University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

"Writing our own program": the USC experiment in modern architectural pedagogy, 1930 to 1960

(USC Thesis Other)

"Writing our own program": the USC experiment in modern architectural pedagogy, 1930 to 1960

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content

“WRITING OUR OWN PROGRAM”:

THE USC EXPERIMENT IN MODERN ARCHITECTURAL PEDAGOGY,

1930 TO 1960

by

Deborah Howell-Ardila

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF HISTORIC PRESERVATION

December 2010

Copyright 2010 Deborah Howell-Ardila

Acknowledgements

It would be difficult to imagine a finer group of scholars to have lent their time
and expertise as committee members and outsider readers for this particular study. It’s a
pleasure to turn to the task of thanking them now.
Several summers back, I attended Kenneth Breisch’s summer program in historic
preservation at USC, known to initiates as summer “boot camp.” Ken’s knowledge and
presentation of the topics, and the caliber of students in attendance, convinced me to
enroll in USC’s Historic Preservation program. Ever since, I’ve had a growing list of
reasons to thank Ken: for his inspiring lectures on architectural history and historic
preservation, for advice and guidance on this thesis and many other projects, and for his
never-flagging enthusiasm and sense of humor. I’d also like to thank Ken for suggesting
the initial direction of this thesis and for photographing, on short notice, the USC
demonstration house that turned up in the course of this research. I also thank Ken for
designing and leading a program at USC that encourages students to connect the dots
between academic architectural history and the street-level view.
I’d also like to express my immense gratitude to Kathleen James-Chakraborty—
for defining the gold standard for an academic architectural historian, through the
originality and integrity of her scholarship; for always beating the deadline and the odds
when it came to returning comments; for the insightfulness and rigor of her critique; and
for many enjoyable hours spent attending her architectural history lectures at UC
Berkeley back in the mid-1990s.
ii

My third committee member, Emily Bills, also shared her time and nuanced work
on Esther McCoy. I’d like to thank Emily for our productive and enjoyable conversations
about the direction of this thesis and SoCal modernism; for her participation in the Oral
History Project round table discussion; and for her close reading of this thesis and many
helpful suggestions.
I am enormously grateful to my outside readers, architectural historians William
Littmann and Barbara Lamprecht, whose own work on the UC Berkeley College of
Environmental Design and Richard Neutra, respectively, represents a standard to which
to aspire. Bill and Barbara contributed generously of their time and expertise in sharp,
close reviews of this thesis, and I’m grateful to them. Stephen Tobriner, Greg Hise,
William Deverell, and Dana Cuff also provided advice and insights along the way.
I would be remiss were I not to thank those who have participated in the USC
School of Architecture Oral History Project. This thesis only begins to draw on the
material provided by the USC alums, local architects, and historians who’ve participated
so far: Rudi DeChellis, Ena Dubnoff, Eugene Flores, Frank Gehry, John Grist, Ray and
Shelley Kappe, John Kelsey, William Krisel, Randell Makinson, Carl McLarand, Ed
Niles, John Reed, Frank Sata, Dennis Smith, Greg Walsh, Eugene Weston III, and Chet
Widom. My thanks also go to Dottie O’Carroll, Douglas Noble, and Anjie Emeka of the
USC School of Architecture, the Historical Society of Southern California for partially
underwriting the Oral History Project, and the Gamble House for hosting two round table
discussions.
My colleagues at Sapphos Environmental, Inc., in Pasadena, California, each had
valuable insights to share about considering, then determining, contextual as well as
iii

architectural significance (and always on deadline and a budget): our group manager and
architectural historian, Leslie Heumann, and architectural historians Shannon Carmack
Ciezadlo, Rebecca Silva, and Laura Gallegos Carias. I owe a particular debt to Leslie for
sharing her vast knowledge of Southern California’s architectural heritage and for our
ongoing conversations about architecture. I’d also like to thank David Lee, Cristina
Carrillo Yamasaki, and Sam Ortiz for editing and formatting assistance. A special thanks
goes to the founder and principal of Sapphos Environmental, Inc., Marie Campbell, for
having the imagination and chutzpah to allow her staff to stretch beyond their comfort
zones, in the direction their interests lead them.
This study benefited greatly from the assistance of Claude Zachary and Dace
Taube of the University of Southern California Libraries; Tony Gonzalez of the USC
Architecture and Fine Arts Library; Waverly Lowell, Environmental Design Archives,
College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley; Robert D. Montoya, Charles E. Young
Research Library, UCLA; Jennifer Whitlock, Architecture & Design Collection,
University Art Museum, UC Santa Barbara; and independent scholar and architectural
historian John Crosse.
I’d also like to extend a special thanks to John Reed for being the first person to
mention Weatherhead’s woefully under-researched role at USC, and Aimee Lind of the
Getty Research Institute (by way of her father, John Merritt) for suggesting the same was
true for Arthur Gallion.
And most of all, infinite gratitude to my family, David and Alejandro, for their
support and love, and for being el sol de mis días.
iv

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ii

List of Figures vi

Abstract x

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 Milestones: Arthur Weatherhead and the USC 19
College of Architecture, 1919 through 1945
Section 1 Department of Architecture, 1919 to 1930 19
Section 2 College of Architecture, 1931 to 1939 33
Section 3 Transitional Years, 1939 to 1945 39

Chapter 2 Beaux-Arts to Modern: Weatherhead’s The History of Collegiate 46
Education in Architecture, in Context
Section 1 The Beaux-Arts: A Brief Sketch and Early Critiques 47
Section 2 Pioneering American Departures from the 52
Beaux-Arts System, 1919 to 1935
Section 3 Art versus Pragmatism: The Debate on 62
Architectural Education

Chapter 3 The USC Experiment: Core Ideas behind the Curriculum, 75
1930 to 1944
Section 1 The Philosophy behind the USC “Experiment” 76
Section 2 Contemporary Architecture and “California Living”: 115
Local Press Coverage in the 1930s and early 1940s

