2018 marks the 60th anniversary of the Twin Palms neighborhood in Palm Springs, California, and Houzz has just published an excellent story describing the subdivision’s history and its importance for mid-century modern architecture.

Designed by architect William Krisel and developed by Alexander Construction, the community was initially built with 90 homes. Supposedly each lot was exactly 10,000 square feet and each house had the exact same 40′ x 40′ square floor plan. So 1,600 sf homes.

In addition to this, each lot had a carport, an open courtyard connecting the house and carport, and a swimming pool. 

Unlike some of his contemporaries, Krisel was less interested in building one-off homes for the wealthy. He was more interested in tract housing for the masses. And standardizing the plans was one way to achieve greater affordability.

Krisel still found other creative ways to differentiate the homes, namely by rotating the square floor plan and by rearranging the carport, courtyard, and pool.

He also employed different rooflines, all of which have become emblematic of this era of architecture and of Palm Springs in general. It was about optionality on top of and around the box.

If you have a few minutes, check out the Houzz article. The homes are beautiful and the story is compelling: the modern American dream at an affordable price.

Photo by Nainoa Shizuru on Unsplash

I must have been sick for this lesson in architecture school, because I just discovered, through Curbed, that there is a subset of mid-century modern architecture known as Googie. It originated in Southern California in the 1940s and was all about the future, car culture, the Space Age, and the many other things that dominated the postwar years. Think starbursts, curvaceous geometric shapes, and bright colors. We all know the architecture. But did you know it was called, Googie?

Supposedly the Googie movement was given its label by architecture critic Douglas Haskell, who used it in a derogatory way to describe criticize the architectural fashion at the time. Googie was the name of an actual coffee shop in West Hollywood designed by John Lautner. And that’s something that is noteworthy about Googie. It was a form of architecture for average buildings: coffee shops, gas stations, motels, and those sorts of things.

There will always be critics who eschew that which is fashionable at the time. I suppose one could argue that if you’re being fashionable, then you’re not being timeless. Because fashion is about what’s current. And good architecture should be timeless, right? But there’s something so fascinating about a kind of built form that perfectly captures a particular time and place. Middle of the 20th century. Car-oriented Southern California. 

Sometimes good architecture and design also needs a bit of time and distance in order to fully appreciate it. What was once garish may one day become treasured. Just give it a generation or two.

Photo by ian dooley on Unsplash