Since 1994, every realized MAK Center program has been presented in cooperation with the Friends of the Schindler House, in the name of conservation through activation. The following dialogue, between Julian Hoeber, Renée Petropoulos, Kimberli Meyer, and Anthony Carfello, centers on proposals made by Petropoulos and Hoeber in response to Schindler Lab invitations from 2012. Both proposals were accepted, but proved unrealizable. The conversation, which explores their proposals in light of the challenges of contemporary preservation, took place on August 26, 2014, at the Schindler House, and was subsequently edited for publication.
Kimberli Meyer
Welcome back to the Schindler House, Renée and Julian. We’re revisiting your Schindler Lab proposals from 2012. Back then, we invited each of you, along with a number of other artists and architects, to make a proposal to interpret the house.
Part of the idea for Schindler Lab stemmed from witnessing how everything that is made for the MAK Center is responsive to the site of the Schindler House in some way. Our original goal was to pair two projects. When we reviewed all the proposals, I thought yours would be amazing together. Both were highly tectonic. Renée, your piece covered the entire floor and Julian, yours covered the windows. Both had aspects that went along with those broad formal moves, too, dealing with history and preservation, as well as how we interpret historic sites. In the end, we were unable to realize the projects. But before we get into that, can you talk about what you were thinking at the time and the source of the proposal?
Julian Hoeber
I was actually surprised you contacted me, to be honest. The Schindler House was always a place I felt excluded from, like the sort of playground I associated with my teachers, like Stephen Prina and Christopher Williams. It was flattering to be invited. I came and walked through; I took a lot of pictures and had no idea what I was gonna do. Then I did some in-depth reading on the Schindler House and you sent along this list of restrictions. The list became the most amazing part of the whole invitation to me, because I previously wasn’t thinking that there were things you couldn’t do to the house.
It led me to think: Here’s a cake that you can’t eat. I’ve shown images from my proposal in lectures about my work, and I always put up a slide of the restrictions list to explain my approach. People laugh when they see the list. I pounded my head against the idea of coming up with something that would meet all the restrictions, and I realized I had to make the work about them.
The fireplace really strikes me as the aspect that indicates the Schindler House is so obviously a place to live. It’s so welcoming. I had the same thought about the kitchen, when noticing one of the sinks looks very worn. You can tell that the house is still being used. Somehow all the restrictions suggested stopping that use. That was then the center of my idea, acknowledging the total contradiction in asking the space to be both a house and a museum. In addition, I played with some things that I was already working with. I’d been fascinated with this idea of ruby red gel, and how it’s optically black. From there I quickly had the idea to use the ruby red gels over the windows to indicate the idea of darkness preserving the house, but also to interrupt the idea of it being a house.
Meyer
Yes, I’m well aware that that our restrictions list has a kind of notoriety. It often makes for a point of difficult discussion when we ask someone to do a project here, because of our need to negotiate the restrictions each time. Practitioners present an idea that they have for the house and we point out that making a show here is an act of putting art in a work of art. For most people we work with, it is really nothing like they’ve done before. We’ve heard kneejerk reactions like, “Well, can’t we just put up some false walls to make it look like a white cube?” That wouldn’t work. The art wouldn’t look good, and the house wouldn’t look good. Eventually, people deal with the restrictions.
What you’re saying is interesting because it gets to the crux of the inherent contradictions of programming a historic house. We were one of the first institutions to attempt this so intensively. We’ve done ambitious projects for 20 years, with some that have been impactful. Thinking about these kinds of restrictions and making artwork that responds to them is a core aspect of Schindler Lab and many of our other projects.
The program here positions the house as one of extreme preciousness. We give the historic house a value that makes us think about how we treat works of architecture. We question what makes historic architecture feel relevant or generative, versus dead.
Hoeber
I grew up in a Frank Furness building, so I always assumed that you just live in historically relevant houses. Why would you preserve it? You do what you need to do to live there, right? I mean, it’s probably some kind of sin, but I remember putting thumbtacks into walnut doors. That’s partly why the contradiction is so apparent to me. It seems very counterintuitive that a house would be preserved in a way that wasn’t about use.
Meyer
I agree. Schindler most certainly didn’t design this house with that kind of preciousness in mind. There’s almost a slapdash quality to the way he put this house together, which is part of its beauty. This idea that the house should be kept like a treasure in a vitrine seems very wrong. On the other hand, since it is so fragile and we don’t want to lose it, we must act with utmost care. So there’s the tension. The architecture was designed to have daily domestic life taking place here, not to be a museum.