Chapter 4 The USC Experiment: Curriculum, Faculty, and Projects, 131
1930 to 1960
Section 1 Pre- and Postwar Snapshot: 1937 and 1957 132
Section 2 Design Curriculum 134
Section 3 Traditional Methods and Historical Precedent 177
Section 4 Pragmatism: Bridge between Classroom and Office 184
Section 5 Social Responsiveness 190
Section 6 Allied Fields: Industrial Design 214

Chapter 5 “The Challenge of the Postwar World Is Here”: 224
Arthur Banta Gallion and Continuity and Change, 1945 to 1960

Conclusion 244

Bibliography 251 
v

List of Figures
Figure 1 Thompson/Moseley House, Buff, Straub & Hensman, 1959 3

Figure 2 Thompson/Moseley House, Buff, Straub & Hensman, 1959 3

Figure 3 Frank House, Buff, Straub & Hensman, 1957 4

Figure 4 Plan, Frank House, Buff, Straub & Hensman, 1957 5

Figure 5 Case Study House 22 (Stahl House), 1960, Pierre Koenig 6

Figure 6 Case Study House 22 (Stahl House), 1960, Pierre Koenig 7

Figure 7 Plan, Case Study House 22, 1960, Pierre Koenig 7

Figure 8 Arthur Clason Weatherhead, 1939 20

Figure 9 Courtyard of USC Department of Architecture, circa 1926 30

Figure 10 USC Department of Architecture, 1928 32

Figure 11 Alpha Rho Chi Fraternity and USC Staff and Faculty, 1935/1936 36

Figure 12 Harris Hall, USC College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1940 40

Figure 13 Harris Hall, USC College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1940 41

Figure 14 School of Architecture, 1930, El Rodeo Yearbook 77

Figure 15 College of Architecture, 1933, El Rodeo Yearbook 78

Figure 16 College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1934, El Rodeo Yearbook 79

Figure 17 College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1935, El Rodeo Yearbook 80

Figure 18 College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1936, El Rodeo Yearbook 81

Figure 19 College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1937, El Rodeo Yearbook 82

Figure 20 College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1938, El Rodeo Yearbook 83

Figure 21 College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1939, El Rodeo Yearbook 84

Figure 22 College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1940, El Rodeo Yearbook 85
vi

Figure 23 College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1941, El Rodeo Yearbook 86

Figure 24 College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1943, El Rodeo Yearbook 87

Figure 25 College of Architecture, 1946, El Rodeo Yearbook 88

Figure 26 College of Architecture, 1947, El Rodeo Yearbook 89

Figure 27 School of Architecture, 1958, El Rodeo Yearbook 90

Figure 28 William Lee Judson, circa 1910, College of Fine Arts founder 93

Figure 29 USC School of Architecture Goes Hollywood, 1928 103

Figure 30 Bullocks-Wilshire Building, Parkinson & Parkinson, 1929 121

Figure 31 “Home Nestled Amid Foliage,” Proto-Ranch House, 1931 123

Figure 32 Raymond Kennedy and College of Architecture, 1937 140

Figure 33 “Architects to Finish Santa Ana Rejuvenation,” 1938 142

Figure 34 Editorial Cartoon, “Santa Ana Bound,” 1938 143

Figure 35 Planning Hollywood, 1940, USC Design Project 145

Figure 36 Planning Hollywood, 1940, USC Design Project 146

Figure 37 Planning Culver City, 1942, USC Design Project 148

Figure 38 “Class at S.C. Designs Cabins to Suit Landscapes,” 1941 152

Figure 39 Gordon Drake, USC Class of 1941, Presley House, 1947 158

Figure 40 Gordon Drake, USC Class of 1941, Presley House, 1947, Plan 159

Figure 41 Gordon Drake, USC Class of 1941, Architect’s Residence, 1946 161

Figure 42 Gordon Drake, USC Class of 1941, Architect’s Residence, 1946 162

Figure 43 Gordon Drake, USC Class of 1941, Architect’s Residence, 1946 163

Figure 44 “Five Zones for California Outdoor Living,” Gordon Drake Unit 167
House, 1950, Alameda, California
vii

Figure 45 “Tomorrow’s Architect” presents the USC Study House, 1952 168

Figure 46 “Tomorrow’s Architect” presents the USC Study House, 1952 169

Figure 47 Three-Stage Plan, the USC Study House, 1952 171

Figure 48 Three-Stage Plan, the USC Study House, 1952 172

Figure 49 Three-Stage Plan, the USC Study House, 1952 173

Figure 50 Calvin Straub, Sedlachek House, 1949 175

Figure 51 USC Shades and Shadows Course, 1933, Lee Kline illustration 178

Figure 52 Small-Family Housing, Santa Anita Village, 1939, USC Design 195
Project

Figure 53 The Villageaire Model Home, USC Student Project, 1948/1949 199

Figure 54 The Villageaire Model Home, USC Student Project, 1948/1949 200

Figure 55 Villageaire Model Home, USC Student Project, 1948/1949 201

Figure 56 Plan, Villageaire Model Home, USC Student Project, 1948/1949 202

Figure 57 Advertisement by Gaffers & Sattler, the manufacturers of the stove 204
in Villageaire’s “New Freedom Kitchen”

Figure 58 “Villageaire, Model SC Home, Draws Visitors,” Los Angeles Times 205

Figure 59 Small House Design, 1955, USC Design Project, Calvin Straub 207

Figure 60 Multi-family Residential Project, 1939, USC Design Project 209

Figure 61 Multi-family Residential Project, 1939, USC Design Project 211

Figure 62 USC War-Time Curriculum, 1942, Design Project, Airport 212

Figure 63 USC Industrial Design Lecturer, Kem Weber, Airline Chair, 1934 217

Figure 64 USC Industrial Design Lecturer, Paul T. Frankl, Studio, Los Angeles 219

