Designed at the exact centre-point of the 20c, by self-taught architect Craig Ellwood, the Zimmerman House in Brentwood, California, is an icon of modernist domestic architecture. Ellwood was an admirer of Mies van Der Rohe, last director of Bauhaus, and combined his formalism with a less formal style that almost played style down. There is very little that is remarkable about the front of the building, it is almost as though it has its shoulders hunched away from the visitor. But the use of internal and external space is remarkable, and its more intimate, more private areas are elegant and simple.
The photographs shown below were taken in 1953 by Julius Shulman, and are © the Getty Research Institute (reproduced here under fair use). Apart from a more recent one taken by Michael Locke, and a brief internal video taken on someone’s phone, these photos are probably all you will ever see of the Zimmerman House.
Why?
Because in 2024 it was bought by actor Chris Pratt and his wife Katherine Schwarzenegger, and was demolished to make way for a “sprawling 15,000-sq-ft mansion” in “the modern farmhouse style that has come to dominate US suburbs” (Dani Anguiano, writing in The Guardian). House and garden are a flattened, muddy site as I type this. What will be put in its place is, it is thought, will be a faux-clapboard monstrosity. Who knows but that one day the future will look back at phoney farmhouses with nostalgia for 21c style.
Me? I know vandalism when I see it.
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Taxonomy Domine 