from
its original
construction and
occupation by the
Andres, not only
outside but inside.
Pimentel-Orth House • 1961 • 1983 The
Pimentel-Orth House qualifies for the Master List
as “one of the most unique and important historic
properties and resources in terms of …
architectural … significance” as an embodiment of
Minimalism and Functionalism and representing
the work of a master. Its interior and exterior axial
arrangements formed of boxes; complex use of
materials, light, and views; and angular
juxtaposition to the natural landscape express the
Corbusian notion of a machine for living.
The integrity of the Pimentel-Orth House in location, design, setting, materials,
workmanship, feeling, and association obtains after subtle pushouts to augment
interior spaces, executed by the architect within the period of significance.
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Ken and Martha Schwartz House • 1962 The
Schwartz House qualifies for the Master List as “one of
the most unique and important historic properties and
resources in terms of … architectural … significance”
as an embodiment of California Minimalism and
Functionalism, representing the work of a master. The
most Neutraesque of Schwartz’s work in exterior
expression of Minimalist form, it shows the influence
of Mies in use of planes, Wright in treatment of public
and private space, and the Second Bay Tradition
(possibly through Neutra) in its use of materials, but it
is distinctively the work of Schwartz in its kinetic logic.
The house also qualifies for the Master
List as “one of the most unique and
important historic properties and
resources in terms of … historical
significance” as the home of Ken
Schwartz, a person significant in San Luis
Obispo’s past who made a significant
contribution to the broad pattern of our
history as the most influential exponent of
city planning in over six decades of
service as mayor, Planning Commission
chair, and many other roles.
Council Member Myron Graham and
Mayor Ken Schwartz, 1973
The Schwartz House has integrity of location, design, setting, materials, workmanship,
feeling, and association within the 1962–2019 period of significance, both inside and
out. The refinements since its completion in 1962 were executed by the architect.
Page-Selkirk House • 1966 The Page-Selkirk House qualifies for the Master List
as “one of the most unique and important historic properties and resources in terms of
… architectural … significance” as an embodiment of California Minimalism and
Functionalism, representing the work of a master. It’s extraordinary hexagonal hub
design leading to three wings of different uses is a Functionalist breakthrough within a
Minimalist aesthetic clearly influenced by Futurism.
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The integrity of the Page Selkirk House in location, design, setting, materials,
workmanship, feeling, and association is near perfect from its original construction,
with only the addition of an exterior elevator from street level.
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TIMELINE
1925 Feb. 23 Kenneth Emery Schwartz is born at California Lutheran Hospital in Los
Angeles to Emery Schwartz of Minnesota and Florence Carlson
Schwartz of Kansas. Emery is a cabinetmaker for a contractor; the family
lives in a Neoclassic cottage at 3315 Baldwin St, Lincoln Heights.2
After his parents separate, Ken and his mother live with his paternal
grandparents (Schwartz, op. cit.) and, in an area of Craftsman
bungalows in Highland Park, his maternal aunt and uncle (1930 US
Census).
1935–37 After Florence and Ken move out on their own, Florence, a working
single mother, places Ken in the Lark Ellen Home for Boys, an new
Neoclassic edifice in Sawtelle, West Los Angeles (Schwartz, op. cit.,
“Life on Walton Avenue” and personal account, “Lark Ellen Home for
Boys,” sawtelle1897to1950.wordpress.com).
Lark Ellen Home for Boys, main facade, 1924. UCLA Special Collections.
1937–43 About to marry William Childs, a self-employed paint contractor from
Oklahoma, Ken’s mother brings Ken home from Lark Ellen (Schwartz,
Memoir, “New Family Life”). The family lives in houses and apartments
in Spanish Eclectic, Neoclassical, and Craftsman areas in Vermont and
South Central, including Walton Avenue, 1013 W. 65th Street (1940 US
2. California State Board of Health Standard Certificate of Birth
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Census), and 68th near Hoover Street (op. cit., “Life on Walton
Avenue,” “My Most Unexpected Christmas Gift”).
The Lark Ellen boys growing produce, 1924; Schwartz received eight cents for his first
crop of string beans and five for his Swiss chard. UCLA Special Collections.
1943 Schwartz graduates from Fremont High, where he’s taken architectural
drafting classes; is rejected in the physical for the naval officers cadet
program; and starts classes at Cal Tech (op. cit., “Years of Anguish”).
Struggling, he withdraws when his draft notice comes but fails the
Army physical. Ambitious to become an aeronautical engineer, he gets
a drafting job at Douglas Aircraft in El Segundo.
AD-1; Schwartz did the drawing for the arresting hook, bottom right. Too late for WWII,
it stayed in service through the early 1970s. Naval National Museum of Navy Aviation.
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1944 Disillusioned with aeronautical engineering, decides to pursue a career
in architecture and enrolls at the College of Arts and Architecture at
the University of Southern California (ibid.).
1945 After VJ Day, receives another draft notice and is declared fit for
service (ibid., op. cit., “You’re in the Army Now,” “My Army Days Are
Numbered”). While in basic training at Sheppard Field near Wichita
Falls, TX, becomes seriously ill and is diagnosed with double
pneumonia.
1946 Mar. 24 Marries Martha “Marty” Riggio, his high school sweetheart (op. cit.,
“Marriage”).
Ken receives a medical discharge from the Army as a result of
bronchiectasis, which qualifies him for the GI Bill and allows him to
complete his education (op. cit., “My Army Days Are Ending”).
Returns to USC when practicing architects are being hired part-time to
teach an influx of students (op. cit., “Homecoming”). Modernist
Gregory Ain becomes an influence and introduces him to Richard
Neutra, who with wife Dione will later become a family friend.
Gregory Ain, 1950, with his Museum of Modern Art exhibition house, New York. Homer
Page, MoMA Archives. Dione and Richard Neutra, 1950. Julius Shulman.
1947 Schwartz is diagnosed with tuberculosis and spends the next nineteen
months in the Birmingham VA Hospital, Van Nuys (op. cit.,
“Birmingham D-7-North,” “Birmingham—The Final Ten Months”).
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The Department of Architectural Engineering, offering a BS, is founded
at California Polytechnic.3 It graduates its first students in 1952.
1950 Simon Eisner, recent co-author with Arthur Gallion of The Urban
Pattern: City Planning and Design, teaches Schwartz in a two-year city
planning sequence and becomes a mentor and lifelong friend, later
influencing Schwartz to move into city and regional planning and seek
elective office (op. cit., “Return to USC”).
1952 May Schwartz receives his Bachelor of Architecture degree from USC.
Turning down an offer from William Periera, Schwartz works at the
small firm of Allison and Rible (op. cit., “Allison and Rible, Architects”).
Neutra’s 1939 National Youth Authority Center, which housed the Department of
Architectural Engineering when Ken Schwartz arrived. Cal Poly Special Collections.
Sep. On the recommendation of USC dean of Architecture Arthur Gallion,
George Hasslein, chair of California Polytechnic State College’s
Department of Architectural Engineering, offers Schwartz a teaching
position (ibid., op. cit., “A Grand New Adventure”). Ken, Martha, four-
year-old daughter Lorraine and two-year-old son Jan arrive on a mid-
October Saturday and look unsuccessfully for housing in San Luis
Sunday. Ken begins teaching Monday. An influx of servicemen at Camp
San Luis during the Korean War has caused a housing shortage. Martha
finds the family a small house at 202 Santa Fe Avenue in Shell Beach.
1952–54 Engineering Dean and Shell Beach neighbor Harold Hayes spearheads
FHA cooperative project: sixty-two houses for Cal Poly faculty and
3. Robert Chomitz, “Development of Cal Poly’s School of Architecture and
Environmental Design,” researchgate.net, 2018
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school district and state highway employees on tract subdivided by
Goldtree brothers from their vineyard in 1893 (op. cit., “Goldtree,”
“The Long Wait,” “The Wait Continues,” “2553 Santa Clara”). R. L.
Graves, Hasslein, and Schwartz design a $10,950, 1,090-square-foot,
three-bedroom house; variety is provided by different roof pitches, wall
surfaces, and colors. Schwartz professors Ain, Eisner, and Garrett
Eckbo have collaborated on FHA projects in the LA area.
Goldtree Vineyard Tract map circa 1893. History Center of San Luis Obispo County.
Cal Poly Department of Architectural Engineering, early 1950s: R. L. Graves, George
Hasslein, Ken Schwartz, Hans Mager, and Rudy Poly.
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1954 Newly created Port San Luis Harbor Commission turns to Architectural
Engineering for a development plan, allowing the department to
provide a “place-based, real-world” project for its students, the first of
a number solicited by cash-strapped local jurisdictions for which Ken
becomes faculty advisor (op. cit., “Our First Planning Project”).
1954 spring The Schwartzes move to 2553 Santa Clara Street in the Goldtree Tract.
1954–56 Ken serves as chair of Goldtree Homeowners Association.
1955 Mar. 28 Receives his license from the California Architects Board, after
presenting, uniquely, his teaching work rather than practice for the oral
section (op. cit., “Licensure”; California Architects Board, cab.ca.gov).
1956 Represents the Goldtree Homeowners Association to the Planning
Commission and City Council against rezoning of the land to the south
of Sinsheimer Elementary for industrial use for the General Fireproofing
metal furniture and Shadowline women’s underwear factories
(Schwartz, op. cit., “Goldtree Homeowners Association”). At Planning
Commission hearing Schwartz discovers the city has no long-range plan
for land use. With the support of arguments provided by the Chamber
of Commerce and city staff, the commission votes 7–0 and the council
5–0 against the Goldtree Homeowners. Cal Poly president Julian
McPhee writes to the City Council to support the rezoning, putting him
and Schwartz on opposite sides. General Fireproofing and Shadowline
pull out of their factories not long after they’re built.
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1956–71 Schwartz serves on the board of Natoma Council Campfire Girls,
leading the girls, with the assistance of Cal Poly architecture students,
in building projects at their campsite and in San Luis Obispo. This is an
activity he shares with Martha, who leads the Sinsheimer troop.
1955–83 Ken joins and from 1957 leads his department’s annual LA field trips
(op. cit., “Los Angeles Field Trips”).
1957 summer A two-week MIT course in city and regional planning introduces
Schwartz to the importance of city landmarks and the impact of
circulation systems on land values; it’s also his first trip to the East
Coast (op. cit., “Cross-Country to MIT”).
1957–58 Hasslein and Schwartz design Mount Carmel Lutheran Church on
Fredericks Street; it features in Arts and Architecture for simple design
and low building cost (op. cit., “Mount Carmel Lutheran Church”).
1959 Schwartz designs house for Peter Andre, local lawyer, political figure,
and scion of a ranching and business family (op. cit., “Peter Andre”).
1959–67 San Luis Obispo Mayor Fred Waters offers Schwartz a seat on the
Planning Commission because he’s been protesting rezoning: “If you
don't like things the way they are, you have to put up or shut up” (op.
cit., “A Life-Changing Appointment”). Schwartz serves for eight years.
1960 The Schwartz family takes
a road trip to the annual
Ken Schwartz as Planning Commission
chair, 1967, Telegram-Tribune
conference of the Association of
Collegiate Schools of Architecture at
Syracuse University, visiting Wright’s
Guggenheim Museum; Jefferson’s
Monticello; Skidmore, Owings, and
Merrill’s Air Force Chapel; and the
Chester Stem and Co. hardwood
plywood mill (op. cit., “A Family Foray to
the East Coast”). Taking a wrong turn,
they visit Canada, Ken’s first trip abroad.
1960–62 Serves as president of
Natoma Council Campfire
Girls.
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1961 At Schwartz’s urging, the
Planning Commission
produces the city’s first
general plan.
1961–1962 The Schwartzes and Santa
Clara Street neighbors
the Pimentels buy
adjoining losts, sold
together, on Buena Vista
Avenue and Paso Robles
Drive (op. cit., “Monterey
Heights”). Ken designs
houses for both sites. The
Pimentels build first, the
Schwartzes a year later.
1962–67 Ken Schwartz chairs the
Planning Commission.
1963 Joins Cal Poly group of George Hasslein and three professors from the
Agricultural School on a USAID survey mission to Argentina.
1964–65 Cal Poly adds a five-year Bachelor of Architecture degree to its BS in
Architectural Engineering, breaking the University of California’s Master
Plan monopoly on professional graduate programs.
1966 Schwartz designs Shirley and Hubert Page a house, 2424 Sunset Drive.
Takes summer class on planning and transportation at Renssaeler.
1967 Mayor Clell Whelchel proposes Schwartz, “regarded in planning circles
as perhaps the most outstanding commissioner in this county,” for third
four-year term on the Planning Commission.4 On a 3-2 vote the council
refuses; “area contractors have been perhaps the most vociferous
critics of Planning Commission decisions in recent years”; he has also
become linked with a two-decade long proposal to close Monterey
between Broad and Chorro for a plaza, opposed by merchants.
4. Gilbert Moore, “Plan Board Chief Ousted by Council,” San Luis Obispo County
Telegram-Tribune, 6 July 1967.
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Presents seismic- and radiation-resistant library–bomb shelter design at
the Pentagon, the result of a Penn State–DOD summer course
1967–69 Serves as founding chair of Obispo Beautiful Association
1968 Three Poly architecture students make Mission Plaza proposals their
senior project; a partial grant from the City Council is conditioned on
one proposal showing Monterey Street remaining open. Five minutes
into their closure proposal, Mayor Whelchel gavels the packed hearing
over and demands the city’s money back. Former city attorney George
Andre, Peter’s brother, offers to represent the students pro bono,
Whelchel storms out, and Schwartz decides to run for mayor.