Figure 65 USC Industrial Design Lecturer, Paul T. Frankl, Studio, Los Angeles 220

viii

Figure 66 USC Industrial Design Students, December 1939 222

Figure 67 Greg Walsh, “A Panel House,” circa 1952/1953. Third-Year Design 226
Project for Calvin Straub

Figure 68 Greg Walsh, “A Panel House,” circa 1952/1953. Third-Year Design 227
Project for Calvin Straub

Figure 69 Gallion and Gruen’s Pacoima Public Housing Project, 1954 236

Figure 70 Gallion and Gruen’s Pacoima Public Housing Project, 1956 236

ix

Abstract
Although USC offered the region’s first and only professional degree in
architecture from 1925 until the 1960s, very little research has been conducted on the
school’s history. Much of the secondary literature has generally accepted – and
perpetuated – the assumption that, in the post-World War II period, through the work of a
few determined actors, the USC School of Architecture shed virtually overnight its
Beaux-Arts-influenced curriculum and adopted a modern, pragmatic approach.
This thesis demonstrates that USC launched a modern “experiment” in
architectural education far earlier than is generally acknowledged—beginning in the early
1930s and primarily shaped by the exigencies of the Great Depression, rather than 1945
with the end of World War II. The individual who was most decisive in launching this
experiment is also the person least cited in the literature: Arthur Clason Weatherhead,
head of the program and dean from 1914 to 1944.
In 1930, through Weatherhead’s design and initiative, the USC College of
Architecture became the fifth out of 45 American collegiate schools of architecture to
shift away from the Beaux-Arts system and craft a modern, hands-on alternative. In the
case of USC, this alternative was grounded in pragmatism, social responsiveness and
“present-day conditions,” contemporary, site-specific design, regional identity, and a
close association with the allied arts.
Weatherhead’s thirty-year career at USC coincided with an era of widespread re-
evaluation and subsequent overhaul of American collegiate schools of architecture. This
thesis sheds light on this era through an examination of departmental bulletins and course
lists, newspaper and trade magazine articles of the day, faculty and student publications,
x

as well as interviews with alumnae. Once the USC “experiment” was established and in
place in the late 1930s, the curriculum and design philosophy remained largely intact
through the early 1960s.
This study does not intend to diminish the achievements of the postwar dean,
Arthur Gallion. From 1945 to 1960, Gallion built on the foundations in place and
expanded the school according to the pressing issues of the day: housing, planning,
industrial design, and landscape architecture. In national terms, the example of the USC
School of Architecture illustrates how educators and architects on the “far western”
periphery of Southern California responded to the issues challenging – and changing –
the architectural profession and academy across the United States.
Seen in the context of the 1930s, Weatherhead’s program at USC was shaped by
the need to reject prescriptive ideas about style emphasized under the Beaux-Arts system.
At USC, the social aspects of modernism became the focus. In this way, the affinity
between the USC design philosophy and the iconic work of the region’s modernist avant-
garde is not meant to suggest that the USC School of Architecture fits within the larger
story of the region’s genius-architects. Rather, this thesis suggests that the work of the
region’s early “starchitects” fits within the broader social context that also nurtured and
produced the modern USC School of Architecture. To paraphrase Gwendolyn Wright,
this study hopes to highlight not the “individual stars” but the larger “constellation” of
modern architectural thought and design in Southern California.
1

1
Gwendolyn Wright’s original quote read: “From Craft to Profession shifts the focus of architectural
history from individual stars to constellations.” Woods (1999), back cover.
xi

Introduction
In 1975, writing in the journal Perspecta on the Case Study House program,
Southern California’s pioneering architectural critic Esther McCoy described what had
come to be seen as two distinctive paths in the region’s post-World War II modernism:
the Case Study House “style,” reflecting the presumably Miesian, steel-frame
construction of, among others, Raphael Soriano, Charles Eames, and Pierre Koenig, and
what had come to be known as the “Pasadena” or “USC style,” a type of residential
design based on
a panel system and framed with 4 by 4-inch posts 4 feet on center. Roofs were
gabled and low pitched, and glass often followed the gable line. Decks and
porches were oriented to the mature trees of Pasadena. They were influenced by
Greene and Greene and earlier cottages, which Randell Makinson calls the Brown
and Browns, and by Harwell Harris.
1

As described by McCoy, the USC style was characterized by an exposed wood
post-and-beam structural system, with aesthetic effect achieved through an asymmetrical
but balanced arrangement of modular, in-fill panels. The use of post-and-beam
construction allowed for an open, flexible plan, as well as a high level of integration with
the outdoors. Patios directly off rooms, visible through generous expanses of glazing,
helped extend living space and provided transitional areas between indoors and out (with
indoor-outdoor integration the leitmotif of the style). In homage to its Arts and Crafts’
roots, McCoy wrote, a low-pitched gable, with wide eaves punctuated by exposed rafter
tails, capped the building. On equal footing with any given architectural feature was a
concern for site-specific design, in which the existing topography was understood as a

1
McCoy, Esther, “Arts and Architecture Case Study Houses,” Perspecta, vol. 15 (1975): 55-73, quoted
here p. 72.
1

canvas half filled. Classic examples for each are reflected in, for example, Buff, Straub
& Hensman’s Frank House (1957) and Thompson/Moseley House (1959), and on the
other side of the presumable divide, Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House #22 (1960).
(Figures 1 to 4, Buff, Straub & Hensman, Thompson/Moseley House and Frank House,
and Figures 5 to 7, Pierre Koenig, Case Study House #22).
During the 1950s, the principal practitioners of the “USC style” included the
architectural firms of Buff, Straub & Hensman, formed by three graduates of the USC
School of Architecture, Conrad Buff III (1952), Calvin Straub (1943), and Donald
Hensman (1952); Ladd & Kelsey, formed by USC alums, Thornton Ladd (1952) and
John Kelsey (1954); and Smith & Williams, founded by USC alumni Whitney Smith
(1934) in collaboration with fellow alum Wayne Williams (1941). Given the shared alma
mater and architectural language, it is unsurprising that commentators of the time looked
toward the USC School of Architecture to characterize this work.
McCoy’s Perspecta article on the Case Study House program is an eloquent piece
of architectural criticism. However, what goes undeveloped in the article—but what
stands out today—is how thoroughly pre-1945 USC graduates dominate the roster of
postwar Case Study House architects described by McCoy. Although she does not
identify the architects as USC graduates, the list reads like a reunion of the 1930’s and
early 1940’s School of Architecture: Sumner Spaulding, a USC instructor from 1923 well
into the postwar period, Thornton Abell (1931), Spaulding’s young partner, John Rex
(1932), Smith, Donn Emmons (partner of Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons), and Raphael
Soriano (1934), Jules Brady (1936), Edward Killingsworth (1940), Kemper Nomland, Jr.
2

