Garden Symposium Looks at Frank Lloyd Wright’s California Legacy and Explores His Lesser-Known Work

Tour of the Hollyhock House, Los Angeles, CA

In April, the Garden Conservancy hosted the two-day Frank Lloyd Wright Garden Symposium: His Southern California Work and Legacy, which delved into a lesser known yet impactful period in the architect’s career. It offered a unique perspective on the architect’s exceptional talents, showcasing a design philosophy where buildings and gardens coexist in harmony. The event, held at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles, attracted 110 attendees.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s time as an architect in Los Angeles was brief, lasting only a few years in the early 1920s after he returned from projects in Japan, including the Imperial Hotel. However, this period proved significant, particularly in shaping his approach to landscape design, as evidenced in his work on the Ennis, Storer, and Freeman houses. Janet Parks, a co-organizer of the symposium and retired curator of the Avery Archives at Columbia University, opened the event by highlighting the enduring role that landscape played throughout Wright’s long and prolific career.

Panelist at the Frank Lloyd Wright Garden Symposium

Laura J. Martin, a professor of environmental history at Williams College and the author of Wild by Design (2022), delivered the keynote address. Her talk placed Wright’s interest in gardens, particularly native plants, in context. Martin noted the influence of Wright’s friend, landscape architect Jens Jensen, and shed light on the field’s pioneering women scientists, including Elizabeth Britton, Eloise Butler, and Edith Roberts.

The impact of the automobile on both Los Angeles’ development and the rise of wildflower picking as a weekend leisure activity during the early 20th century was also explored.

Striking historical photographs highlighting the city’s pre-modern landscape were featured in several presentations, most notably those of Director & Curator at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House Abbey Chamberlain Brach. Hollyhock House was completed just before Wright moved to Los Angeles and is regarded as his masterpiece. Its owner, Aline Barnsdall, originally envisioned the house as a performing arts center with her residence as its centerpiece atop Olive Hill, a thirty-six-acre site. Gardens occupied a special place in its conception; Barnsdall described it as being planned as “half garden, half house.&rdquo

Hollyhock House patio | Credit: Joshua White JWPictures.com. Courtesy of the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs

Today Hollyhock House is a house museum and UNESCO World Heritage Site operated by the City of Los Angeles. It underwent a major renovation by its previous director and curator, Jeffrey Herr, and Abbey has focused her attention on the rehabilitation of the landscape with help from Terremoto, a landscape architecture firm in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Jenny Jones, principal at Terremoto LA, spoke next. Though Terremoto is Italian for earthquake, Jenny showed how her team is anything but destructive in their work at Hollyhock or any of the other many mid-twentieth modernist masterpieces they are working on in Southern California. Underlining her work is an infectious curiosity about landscape history and a commitment to using historical records.

Kenneth Breisch pushed the story further in his symposium talk. Ken, an emeritus professor of architecture at the University of Southern California, considered Wright’s legacy in the region. Like a series of concentric circles, the most immediate instances were Wright’s son, Lloyd Wright, a gifted landscape architect, and Rudolph Schindler, a Wright protégé, both of whom assisted on the Hollyhock House. Ken illuminated Wright’s impact, for example, on the early work of the leading postmodernist Frank Gehry. From one Frank to the next, Wright emerges as a key to understanding how a considerable number of twentieth and twenty-first century architects have worked with nature in Southern California.

The last presentation was a short film by Safina Uberoi, a filmmaker, gardener, and owner of a Frank Lloyd Wright designed House. Safina scaled the discussion to the personal, recounting her journey from a gardener in the Santa Monica Mountains in Los Angeles to the owner of a 1950s Usonian-designed house by Frank Lloyd Wright in Cincinnati, OH, and how one influenced the other.

The symposium experience extended beyond lectures, as its second day included tours of two Wright-connected Los Angeles gardens: Hollyhock House and the Schindler House, designed by Wright’s protégé Rudolph Schindler. These tours provided a firsthand look at Wright’s enduring influence on Southern California architecture and landscape design, evident even in the work of prominent architects like Frank Gehry.

Today, Schindler House is operated by the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, one of several local partners of the Frank Lloyd Wright Garden Symposium. Along with the Hollyhock House, Ganna Walska Lotusland, and the Hancock Park Garden Club, our partners helped contribute to the event’s success. A special thanks to the Ebell of Los Angeles for providing their beautiful Wilshire Theatre for the presentations on the first day. The Garden Conservancy was also delighted to link arms with the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, and the Garden Club of America for this event.