Schwartz, George Andre, former council members R. L. Graves and
Margaret McNeill, and Peter Andre law partner Richard Woods
circulate a referendum petition to close Monterey Street for a plaza. It
qualifies, and San Luis voters approve it by a 2-1 margin.
The Department of
Architecture and
Architectural Engineering
becomes the School of
Architecture, with a new
city and regional planning
major added to
architecture and
architectural engineering.
1968–78 Schwartz serves as
director of curriculum for
School of Architecture.
1969–1979 Runs for mayor against
Clell Whelchel and serves
five two-year terms.
Ken Schwartz pictured in the Telegram-
Tribune during his first mayoral run.
1969 Nov. 17 Despite hesitating politically “to stir up a city apparently pleased with
its present status,” Schwartz sends a seven-page letter to the chair of
the Planning Commission on the nature of cities and San Luis Obispo’s
place in the larger economy, its resources, and how to develop its trade
and service, recreational and tourist, and industrial sectors. The letter,
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known as the Schwartz White Paper, circulates among advisory bodies,
civic groups, and citizens. Schwartz identifies “our magnificent scenic
resource” as “the single greatest resource that we have for building
future economic prosperity” and calls for turning San Luis from a “half-
way stop” into a tourist “mecca.” He focuses on making commerce
recreational and recreation commercial; creating an attractive city that’s
easy to get around; and attracting low-bulk, high-value industry.
Mayor Schwartz lays bricks for the plaza
Schwartz administration’s contributions
include quality-of-life, city beautification,
and user-friendliness: undergrounding
gasoline storage tanks and downtown
utility wires; sign regulation; waterways
planning; an Architectural Review
Commission; Historical and Architectural
Conservation Element; simple guides to
zoning, permitting, and architectural
review; tree-planting program; senior
center; consolidated city-county library,
Meadow Park; the Jack House and
Garden; bicycle lanes; a public
transportation system; cultural offerings
like the Mozart Festival and Mission Plaza
programing; and quashing Alex
Madonna’s Cerro San Luis development.
Initiates a capital improvements program
and water and land use, circulation,
economic, and growth policies.
1969–76 Serves as program leader for City and Regional Planning at Cal Poly.
1971 The School of Architecture becomes the School of Architecture and
Environmental Design (SAED).
Mission Plaza is completed.
Schwartz becomes a founding member of the California Council of
Architectural Education.
Receives Distinguished Teacher Award, Cal Poly
1972 California Polytechnic State College becomes California Polytechnic
State University.
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1972–80 Schwartz becomes a founding member of the Liaison Committee on
Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and City and Regional Planning
for the California Articulation Conference.
1974 Former client Peter Andre approaches Schwartz with the idea of the
city accepting the Jack House and Garden from the Jack heirs as a city
park and historic house; Schwartz convinces the council to agree.
Martha becomes the driving force behind the Jack House docents; the
Parks Department Volunteer of the Year Award will be named for her.
Mission Plaza wins the Landscape Award of the American Association
of Nurserymen, presented to Mayor Schwartz by First Lady Pat Nixon at
the White House.
1977–1998 Schwartz serves as a member of the Jack House Committee.
1978 Serves as president of the California Council of Architectural Education.
1979 Is made a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects for public
service in urban planning and education.
1979–83 Serves as SAED associate dean. Photograph by Dale Flynn.
1981–82 Serves on county grand
jury, whose report on
water resources leads to
complete revision of
master plan.
1983–84 Serves as interim dean.
1983–85 Develops SAED master
plan.
1985–96 Serves on Citizens
Advisory Committee,
California Men’s Colony.
1986 On sabbatical visits 44 US
and Canadian architecture
schools to examine
curriculum activities in
housing.
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1987–88 Architectural consultant for founding of Escuela de Agricultura de la
Region Tropical Humeda (EARTH) in Costa Rica
1988 Retires from SAED. The program has grown from 95 students when he
arrived to 1,700, the largest in the US. Having his Cal Poly salary
reduced by 10 percent for the 10 years he served as mayor reduces his
pension by a year.
1989 Chairs Citizens Advisory Committee, California Men’s Colony.
1989–97 Serves on County Planning Commission.
1991–92 Chairs County Planning Commission
1992 Member, San Luis Obispo Downtown Physical Design Concept Group
Ken’s annotations of a staff evaluation by Whitney McIlvaine and Glen Matteson of the
Conceptual Physical Plan for the City’s Center or Downtown Concept Plan. The note
before the exclamation “NUTS!!” reads, “The idea of DT plan was to develop new—
not necessarily ‘approved’—city policies.” Schwartz may have been, as Gilbert Moore
wrote for the Telegram-Tribune in 1969, “a master at drawing out people, giving
everyone his say, achieving consensus,” but he didn’t do it by pulling punches.
1992–94 Chairs Jack House Committee.
1995–96 Chairs County Planning Commission.
1996 Distinguished Leadership Award for an Elected Official, American
Planning Association
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1997 Receives National Planning Award for Distinguished Leadership as an
Elected Official, American Planning Association.
1998–2004 Appointed to an unexpired term and then elected to a full term on the
San Luis Obispo City Council.
2004 Death of Martha Schwartz after fifty-eight years of marriage.
2015 Dedication of Mission plaza plaque to Ken Schwartz.
2016 Schwartz serves on the Creative Vision Team, Downtown Concept Plan.
2019 Oct. 19 Death of Ken Schwartz in San Luis Obispo.
The stair tower entry to the Schwartz House: an inventive adaptation to the site that
subtly but dramatically communicated a sense of arrival to generations of activists and
politicians.
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KEN SCHWARTZ AS ARCHITECT
Schwartz’s father was a cabinetmaker for a contractor; his stepfather, a housepainter.
Yet, recounting his early years in his Memoir, he never recounts buildings, in contrast
to his vivid, detailed, and often loving descriptions of machines: the yellow streetcars
of the Los Angeles Railway; his piano teacher’s black Star; his new bike, whose coaster
brakes had thirty-two disks; and his first car: “a black 1933 Dodge coupe with a rumble
seat and two spare tires, one set in each of the two front fenders. A chrome ram
adorned the radiator cap. … The wheels were spoked and cream-colored. The
radiator and headlights were chrome-plated, as were the bumpers. The tires still had
tread on them” (Schwartz, op. cit., “Hey, Ken, Do You Have $75?”).
Schwartz records no Aha! moment, as the teenage Gregory Ain experienced looking
at a building by Schindler, that sparks his enthusiasm for the art of architecture. Even
in architecture school, when Ain organizes Schwartz’s’s first field trip, the description
brings out the sense of hunt—the students’ cars snaking through LA behind Ain’s big
Packard roadster—but doesn’t detail the quarry further than “projects that
represented his idea of ‘good architecture’” (“Homecoming”). Schwartz describes
Ain’s car but none of the buildings. Ending up at Neutra’s house, it’s the occasion,
“sitting on the living room floor of this much photographed house,” listening to Ain
and Neutra discuss design issues and the future of architecture, that stirs his blood.
That’s an understandable reaction to the aura of greatness for the stepson of a house
painter from slightly seedy South Central. But something lies deeper. Describing his
life as a latch-key kid on the 4200 block of Walton Avenue before he went to Lark
Ellen, Schwartz writes, “Lots of eyes watched the street” (“Walton Avenue”).
Jane Jacobs
This echo of Jane Jacobs’
famous phrase “there must
be eyes upon the street”
hints that people were at
the center not just of
Schwartz’s city planning
but his architecture.
Obsessed by machines (he
originally wanted to
become an aeronautical
engineer), he was to
fashion machines-à–
habiter, Le Corbusier’s
“machines for living.”
Le Corbusier
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In car-crossed California, the machine for living at the end of one’s journey was often
an afterthought: a production-line building that made sometimes an aesthetic nod to
local culture but rarely an accommodation to the external environment and internal
use. The nineteenth-century adobes and ranch houses had done so, but they were
quickly swamped by new houses for immigrants that were not much different from
their East Coast and Midwest counterparts. The California Bungalow—invented by the
St. Louis–raised, Boston-trained, Pasadena-transplanted Charles and Henry Greene—
was the first modern architectural reaction to the regional environment, one that was
picked up and modified by the First Bay Tradition to the north.
Hills, views, and verdant nature inspired the First Bay Tradition. Climate and flats
inspired the California Bungalow. Climate and hills, Schindler and Neutra and the Case
Study houses in LA. Architecture was less shelter or show than the means of creating a
porous membrane between inside and outside. In colder, rainier Northern California,
this often consisted of bringing woodiness—particularly redwoodiness—inside. In
Southern California, there were patios and plate glass for osmosis.
George Wyman’s Bradbury Building.
The buildings Schwartz finally explores in
his Memoir, those he visits over and over
again to show students on field trips, are
the 1890 Bradbury Building in downtown
LA, whose “space soared upward for five
stories to an enormous skylight that filled
the court with natural light” (“Los
Angeles Field Trip”); William Becket’s
hillside Jay and Lynne Livingston House
in Beverly Hills, with a floor to ceiling
glass-backed shower that had a view of
Catalina (“Field Trip Interlude: Buttons
and Bows”); the 1907 Blacker House by
Greene and Greene, its huge canopied
outdoor spaces and glazed indoor
spaces creating a medial environment
(“A Field Trip Interlude: The Blacker
House, a Greene and Greene
Gem”); Jack Ouzounian’s hillside house in Westwood, which emphasized its site’s
steepness with exterior stair flights, precipitous driveway, and overhangs (“A Field Trip
Interlude: A. C. Martin versus Jack Ouzounian”); and Richard Neutra’s Silver Lake
house and studio, which gradually revealed its secrets to Schwartz in the use of glass,
25
mirror, water, light, street level privacy, upper level environmental openness, and
transitional interior stairs (“A Field Trip Interlude: Richard and Dione Neutra”).
With each of these buildings, however, Schwartz focuses on the occupants and their
use of the space: from the sweatshop garment workers in the Bradbury Building to
Lynne Becket showering behind a picture window; Margery Hill, owner of the Blacker,
exploring the cellars for forgotten fixtures; fear of driving up and down Ouzounian’s
precipitous drive and the architect answering questions about a one-man shop on his
sheltered rear lawn; and Dione Neutra singing and playing cello to her guests.
Greene and Greene’s 1907 Blacker House, Pasadena. Greene and Greene Archives,
Gamble House, USC.
Ken Schwartz’s work was informed by direct contact with the intellectual cutting edge
of LA: Richard Neutra’s Modernism and Gregory Ain’s small-house Modernism from
his USC training, kept fresh by the long friendship with Neutra and constant
reexamination of the best of old and new buildings in the LA field trips. Schwartz’s
aesthetic also flourished in the space between Southern California Modernism,
dominated by Neutra and Schindler, who had absorbed (as had Le Corbusier) the
Functionalism and Minimalism of Adolf Loos during their training in Vienna, and
Northern California Modernism, which grew out of the more environmentally organic
Second and ultimately First Bay Traditions. His aesthetic flourished within the small-
town constraints of San Luis, where not just economy but modesty were
considerations. And it migrated to the difficult hillside sites that have come to define
twentieth-century California architecture: at the confluence of seeing and being seen.
Influences: Calvin Straub and Garrett Eckbo Ken Schwartz had a number of
teachers he admired at USC, practicing architects who were in the classroom part time
as the university grappled with booming postwar enrollment. These included Calvin
Straub, who specialized in houses for individual clients and was “a proponent of wood
post and beam modular structural systems and liked using large expanses of glass to
invite outside gardens and vistas into the interiors” (“Return to USC”). This outlook
26
oclearly influenced Schwartz’s 1959
Andre House and those beyond.
He was also taught by the distinguished
LA landscape architect Garrett Eckbo,
author of Landscape for Living (1950). “I
shall always remember Eckbo discussing
the advantages a landscape architect has
over an architect in designing spaces.
Because the landscape architect deals
with outdoor spaces, he/she has
advantages of the seasonal change
Right: Central post and beam module of
the Andre House opening through a
glass wall to the back patio
Left: Eckboesque garden at the stair top,
Schwartz House
of plant materials; the movement of
shade and shadows; the infinite palette
of colors and shapes of flowers, leaves,
and bark; the play of wind and rain and
snow; the use of scents—the perfumes of
blossoms; and the attraction a well
designed garden can have for birds and
animals, creating not only visual delight
but dynamic movement in and through
the garden” (“One More Year and
Graduation”). Eckbo even challenged his
students to design a garden without
plants.
Influences: Gregory Ain and Richard Neutra Schwartz’s chief faculty influences
were Ain in architecture and Simon Eisner in urban planning. Ain, a generation older
than his students, had dropped out of USC because of its Beaux Arts emphasis and
worked instead for Neutra and Schindler, who had relocated to Los Angeles to
become two of America’s leading exponents of the International Style. Ain “was one
of those practicing architects/part-time teachers who had a profound impact on my
early understanding of the architectural design process” (“Return to USC”).
27
Ain followed Neutra in emphasis on the
affordable house: as a one-off (the 1939
Margaret and Harry Hay House in the
Hollywood Hills for the father of the
LGBT movement and his mother), a small
assemblage (the 1937 4-unit Dunsmuir
Flats in Mid-Wilshire and 1947 10-unit
Avenel Cooperative in Silver Lake), and
part of a larger project (the 1948 52-unit
Mar Vista Tract, in collaboration with
Eckbo). Ain worked with Eckbo and
Eisner on a proposed 280-unit modernist
cooperative project in Reseda, but
because it was mixed-race the FHA
rejected funding.