Figure 1. Thompson/Moseley House, Buff, Straub & Hensman, 1959, San Marino,
California. Photograph by Deborah Howell-Ardila.

Figure 2. Interior, Thompson/Moseley House, Buff, Straub & Hensman, 1959, San
Marino, California. Source: Buff & Hensman (USC 2002).

3

Figure 3. Frank House, Buff, Straub & Hensman, 1957, Pasadena. Los Angeles
Times Home magazine, led by Dan McMasters, spread the gospel of site-
specificity as the epitomy of modern California living: “Planned to
inhabit is wooded site naturally and effectively in both concept and use of
materials without disturbing original beauty of the hillside.” Source: Los
Angeles Times Home magazine, 18 March 1962.
4

 

Figure 4. Plan, Frank House, Buff, Straub & Hensman, 1957, Pasadena, California.
Landscaping by Eckbo, Dean, and Williams. Source: Buff, Smith &
Hensman, Pasadena.
5

Figure 5. Case Study House 22 (Stahl House), 1960, Pierre Koenig. Julius
Shulman’s stylized photographs helped make Case Study House 22 one of
the icons of John Entenza’s program. Shows detail of corregated steel
sheets that served as the roof, sheltering the house under wide overhanging
eaves. Source: Courtesy of Getty Research Institute, Julius Shulman
Archives.
6

Figure 6. Case Study House 22 (Stahl House), Los Angeles, 1960. Sited on a
small, irregularly shaped lot at hill’s edge, the house utilizes a cantilevered
L-shaped plan to capitalize on the view. Source: J. Paul Getty Trust. Used
with permission. Julius Shulman Photography Archive, Research Library at
the Getty Research Institute (2004.R.10).

Figure 7. Plan, Case Study House 22, Pierre Koenig, Los Angeles. Source: USC
School of Architecture.
7

and Williams (1941), Straub (1943), and, finally, reaching the postwar period, Buff,
Hensmann, and Koenig (1952).
Clearly something was underway at USC in the 1930s. Thus far, the story has
gone untold. Virtually no scholarship exists with the clear-eyed certainty expressed by
McCoy placing the “USC style” within the context of the USC School of Architecture
itself, whose post-World War II environment was identified as critical. Although USC
offered the region’s first and only professional degree in architecture from 1925 until the
1960s, very little research has been conducted on the school’s history. Much of what has
been written accepts—and perpetuates—the assumption that, in the post-World War II
period, through the work of a few determined actors, the USC School of Architecture
shed virtually overnight its Beaux-Arts-influenced curriculum and adopted a modern,
pragmatic approach. In these accounts, when it comes to the USC School of Architecture,
the year 1945 is presented as a caesura—social, cultural, and technological. But the
language of caesura eclipses the possibility of continuity between the pre- and postwar
periods. After all, something was underway at the School of Architecture in the 1930s
and early 1940s – and given the breadth and richness of the work created by even the
partial list of graduates above, it went well beyond modern meditations on the Arts and
Crafts.
This thesis demonstrates that a modern, hands-on curriculum at USC not only
began far earlier than is generally acknowledged (in the early 1930s rather than 1945) but
was designed and launched by a figure who has been all but forgotten in the literature:
Arthur Clason Weatherhead, department leader and dean from 1914 to 1944. In 1930,
through Weatherhead’s initiative, the USC College of Architecture became the fifth out
8

of forty-five schools of architecture in the United States to shift from a Beaux-Arts-
influenced pedagogy toward a pragmatic, hands-on alternative, grounded in
contemporary, site-driven design and regional identity.
Weatherhead’s thirty-year career at USC coincided with an era of widespread re-
evaluation (and subsequently overhaul) of US architectural pedagogy. This thesis
illuminates this era, through an examination of departmental bulletins and course lists,
newspaper and trade magazine articles of the day, faculty and student publications, as
well as interviews with alumnae. These documents demonstrate a remarkable level of
continuity in the USC curriculum from the 1930s through early 1960s, in terms of
classes, sequence, design philosophy, and methodology.
This study does not intend to diminish the achievements and leadership of the
postwar dean, Arthur Banta Gallion. From 1945 to 1960, Gallion maintained the
approach established by Weatherhead and expanded the school’s scope according to the
pressing issues of the day: planning, industrial design, and housing. In national terms, the
example of the USC School of Architecture illustrates how interwar educators and
architects on the “far western” periphery of Southern California began responding to the
issues challenging (and changing) the profession and academy across the United States.
Beginning in the 1930s, the goal at USC was the fashioning of a middle ground between
the history-free “ultra-modern,” as Weatherhead and Gallion both referred to the
machine-age side of the modern movement, and the style-prescriptive Beaux-Arts
educational system and historic eclecticism.
Recent scholarship has begun to contend with the theme of pedagogical reform in
American schools of architecture during the transitional era of the 1930s. In dissertations
9

