Missions’ Legacy Lives On in Vast Landscape of Red Tile Roofs and Adobe

Adobe walls. Red tile roofs. Wrought iron. Nothing sends developers and planning boards into a romantic swoon like the Mission style. Who wants concrete strip malls if you can hide them under Mission-like roofs? Isn’t an Arco gas station more palatable if it’s made of adobe? Aren’t these vaguely Spanish structures a relief from the endless rows of pale pink and baby blue bungalows?

It is a cute fairy tale. But it could also suffocate us. Los Angeles has always been about transplanted glamour, and in architecture too, that glamour comes in all shapes and sizes. Mission, Craftsman, Modern, take your pick. But as the San Fernando Mission--one of the grandest in the 21-mission chain--marks its bicentennial this weekend with solemn ceremonies and exultant choirs, the depth of nostalgia for this fragment of our history becomes apparent. Imitation Spanish buildings still gobble up large swaths of our suburban landscape. The myth lives!

Of the missions built in California, San Fernando ranks among the best. La Purisima, on the outskirts of Lompoc, is inspiring in its extreme simplicity, but its rough forms lack true architectural merit. Turn a corner at Mission Santa Barbara and you are suddenly confronted with splatterings of gaudy ornament. Mission San Fernando, however, balances all the simple elements that give the style its allure: plain adobe forms, warm red tile roofs, an intimate courtyard scheme.

Here, architecture is reduced to a minimum. The clean adobe walls are almost modern in their abstraction. Repetitive, heavy timber lintels mark windows and doors. The complexity of the Mission style comes from the subtle organization of the buildings, each carefully set at slightly skewed angles to each other. Arcaded terraces lead you into the landscape, buildings entrap large fountain-centered gardens, turning them into meditative plazas. It is easy to be selective about history here, where thick silent walls block out the harsher memories of mission life: mass Indian graves and the grim wilderness life of the colonists.

Soon after the turn of the century, masters such as George Washington Smith and the precocious Wallace Neff nimbly manipulated these trademark elements into blissful domestic fantasies. The meditative landscapes became Eden-like shelters. Neff, in particular, was a child of Hollywood, and while some of his homes may be Spanish Mission revival, their origins are as hazy as the origins of their Hollywood owners. At the 1927 Bourne House in San Marino, considered a Spanish revival masterpiece, the dramatic door frames are Gothic. The circular towers, French Norman. Look closely above the threshold of another Neff work, the 1924 Thomson House in Beverly Hills: the princely coat of arms includes scrolls of film and a horseshoe, a sly play on the fleeting luck of the film trade.

These grand dwellings were quickly adapted to budget tastes. The 1920s courtyard apartment schemes off Fountain Avenue in West Hollywood are often more playful interpretations of the architecture of the original missions: adobe dwellings wrapped around a lush fountain courtyard, or two-story apartments climbing up from a forest of palms and floodlights.

*

Often, these exotic little communities, sheltered from the hostile world--both natural and human--achieve a cinematic glow. The courtyards are mini social condensers, communal spaces where neighbors can mingle in the vast loneliness of L.A. These homes perfectly fit the dry California landscape--and they offered the ingenue an instant past, roots that could be vaguely traced back to Mediterranean shores. Never mind that in the early part of the century, the missions themselves were for the most part neglected heaps, their walls crumbling and their floors littered.

Of course, it is the style, not the substance, that we have inherited. In 1990, in a coup for birdbrained local government, Muslims in the San Fernando Valley were asked to build their mosque in the Mission style. Community leaders, of course, missed the architectural joke: It was the Moors who brought their own vernacular to southern Spain, and then the Spanish who brought it to Southern California. But what does it matter? Here, style was used indiscriminately, perhaps to mask something vaguely threatening. The building has passively disappeared into the landscape, one can assume to the relief of Granada Hills residents.

*

Coercion, of course, is only part of the story. More often, developers leap at the opportunity to add red tile roofs to their sterile gated communities. Taco Bells know that mock Mission facades lend historical authenticity to their Breakfast Burritos. That sentimentality runs deep. It is part longing for a simple past that never existed, part desire to smooth over the growing complexities of our urban condition. “Do not disturb,” these buildings grumble.

But the romantic notion that these buildings are the true legacy of California is, of course, just another fleeting fantasy. Historically, the Mission revival always had its rivals. Born in the 1880s, it produced its best works in the boom years after the turn of the century, alongside other California fantasies such as Greene and Greene’s 1908 Gamble House in Pasadena, an elaborate Arts and Crafts retreat whose crisscrossing post and beam construction and big sweeping porches instantly inspired strip after strip of Craftsman bungalows--perhaps one of the most successful translations ever of high-end architecture for the masses.

Soon after, star-struck European Modernists began building some of their most radical works here, such as Rudolph Schindler’s 1922 King’s Road House in West Hollywood. To any architect working today, the work of Modernists such as these is the most relevant part of the Great California Tradition. That language, with its sleek low roofs, inside-outside spaces and tilt-up concrete construction, seems the closest in sensibility to our own age.

*

But to ask which of these styles truly belongs to California is as meaningful as asking whether you like Marlene Dietrich or Marilyn. Like giddy new stars who quickly add an intellectual haughtiness to their seductive struts, these homes are all romantic make-overs. Here they are all natural, they are all real.

Strip the best of them of their makeup, however, and these structures reveal a deeper common bond: a sensitivity to the horizontal, never-ending landscape, a hedonistic pleasure in the climate, whether in Greene and Greene’s treehouse-like sleeping porches, Albert Frey’s amoeba-shaped swimming pool carved right into a glass-enclosed living room, or Neff’s Andalusian dreams. Nature is the binding fabric in all of them.

Or compare Richard Neutra’s Modernist 1938 Strathmore Apartments in Westwood, where terraced homes are embedded in a steeply sloped hill and buried in thick gardens, to Irving Gill’s Horatio West Courts in Santa Monica. The latter is a wonderfully scaled abstraction of a Spanish Mission scheme, its white Cubist forms tightly wrapped around an intimate courtyard. But they are both coy Edens, seducing with the same subtle themes.

*

All of these formal styles can sustain themselves in our democratic, look-at-me culture. The real question is: What’s next? One can make a hesitant guess. The radical formal experiments of the ‘70s and ‘80s that put L.A. on the architectural map again have become more subdued today. Humble works by young firms such as Guthrie Buresh or Daly Genik, to name a few, sparkle like jewels in a dreary landscape. And they draw on all strands of the California tradition. Extracted from Gill’s clean take on the Spanish Mission revival and the brilliantly subdued compositions of Frank O. Gehry’s ‘70s-era houses, these homes aspire to make the everyday sexy: Plywood and wooden studs become powerful compositional elements. Shadows flicker behind translucent walls. They may be a peek at the city’s next incarnation.