Ain’s Hay House, with view windows
reserved for the back—presciently, as
Harry Hay was under surveillance.
After Schwartz returned from the Army for his second year at USC in the fall of 1946,
Ain was one of his teachers, the one who introduced him to Neutra. Listening to them
in Neutra’s home “was an experience incapable of replication. If I had any doubts
about architecture as my profession, I was now firmly hooked” (“Homecoming”).
Ken and Martha were to become friends of Richard and Dione Neutra (who never let
on Ain loathed Richard), and Ken led field trips of Cal Poly architecture students to the
Neutras’ house and studio every year. “I was transported back to my undergraduate
days at USC when … Gregory Ain brought a handful of his students to visit his friend
Richard Neutra at this same place. … Would my students be as stimulated as I was?
Only time would tell. A close observer can tell that much of my own design shows the
influence of Neutra” (“Field Trip Interlude: Richard and Dione Neutra”).
Two decades after his first visit to the Neutra House, Dione, who regularly stayed with
the Schwartzes on her way to the Monterey Bach Festival, showed her husband
through Ken’s newly built house (“Monterey Heights”). Poignantly, Ken had built his
house just as the Neutras’ house had been destroyed by fire, though their son Dion
had since rebuilt it in collaboration with his father. One can feel Ken’s trepidation,
thrust back to an undergraduate project critique. “I said I hoped he could detect some
qualities that I had derived from his inspiration. He said he did and seemed pleased. It
would be the last time we saw Neutra alive.”
Mies van der Rohe Schwartz never met Mies, but he quotes him more than once
in his Memoir: “God is in the details” (a wonderful inversion of “the devil is in the
details”). Not just this outlook but Mies’s spectacular Minimalism, which make ill-
28
thought detail impossible to cover up, influenced Ken. Mies’s glass Farnsworth House
(with its single level and facade plane and slightly lower deck) shows a greater impact
on the Schwartz house (with its single roofline and facade plane and slightly higher
bedroom wing floor line), than the designs of Neutra, who preferred more dramatic
variations in two and three dimensions.
Buckminster Fuller Fuller visited the Architectural Engineering Department at
Cal Poly in 1956, deeply impressing not only Schwartz but the department’s students,
who by 1957 had built the first geodesic dome not under Fuller’s direct supervision
and the first permanent one on the West Coast (op. cit., “Buckminster Fuller”;
“Geodesic Dome is Highlight of Architectural Displays,” El Mustang, 26 Apr. 1957, p.
7). The geodesic dome is formed of triangles that in turn form alternating hexagons
and pentagons (Pierre Cabrol’s 1963 Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, which was
intended to be the first of a chain of geodesic Cinerama theaters, uses precast
concrete hexagons and pentagons for its structure).
Schwartz never built a
geodesic dome, but in 1958
he proposed a hexagonal
roof for the expansion of St.
Stephen’s Episcopal Church,
and in 1966 he designed the
Page-Selkirk house around a
hexagonal hub.
Schwartz’s model for the St.
Stephen’s expansion
On a flat plane rather than a sphere, the Page-Selkirk House’s projecting rectangular
wings imply, in the spaces between, additional hexagons (as in a honeycomb) rather
than pentagons (as in the curvature of a geodesic dome), but Schwartz likely borrowed
this unusual building shape from Fuller rather than bees. That said, he may well have
been aware of Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1948 hexagonal Della Walker House in Monterey,
the architect’s only California coastal commission. He certainly admired Wright, and on
their first trip to New York, in 1960, the family took, “to humor Dad, a tour of Frank
Lloyd Wright’s new spiral Guggenheim Museum” (“A Family Foray to the East Coast”).
The angled forms of concrete block in the Andre House entrance, and the hallway-
ending master bedroom in the Schwartz House, are both Wrightian characteristics.
Design Approach In his memoirs, Schwartz does not espouse grand theories of
design. When he talks about buildings, either as a student or an architect, he talks
29
about solving problems. He describes USC professor Harry Burge, who taught
Professional Practice, as “a favorite of mine”:
Harry taught about how buildings went together, how to keep water out, how
to properly detail windows and doors, how to specify appropriate materials and
workmanship, what constituted a proper set of contract documents, and how to
avoid malpractice lawsuits, et., etc., etc. I can’t remember Harry ever answering
a student’s question. He always answered by asking a question, which meant we
had to go out and find the answer. … We didn’t forget those things we had to
dig out for ourselves (“Return to USC”).
Yet Schwartz is clearly entranced by the aesthetics of Richard Neutra’s house, “set on
a postage-stamp-sized plot of land purchased during the Depression.”
A steep, ladder-like
stair accessed a small
guest room—the
only room on the
third level. The room
was so small it could
only hold three
people at a time. …
The roof of the
second level of the
house was flat and
was flooded with an
inch of water that
acted as insulation. The wall facing Silver Lake was floor to ceiling glass
protected by an overhanging roof. The bed was so low to the floor that when
one lay and looked to the lake, the water on the roof looked to be an extension
of the lake. It was difficult to tell where the roof water ended and the lake water
began—it appeared as if the lake came up to the edge of the window.
Reflections of starlight and moon glow made for additional visual illusions.
Fantastic effects! ("Field Trip Interlude: Richard and Dione Neutra”; the image
above is from the rebuilt house, the original having burnt in 1963)
Certainly Neutra had learned how practically to keep water out, but he also had
learned how aesthetically to bring water in. Ken had an eye for both practical and
aesthetic details, which is key for an architect. He had empathy for how people used
spaces and creativity about how to challenge their uses. But he also had a sense of
visual statement, as in gathering the levels of the Andre House under one sweeping
30
roof, and audacious design, as in sorting people and functions down the spokes of the
Page-Selkirk House.
These showed when George Hasslein and Schwartz designed Mount Carmel Lutheran
Church. A T-shaped lot with a drainage swale—“a design nightmare”—running
through the T’s stem accompanied a “champagne appetite” with $45,000 “beer
budget.” The solution: a simple wood frame, a large flat-floor room without pews so it
could quadruple as a worship space and fellowship hall and for youth sports and
church suppers (a people-based response). Offices, restrooms, and classrooms would
be to the side. Placement in the T’s stem would allow a larger church to be built later.
A large truss running lengthwise would minimize wall loads to adapt to the swale.
Mount Carmel, 1958, contrasting vertical church with horizontal annex. The flat roof,
peaked at the truss, would later be replaced with a sloping roof, ancillary beam ends
cut off, and both cedar siding and concrete base covered with stucco.
31
The aesthetics grew out of
this response. “Roof joists
[above right] would spring
off of the truss and in so
doing impart a unique
exterior expression to the
building. A continuous
skylight on each side of the
truss brought natural light
into the center of the room.
… The exterior wood frame
walls would … be clad
inside and out with vertical
cedar siding” (“Mount
Carmel Lutheran Church”).
Interior cedar remains exposed above concrete base—
between a Gothic chapel, church hall, and gym.
In 1958, when Schwartz was asked to design an expansion of St. Stephen’s, he
proposed it in horizontal redwood shiplap juxtaposed to the 1873 church’s vertical
redwood board and batten, the latter a Carpenter Gothic style that Richard
32
Upjohn had adapted in 1851 for American churches that were based—like St.
Stephen’s—on St. Michael’s Longstanton, a small, elegant thirteenth-century church in
Cambridgeshire that the Ecclesiological Society promoted as an architectural model
for Anglican congregations in the British colonies and Episcopalian ones in the United
States. St. Stephen’s decided to use an architect from their own congregation instead,
but Schwartz later revived the proposed hexagonal roof for the Page-Selkirk House.
Exterior Environment All four houses Ken Schwartz wanted to be remembered
for were designed for hillside sites with stunning views. This California aesthetic is a
function partly of the state’s seismic and volcanic geography and partly of the
aesthetic movements that have accompanied its growth. Flats—easy to build and
productive to settle—were often surrounded by dramatic hills, occupied as a town
expanded: as bohemians looked for solitude, nature, and inexpensive land; as the
wealthy copied bohemians; as the population simply filled up everywhere available.
The iconic hillside retreat—painted repeatedly by William Keith—was the Rev. Joseph
Worcester’s house in Piedmont. Built by the Swedenborgian in 1876, it was the first
Shingle Style house on the West Coast and far more rustic, in style and site, than the
first on the East Coast: William Ralph Emerson’s 2½-story for a Boston gentleman at
the seaside resort of Mount Desert, Maine, published in American Architect in 1879.
William Keith, A View of the Rev. Joseph Worcester’s House, Piedmont, circa 1883
33
Worcester, who was well
connected to architects on
both coasts, convinced a
parishioner around 1888 to
build three rustic shingle
houses on the remote top
of Russian Hill in San
Francisco and built a fourth
himself in 1890. Then in
1892 the architect Willis
Polk added a shingle
duplex, split down the
middle, for his family and
the artist Dora Norton
Williams, which rambled
dramatically down the hill in
six stories.
Williams-Polk House, 1890s. The street facade is to the
right. California Historical Society.
California hillside architecture invented the urban recluse: a citizen who was part of the
city, observed the city, and was distinct from the city. This cliff-dweller also had the
view of the city in its natural context of water and wasteland: the unbuilt areas.
Polk’s contemporary, Bernard Maybeck,
went on to design hillside houses for
himself and others in the Bay Area from
the 1890s to the Wallen Maybeck House,
Hilltop, in 1937. From 1919 to 1947,
Maybeck’s younger collaborator, Julia
Morgan, designed and supervised the
construction of California’s greatest
hilltop house, La Cuesta Encantada—
Hearst Castle.
A sketch by Morgan of La Cuesta
Encantanda. Cal Poly Special Collections.
34
Hillside architecture made a different
mark in the desert, rocks, and chaparral
of Southern California, without the
chance to integrate into forest through
shingle walls and redwood interiors,
characteristics of Worcester’s cottage
and the subsequent First Bay Tradition.
Raymond Chandler’s 1940 novel
Farewell, My Lovely describes the LA
version: “Montemar Vista was a few
dozen houses of various sizes and shapes
hanging by their teeth and eyebrows to a
spur of mountain and looking as if a
good sneeze would drop them down
among the box lunches on the beach”
(Stories and Early Novels [New York:
Library of America, 1995], p. 799).
Schindler’s 1928 Wolfe Summer House,
Avalon, Catalina Island.
The Southern California hillside house was more artificial in angularity, material, and
landscaping. Neutra and Schindler’s houses looked less like bohemian retreats than
Modernist outposts. Their descendants—Pierre Koenig’s 1959 Case Study House #22,
John Lautner’s 1949 Sheats Apartments and 1960 Chemosphere, and Harry Gessner’s
1959 Boat Houses—look like futuristic space ships that have just landed.
Lautner’s Chemosphere, Hollywood Hills
San Luis Obispo was a midpoint between
these two traditions. Schwartz was more
inclined to employ wood and stone than
Southern California hillside architects,
who favored concrete, stucco, plastic,
and metal. He had no hesitation,
however, to use large expanses of plate
glass: to provide views, integrate indoors
with outdoors, and make a statement
about light and transparent building
fabric. “Neutra’s influence became
35
evident as I tried to keep our floor areas minimal … but walls as open as possible to
enfold the magnificent views,” writes Schwartz of his own house, which integrated
wood and plastic in its dominating lighting fixtures (“Monterey Heights”).
The hexagonal, spoked Page-Selkirk House (above) looked like a space ship softened
with wood and functioning with the environment. As Shirley Selkirk says of the spaces
between the spokes, “You can pick your alcove depending on the time of day.”
Despite his Los Angeles origins, USC education, and leading of Cal Poly’s Los Angeles
field trips, Schwartz’s designs have commonality with Second Bay Tradition architects
like Joseph Esherick and Henry Hill—though perhaps naturally they remain closest to
Neutra’s Bay Area adaptations, like his 1937 Darling House in San Francisco, whose
street facade, with its arrangement of boxes and planes, is a precursor to the view
facade of the Pimentel-Orth House.
Darling House. Julius Shulman.
Pimentel-Orth House
36
The unbuilt lot at 201 Buena Vista with the pepper tree growing out of the swale, the
Schwartzes’ 1960 Ford Falcon parked in front, and 201 today. Schwartz placed the
carport in the swale, the public rooms on a plane above, and the private wing raised on
the lateral incline of the hill. “The base of the gnarled old pepper tree would become
the point from which I established all the levels of the house. The tree would become a
major interest point captured in the views … “ (“Monterey Heights”).
Use In Mount Carmel Lutheran Church, Hasslein and Schwartz created a form—
and convinced the congregation to accept it—that would have the unity of a
traditional church edifice from the outside but, without fixed furniture or overt
messaging, have multiple uses on the inside: the ecclesiastical equivalent of a family
room. The four tall, narrow windows on each side squared the lancet window but also
provided functional cross-ventilation; they and two taller, narrower stained glass
windows at each end, which reflected the church calendar in the colors of their glass,
provided a sense of sanctuary from the outside. A delicately attached wing of
classrooms, offices, kitchen, and restrooms, where greater numbers of smaller groups
would gather, telegraphed their lower status with shorter height but their sense of
purpose with emphasized breadth. Hasslein and Schwartz placed everything at the
front of the T lot to anticipate expansion at the back: planned obsolescence.