written in 2009, Brendan Daniel Moran
2
and Avigail Sachs
3
explored how the emerging
field of research (primarily in the social sciences in Moran’s work, and the technical,
building, and environmental sciences in Sachs’ study) proved decisive in the
development of alternative theories for architectural pedagogy beginning in the 1930s.
Moran and Sachs point to the tension emerging in this time between research and design
in the schools. The debate boiled down to these basic ideas: “research” was carried out
in the service of practice—the specifics of site, location, and client and societal needs
were intrinsic parts of any solution to an architectural (or increasingly planning) problem.
The emphasis on “design” held that architecture was above all an art form, and valuable
classroom time should not be wasted on practical experience.
In terms of the emergence of modern architecture in the United States, as Sachs
pointed out, recent scholarship by Kathleen James-Chakraborty and Gwendolyn Wright
refutes the long-held view that a fixed set of heroic émigré architects introduced the
modern idiom and philosophy to the United States.
4
James-Chakraborty observed that
The Museum of Modern Art’s 1932 exhibition of modern European architecture
and the immigration to the United States of the two Bauhaus architects
highlighted in it, Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, have been
widely credited with transforming American architecture and design. This is a

2
Moran, Brendan Daniel, “Sociological Imagination and the City: Encounters between Architecture and
Planning Education in America, 1933-1957” (PhD Dissertation, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA,
2009).
3
Sachs, Avigail, “Research for Architecture: Building a Discipline and Modernizing the Profession” (PhD
Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2009). Studies on the history and modernization of the
profession also include: Woods, Mary N., From Craft to Profession: The Practice of Architecture in
Nineteenth Century American (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999). Bentel, Paul, 1992,
“Modernism and Professionalism in American Modern Architecture, 1919-1933,” PhD Dissertation, MIT,
Cambridge, MA. Hyungmin, Pai, The Portfolio and the Diagram: Architecture, Discourse, and Modernity
in American (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
4
See, for example, James-Chakraborty, Kathleen, “From Isolation to Internationalism: American
Acceptance of the Bauhaus,” in James-Chakraborty, ed., Bauhaus Culture from Weimar to the Cold War
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), and Wright, Gwendolyn, Modern Architectures
in History: USA (London: Reaktion Books, 2008).
10

myth. The Great Depression and World War II, not the presence of the émigrés,
were responsible for far more substantial changes in both fields. These shifts led
to the adoption of forms that in most cases bore little resemblance to their
supposed European antecedents.
5

While scholars such as James-Chakraborty and Wright have helped broaden the
understanding of the emergence of American modernism, Sachs and Littmann observe a
narrow view persisting when it comes to the history of architectural pedagogy, with a
continuing overemphasis on “the theories and practices developed at the German school
the Bauhaus, and the influence of Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe.”
6
The
centrality of Gropius and Mies has led to an oversimplified conclusion, Sachs argues,
with respect to their influence. They arrived in the US, set the agenda, and all other
schools followed. In Littmann’s research on the University of California, Berkeley, in
which he demonstrates that a student movement from below, rather than administrative
changes from above, occasioned the shift toward a modern curriculum, he observes the
same problem:
Most scholarly descriptions of this era credit this shift to the determined actions of
a handful of architects. In these narratives, noted modernists like Walter Gropius
and Joseph Hudnut are portrayed as heroic actors almost single-handedly casting
out the old-fashioned French approach from the universities.
7

A similar dilemma exists in the literature on Southern Californian modernism. In
terms of design, a wealth of scholarship illuminates the work of a small but important set
of avant-garde architects. This work includes excellent monographs on the triumvirate of
Frank Lloyd Wright and his one-time protégés, Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler,
as well as studies on Harwell Hamilton Harris, who, along with William Wurster, is often

5
James-Chakraborty, “From Isolation to Internationalism,” 153.
6
Sachs, “Research for Architecture,” xiii.
7
Littmann, William, “Assault on the Ecole: Student Campaigns Against the Beaux Arts, 1925-1950,”
Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 53, no. 3 (February 2000): 159-166; quoted here p. 159.
11

said to have provided the bridge between the “first generation” and later modernist
architects. But there remains a relative shortage of comparative scholarship on secondary
narratives and actors. Given the lack of comparative work, in particular on the 1930s,
Mid-Century Modern design in Southern California is often observed through an
exceptionalist lens, through which certain design principles (such as site-specific design
and indoor-outdoor integration) are understood as uniquely Southern Californian, and
uniquely postwar. However, this exceptionalist lens misses the movement’s continuity
with the 1930s and place within the larger context, as architects throughout the United
States (and beyond) began exploring the middle ground, between a new history-free
architectural idiom and regional precedent and identity.
With respect to education, the focus on post-World War II educators and
architects has left untold the story of the continuity between the pre- and postwar periods
at USC. The dominant narrative emphasizes the contributions of postwar actors, with the
Beaux-Arts system itself serving in the role of progress’s enemy (though coursework well
into the early 1960s shows that neither Weatherhead nor Gallion intended to throw out all
vestiges of traditional methods).
In her study of the history of architectural practice, Mary Woods challenged what
she described as a long-standing tendency among architects and historians to focus on
genius-artists “to the exclusion of other narrators and narratives.”
8
She described the
tendency as “Roarkism,” referring to the iconoclastic architect of Ayn Rand’s novel The
Fountainhead. Broadening the focus to present a “mise-en-scene of the architectural
profession,” Woods’ concern lies “with multiple participants, overlapping

8
Woods, Mary N., From Craft to Profession: The Practice of Architecture in Nineteenth Century American
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 1.
12

responsibilities, and the settings for design and building.” The Roarks, she writes, do
play a role in the story,
since they were, after all, principal players in constructing professional identity
and institutions. But I view them from unorthodox perspectives. Here they are
not omniscient creators but collaborators, partners, entrepreneurs, merchandisers,
educators, employers, and lobbyists. Their narratives are interwoven with those
of modest, provincial, renegade, and failed architects.
9

