You can never truly go home again, but you can sometimes visit as a tourist. That is what I had the pleasure of doing a few weeks ago when I was able to revisit the old apartment building where I once lived at 1400 Hayworth Avenue in West Hollywood, Calif. Built in 1954, it is a marvel of expressive Modernism carried out with mostly off-the-shelf materials. After all these years, it retains its original form and even color, with only a dreadful pool enclosure to mar the dialogue of diagonals and the snazzy organization of simple housing blocks that excited us every day we lived there in the early 1990s.
Edward Fickett, the architect of the building, was then a forgotten figure. Although he had designed thousands of homes and apartment buildings all over Southern California, had participated in the layout and planning of some its most famous developments, like Trousdale Estates, and was the architect of both hedonistic oases such as the Costa Mesa Country Club and more prosaic structures as the original buildings at Edwards Air Force Base, his reputation was eclipsed by the Second Generation Modernists the historian Esther McCoy had favored and the participants in the 1950s Case Study program.
The main reason Fickett was for so long not taken seriously was that he designed in volume and for mainstream clients, rather than concentrating on the production of a few masterpieces. He usually worked on a budget, and often for commercial developers, so that the beauty of his work became part of the overall landscape you would see along the Sunset Strip (where he designed what later became Spago, Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant, among other structures) and the boulevards of the San Fernando Valley. Many of his structures are not particularly notable, although quite a few are. His recent rehabilitation, which has led to a monograph and his archive being housed at the University of Southern California, means that now buildings he never or barely touched are attributed to him.
The building at 1400 Hayworth, or the Hollywood Riviera, as it is officially called, is remarkable because of the way it responds to the landscape and opens up generous shared spaces within its confines. Its main feature is a front block with a steeply sloped roof that accentuates the gentle rise of the street and gestures to the jagged hills to the north. Enter underneath that two-story front slab of apartments, past a garden of banana plants, and through an undercroft featuring a cantilevered outdoor staircase and pilotis, and you find yourself in an expansive courtyard enclosed on the other sides by the less jazzy shapes of the rows of apartment (now condominium) units. Even here Fickett has enlivened the forms with canted railings and open corners. The pink or dusty red color of the whole complex enhances its sense of glamour, as do the curves of the swimming pool.
The most striking spatial characteristic of the Riviera, beyond its angled front, is the slot next to the deck that opens to the parking area below. Fickett took advantage of the site’s slope to let you enter onto the lower garage level directly from the street. He then left that storage space for cars open to the spaces above, so that you can see the complex as you drive in and the automobiles, essential status symbols in Los Angeles, are visible from the apartments. It is typical of his work. Rather than hiding automobile culture or relying on signs to the street, Fickett embraced the need for forms that would both express the excitement of the modern world and make its implements visible, while letting you understand and be part of the geology of the site.
The Riviera’s qualities have not escaped unnoticed. Over the years, it has been a set for movies such as Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey and L.A. Story, as well as for the more recent television series Transparent. That also helped keep the condo fees low, and convinced the unit owners, who moved there at least in part of the design, to preserve the complex’s original look and feel.
When we moved into the unit at the top of the front slope in the early 1990s, we did receive permission to make one highly visible alteration: We glassed in the back porch to create a 7-foot-wide, 20-foot-long bedroom with glass on both sides reaching up all the way to the top of the angled roof. From there, we had a view over much of Los Angeles and, on clear days, almost all the way to the ocean.
Living at the Riviera gave us the sense that we were part of LA; rooted in its landscape, both human-made and natural, and part of the excitement and glamour that made Southern California such a fantasyland. We also experienced the Southland’s other side, from watching the fires burn after the civil unrest of 1992 after a jury acquitted the police offers who beat Rodney King to holding on to the doorframe during the 1994 Northridge earthquake. We also coped with the daily annoyance of traffic jams for Director’s Guild of America events up the block and the rock ‘n roll neighbors when they came home from a night on the Strip. Being open meant seeing and being seen, and being part of both the good and the bad of Los Angeles, albeit at a remove.
I was able to revisit the building because a documentary about Fickett is in the works, and I was being interviewed for that film. I found the place not only in good condition, but pricey to the point that I would never be able to live there anymore. Midcentury Modern has regained its place as the perfect style for Southern California, but now only for the felite. I can only hope that because of its popularity the clarity, simplicity, and expressive response to context that the Riviera and so much of Fickett’s work represents can be developed into a vernacular that is both sustainable and more available to all. The bits and bones for such an economic and democratic construction are certainly there, waiting for their forms and strategies to be spun out up and down the slopes of Southern California.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine or of The American Institute of Architects.