Shortly after Mount Carmel, Schwartz was called on to design a domestic space for the
Andre family. With a lot that could have accommodated half a dozen houses, he
placed the structure at the highest point that was closest to access and facing the
landmark of Cerro San Luis. Once again he thrust the private rooms (not offices and
classrooms now but bedrooms and bathrooms, kitchen and garage) to the sides.
Interior dining level leading to bedrooms
Sunken living room and balcony in front
He crossed this axis with another formed by a vast, almost church-like linear public
space running from the front to the back of the house under a single canopy: front
balcony, living room, dining area, and back dining patio. This time the public space
was transverse to the roof beam so it was able to descend down the hill, with a sunken
living room that created a separateness without walls from indoor and outdoor dining.
Floor-to-ceiling glass walls with glass doors to the front balcony and back patio made
indoor and outdoor space continuous.
Schwartz borrowed from
Gregory Ain, installing a
floating line of kitchen
cabinets to allow eyes upon
the kids everywhere under
the canopy. The kitchen has
a lower beam extending to
the carports for a more
intimate space (unlike
Usonian kitchens, which
shared the high ceilings of
the public spaces, resulting
in inaccessible cabinets).
Schwartz also placed the bedroom wing under a lower beam, with children’s
bedrooms at the dining level and the master suite slightly higher up the hill—but still
under the same side roof canopy—in back. Because the view is out the front of the
hillside house with no privacy issues, that is where the big windows are, with higher
privacy windows for the bedroom wing as it looks onto the dining patio in back,
reversing Ain’s arrangement for the small city house. The master bedroom, however,
has a sliding glass door, which would become a Schwartz signature.
Lot 29 is 201 Buena Vista Avenue, the
Schwartzes’ lot.
With the Pimentel-Orth House, Schwartz communicated a greater degree of
informality and even eccentricity. “I didn’t even have to ask them how they lived, how
many kids they had, or whether they liked to play poker. All that stuff I already knew”
(Monterey Heights).
It was a lot that descended rather than ascended from the street. (When the Pimentels
and Schwartzes bought the lots together, Ken wanted the south-facing lot on Buena
Vista Avenue; fortunately, the Pimentels wanted the west-facing one on Paso Robles
Drive.) Where the Andre carriage drive mounted directly to the wide, centrally-cresting
facade, Schwartz oriented the Pimentels’ house to the hill’s slope, at a 45-degree
angle from the street entrance, its initial appearance to visitors a carport, flat roof, and
view beyond.
Schwartz designed the house in two stories to maximize the steep, small lot, with two-
thirds of the floor space on the upper floor and a third on the lower. It would be about
50 percent larger than the Pimentels’ Goldtree Tract house, which they felt they’d
outgrown. As with such descending houses, the upper was the public floor (also
accommodating a master suite, later used as a den), and the lower was the children’s
floor with two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a “den” with a wardrobe (later used as a
bedroom). Key differences from Goldtree were one extra room (Dick Pimentel’s
parents liked to visit from San Jose) and an extra bathroom. The upper floor was also a
foot taller, with open beams and rafters, giving a sense of spaciousness.
Northwest facade: carport; above, window for master bedroom; below, window (later
sliding glass door) for bedroom 3 (later master bedroom); balcony at right
With Californian casualness and practicality, Schwartz placed the living room and
kitchen entries adjacent and parallel to each other but slightly offset under the carport
canopy. The living room entry presented first, but the visitor was left to choose, like a
Monty Hall contestant, which was the right door. (Schwartz also placed a sliding glass
door, screened from the driveway, on the southeast façade, communicating between
the landings of exterior and interior flights of stairs, midway between upper and lower
floors, offering an out-of-the-way children’s entrance.)
On the southwest wall, opposite both kitchen and living room entrances, to draw the
eye and the person, Schwartz placed an elbow glass wall, which provided 25 linear
feet of near floor-to-ceiling light and views southwest (to Cerro San Luis) and
northwest (to Bishop Peak) and led to a viewing balcony, for the “spectacular sunsets
silhouetting the old morros before darkening behind the distant Irish Hills.” For
morning, the southeast wall had nearly another hundred square feet of glass including
and above the sliding glass door landing entrance. The master bedroom had an 8’
wide, 4’ tall window facing northwest, good for sunsets and also sleeping in late.
The effect was somewhat like a viewing platform on a tower, reminiscent of Irving
Gill’s 1919 Horatio West Court in Santa Monica, which placed the bedrooms on the
ground floor and living rooms on the second floor for the views through ribbon
windows. Horatio West Court was on urban flatland. The Pimentel-Orth tower, on a
hill, was entered from its porous upper instead of lower floor.
Lorraine and Jan’s Modernist backyard A-frame, 1961.
On flat Santa Clara Street,
Ken had built a ten-foot-tall
play structure with white
plywood shear wall. While
the Pimentels were on
vacation, he added two
blue eyes overlooking their
backyard with the legend
“Whacha doing
Pimentels?,” visible to all
houses down the line. He
offered to paint it out; Dick
Pimentel wanted it left.
With a site beneath a remote hillside street, with the surrounding houses below and
facing away from theirs, no one was watching the Pimentels now. As if in expiation for
his earlier A-frame, Schwartz gave full advantage to the fact that they were now
viewing without being viewed. Although their house was only about 1,500 square feet,
their architect had opened it up to the morros and their valleys.
When it came to designing his own house a year later, however, Schwartz made
numerous refinements to the machine for living. The Schwartz House was closer to
twice the size of a Goldtree house. Schwartz, like Jack Ouzounian, who also had a lot
upsloping from the street, put it all on a single axis on one level—almost. Three steps
led up from the Schwartzes’ kitchen–dining room–living room square to the bedroom–
bathroom–den wing. Besides being a physical acknowledgement of the westerly
lateral rise, this gave the bedroom wing a more intimate height under the house’s
single flat roof and inverted the usual rhythm of such wings by pushing it up rather
than (as with the Andre house) down or (as with the Pimentel-Orth House) to a
separate floor. The three steps also gave greater differentiation to the height of the
public rooms than in the Pimentel-Orth House. Adding to the airiness was the fact that
the entire front wall of the living room was glass and two sides of the dining room.
Schwartz tucked carport and utilities below. He admired Jack Ouzounian’s departure
from his neighbors in building a steep hillside driveway to the back instead of digging
a garage out from under the house, but on a shallow gore lot Schwartz had little
choice in order to keep cars out of view of a largely glass house. Ken loved his cars,
but they were not to interfere with his meticulous landscape architecture, and
conveniently a swale ran through the property where the carport could go. This also
had the effect of raising the house rather than, as with the Pimentel House, dropping
it into the hillside, so there could be a set of rooms along the hill side of the private
wing’s hall, with natural lighting and ventilation.
Schwartz opened the long, narrow kitchen at one end to the dining room and at the
other toward the foyer, but he screened the bulk of it from the living room, with no
floating cabinets. Apparently Lorraine and Jan did not need watching. (“We like to live
informally but in an orderly way,” Ken revealed to Los Angeles Times Home Magazine
in 1967.)1 A narrow hallway lit by a skylight and fluorescence above an opaque plastic
ceiling screen was lined on street side by children’s bedrooms and on hill side by den,
toilet (convenient for guests; the Pimentels’ only upstairs bathroom was in their
bedroom), and children’s bathroom; it opened to a master suite at the end (a Usonian
feature). Logically, and unlike the house of the Pimentels (who also has a girl and boy),
Lorraine and Jan’s rooms were identical in size and scarcely different in layout.
The Schwartz House is as close as San Luis Obispo could probably come, a house
fronting a suburban street would want to come, and the Schwartz family could afford
to come to Mies’s Farnsworth House (design exhibited in 1947, completed in 1951)
and Philip Johnson’s Glass House (1949). Schwartz installed floor-to-ceiling street- and
view-facing glass to front not only the whole of the living room but half of the master
bedroom and more than half of each of the children’s rooms. Floor to ceiling glass also
cornered the dining area, looked out into a back pocket garden as one reached the
top of the entry stairs, formed the stair tower’s clerestory, looked onto a side garden
from the master bedroom, and formed one wall of the master bathroom (though not,
like Lynne Livingston’s, with a view to Catalina but rather to an enclosure from the
neighbors). Privacy was provided in the front by drapes and on the back and sides by
hillside, plants, or fencing.
Schwartz had designed a house of light, lightness, and views—without the purism of
Mies or Johnson but with suburban livability, for the Farnsworth and Glass Houses
were both on secluded estates. Schwartz was more audacious that Ain or Neutra, who
avoided fronting their street facades with glass. But the Schwartz House would be the
perfect house for a mayor who strove to bring transparency to city government.
Schwartz wanted to build an ascending house for the steep upslope lot of Hubert and
Shirley Page, but they anticipated when they would be older they would want to live
on one level. (Arguably, Ken’s entry stairs in the Schwartz House kept him going into
his nineties, but they triumphed over him at the very end.)
After the Pages rejected his first design, Schwartz tucked garage and carport under a
viewing deck and put together a house on one level that rotated from a hexagon
(revived from his St. Stephen’s design) that combining kitchen, dining, and family
room. Three square, lower-ceilinged spokes consisted of (1) a children’s bedroom,
bathroom, and laundry wing; (2) a parents’ bedroom and bathroom wing; and (3) an
entry–living room–study wing with a deep overhang over its southwest-facing deck,
which from above makes it look longer than the others.
1. Douglas M. Simmonds, “Crisp Eye-Catcher … on a Site Too Bad to Be True,” Los
Angeles Times Home, 15 Oct. 1967, pp. 18–21.
Between the hexagon’s twenty-foot-wide spokes were eight-food sides: one a kitchen
wall and window, one a sliding glass door, and the third with a brick fireplace and high
window above it. Shirley Page Selkirk did not want a sliding glass door there because
she did not want people peering in from the entry. The fireplace allowed a high
window by moving the chimney outside.
In the Page-Selkirk House, Schwartz rearranged the presentation of family life in a
virtuoso fashion while keeping it both practically and symbolically centered. Children
and parents were neither on separate floors (as with Pimentel-Orth House) nor in the
same wing on separate levels (as with the Andre House) nor in the same wing on the
same level (as with Schwartz House). Uniquely among the four houses, Page-Selkirk
had two separate entertainment spaces, the less formal hub and the more formal living
room. There were also four logically and spatially distinct outdoor areas, the three
alcoves between the spokes and the viewing deck at the end of the living room spoke.
Schwartz was not doctrinaire about arranging openings to the outside world: the living
room spoke had a sliding glass door at the end; the parents’ spoke had one at the
side opening to an alcove; the boys’ room wing had none; and the hub had one on a
non-entrance alcove side.
The hexagonal hub echoed the octagon houses of the nineteenth century, but those
had interiors awkwardly divided into square and triangular rooms. Buckminster Fuller
visited the Cal Poly Architectural Engineering Department (and Ken’s Santa Clara
Street house) in 1957, and after he left, the students promptly built a geodesic dome,
the first without Fuller’s onsite inspection (“Buckminster Fuller”). But geodesic domes
were also awkward to divide into rooms. Schwartz came up with the solution, a
hexagonal hub and spokes: the centripetal family/public area, which centrifugal private
areas thrown out to the sides.
Resources Schwartz in his Memoir goes into some detail about the resources
available—slim—for Mount Carmel Lutheran Church and the fact that design and
materials were both predicated on the low budget. (With Ochs’ contractor’s bid it
came in under budget, which paid for the freestanding metal crosses.)
Schwartz was working in a small community that was not used to showing off where
housing was concerned. Even the Hollister-Jack family, one of the largest and richest
landowners in the state, built, in the Jack House—which Ken was to acquire for the city
at Peter Andre’s initiative—a modest Italianate villa with no servants’ quarters, though
it did boast a one-acre landscape fronting its utilitarian corral and orchard.
Apart from Ken’s own house, the Andre House—built for a civically active lawyer from
a prominent family—was the closest to a showplace, but it was also, indeed primarily,
designed to be a family home. The Andres had been living in a tract house but had a
horse property on Murray Hill. “A new home should incorporate the vistas and provide
ample space for an active family,” Ken wrote of this commission in his Memoir. “There
was to be a bedroom and bath for a maid and, importantly, patio space for
barbecuing and outdoor dining, which Peter was fond of” (“Peter Andre”).
Nielsen Construction built the house, employing “craftsmen who could attend to the
unique details” in Schwartz’s design. These included wall stonework and wall and floor
tilework in the living room; exposed beams, plank ceilings, and paneling in the public
areas; and decorative cuts in the rafter tails.
Andre living room: exposed posts and beams, river
stone, plank soffits, matching rafter tail and balcony
joist carving, board and batten siding, glass corner, and
balustrade construction reminiscent of Gerrit Rietveld’s
1918 De Stijl Red and Blue Chair (right),
Yet the Andre House doesn’t come across as
pretentious; the craftsman details and structural
exposure confer a rustic warmth appropriate to a
lifestyle revolving around horses and barbecuing: a city
house for a ranching family. They also balance what
could have been coldness from the expanses of glass.
The Pimentel-Orth House was built for a Cal Poly professor also upgrading from a
tract house to a hillside house but necessarily a more modest house on a more modest
lot on a more modest income. It was more practically two stories because of the small
size of the lot. The effect of the Andres’ more expensive board and batten
exterior, a siding popularized by Cliff
May, is achieved with V-groove vertical
shiplap. To good effect, Schwartz
reprised his Masonite panels above and
below windows, this time creating
aesthetic unity between upper and lower
floors. Schwartz exposed rafters topped
by plank ceilings on the upper floor, but
they are not carved at the end, and apart
from the carport and balcony overhang,
the house was eaveless, a Neutraesque
touch. The roof was flat, hence without a
huge central truss and cavernous space,
and there was no rustic but expensive
stone accent wall (indeed originally no
fireplace at all. The house was relaxed but
rational, with splendid views but austere
in itself.
