LA Home by Frank Lloyd Wright Finds New Role: a Space for Art
A century after the master architect’s first Los Angeles house was built, an art installation is bringing in fresh energy — and younger visitors — inside it.
Wright’s Hollyhock House is hosting paintings and ceramics as part of a temporary show that celebrates the 1920s home as a space for contemporary artistic experimentation.
Photograph by Joshua White, courtesy Hollyhock House
To its fans, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House is itself a work of art. A highly ornamental cast-concrete structure studded with stylized representations of its namesake flower throughout, the house connects the Prairie-style residences Wright was known for in the Midwest to the Mayan Revival ones he created in Los Angeles throughout the 1920s. Built between 1919 and 1921, the house became the first building in LA to be added to the Unesco World Heritage List in 2019.
After the home’s original owner, oil heiress Aline Barnsdall, donated it to the city of Los Angeles in 1927, Hollyhock House lived on as a home for the California Arts Club, then as a USO facility. Renovated and opened to the public in 2005 (and renovated again in 2015), it stands today as the centerpiece of Barnsdall Art Park, an 11-acre public park in East Hollywood. Like many Wright works, the building still draws devoted followers and casual admirers of the famed designer, but its curators have been looking for ways to bring in new energy — and visitors — by engaging with contemporary artists.