In this spirit, this thesis hopes to help broaden the mise-en-scene of Southern
Californian modernism by exploring the secondary narrative represented by the USC
School of Architecture, its principal authors, Weatherhead and Gallion, and the work of
selected faculty and alumnae. The goal is not to elevate Weatherhead and Gallion to the
Roarkian pantheon but rather to consider how their stories, thus far unexamined, fit
within the formation of modern architectural thought and design in the region, as well as
planning, industrial design, and landscape architecture.
The most fruitful path for examining the modern USC program, though, lies in the
context out of which the program emerged. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on this context.
Following a brief biographical sketch of Weatherhead, Chapter 1 aims to outline the
administrative milestones of the School of Architecture, during its formative years, and
the career milestones for Weatherhead, whose career directly mirrored the growth of the
department he led. During this time, the architecture program at USC went from several
courses in the 1910s, housed in the College of Fine Arts, to a “department” offering the
region’s first specialized degree in architecture, to a stand-alone College of Architecture
in 1931. Architectural pedagogy became Weatherhead’s professional focus, beginning in

9
Woods, From Craft to Profession, 1.
13

1918 as he traveled the US and Europe to study teaching methods, and culminating in the
1941 publication of his book, The History of Collegiate Architectural Education in the
United States. Chapter 1 introduces limited historical context, as it reflects the growth of
the USC College of Architecture during this time; but, given the dearth of material on the
USC program, the main goal of the chapter is to clarify the administrative milestones in
the early years.
In the wake of World War I, spurred by the advent of European (and US)
modernism, US colleges of architecture began fashioning alternatives to the Beaux-Arts
system. While early educational experiments varied from college to college, one shared
objective was writing pragmatism into the coursework. Chapter 2, “Beaux-Arts to
Modern: Weatherhead’s History of Collegiate Education in Architecture in Context”
traces the early evolution toward modern pedagogy from approximately 1919 through the
1930s. Excerpts from Weatherhead’s book illuminate his views on the shortcomings of
the Beaux-Arts system as well as his goals for USC. Following a brief sketch of the
Beaux-Arts system, the early departures from it are detailed in Chapter 2, beginning with
the University of Oregon in 1919. The chapter concludes with an overview of the debate
between proponents of traditional methods and those favoring contemporary, pragmatic
alternatives.
By the time Weatherhead’s 1941 book was published, the ideas he had begun
developing in the 1920s had emerged fully in the USC curriculum. Chapter 3, “The USC
Experiment: Core Ideas behind the Curriculum, 1930 to 1944,” draws on newspaper
articles by Weatherhead and his staff, departmental course bulletins, and student
publications to illustrate how the dean’s philosophy evolved into a core set of ideas.
14

These ideas centered on: (1) realism and “present-day” conditions, not as a Zeitgeist to
intuit but rather a set of social, economic, and aesthetic conditions to be studied and
incorporated into design solutions; (2) pragmatism, providing a bridge between the
classroom and office, as seen in a core of technical classes and emphasis on three-
dimensional visualization and modeling rather than paper techniques; (3) a
multidisciplinary approach, including allied fields such as planning, industrial design, and
the fine arts; and (4) a rational, problem-driven approach to design that inflected regional
characteristics and conditions. The chapter concludes with a brief sketch of local
architectural press coverage and reactions to (and interpretations of) contemporary
architectural thought and style. Chapter 3’s passage on local context and press coverage
seeks to introduce the issues shaping the curriculum at USC, in particular with respect to
the good “California life” and housing modernization. The particular spin given to these
ideas in Los Angeles suggests the ways in which the language of regional exceptionalism,
which later came to characterize the work of both the heroes of the modern movement
and postwar USC graduates, had its roots in the 1930s.
Chapter 4, “The USC Experiment: Curriculum, Faculty, and Projects, 1930 to
1960,” illustrates how Weatherhead’s ideas translated into a program of study that
remained largely intact until the early 1960s. The chapter draws from course catalogs,
published projects, as well as faculty and student work. In the period under consideration,
the most radical change in the design curriculum, as reflected in course catalogs, took
place during the first several years of Weatherhead’s experiment, from 1929 to 1934.
During this time, Beaux-Arts problems sets and classicism as the aesthetic focal point
decrease, then disappear. Since course descriptions cannot fully describe the content and
15

atmosphere of the classrooms, newspaper articles describing projects, both in terms of
topics and methodology, will help complete the picture. Throughout the 1930s, the Los
Angeles Times reported frequently on the initiatives and student projects of the College of
Architecture. The frequency of this coverage, as well as the tenor of the articles, reflects
the increasing regional profile of the USC program and its role in establishing and
fostering modern ideas about architecture and planning.
As reflected in Chapters 3 and 4, the principles driving the USC design
philosophy will sound familiar to anyone with a working knowledge of Southern
Californian – or, more accurately, Californian – modernism. By the late 1930s and early
1940s, Weatherhead and his faculty emphasized resourceful, site-specific design;
“original expression” and regional identity, as reflected in environmental factors such as
climate, topography, and locally available materials; and economy (which through the
1930s included prefabricated materials such as plywood) but never at the expense of
craftsmanship. While little photographic evidence of student projects exists, the
descriptions of projects reflect a design ethos that was highly compatible with that of the
region’s architectural avant-garde.
This affinity, the predominance of USC graduates on the early Case Study House
roster, and the degree of pre- and postwar continuity in the USC curriculum begs the
question of how engaged Weatherhead was with the local architectural avant-garde.
Although the dean’s program shared central concerns with the iconic work of modernist
architects that began putting Southern Californian architecture on the national map (in
particular in residential design), the evidence shows some but not an extensive level of
involvement by Weatherhead either interacting with or promoting the region’s
16

modernism. Placed in the context of the time, Weatherhead’s philosophy appeared
grounded in a need to reject the prescriptive ideas about style embodied in the Beaux-
Arts’s approach to education. In this way, the affinity between USC and icons of the
region’s avant-garde should not be interpreted as a suggestion that the USC School of
Architecture fits within the larger story of the region’s genius-architects. In fact, the
argument presented here is that the stories of the genius-architects fit within the broader
social context that also nurtured and produced the modern USC School of Architecture.
To paraphrase Wright’s review of Woods, then, this study hopes to emphasize not the
“individual stars” but the constellation.
10