Pimentel-Orth balcony above bathroom
and bedroom: effect depends on
arrangement, not rich material or detailing
The Schwartzes had as slender means as the Pimentels, but Ken’s house had to be a
showplace, though one for architects and architecture students—who might have a
similar experience to what he had had sitting on Richard Neutra’s floor—not the
center of a political machine. He built it when he was chair of the Planning
Commission, before he had any thoughts of running for mayor, and at any event,
lavish entertaining was not what mayors in San Luis Obispo did. He was the thinking
man and thinking woman’s mayor, and his den and orderly living room were the
carefully designed settings for rational discussions with individuals or small groups.
Jan with one of his retaining walls
Schwartz “fell in love with a steel-framed
structure … only to discover the design
was ahead of local contractors’ expertise”
(“Monterey Heights”), so it was back to
wood post and beam. He worked to limit
floor area to less than two thousand
square feet, but even so, the extended
family would have to do much of the
construction themselves to make the
house affordable. Martha’s father, Pop
Riggio, took care of the plumbing and
called in favors for the fixtures. Martha
did 90 percent of the painting, following
the carpenters around to prime their
splices. Lorraine installed most of the
wiring, which the electrician connected.
Jan built broken-concrete retaining walls.
Everyone pitched in on insulation, hearth,
lighting soffits. They hung sheets in front
of the magnificent windows for months
before there was money to buy drapes—
a situation neither Mies nor Johnson had
to deal with in their glass houses. (When a
bridge access road was built 250 feet
from her famous weekend retreat, Edith
Farnsworth fled to her Italian villa.)
The Los Angeles Times Home Magazine
shot of Schwartz House living room, 15
October 1967. Douglas M. Simmonds.
Ken and Lorraine hanging shelves
Despite being homemade, there was
nothing rustic about the house, sleeker
than anything Schwartz designed before
or after, with plasterboard and hardwood
plywood paneling, textured ceilings,
panel lighting, built-in furniture, and glass
integrated wherever it could practicably
go. Outside it had complete economy of
form and musical rhythm, its vertical
redwood shiplap, shaped balcony
balusters, drapes, door frames, and even
(eventually) its pale eucalyptus trunks
creating variant but harmonious
repetitions between the horizontal white
fascia boards. The house looked layout
perfect and occupied multi-page spreads
in the Los Angeles Times in 1967 and
Perfect Home (a national real estate
magazine with local editions) in 1973.
For the last of these houses, the 1966 Page-Selkirk, Schwartz employed the simplest
siding possible: plain plywood sheathing. Vertical battens and horizontal boards to
cover seams produced a varied and harmonious grid. Like the Pimentel and Schwartz
Houses, the Page-Selkirk spokes were flat-roofed in asphalt and the interiors sheathed
with plasterboard. The hexagonal hub, however, sloping and shingled, was richer in
interior fabric, with interior paneling of redwood plywood, a brick fireplace, and wood-
plank ceiling circling a central hexagonal skylight.
Again, there were homemade aspects.
Bruce Selkirk, who had built a Bitudobe
near Cayucos, and Shirley Page Selkirk
laid Mexican tile in the hexagonal hub,
pulling it up and re-relaying it when it was
clear it wasn’t going to come out right.
Shirley designed and constructed the
exterior lighting fixtures. She also
designed the first set of steps leading up
to the house; Bruce, the steps that
replaced them. Bruce took down the rear
pergola. After Bruce’s death, Shirley
rebuilt it in order to please Ken.
The Page-Selkirk House stands out not for extravagant resources but for resourceful
design and—as Shirley required—views in several directions. Its clever employment of
common materials and the involvement in design and construction of its owners
provides a substantial part of its organic charm.
Materials Ken Schwartz’s materials were not simply dictated by budgets and
availability, they were matters of vision. But for the LA Modernists that Schwartz most
admired—Neutra and Ain—making good architecture affordable was part of the
architect’s vision.
Neutra built showplaces for the film star Anna Sten and director Josef von Sternberg
in 1934 and 1935, but between 1933 and 1936 he also built twenty houses costing less
than $5,000.2 His middle-class clients included high school teachers, college
professors, retirees, a psychologist, a sales manager, and small businesspeople, and
the exterior materials included stucco, wood, and metal (Hines, op. cit., 115–126). His
metal house for a Cal Tech engineering professor won the small house category of the
Better Homes in America Competition, sponsored by Architectural Forum and CBS, in
1934; one that was sheathed with plywood inside and out (as Schwartz’s Page-Selkirk
House would be) won second place in General Electric’s 1935 Small House
Competition; and Neutra entered in the 1936 California House and Garden Exhibition
in Los Angeles another plywood house, which was won in a raffle and moved to
Westwood. In 1938 and ’39, Neutra did designs for the Bildcost series of Better
2. “Plywood House,” Architectural Forum, July 1936, p. 38.
Homes and Gardens and the National Small House Competition of the Ladies’ Home
Journal, with plans of the latter obtainable for one dollar.
By 1937 Neutra had designed his first redwood-clad building, the clapboard Darling
House (pictured earlier), appropriately in San Francisco, where the First and Second
Bay Traditions held sway. Two years later his Davey House, clad with vertical redwood
planks (as Schwartz would clad his own family’s house) was built in Monterey, and in
the same year he completed three redwood houses in Los Angeles with horizontal
wood on the house walls and vertical on the garage doors. Schwartz would reverse
this arrangement on his own house when he finally installed garage doors.
Neutra’s plywood house, California House and Garden Exhibition, 1936, detail. Julius
Shulman.
Pitched roofs, exposed beams, plank ceilings, and brick fireplaces entered Neutra’s
idiom by the 1940s. Wood walls, ceilings, and exposed beams had been in Schindler’s
repertoire from the 1920s, heavy and juxtaposed with concrete in his more Brutalist
oeuvre. But in the 1940s Schindler even adopted the stone accent wall and Neutra the
board and batten exterior, both seen in Schwartz’s Andre House. The LA Minimalist
masters were edging away, for the time being, from the smooth-surfaced boxes of
Adolf Loos as they ceded ground to Cliff May, Sunset, and Mid-Century Modern. But
they and their clients would soon move back to Minimalism.
Schwartz took materials seriously, as evidenced by his irritation at the resurfacing of
Mount Carmel, after which he never again drove down Fredericks Street. The church’s
vertical natural wood planks were not just a light and economical structural solution,
they had aesthetic and environmental significance—from the First and Second Bay
Traditions; the board-and-batten Carpenter Gothic of Richard Upjohn, which Schwartz
saw at St. Stephen’s, for which he designed an expansion as soon as he was finished
with Mount Carmel; even in Neutra’s
exterior board and batten and
contrasting horizontal parapet planking,
as well as interior vertical and horizontal
plank paneling, in the 1939 National
Youth Administration Center at Cal Poly,
where Schwartz and Hasslein’s
department was housed. (This Neutra
work has also been—insanely—covered in
stucco and refenestrated to banality.)
Neutra paneling and brickwork behind
cubicles, NYA Center, Cal Poly
Neutra’s 1939 National Youth Administration Center, Cal Poly. Julius Shulman.
In the Mount Carmel church, the vertical cedar planks provided a counterpoint to the
white horizontality of the annex’s deep eaves, beams, fascias, and extended
superstructure (with all of which Neutra experimented in the 1940s and ’50s) and of
the church’s own concrete base and massive truss. The planks provided a rhythmic
echo of the tall windows, themselves echoing the lancet windows of the ecclesiastical
past. Vertical cedar inside and out provided unity. “Ornament and Crime,“ Loos called
a 1910 essay. “God is in the details,” as Schwartz quoted Mies. Functionalism stripped
ornament so detail could be seen.
Hasslein and Schwartz’s church with its classroom and office annex is a lost
masterpiece of the integration of materials and design. Sadly, the white stucco
suburban Modernist church would become a cliché when the First Methodist Church
of La Verne (Ladd and Kelsey, 1961) appeared in The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967).
Schwartz carried on his dedication to materials to his domestic buildings (Mount
Carmel wasn’t altered till they were built). Each of the four he wanted to be
remembered by has a wood and glass exterior, but in each the wood takes a different
rhythmic form: vertical board and batten for the Andre House (with one exterior and
interior stone accent wall for the fireplace), vertical V-groove shiplap for the Pimentel-
Orth House, vertical redwood nickel-gap shiplap for the Schwartz House, and plain
plywood for the Page-Selkirk House. (His St. Stephen’s proposal employed horizontal
redwood plank.)
Andre House: Brick,
concrete block,
board and batten,
masonite, opaque
glass, carved rafter
tail
Pimentel-Orth
House: Fixed glass,
sliding window,
Masonite, V-groove
shiplap
Schwartz House:
Nickel-gap shiplap,
stucco, tile, tree
Page-Selkirk House:
Plywood sheathing,
battens, fixed glass,
V-groove shiplap
soffit, plain beams,
wood-strip lamp
Wood, the most common material for nineteenth-century architecture in San Luis and
suited to its small-town, ranching-country nature (as Alex Madonna intuited in 1958 for
his supermotel), was also a favorite for the early twentieth-century American
Craftsman/California Bungalow style that derived from Greene and Greene. The
Greene brothers were masters of wood as an interior and exterior material and of
creating wood-built spaces like porches, balconies, and pergolas that were medial to
the planted environment.
By the 1920s, however, wood was being supplanted by brick, stucco, concrete, and
metal in everything from Eclectic revivalisms to the Moderne. California Modernism—
interested in forging a connection between a house and the local environment but
also with a social interest in cost—ultimately turned to wood, finding that it also
softened the impact for clients of Minimalism, Functionalism, and walls of glass.3
The Schwartz House with its original natural redwood coloring and open carport, 1965
The nature of wood—its linearity combined with the subtle shading, graining, and
finishes that communicate warmth, as well as its history and tradition in building—
humanized the new, huge plates of glass moving from industrial and commercial to
domestic architecture, to machines for living. Schwartz took advantage of this
interplay by combining wood and glass for his exteriors and using wood selectively
and effectively in his interiors. His interiors have exposed beams and plank ceilings
3. “The … McIntoshes [in 1939] were willing to go only ‘so far’ toward the brave new
world of the International Style and gladly accepted Neutra’s suggestion of the more
familiar and ‘homey’ redwood as a compromise. He thereupon transferred the ribbon
windows and other Modernist trademarks to this medium. Schindler had already done
this with success, and Wright at the time was beginning his kindred series of Usonian
houses” (Thomas S. Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture
[Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994], p. 126 ).
(Andre, Pimentel Orth, and Page-Selkirk), paneling (Andre, Schwartz, and Page-
Selkirk), doors and cabinetry (all four houses), lighting fixtures (Schwartz and [designed
and built by the client] Page-Selkirk), built-in furniture (Schwartz), and even (but very
rarely) floors (the revised Schwartz dining room, originally linoleum). Schwartz
juxtaposed glass to wood posts and wall beams, ran his beams and plank ceilings
outside above glass walls, used wood for exterior soffits and balcony floors, visible
from the inside, and drew the eye with wood balustrades for his balconies, pergolas
for his patios, which created a half-world between wood structure and living plant. The
exterior siding was even carried into the master bedroom in the Schwartz House.
Redwood plywood walls and soffits rise to a complex network of rafters with a plank
ceiling and hexagonal skylight in the Page-Selkirk house.
For Schwartz, glass introduced light and views: in the Pimentel-Orth and Page Selkirk
Houses in copious amounts, in the Andre and Schwartz Houses in spectacular
amounts. Today’s ubiquity of the metal-framed sliding glass door belies its
revolutionary appearance in Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye in 1929, in Neutra’s buildings
in the thirties and forties, and in the work of more mainstream architects like Cliff May
after World War II. Even the glass doors of Mies’s 1947/1951 Farnsworth House in
Illinois and Johnson’s 1949 Glass House in Connecticut are standard size and hinged,
as are those of the 1949 Charles and Ray Eames House (Case Study House #8) in LA.
Metal-framed sliding glass doors are rare in Case Study Houses before the 1950s. The
glass doors in Wright’s 1956 Kundert Clinic, the most avant-garde structure during
Schwartz’s early years in town, were framed in wood and turned on piano hinges.
Hence Schwartz’s huge metal-framed sliding glass doors set in a fixed glass wall in the
Andre House were a big deal, and they remained the cutting edge of Modernism in
the Pimentel-Orth, Schwartz, and Page-Selkirk Houses. The glass corners in the Andre
House and Pimentel-Orth House living rooms and Schwartz dining room were also a
big deal and two decades later were introduced to the Pimentel-Orth kitchen, now
with the corner post removed from the structure with a spider leg outrigger.
Would Schwartz have employed even more glass in his own house if he could have
used steel framing, like Pierre Koenig’s iconic 1959 Stahl House/Case Study House
#22? The Stahl, all wall from the street entrance, floats far above West Hollywood, to
which it presents all glass. But people who live in glass houses shouldn’t front them to
suburban streets. Schwartz, like Neutra, accented surroundings by creating partial
views and accented openness by creating partial privacy. Windows were a necessary
corollary of walls in premodernism, walls a necessary corollary of windows in
Modernism. But Ken Schwartz was not in the aquarium business.
