Etan Does LA 212: Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House (East Hollywood) | Los Angeles history

National Register visit 212: Hollyhock House 📍4800 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles
If you live in LA and you care about buildings, or even if you don’t, I implore you: make the pilgrimage up Olive Hill and visit Hollyhock House. Go again, if you’ve already been. This is the only tourable Frank Lloyd Wright building in Los Angeles, and it is FILTHY with fascinating aesthetic details and historical tidbits. I guarantee you will pick up factoids on visit 17 that you didn’t pick up on the first 16.
For example, did you know that:
🤯 Hollyhock House’s commissioner Aline Barnsdall used to produce experimental theater in the same Chicago office building where Wright worked?
🤯 Three years before Barnsdall purchased Olive Hill, it stood in for the biblical Mount of Olives in DW Griffith’s epic silent film Intolerance?
🤯 FLW’s son Lloyd Wright, Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra - 3 giants of modernism - all made contributions to Hollyhock House?
🤯 The pergola that connects the house to the Visitors Center was intended to hold a menagerie of animals?
🤯 One of Hollyhock House’s most innovative features never really worked?
🤯 Frank Lloyd Wright returned to Olive Hill in 1954 to build a temporary art gallery - making this site his first AND last project in LA?
🤯 It is the only UNESCO World Heritage site in LA?
There is so much to learn about Hollyhock House’s history. Read way more at EtanDoesLA.com: etandoesla.com/212-frank-lloy...
Photo credits, in order:
COVER 📷: Julius Shulman: Hollyhock House, ca. 1963 (© J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, LA (2004.R.10))
📷 1: FLW portrait, ca. 1926 (Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division)
📷 2: Aline Barnsdall, 1914 (Courtesy of David & Michael Devine)
📷 3: Julius Shulman: Hollyhock House, ca. 1963 (© J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, LA (2004.R.10))
📷 4: Julius Shulman: Residence A, ca. 1963 (© J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, LA (2004.R.10))
📷 5: Residence A (Courtesy of the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs & Hollyhock House)
📷 6: Aline Barnsdall with daughter Betty, ca. 1923 (Courtesy of David & Michael Devine)
#franklloydwright #losangeles #architecture #nationalregister #schindler #neutra #modernarchitecture

[@alvins.4775]

I shall refer to FLW as Moses henceforth.

[@etandoesla]

Hahaha...glad you appreciated that comparison! I realized a strange FLW/Moses connection a day after I posted that video: Frank Lloyd Wright's granddaughter was the Oscar-winning actress Anne Baxter, who played the Egyptian princess Nefretiri in The Ten Commandments (1956). Nefretiri tries to hook up with Moses in the movie!