While Chapter 4 demonstrates the continuity in the pre- and postwar College of
Architecture, a short coda in Chapter 5 sketches the postwar departures and innovations
initiated by Gallion. During his term as dean, from 1945 to 1960, Gallion built on the
foundations in place and oversaw the rapid expansion and influence of the school. In his
first several years at USC, Gallion expanded the areas of planning, landscape
architecture, and industrial design, converting the four-year course in industrial design
created in 1939 to a stand-alone department. In addition, with the debate on pragmatism
versus high art in architectural education largely resolved, Gallion appears to have re-
engaged the question of aesthetics (which Weatherhead, like other progressive educators
of the time, skirted in deference to the science and sociology of architecture). Interviews
with alumnae of the School of Architecture from the 1940s through early 1960s
11
will

10
Ibid, back cover. Gwendolyn Wright’s original quote read: “From Craft to Profession shifts the focus of
architectural history from individual stars to constellations.”
11
This thesis draws on interviews collected by the author as part of an ongoing Oral History Project on the
USC School of Architecture. The following USC alumnae, as well as local architects and historians, gave
generously of their time in interviews carried out by the author: Rudi DeChellis, Ena Dubnoff, Eugene
17

shed light on the curriculum at the time, as well as the atmosphere of the school, which
architectural historian and Neutra scholar Barbara Lamprecht aptly described as “the
region’s flashpoint for an agile curiosity… [during] a heady, exhilarating time.”
12

Concluding comments explore the avenues for further research suggested by this
study, as well as revisit McCoy’s ideas about the “USC” and “Case Study House” styles,
in the context of the “California school” of design and regional modernism in the United
States.

Flores, Frank Gehry, John Grist, Ray and Shelley Kappe, John Kelsey, William Krisel, Randell Makinson,
Carl McLarand, Ed Niles, John Reed, Frank Sata, Dennis Smith, Greg Walsh, Eugene Weston III, and Chet
Widom.
12
Lamprecht, Barbara, 2005, “Pasadena Modern,” Pasadena Heritage Tour Brochure. On file at Pasadena
Heritage, Pasadena, California.
18

Chapter 1

Milestones: Arthur Weatherhead and the
USC College of Architecture, 1919 through 1945

Although accounts of the USC School of Architecture often highlight Arthur
Gallion and his considerable contributions to the school’s postwar development, the
individual who initiated the modern School of Architecture is the same person who is
least cited in the school’s history: Arthur Weatherhead, faculty member, de facto
department head, and dean from 1914 to 1944. (Figure 8, Arthur Weatherhead,
“Architecture Instructor, Dean, Enthusiast.”)
During his 30-year tenure as dean and faculty member, Weatherhead’s research in
architectural pedagogy mirrored the growth of the department he led and shaped its
philosophy. If Weatherhead’s story, and the history of the School of Architecture in
general, remain largely untold, though, it is less due to willful oversight than the scarcity
of primary sources illuminating the school’s early years. Consequently, the available
literature traces an inconsistent path with respect to the school’s establishment and
growth. In order to clarify the founding years, this chapter marks the major milestones
for both the school and Weatherhead, placed in the context of the era.

Milestones: Department of Architecture, 1919 to 1930
Scant biographical information exists on Weatherhead’s personal or professional
life. Public records, articles, as well as a self-authored entry in Who’s Who in California,
offer some detail on his early life and education. Born October 9, 1888 in Minneapolis,
Minnesota, Weatherhead was the elder son of Eugene Haskell and Hattie A.
19

Figure 8. Arthur Clason Weatherhead, “Architecture Instructor, Dean, Enthusiast,”
1939. Source: Southern California Alumni Review, December 1939.
Printed courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries, University
Archives.
20

Weatherhead. From 1907 through the year he graduated in 1914, Weatherhead worked
as a draftsman apprentice in architectural firms. By 1910, census records indicate that the
Weatherhead family, which included Arthur’s younger brother, Ray, had relocated to a
Yamhill, Oregon, a small town close to Portland.
1
During this time, Weatherhead began
attending the University of Oregon but reportedly withdrew during his senior year of
studies due to “poor health.”
2
In 1912, he relocated to Southern California and enrolled
at USC, completing his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1912 and Master of Fine Arts two years
later, in 1914.
When Weatherhead began teaching in the USC College of Fine Arts in 1914, the
offerings in architecture consisted of a three-year “architectural course,” leading to a
Bachelor of Fine Arts. The College of Fine Arts, established in 1895 by artist William
Lee Judson, attempted at the time to encompass “all branches of the graphic arts, both
academic and collegiate,” including “architects, scientific investigators, newspaper artists
and correspondents, machinists, designers in glass, textile ware and ceramic ware.”
3
Los
Angeles architect Sumner Spaulding, who joined the USC faculty in 1923 (and who,
along with partner and USC alum John Rex, contributed one of the first Case Study
House designs to Arts and Architecture), recalled his 1914 introduction to Weatherhead
and his initial impressions of the dean:
[Weatherhead] undertook to run a School of Architecture at the University of
Southern California. It seemed to me an impossible task, for the building was

1
United States Federal Census, 1910; South Newberg, Yamhill, Oregon. Roll T624 1290, Page: 12B,
Enumeration District: 297. Available at: http://www.ancestry.com.
2
Harrington, Johns, “A Dream Come True: Biography of Architecture Dean Discloses His Vision and
Efforts toward Realization of Combining Architecture and Allied Arts,” Southern California Alumni
Review, December 1939, 14-15, 26-27, quoted here p. 15. USC Libraries, University Archives.
3
Johnson, C. Raimond, “University of Southern California, The School of Architecture,” Los Angeles
Times, 1 March 1930.
21

inadequate, there was no library, and there was only a small faculty. During the
many years when funds were not available to develop the school, he managed by
support of the profession to build up the school’s reputation.
4