Schwartz dining room in the Los Angeles Times, 1967: California Moderne as high tech
Spanish ramada. Douglas M. Simmonds.
Construction Post and beam construction allowed small-scale architecture the
open floor plans; wide, floor-to-ceiling expanses of plate glass; and structural
expression that were key to Minimalism and Functionalism. For California, it was suited
to hillsides and resistant to earthquakes. (If you needed to protect against nuclear
fallout, Ken told the Pentagon, you could pile books against the walls.) Post and beam
was a throwback to the time before the balloon-frame and box frame, whose structural
soundness depended on walls—before even the load-bearing adobe—came to
dominate construction in the Old West because of their ability to be produced by non-
experts. Post and beam was a throwback to the earliest European structures in
California, the ramada and jacal, whose roofs provided protection from sun and rain
and whose walls, in the California climate, were an afterthought.
In the Andre House, Schwartz dramatically expressed the beams, including with
contrasting color, though he largely camouflaged the posts in walls, except for the
front and back walls made of glass. In the Pimentel-Orth House, Schwartz also
exposed beams, dark-stained against light wood ceilings, though in this flat-roofed,
boxlike structure, they appear functional rather than dramatic.
In his own house, Schwartz expressed the wall beams and posts in the living area in
sometimes dark stained wood and sometimes white painted wood, but for the first
time he covered up roof structure with a drop ceiling. The effect is the smooth
Neutraesque or Miesian box. He contrasted the two aesthetics in the Page-Selkirk
House: the wings smooth, white, and finished on the interior, contrasting with the
beamed, bricked, tiled, plank-ceilinged and plywood-paneled hexagonal hub, with the
same flavor of the great hall of manor.
Interior Space Ken Schwartz’s quote to the Los Angeles Times Home Magazine
in 1967 is key: “We like to live informally but in an orderly way.” Schwartz excelled in
open, informal living spaces, but he created these by keeping their focus strongly
formal in logic and geometry.
Mount Carmel Lutheran Church, designed as a multi-use hall, nonetheless was
elongated, with a massive truss flanked by skylights to emphasize its length and four
windows on either side of its midpoint to emphasize its breadth, in providing both
light and cross-breezes. Thus despite being a multi-use rectangle, in its interaction
with the environment, it was an implied cruciform.
In the Andre House, Schwartz also used these crossing axes, with the family’s private
or utilitarian aspects (carport, laundry, kitchen, bedrooms and bathrooms) distributed
along the side of the hill and its social aspects (dining, living, and viewing) descending
down the hill in indoor and outdoor spaces on two levels enclosed by their own vast
canopy. Having arrived by a sweeping carriage drive, one entered by a pathway along
the utilitarian axis and was admitted into the social axis, which immediately pulled one
to the left or right, up- or downhill.
The Pimentel-Orth House presented a 45-degree angle to the entrance from the
street, but the drive curved under a carport/porte cochère that formed a right angle to
the axis running along the hillside. From the porte cochère one entered, through
either the front door or parallel but offset kitchen door, and faced the viewing balcony
with its three surfaces of floor-to-ceiling glass forming one interior and one exterior
angle, the one light and view source in the opposing wall.
The front door allowed one the choice to descend, to one’s left, the stairs to the lower
floor (or sliding glass landing door) or enter the upper living and dining area (by
making a jog to one’s right around a partial divider). The upstairs and downstairs
spaces ran perpendicular to this entry axis. Much as in the Andre House, one entered
at a right angle to the axis one was presented with, though unlike the Andre House,
one’s view of the feature of the room—the glass wall—was directly in front rather than
oblique to the left or right, and one was drawn to it by the line of the beams, while the
beam lines in the Andre House drew to either side.
Perhaps this arrangement was logical but ultimately too complex. The Orths
abandoned the front door and switched to the kitchen door for entry.
The dining room–kitchen axis with the
kitchen’s full-length and -width, wood-
framed, opaque plastic light panel
Entry was more complex in the Schwartz
House but felicitously offered fewer
choices. One walked up exterior stairs to
the west, turned north,then east to face
the front door, was admitted into the stair
tower, and then turned north again to
mount the interior steps, confronted at
top through an impermeable floor-to-
ceiling window by an Eckboesque
garden: a private experience for the
entrant, as neither flanking den nor
kitchen opened to it.
At this point one might turn to west to
mount the three steps to the private wing
of bedrooms, bathrooms, and den
(obscured from visitors by a wall and coat
closet) or turn east to the living room
(which invited the gaze over a
balustrade).
The greater living area was divided into
three parallel east-west axes—living room
in the center, kitchen and dining room to
the north, balcony to the south—any of
which one might choose.
The living room balcony followed the same line as the bedrooms’ balcony, though
interrupted by the function of the laterally transparent stair tower and the bedroom
balconies’ privacy wall. The interior kitchen wall continued as the interior wall of den
and bathrooms along the private wing. Shared hallway and shared bedroom balcony
sandwiched the private bedrooms (boy’s, girl’s, and parents’) between them
somewhat like the interior hallway and exterior deck of a ship, allowing privacy but
providing connection. The stair tower and inaccessible garden crossed the main house
not only horizontally but vertically, a double cruciform. As the tower thrust to the
front, it pulled the garden from the back. Offset and thrusting out the back was the
den, the whole like a sliding tile puzzle.
The tripartite axes of the Page-Selkirk House upset all these right-angle notions of
logic. Again, the visitor entered through the side of one wing and could then turn right
into the more formal living room or left into the less formal living, dining, and cooking
hub. But no wing crossed another, and the house was randomly permeable by sliding
glass doors at wing end (living room wing), wing side (master bedroom wing), and hub
(the one side occupied by neither fireplace, kitchen, or wings). It defied the right-
angled traffic grid, handed down from the ancient Athenian marketplace to the
American city plan from Manhattan to San Francisco to San Luis (which has two grids,
one oriented by the Spanish to the prevailing winds and the other by the Americans to
the compass points). It was a grid suited, inside and out, to the rectangularity of
buildings. Though the most complex of any of Schwartz’s houses, the Page-Selkirk
House is perhaps the only one whose informality invites disorder.
Page-Selkirk House from the street, showing stairs, living room spoke, and deck
Interior-Exterior Interplay Ken Schwartz designed California Dream houses:
clean, spacious, informal, modern, light-filled, view-endowed. It was a dream nurtured
by Greene and Greene, Maybeck, Morgan, Schindler, Neutra, Ain, Eckbo, the Second
Bay Tradition, the Case Study architects, and many others. Schwartz had a keen sense
not just of the landscape but of the landscape architecture that should surround a
house; of light not just from windows and glass walls but skylights, clerestories, and
panels; not just of portals and rooms but of the flow of people into and out of them.
Schwartz offered one way for the visitor to enter the house, carefully choreographed
by the architect, but there were myriad ways to then move into and back from the
surrounding landscapes, as one was subsumed into the family and its circle in informal
San Luis. Ken’s own house had seven glass doors: from dining room, living room, each
children’s room, both exterior sides of the master bedroom, and even the master
bathroom (over a footbridge above the sunken tub).
That is the essence of a Schwartz house: its interior-exterior interplay is not just that of
light and views but of people. People came to Ken’s houses—not just his own but all
the houses he designed—to see a different way of living: reasoned and reasonable,
minimal, functional, even futuristic, but above all centrifugal and centripetal.
Ken spent too many months and years in institutions—Lark Ellen, Army hospital,
Birmingham VA—not to have thought of the ideal dynamics of family space. What
Jane Jacobs believed of the city—that it must make an asset out of the presence of
strangers by making a clear demarcation between public space and private space, put
eyes upon the public space, and have users in the public spaces fairly continuously—
was what Ken Schwartz believed of the house.4 He thought carefully of how to bring
people into the house; how and why (Jacobs: “You cannot make people use streets
they have no reason to use” [46]) to redistribute them along axes, among levels, and
through doors to specialized rooms and out doors to garden, patio, and balcony
areas; and how bring them together again. However many portals he provided to
surrounding landscapes, there was one way to depart the house at last. His slyest
architectural wit was his own front door, which was opaque from the outside but
whose inside was wholly visible through a picture window as one approached from the
driveway: the private always already public.
Apart from his own house, none of his houses had eyes upon the benign suburban
street. Their windows were on the foreground landscape architecture and background
natural landscape. But they were all carefully designed to keep eyes upon the people
inside, with unified spaces and unifying portals and sightlines for the family and its
circle to observe and connect with each other once they arrived at the house and once
they emerged from private spaces like bedroom, bathroom, and study. The
spectacular scenery and utopian climate was merely a backdrop, as was postwar
prosperity and suburban propriety.
An hour sitting on a living room floor listening to two people, who happened to be
Ain and Neutra, discuss great issues: It might have been “an experience incapable of
replication,” but Schwartz would create the built environment that could inspire it.
That was his California Dream. And his dream as a city planner and politician was to
recreate it outside the house.
4. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Modern
Library, 1993), pp. 44–45. For Jacobs the public space was street or sidewalk; for Ken,
living room, dining room, balcony, or patio. In the Schwartz House, kitchen, dining
room, and living room were literally a public square. In the Page-Selkirk House, the
squares were private, the hexagon public.
KEN SCHWARTZ AS POLITICIAN
For six decades, Ken Schwartz was a major force—for much of that time the major
force—in the City of San Luis Obispo, a record no one else has matched or is likely to.
He was the right person at the right time: a teacher of urban planning as the age of
urban planning flourished. But he was something more. He became a force by the
force of his intellect; the detail of his observation and his observation of detail; and his
insistence on thinking, thinking things through, and thinking things through together.
Schwartz became a force
from his passion for not
only people-centered
urbanism but people-based
decision-making. He was,
as the Telegram-Tribune
wrote during the first of his
five successful runs for
mayor, “in planning matters
… very confident and …
does not hew to an
arbitrary division between
administration and policy-
making” but was “a master
at drawing out people,
giving everyone his say,
achieving a consensus.”
Judge Richard Harris roasts Schwartz at a 1975 Obispo
Beautiful dinner honoring the mayor. Telegram-Tribune.
The downside of urban planning is its tendency to ride roughshod over the people it
claims to be designing for in order to follow a concept. Schwartz gained his first
political power—membership on San Luis’s Planning Commission—in 1959, the year
after Jane Jacobs bested Robert Moses over the latter’s plan to run four lanes of Fifth
Avenue through Washington Square Park. Ken became chair of the commission in
1962, the year after Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the
book where she introduced her famous concept “eyes upon the street.”
Schwartz combined the yin of Jacobs with
the yang of Moses: he made big plans
but introduced a robust citizen advisory
process so contrarian voices and nuance
could enter the picture. He welcomed the
marketplace of ideas in the way that
people do who are without intellectual
insecurity—people who have thought
things through but realize there are other
ways to think them through.
The neighborhood leader: from “Future
Neighbors Get Acquainted,” Telegram-
Tribune, 15 January 1954
The activist: Schwartz quoted in
“Rezoning Plan Under Criticism,”
Telegram-Tribune, 5 May 1956
It was characteristic that for the orals of
his architectural licensure Schwartz did
not, as was usual, present his own
projects but the projects of his students,
discussing how his input influenced their
development. He passed.
“After moving to San Luis Obispo,”
according to a 1974 special edition of the
AIA Memo, “Kenneth E. Schwartz
became an increasingly outspoken critic
of the city’s planning procedures”
(“Schwartz Helped Town Save Its Old
Mission”). He never ceased speaking out,
which came both from head and heart.
He never discouraged others from
speaking out, which he saw as the
foundation of not only democracy but
good decision-making.
Schwartz was not the only politician in San Luis Obispo who believed this. When
Mayor Fred Waters, a local mortician whom Schwartz had never met, called him up in
1959 to ask him to join the Planning Commission, this was Waters' explanation: "The
folks at City Hall tell me you have appeared before the Planning Commission and
former City Council protesting some rezones. I thought if you have better ideas on
land use zoning, you might welcome the opportunity to serve on the commission."
When Ken asked for a couple of days to consider, Waters said, "Sure, but just
remember, if you don't like things the way they are, you have to put up or shut up"
(Schwartz, op. cit., “A Life-Changing Appointment”).
Schwartz joined the commission, which was accustomed to unanimous votes. Every
time it did ad hoc rezoning, he would vote against because there wasn't a general
plan. Finally, one night after 10 pm, Commissioner Scott, "who could have played
defensive tackle for the Chicago Bears" got out of his chair, came around the front of
the dais, and confronted him. "Schwartz, goddammit, just what is this general plan
thing you keep bitching about?" (ibid.).
"Quaking in my boots," Schwartz explained at length. "Scott had listened very
intently. He stood up straight and half to me and half to the rest of the commissioners
said, 'That makes a lot of sense. We ought to have a general plan.' …
The vote was unanimous. No such item had appeared on our agenda. There
was no public discussion because there was nobody in the audience. In those
days, those types of details didn't matter.
And that's the story behind San Luis Obispo's first general plan.
Within three years of his appointment,
Schwartz was chairing the Planning
Commission and would do so for five
years, until, renominated in 1967 by
mayor Clell Whelchel for a third four-year
term, he was refused reappointment by a
developer-oriented city council that was
also opposed to turning the block of
Monterey Street in front of the Mission
into a pedestrian plaza, which the
commission had begun to support.