Renée Petropoulos
The MAK Center being in the house and keeping it active can actually improve the preservation. If you leave something alone, it disintegrates, right? We’ve seen architecture that has been neglected fall apart. Using it actually does save it. In that sense, the programming and the activities breathe life into the house and keep it lively and contemporary.
Meyer
It’s true. You have to keep driving a car, otherwise it doesn’t work.
Petropoulos
It is the same with fabric. If you don’t wear it, the creases become brittle.
Meyer
It’s the relationship between the object and everyday life. Things that are created in order to be used in everyday life have a use value that gives them their purpose. If you remove that use value, you make it a monument instead. It relegates design to a role that is completely different.
Anthony Carfello
This house is part of an industry of historic houses. A large portion of our tourist audience comes here to see the house fully furnished with books on the shelves and chairs at the table, perhaps even velvet ropes. They are oriented to a historic preservation style like the Gamble House, in Pasadena, or a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Those places stay open, active, and appreciated, for sure, but people move through them with a hands-off relationship, like a mausoleum.
Visitors can be confused here about our programming, because many aren’t aware of the committed public life the house had from the beginning. It was never fully devoted to private life.
Petropoulos
I knew about the restrictions, and I wanted to make a proposal that wouldn’t interrupt the typical tourist. By covering the floor, I wanted to engage perception beyond sight. You would see the green color of the shag rug, but you also would have to take your shoes off to walk in, so you would experience the house differently. Your feet could feel the carpet, ruffle around in it. If you sat on the floor, you’d see the house really differently than if you were standing. I thought for sure nobody would have a problem with it, because it wouldn’t interrupt sightlines or cause other installation challenges.
My approach played off the idea of Pauline Schindler putting rugs down on her side of the house. Even when she was still living with Schindler, she draped fabrics and set rugs and cushions all over the house, so people could sit on the floor. No one was going to sit on a cement floor, especially in the 1930s.
Hoeber
Before you mentioned those rugs and cushions, I was thinking that you were describing a huge interruption. The proposal would totally alter the experience of the space.
Meyer
One of the concerns voiced to us by conservation leadership was that if visitors wanted to take a photo, they couldn’t see the original house when the green shag carpeting was on the floor. With Julian’s installation, there was concern that the awareness of the role of light would be completely changed—natural light is a key aspect of Schindler’s design. So some of the anxieties revolved around getting a photo of the historic house.
Carfello
Basically, there would be no way to leave your projects out of the camera frame.
Meyer
Exactly. Tourists usually come to focus on the house and don’t necessarily want to see the art. They are looking for some kind of authentic architectural image. We are here for tourists, but our main purpose is to offer a variety of perspectives on art and architecture in tandem. There are many photos of the Schindler House online that you can download to see the floor or the windows as they usually are.
One of the benefits of exhibiting your projects at the same time would have been that in one half of the house you could see the original floor but the light would be disrupted. On the other side, you could see the original light quality but the floor would be disrupted. Each case highlighted the architecture—creating an awareness of the role of light and materials in the design—by taking something away.
Hoeber
The idea of splitting the house with these two projects in order to comment on preservation makes even more sense.
Petropoulos
We couldn’t have anticipated that because we weren’t collaborating, but I like the idea that there was this sense of a potential mirror—the green and red as opposite spectral colors. Part of the intervention in my mind was to explore a viewer’s expected experience. There’s something about a stripped-down house that has nothing to do with the history.
Then there’s something you can’t see, because you can’t be large enough to see the house as an object. You have to recognize your own body in relationship to the space. In my work, I think a lot about where a viewer stands and how a viewer might approach the work.
Hoeber
When people encounter these preserved house museums, they think architecture is about looking, and not walking or touching or sitting or hearing.
Petropoulos
Temperature is a huge part of the experience, especially here.
Hoeber
What you’re describing is a way to reinvigorate access to those other experiences. You’re talking about being able to see and feel the parts of the house that generate the function.
Meyer
That haptic quality of your pieces in the house reminded me of Schindler. For example, he purposefully made the house low because he wanted people not only to stand but also to sit and lie down. Attention to the body was in the foreground of his thinking. The architecture is very sensual.
Petropoulos
His furniture is very low too.
Meyer
It makes a big difference. We tend to overly privilege the visual in our culture, and this applies to architecture in the way we can package it to promote it for reasons of tourism and market value.
Carfello
Well, that’s the visitor’s experience of the Eames House. It’s all image-based. You just get to look into the time machine and see exactly the way the blanket was when Ray last sat in the chair.
I think about how frequently people describe their experience of the Schindler House in visuals, essentially thinking of a photographic image of the house while they look at it. On the other hand, some architects will go right up to some small detail of the woodwork or lighting and comment on Schindler as a builder.