Telegram-Tribune headline, 6 July 1967
It was not until 1968, however, that Schwartz decided to run for mayor—when three
Cal Poly students had their presentation on pedestrianizing the 700 block of Monterey
Street gaveled to an end after five minutes by Mayor Whelchel, who demanded grant
money back and walked out after former city attorney George Andre offered legal
representation to the students. Schwartz, Andre, two former council members, and
one more lawyer formed a Citizen’s Committee for Mission Plaza, circulated a
referendum petition, got Mission Plaza on the ballot, and won by almost two to one.
Ken Schwartz had been transformed from a political appointee to a community
activist. Taking power at the ballot box was the next logical step. But it was
characteristic that he should have been moved to this—even during the Vietnam era—
not as a firebrand for change but as a methodical champion for planning, process, and
community input. Ken was an Organization Man. But he was more particularly a
Planning Man. He wanted problems worked out as they were in the classroom, by a
deliberative rather than political process: hence his emphasis on advisory bodies.
Endorsing Schwartz in his second reelection bid, the Telegram-Tribune listed nine
changes that were reason to vote for him. Listed first: “Has expanded citizen
participation in government.”5 The Trib also emphasized his contribution to the city’s
planning, appearance, downtown economic growth, and protection of its environment
from developers. These flowed from the first. One of Schwartz’s earliest actions as
mayor was sending a seven-page letter to the chair of the Planning Commission on
cities, San Luis, the national and regional economies, the city’s resources, and how to
develop its sectors in commerce and services, recreation and tourism, and industry.
This was circulated widely among advisory bodies and citizens. It was not a series of
campaign promises or an action template. It was an analysis; a basis for discussion.
This inclusive approach led to many specific improvements in the next ten years.
For his fifth and final mayoral run in 1977, Schwartz wrote in his manifesto (2,500
words long), “I strongly support the use of citizens on commissions and boards to
advise the city council. Conflicting viewpoints are worth the price of the process. Many
useful ideas are produced.”6 Characteristically, he hesitated to take individual credit
for anything, but he listed as changes during his eight years in office: the creation of
design, planning, and environmental documents, regulations, and advisory bodies; the
addition of 2,900 new housing units; adaptive reuse with new tenants of landmark
buildings; widening and asphalting of streets and creation of bike lanes and a public
transit system; improvement of numerous public services; and new public parks.
He included a long list of things he wanted to do in the next two years (mostly more
planning, including planned growth in the context of water). He also lauded the 256
citizens who, in the last eight years, had “served with distinction” on the city’s advisory
bodies. One could trust Ken to be precise about the number.
Under Ken Schwartz, the architectural practitioner and award-winning teacher, the city
became a master class where the citizens, like his Cal Poly students , learned by doing.
The Telegram-Tribune quoted him during his first run: “Anyone in a leadership
position is in part a teacher, whether he knows it or not. The question is, are you a
know-it-all teacher? I believe in making it as much self-teaching as possible.”7
5. “Another Term for Ken Schwartz,” Telegram-Tribune, Apr. 1973.
6. Kenneth Schwartz, “Agenda: The City of San Luis Obispo” (San Luis Obispo: Ken
Schwarz Reelection Committee, 1977).
7. Gilbert Moore, “Schwartz: An Architect for City,” San Luis Obispo Telegram-
Tribune, 1969.
The voters made Schwartz, as a supporter of self-
teaching, responsible for shepherding the city from
the era of amateur, ad hoc rule dominated by
business interests to one of professional planning
and management that would not just allow but
actually foster citizen input and creativity. Although
the city engaged firms and hired staff to do planning,
Schwartz had no hesitation about becoming involved
with and pushing back on both, in being a strongman
in a weak-mayor system, for if business interests were
reined in, there would be nothing to prevent staff
interests from becoming dominant.
As the Telegram-Tribune said during his first run,
after eight years’ experience on the Planning
Commission, “he does not hew to an arbitrary
division between administration and policy-making.”
No detail was too small if it revealed a right way or a
wrong way, a good outcome or bad.
Ken Schwartz from the cover
of his campaign manifesto
Martha Schwartz, unstoppable
activist-recruiter, from Camp
Fire Girls and community
theater to the Jack House
Ken Schwartz’s criticisms were incisive, but he made
his agenda and assumptions clear, and he proceeded
with good humor, assisted by “his fun-loving,
effusive wife, Martha,” as former city manager John
Dunn described her in a letter to the Tribune after
Ken’s death (“Readers Remember Mission Plaza
Founder Ken Schwartz,” 30 Oct. 2019). Ken’s 1977
campaign manifesto included an analogy on city
planning from a Mickey Mouse and Goofy cartoon.
Ken Hampian, city manager under Ken, recalled him
sending a letter to Hampian’s wife: “Your husband is
as fiscally tight-fisted as they come. He seems to
believe that twenty computers, a police SUV, or a
new park lawnmower have a higher priority in the
scheme of things than an attractive and fun water
display. Is there a way to change his hidebound
attitude for the benefit of our otherwise attractive
community?” Naturally, Ken Hampian wrote back to
Martha (ibid.).
Schwartz, in his manifesto, focused on Mission Plaza as a central accomplishment,
because “the Mission Plaza is responsible, at least in part, for restoring faith, vigor,
and public interest in our city center.” “It has precipitated changes in the human
structure of our downtown environment. The Beauty of the Mission Plaza would fall
short if it were not for people … . Thanks to Linnaea [Phillips], the Plaza is a people
place, and that’s what cities are all about—people.”
When all is said and done about Ken Schwartz’s accomplishments as mayor—including
the tougher accomplishments of ushering in new processes, not just new products—he
had an extraordinarily long and active term as a Cincinnatus. And his farm, much more
than the university, was the city and county.
A 1985 student project that Schwartz saved; Tod Fontana remakes the cultural center
of San Luis Obispo (with the destruction of numerous historic buildings, including the
Heyd Adobe, Leitcher House, Bello House, and half of the Morganti compound).
Schwartz ultimately relented on this Robert Moses–like plan.
After finishing his fifth term as mayor, Schwartz spent 5 years as associate dean and
interim dean of the School of Architecture and Environmental Design, another year
developing the school’s master plan, 2 more years as architectural consultant for the
founding of Escuela de Agricultura de la Region Tropical Humeda (EARTH) in Costa
Rica, and finally retired from the faculty in 1988, 36 years after his arrival.
But by then he had served a year on the county grand jury dealing (further) with the
region’s water question, was serving his 21 years on the Jack House Committee and
11 on the Men’s Colony Citizen’s Advisory Committee, and he would soon start his 8
years on the County Planning Commission and, after that, 6 more years on the SLO
City Council (adding up to 16 years on the council in all). His service on the Downtown
Physical Design Concept Group in 1992—13 years after his retirement as mayor and 4
after his retirement from Cal Poly—would nonetheless be reprised when the group
was reassembled a quarter century later. That was in 2016, 57 years after his
appointment to the city’s Planning Commission, 60 years after he battled the
commission and the City Council for the Goldtree Homeowners Association.
Ken Schwartz has become the face of Mission Plaza, but—as he understood, said, and
enfolded into his politics—it took decades of the community working together to make
the plaza a physical reality and a human success thereafter. His effect on the city’s
planning, beautification, and services, as well as citizen input into all of these, was less
physically centered but far greater. The poster child for citizen input, he always
promoted that dialogue as council member and mayor.
As tempting as it is to represent Ken Schwartz’s political career in numbers—the
number of years, the number of accomplishments, the number of people appointed to
advisory bodies—it is the consistent standard of thinking he demanded that is his
legacy. He demanded it of himself, of his political colleagues, of the city’s staff, and of
its citizens. This dialectic has influenced the health of the city for decades and, we can
only hope, will continue to do so for the decades to come.
As thoughtful as he was, Schwartz was always willing to admit when he was wrong.
Indeed his buildings serve as a metaphor for his politics (or vice versa): one has a
human problem to solve, a limited number of physical resources to solve it with, a
theory, a plan, but each time there is rethinking, tinkering, refinement to arrive at the
detail that provides a revolutionary solution. If Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses
provided Ken’s yin and yang, so, too, did his two favorite quotes: Daniel Burnham’s
Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably
themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work,
remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but
long after we are gone be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing
insistency.
And Mies’s
“God is in the details.”
PETER AND CAROL ANDRE HOUSE
Period of Significance Throughout much of Ken Schwartz’s lifetime, he
continued to make refinements to his own house and the houses of his clients, or they
would seek approval from him for changes or restore to please him. Hence setting the
period of significance for each of these four houses from their date of construction to
Schwartz’s death in 2019 is a reasonable approach. This is in contrast to Mount Carmel
Lutheran Church, where changes already by the late 1960s were not approved by the
architects, hence only the original form was the significant one, and the period of
significance was brief.
In the case of the 1959 Andre House, the earliest built, this approach creates a sixty-
year period of significance. As the exterior of the Andre House is virtually unchanged
from the time of construction (the same is almost entirely true of the interior),
narrowing or expanding a period of significance between 1959 and 2019 would have
virtually no practical impact.
Eligibility Under Master List Criteria: Significance The uniqueness and
importance of the Andre House as an embodiment of Mid-Century Modern
architecture in San Luis Obispo depends in particular on its masterful handling of
space, both in its functional and aesthetic effects, but also the structure enclosing the
space; the materials the structure is made of; and the environment the materials
exclude, frame, and give access to.
New York–based architecture critic Lewis Mumford’s 1949 characterization of the “Bay
Region School” (now more commonly known as the Second Bay Tradition) could easily
be a description of the Mid-Century Modern: “though it was thoroughly modern, it
was not tied to the tags and clichés of the so-called International Style: that it made no
fetish of the flat roof and did not deliberately avoid projections and overhangs: that it
made no effort to symbolize the machine, through a narrow choice of materials and
forms: that it had a place for personalities as different as Maybeck and [Gardner]
Dailey and [William] Wurster and [Ernest] Kump. What seemed to me admirable in the
style that had developed during the last half century was that it was a steady organic
growth, producing modern forms accepted as natural and appropriate by both client
and architect. Even the speculative suburban house in the Bay Region, during the last
fifteen years, has not been untouched by this movement. But in perspective, the work
of this style was part of a worldwide movement: a movement in which no single
country can claim preeminence.”8
Hence what Mumford identified as the Bay Region School may simply have been (as
he himself acknowledges) a widespread suburban style that, as a New Yorker, he first
noticed in the Bay Area when he was being driven around by William Wurster to look
at Maybeck buildings in 1941. Yet the West Coast landscape and climate and the
architectural visionaries this edge of the world attracted gave the California version a
particular prominence.
The 1949 exhibition of Second Bay Tradition architects for which Mumford wrote this
introduction included a “Background Section” with the work of mostly First Bay
Tradition architects, including Joseph Worcester, Willis Polk, Maybeck, Julia Morgan,
and Greene and Greene.
Significantly, it was probably to Greene and Greene that Ken Schwartz owed the
exterior form of the Andre House. There appear to be no models for a roof with side
gables overtopping flanking side-gabled roofs in Neutra’s or Cliff May’s work.
Schindler’s 1946 Marian Toole House in Palm Desert nested three graduated gables in
one direction; Schwartz may have been aware of it. But he was certainly aware of the
garage of Greene and Green’s Blacker House, to which he took Cal Poly architectural
engineering students at least three times before designing the Andre House.
Schwartz says in his Memoir that Cal Poly architecture students first visited the Blacker
House soon after it was “purchased by Mr. and Mrs. Hill, who were new arrivals from
Texas” (“A Field Trip interlude: The Blacker House, a Greene and Greene Gem”). Max
and Margery Hill moved into the house in the summer of 1955.9 So Schwartz must
have first seen the house (and its extant garage) in 1955 or more likely 1956. He
designed the Andre House in 1959.
What Schwartz—with his background in Functionalism—does to this varied and
attractive exterior arrangement is to change its interior functionality by extending the
central section to the front to accommodate a sunken living room and viewing balcony
and to the back to accommodate an outdoor dining area. He turns the areas under the
flanking gables into wings for the family’s private life. Hence he audaciously marries
Craftsman appearance and Functionalist space into Mid-Century Modern design.
8. Lewis Mumford, “The Architecture of the Bay Region,” in Ernest Born, Esther Born,
and Robert M. Church, eds., Domestic Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Region
(San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Art, 1949).
9. (“Each of Her Hobbies Has a Room of Its Own,” Los Angeles Times, 11 Dec. 1955,
Part VI-S-SUN, p. 18.
Greene and Green’s south elevation, Blacker Garage, 1907. The north facade had the
same arrangement originally, but a right-angle wing has since been added.
Schwartz describes the process in his Memoir.
The slope of the site dictated the house should be terraced. The plan was
divided into three distinct levels: a living room level; an entry, kitchen, dining–
family room, kids’ bedroom level; and a master bedroom–bath–dressing suite
level. The living room opened to a balcony; the other rooms all opened to
outside terraces. Even though there were three floors, the roof was one long
sloping plane covering all of the areas. The roof over the master bedroom suite
had a reverse pitch. All of the roof beams would be exposed and set on a
uniform module. Only the bedrooms and bathrooms were enclosed with walls;
the other rooms flowed together spatially, giving a sense of openness to the
living portions of the home. (Schwartz, op. cit., “Peter Andre”)
William Wurster, writing in the San Francisco Bay Region exhibition’s catalogue how he
encountered the First Bay Tradition as a seventeen-year-old architecture freshman at
Berkeley in 1913, describes how “it meant giving up the idea of windows as holes in
the wall, of competing with the view with the triviality of fabric, color, or pattern. It
meant steering free of the ruffles of existence” (“A Personal View”). Notably, in the
public axis of the Andre House, the exterior walls are glass and there are no curtains
or accommodations for them, a frequent characteristic of the Mid-Century Modern
hillside view house. Other ways in which the Andre House embodies the Mid-Century
Modern have been discussed earlier in this application, but these aesthetic
connections to earlier California styles developed in a Functionalist context define the
region’s Mid-Century Modern.
Joseph Esherick, Brooks Walker House,
Tahoe City. Roger Sturtevant.
Peter and Carol Andre House: use of the
non-right angle
The Andre House ends with the detailing of the rafter tails, which evokes Greene and
Greene’s aesthetic treatment of this structural element but also resembles the beam
ends in Joseph Esherick’s Second Bay Tradition (or Mid-Century Modern) Brooks
Walker House in Tahoe City, featured in the Domestic Architecture of the San
Francisco Bay Region. The exposed rafters support the deep overhangs that Mumford
mentions in the same catalogue but also symbolize rusticity in the suburban house of a
lawyer who does not want to forget he’s a rancher.
When Schwartz writes about the craftsmanship, he sounds like a Craftsman architect—
a Greene or a Morgan. “Peter engaged Nielsen construction to build the house. They
did a fine job. Nielsen, a Dane, paid attention to my plans and employed craftsmen
who could attend to the unique details in my design. Peter and Carol seemed as
pleased with the result as I was” (ibid.).
Eligibility Under Master List Criteria: Integrity
• The Andre House retains its original location.
• Its exterior design has not been changed, and its interior design has been changed
only in the master bathroom.
• In 1959 “they acquired a fine piece of land above Johnson Avenue. Nothing was
above them or likely to be” (ibid.). There is, now, one house above the Andre House,
but it does not substantially alter the setting of natural hillside above, suburban
development below, and “a splendid vista westward to Cerro San Luis and Bishop
The Andre House (center left) surrounded by its paddock with the house now above it
(top left) and other suburban neighbors. Google Map satellite 3D.
Peak.” The horse paddock surrounds the house on two sides, but as the front facade
faces the hill-mounting carriage drive, it is possible this could be developed with low-
built housing without substantially altering the integrity of the setting.
• The Andre House’s exterior materials remain the same as in 1959: concrete and
concrete block, brick, stone, board and batten, posts, beams, and glass.
• The workmanship from 1959 is still intact and apparent in everything from rafter tail
detailing to woodwork, stonework, brickwork, and tilework.
• The feeling on the upper edge of the city and lower edge of the hills is not
substantially different from 1959, with natural sounds and scents in abundance. Only
the reintroduction of horses would make it more authentic.
• The association with both the architect Schwartz and his clients the Andres remains
unmistakable in its design and integrity.
PIMENTEL-ORTH HOUSE
Period of Significance The house was designed and built for Richard and
Thelma Pimentel in 1961 and remodeled for Michael and Pam Orth in 1983. Its period
of significance extends from 1961 to 2019.
Eligibility Under Master List Criteria: Significance In his Memoir, Schwartz
writes of the Pimentel-Orth House, “That house is one of my favorite designs”
(“Monterey Heights”). It embodies Minimalism and Functionalism in an axial
arrangement far more rationalist, less dramatic than the Andre House of only two
years before. It appears to be a plain, angular box dropped on a curving hillside, but,
like the Andre House, it descends down the grade—though on two graduated floors
rather than under a continuous canopy.
Access to the larger public top floor is by two entries parallel but offset: the first the
formal entry to the living room, the second the informal entry to the kitchen. Both
follow the exposed rafters from the carport through the enclosed areas through the
glass wall of the opposing balcony. Counter to the rafters run the roof planking above
and wall beams below; also counter runs the long axis of living and dining room. The
top level is essentially cruciform.
The master suite is also on this floor, occupying the southwest side—possibly not a
felicitous arrangement as children grew to stay up later than their parents. (The Orths,
after they bought the house in the early seventies, switched the master bedroom to a
den and the downstairs den to a bedroom.)
The private bedroom and den wing is tucked under the public floor along the same
axis (the one that runs southwest to northeast along the hillside) and not, as with the
Andre or Schwartz Houses, to one side or, as with the Page-Selkirk House, two sides.
It is accessible by interior stairs. Its hallway on the hill side gives access to a den,
bedroom, and bathroom, then opens up to a larger bedroom at the end with (now) a
sliding glass door: a Usonian arrangement that Schwartz would repeat in his own
house but with the end bedroom designed as the master suite.
Axial treatment continues on the exterior. One feature that Schwartz did not borrow
from Neutra was the ribbon window. Schwartz’s windows in the horizontally oriented,
one-story Andre House provide contrasting verticality with, Masonite panels above
and below. In the two-story Pimentel-Orth House, the same window arrangement
emphasizes the building’s verticality, with the master bedroom’s window and Masonite
panels forming a plane with the third bedroom’s sliding glass door below and the
second bedroom and downstairs bathroom windows and panels forming a plane with
the balcony and its sliding glass doors above. Where the northeast facade cannot carry
this two-story arrangement, it makes a similar point with clerestory windows above a
openable sliding window and a sliding glass door that leads from the middle of the
exterior stairs to the middle of the interior stairs.
The V-groove shiplap siding lends verticality though with more Minimalist subtlety
than the board and batten siding of the Andre House. The absence of eaves and
horizontality makes a definitive break with the Mid-Century Modern and forges a
connection both to Minimalism and the Third Bay Tradition that would shortly be on
display at Sea Ranch on the Sonoma Coastline. The porthole defying the strict logic of
the stacked window and door arrangements lends a whimsical Third Bay note, along
with the variety of pushouts. Just as the nineteenth-century asymmetric Italianate form
was recommended as a way to accommodate later additions, Schwartz, in 1983, was
able to extend the northwest kitchen wall, add storage to the carport, create room for
a top-floor fireplace, and enlarge the downstairs bathroom without upsetting the
building’s aesthetic. (Imagine such additions at the Farnsworth House.) The addition of
a kitchen island, west-facing corner window above a relocated sink, and hill-facing
dogtooth skylight introduced still more definitively the relaxed spirit (if relaxation can
be definitive) of the Third Bay Tradition. These are character-defining features along
with the Minimalism of 1961.
Eligibility Under Master List Criteria: Integrity
• The Pimentel-Orth House retains its original location.
• Its 1961 and 1983 overall design and individual features remain the same. Though
the kitchen was updated in 1983, for instance, the 1961 gap under the kitchen
cabinets for viewing (and doubtless dish) access to the dining area was retained.
• No development has been added since 1961 to the immediate natural surroundings
or distant views to impinge on the house’s original setting.
• With the exception of a larger downstairs bathroom window, new kitchen window,
downstairs sliding glass door, carport storage addition, and upstairs fireplace pushout,
1961 exterior materials remain the same, as does the workmanship.
• The feeling of the suburban-rural edge persists, with Paso Robles Drive as remote
and undeveloped as it was when, in the late 1950s, Ken and Martha Schwartz came
upon the two for-sale properties on this “well known lovers’ lane” where they would
sometimes drive to “sit and admire the grand vista” (ibid.).
• The house retains strong association with the architect and his clients, the Pimentels
and the Orths, given the integrity of all other factors. Schwartz lived next door for
nearly sixty years, maintaining a relationship with the house and its occupants, and
Pam Orth continues to live in the house.
KEN AND MARTHA SCHWARTZ HOUSE
Period of Significance The period of significance both for the Schwartz House’s
architectural and historical significance extends from its construction in 1962 to Ken
Schwartz’s death in 2019.
Eligibility Under Master List Criteria: Significance This building was Ken
Schwartz’s experimental and demonstration house: where he could apply his theories
and experience; where friends, colleagues, students, and Campfire Girls could visit
and learn about a different way of living, one with eyes upon and eyes from the street.
The Goldtree home at 2553 Santa Clara was a good home, we enjoyed living
there, and we invested in fixing it up. It was a good neighborhood for which we
were proud to have been active participants. But our Monterey Heights home
at 201 Buena Vista is my design. For good and for bad, I have learned much
from living in one of my own creations. Every architect should have to live with
his own success … and with his own failures—there are always a few things that
should have been done differently. (Ibid.)
The Schwartz House embodies
Minimalism and Functionalism,
particularly in their Southern Californian
and Neutraesque variant, and relates to
the Second Bay Tradition possibly
indirectly through Neutra. Its character-
defining features include a single level
built out over a hillside location;
continuous rectangular facade with
slightly offset public and private wings
under a continuous flat roofline; large
expanses of glass and vertical redwood
siding rhythmically arranged; axial
counterpoints between the house and
stair tower; a Usonian hallway; integration
between interior and exterior materials;
and expression of structure through
overall form rather than exposed
structural elements.
Schwartz House light panel featured in
Perfect Home, San Luis Obispo edition,
July 1969
The Schwartz House also qualifies for the Master List for its historical significance as
the home of Ken Schwartz during the bulk of his political career, its construction
coinciding with his accession to the chair of the Planning Commission and its
occupation continuing through his subsequent 5 years as chair, 10 years as mayor, 6
years as council member, and almost 60 years on a wide variety of city and county
bodies and involved in an astounding array of activities that transformed San Luis
Obispo from a town with little planning, beautification, or attention to public space
into a tourism and recreation destination and notoriously happy place. He did much of
the analysis and planning for this transformation from his den and much of the
discussion there and in his living room.
Eligibility Under Master List Criteria: Integrity
• The Schwartz House is in its original location.
• The 1962 design has been changed only in details, such as the reconfiguration of
dining room fenestration, the staining of exterior redwood to match the interior
paneling, and the addition of pergolas and a garage door. These changes were
brought about by Schwartz as refinements in aesthetic theory and practice.
Spider leg outrigger and carved pergola beam added in front after the 1970s
• The setting of “homes … in the Mediterranean style popular in the late twenties and
early thirties” (as well as several Mid-Century and Modern ones) persists, as does the
grand vista, though there are fewer vacant lots. Many of the homes originally
surrounding the Schwartz House are still there, and the additions are in keeping with
the upper middle class, individualistic, suburban character of the neighborhood. Ken
meticulously maintained his original landscape architecture, which has matured into
what the original plantings foreshadowed, as in the pale, linear eucalyptus. The
“gnarled old pepper tree” that became the point from which Schwartz “established all
the levels of the house” and “a major interest point captured in the views from within
the house” survives and thrives.
• The materials and workmanship survive, to a large degree testament to the
craftsmanship of the Schwartz and Riggio families, as well as to the hired carpenters.
• The feeling of quiet, out-of-the-way Buena Vista Avenue, with its mix of interesting
newer and older houses and its green island down the hill, remains; as does the feeling
of San Luis Obispo—about twice the size as when the Schwartzes built their house but
with no traffic noise from the freeway.
• The house retains strong association with Ken Schwartz from his distinctive design
and subsequent refinements.
Ken, Martha, and unidentified child next to their 1960 Ford Falcon below the 201
Buena Vista lot. Four of the five Modernist and Mid-Century houses in the background
remain.
PAGE-SELKIRK HOUSE
Period of Significance 1966–2019.
Eligibility Under Master List Criteria: Significance The Page-Selkirk House is
Ken Schwartz’s most audacious design. Its hexagonal hub and spoke design embodies
a combination of Minimalism, Functionalism, and Futurism that allowed for
experiments like the geodesic dome, the Chemosphere, and Rudolph Schindler’s 1949
Hollywood Hills house for his mistress, the Dunite poet Ellen Janson. Other character-
defining features include the exposed beams, plank ceilings, round skylight, and brick
fireplace and freestanding chimney of its hub, Neutraesque plywood siding outside
and paneling inside, large sliding glass doors, interstitial alcove areas, views from each
of them (Shirley Page Selkirk insisted on that aspect), and pergolas over each (which
make them more “sittable”).
Eligibility Under Master List Criteria: Integrity
• The Page-Selkirk House maintains its original location.
• The 1966 design has not been changed, except for the barely noticeable addition of
an elevator from garage level at the front of the deck. Indeed a pergola that had been
removed was rebuilt by Shirley Selkirk after Bruce Selkirk’s death in deference to the
original design “to please Ken.”
• A pioneer house on the hillside when Hubert Page and Shirley Page Selkirk built it in
1966 on land they had purchased from the dairy-farming Mellos, the Page -Selkirk
House now has additional neighbors, including one up the hill. However, the slope of
the hill and landscaping retains the back view, and the front view and side view over
the Mello House are largely the same. The site retains its suburban setting, with a
number of original neighbors in period style.
• The materials and workmanship, including that of the owners, remains, apart from
double-paned sliding glass doors and windows with black frames replacing the single-
paned, metal-colored originals but without altering the fenestration’s form or
substantially altering the building’s appearance.
• 2424 Sunset Drive, like the Andre, Pimentel-Orth, and Schwartz Houses, is on a
hillside site at the edge of the city. Raised above and back from the street and
surrounded by alcoves, its seclusion and closeness to hillside nature maintains its
original feeling, with quietude and wildlife.
• Schwartz’s clients the Pages were very specific in their requirements, which Schwartz
responded to, including with redesign. The retention of the original design in both its
overall concept and details, additions such as exterior light fixtures made by the
clients, as well as the restoration of the missing pergola, contribute to a strong
association with Schwartz, his clients the Pages/Selkirks, and his client relationship.