In Charles Moore’s architecture guide (The City Observed: Los Angeles, 1984), he starts his entry on the Schindler House by saying that it’s a complete shanty. He actually emphasizes the house’s aging process.
Petropoulos
In my first experience of the house, it was indeed shabbier than it is now, and I thought about it as an act of formal camping. I couldn’t imagine living in it, and thought that Schindler wanted the feeling of being in a tent. The temperature fluctuates. You’re moist. You’re wet. We’ve all been here for rainy nights, and it’s not exactly pleasant.
There’s an aspect to this house that’s about being hardy. The indoor-outdoor conceptual notions are a knock at a bourgeois ideal of being completely insulated. Schindler made it physically difficult. It is not an easy house to inhabit because of the temperature fluctuation and the landscape. This characteristic is carried through all of the exhibitions.
I came to know it through the physical senses. I moved around its surfaces. The concrete, the wood, the canvas are all particular textures; putting a rug in would add yet another aspect to the house’s texture.
Meyer
Part of what was objectionable about the rug may have been its lowbrow quality—it was read as cheap and tacky 1970s carpeting inside of a masterpiece of modern architecture.
Petropoulos
But, this is exactly what I think Pauline was suggesting in her later re-carpeting of the house.
Hoeber
Can we talk a little bit about how much of modernist architecture and design was aimed at the working class? God forbid we should allow some kind of lower tastes into the place.
Meyer
We all talk about the various failures of modernism. One of those is the ultimate inability of architecture to mitigate socioeconomic inequities. If you look at the Case Study Houses as an example, you see that voracious capitalism has made houses intended for the middle class into homes for the super-affluent.
Carfello
They’re a good example because they’re fully embraced by the tourist architecture consumption model. The houses are now signs of urbane Los Angeles and vacationers seek them out all the time. But those houses were built with a suburban mentality. Everything about them was meant for postwar, private domesticity.
Petropoulos
It was also about the durability of materials. The materials weren’t precious, and they were economical. One aspect of that is particular to Southern California, where the weather allows flat roofs. You couldn’t do that in snow (at that time). The environment here allowed for inexpensive, mass-produced building materials precisely because you didn’t have to bolster the houses in the way you would in another climate.
Carfello
When Gregory Ain did the project at MoMA1 in 1950, he built his Mar Vista-style house right in the middle of Manhattan. This humble and unassuming Southern California modern house was more about problem solving than anything else. But when Ain put it in Manhattan, the general reception was, “What is this suburban house doing here?”
Hoeber
Did you grow up out here?
Petropoulos
Yes.
Hoeber
I didn’t, and I have always found the houses in Southern California very strange, as if they’re naked. The first time I came to Los Angeles was to look at graduate school. Within fifteen minutes of driving on the freeway, I thought to myself, “This place is filled with death.” A kind of darkness. That’s always my understanding of Los Angeles. When friends come from the East Coast, they don’t like it. I try to explain that everything is going wrong underneath the surface and that is part of the pleasure. You have to take a kind of perverse pleasure in this place. I think that’s part of what I intended with the red gels. It wasn’t a neutral density gel.
Petropoulos
It’s death metal gel.
Hoeber
Yes, it’s death metal gel. It’s the gnarliest Turrell ever.
Petropoulos
I think perversity breeds utopia. And then it reverses.
Carfello
That was one of the nice things about the gels, they played off that diametric sunshine and noir cliché. Daytime Los Angeles, nighttime Los Angeles. The red gels would have made daytime in the house even darker, twisting the binary for a bit. The 2 P.M. sun would’ve been the evil sun.
Petropoulos
That is why I was also interested in having séances with the public here on Friday afternoons. In some unconscious way related to the day for night that’s occurring in Julian’s proposal, I wanted to tap into the history here related to Pauline, to her extensive search for another existence or consciousness.
Hoeber
The more I think about this project, it’s such a perfect fit. The other part of my proposal was to put an apple tree in the courtyard. But then, at one point during our planning, I thought, “Well, they did just legalize marijuana in West Hollywood. We could plant some pot.” The more I thought about it, it seemed much better than an apple tree. It’s the other perfect Southern California thing. This place seems really suited to growing pot. It’s a very good stoner environment.
Carfello
We’re pretty low on planted interventions. I’m surprised we don’t receive more proposals to grow something in relationship to the house. There are ideas for the landscape, but they’re usually sculptural installations that are dropped in.
Petropoulos
I made those topiaries a number of years ago. I put a topiary dolphin in the front entry, visible right as you turned the corner. It was part of a larger exhibit called Houses x Artists. I also changed the faucets in the bathrooms to zinc fish with large fins. There wasn’t concern with these alterations to the house.
Meyer
There is also a question of who gets to interpret the Schindler House and how. How are the various histories of the house told, and how is the knowledge about the house perpetuated?
Carfello
That was another notion put to us, that your projects would get in the way of educating people about the house.
Hoeber
Yeah, my impression was that it was decided that our proposals would sort of erase the idea of what the Schindler House is, and that was unacceptable. But that is exactly why I thought it was interesting to do.
Petropoulos
I do, too. But there was an earlier Schindler Lab show where Thurman Grant built these floor-to-ceiling reflective pieces, and I thought that those seriously altered the house.
Carfello
They altered a whole wing.
Petropoulos
It was totally disruptive. I photographed it because I was interested in the way that the photograph constantly showed the installation superimposing itself on the house. I thought that if he could do that here, then surely the carpet would be alright. That said, the class issues were definitely present in my thinking.
Carfello
After the show with Thurman, there was an archival exhibition, Everything Loose Will Land, with tons of material that completely took over the whole house. We had massive vitrines built, we had work piled up to the ceiling, we had a large-scale Bruce Nauman installation built in the courtyard. I couldn’t imagine where one would stand in the house and be able to block out that show happening around them.
Petropoulos
That show didn’t upset any values or ideas about the meaningful, hierarchical position of the house. It confirmed those aspects, actually.
Hoeber
It also allowed the house to be a container for something, rather than to be completely enveloped by anything. Both of our proposals were contiguous with the house and suggested the house was not containing anything.
Meyer
Your proposals were a kind of confrontation with it. How does one accept a certain mentality about preservation that is about the past, or a particular story of the house? I never realized before how loaded that meaning of the house was.
Petropoulos
I understand better now that the larger institution continues to want to preserve a kind of elite position for their possessions. That’s what they wanted in preserving this architecture.
Hoeber
I understood that completely when I wrote the proposal the way I did. That’s what the restrictions in the list signal. It’s not a provenance issue. You’re not lowering the value of the place by putting a pin in the wall. It’s something else.
Petropoulos
I was thinking that it would be productive to tease out the history and then continue to develop it.
Hoeber
That’s because you believe that history is mutable.
Petropoulos
That’s true.
Meyer
The challenge in the process arose when we were told by conservation leadership there was a “philosophical problem” with the proposals. These are words I’d never heard before in my time as director.
Granted, this tension is built into the MAK Center. On the one hand, preservation and conservation are part of the mission. On the other, activating the house to test, prod, provoke, and question is also part of the mission. Friction is built into the marriage between us and the Friends of the Schindler House. It’s part of what makes us who we are, and we’ve been dealing with this for many, many years.
Petropoulos
We are discussing effects that are far more impactful than touching surfaces or altering the physical entity, which is where preservation usually resides. We are discussing questions of meaning, questions of perception.
Meyer
I never thought that these would be controversial projects. Your proposals were so low impact in terms of what we were actually doing here, physically.
Hoeber
I think that the board saying no to our proposals is more revealing and functional as an institutional critique than the actual pieces would’ve been. The whole conflict shows how idiosyncratic the idea of history is, right? One can start to see how these ways of guiding the history and the story of a place can get personal really fast.
Petropoulos
When one believes in a certain trajectory of history and a position exterior to your process and lineage threatens to derail that trajectory, then presentation of ideas comes seriously into question. This condition isn’t unique. We know it happens everywhere. But we often don’t have access to how it happens and the ways that it’s submerged.
Meyer
In the end, is it a legacy question: Who owns the story of the house?
Carfello
I remember the distinct word choice, that the projects would “obliterate” the experience.
Meyer
What is it about reverence that makes something great? How can we embrace critique to help us look at places we cherish in a different light without fear of destroying them?
Petropoulos
That’s a really interesting question. It asks one to fundamentally confront this astounding faithfulness to the lineages in the institutions we participate in. Oftentimes moments that we cherish the most are the radical ones, the ones that disrupt the lineage. Why don’t we want to upset them now?
Hoeber
We like the ruptures that happen in the past, not the ones that happen now.
Carfello
We had a panel recently with people navigating a similar condition, producing work for other house museums. There’s this fervor around contemporary art installations in historic architecture, which is often about increasing attendance.
Petropoulos
You’re talking about feeding another kind of consumerism.
Carfello
Yes. These projects look very similar and often contain a politically vacant gesture that tries to conflate the site’s significance with whatever new objects are being installed.
Hoeber
The art is infected with the importance of the site and the site is infected with the importance of art.
1 Ain, Johnson and Day, Museum of Modern Art / Woman’s Home Companion, Exhibition House, New York, 1950.