While the booster’s tone is difficult to miss, this excerpt, drawn from a
commemorative issue of The USC Alumni Review, marking the 25
th
anniversary of the
School of Architecture, is noteworthy as one of the few sources commenting directly on
Weatherhead and the early years of the school. In the same issue of The Alumni Review,
Edwin Bergstrom, former president of the Allied Architects’ Association of Los Angeles
and, by 1939, president of the American Institute of Architects, echoed Spaulding’s tone:
I have known Arthur Weatherhead for many years and have watched him bring
his college from its lowly beginnings to its present authority and extended
influence on the architecture and fine arts of our community. … [F]rom the
beginning he had a new interpretation of teaching the arts of design so that
architecture and its allied arts would ever be coordinated in the thoughts of his
pupils, whichever way their talents led them to go. This is his great contribution to
the teaching of the arts.
5

The article claims that, in 1914, the department’s “lowly beginnings” were two courses in
architecture, both of which were taught by Weatherhead, the sole staff member of the
architecture department: free-hand drawing and design.”
6
The architecture department at
the time, it is said, occupied a corner in the Music Arts building.
From the late 1910s through 1920s, the Department of Art and Architecture
appears to have been an ongoing, multidisciplinary work in progress, with a curriculum
balanced between fine arts and engineering. While some sources name 1914 as the
inaugural year of the USC “department of architecture,” which corresponds with the year

4
Harrington, “A Dream Come True,” 15.
5
Ibid.
6
Ibid.
22

Weatherhead began teaching, the College of Fine Arts course catalog indicates that a
limited course of study in architecture, leading to a general Bachelor of Arts, was already
offered as early as 1912. Judging by the 1912/1915 course catalog, the architectural
program appears to have relied upon cross-listing with the USC Department of
Engineering, established in 1906.
Course bulletins of the day, as well as Weatherhead’s 1941 book, cite 1919 as the
year an independent Department of Art and Architecture was formed, as part of the
College of Liberal Arts. Although the curriculum does not change substantially from
1918 to 1919, the year 1919 corresponds with the retirement of Dean Judson of the
College of Fine Arts, at which time the College of Fine Arts was “discontinued” and its
curriculum was absorbed in the newly formed Department of Art and Architecture.
The affiliation with USC’s Department of Engineering proved fruitful. Course
bulletins starting in 1917/1918 highlight the association between the two departments,
which reflected the general pattern of architectural schools at the time. As of 1911/1912,
of the twenty US architecture schools of architecture, eleven maintained “internal
connections” to a department of engineering; six were stand-alone schools or colleges.
7

The link to fine arts, though, reflected an emerging trend in the field. As of 1911/1912,
just three US colleges with professional courses in architecture had established internal
links with an affiliated department of fine arts.

7
Weatherhead, Arthur Clason, The History of Collegiate Education in Architecture in the United States
(Los Angeles, CA, 1941), 136.
23

A year after completing his Bachelor of Arts, in December 1913, Weatherhead
and Mabel Stewart wed in Santa Ana.
8
On December 11, 1917, their son, Roland, was
born. By 1922, Weatherhead’s parents, then retired, and younger brother Ray, had
relocated from Oregon to Los Angeles, living with the couple in their home at 813 N.
Virgil Avenue. Weatherhead’s obituary, published in the Los Angeles Times, stated that
the dean served “overseas” in World War I.
9
However, most available sources, including
his 1942 autobiographical entry in Who’s Who in California, contradict this.
Weatherhead indeed enlisted in the draft in June 1917 (on his Draft Registration Card, he
indicated that he was a professor in the USC “Engineering Department”).
10
But this
enlistment appears to have been in response to an initiative by the US War Department to
register every man of draft age; in a show of solidarity, a group of USC professors
responded to the call, marching together in military fashion and proclaiming they were
“ready to go to war if needed.”
11
(At 29 years of age and married, Weatherhead would
not have been likely to have been called, since the second-round draft called “unattached
men” up to the age of 30.)
Although Weatherhead was a licensed architect and member of the American
Institute of Architects (AIA), the focus of his professional life was architectural
pedagogy. After joining the faculty at USC, his first foray in architectural education
began in 1918, when he took a sabbatical to conduct research on “architectural studies

8
Biographical information draws from voter registration rolls, census records, and birth, death, and
marriage data from the State of California.
9
“Funeral Today for Former SC Architecture Dean,” Los Angeles Times, 19 July 1952.
10
United States National Archives and Records Administration, World War I Selective Service System
Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918, Los Angeles County, California, Roll 1530895, Draft Board 10
(Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration).
11
“College Professors Prepare to Go to War if Needed,” Los Angeles Times, 3 May 1917.
24

preparatory,”
12
returning to Los Angeles in time to teach during the summer 1919 term.
Weatherhead spent at least part of the 1918/1919 academic year at the University of
Oregon,
13
his former home state, college and, during the period of his sabbatical, the first
US school of architecture to abandon the Beaux-Arts system, a transition Weatherhead
would have witnessed first hand. Shortly after Weatherhead’s return to Los Angeles,
University of Oregon instructor Clayton M. Baldwin joined the architectural faculty at
USC, where he remained on staff for nearly forty years, until his death in 1958.
The Department of Architecture’s fortunes mirrored the economic boom of the
1920s. In Los Angeles as elsewhere, post-World War I stagnancy had given way to a
rapid, dramatic expansion in population and building. Between 1920 and 1930, Los
Angeles County’s population more than doubled, expanding from just over 936,000 to
over 2,208,000, a rate double that for the state overall.
14
In terms of construction, in
tandem with the increase in US housing starts in the early 1920s (which rose rapidly
beginning in 1922, reaching a peak in 1925), Los Angeles recorded in 1924/1925 a total
of 16,400 permits for new housing, with over 80 percent of these for single-family
homes.
15
New subdivisions also increased during this time, with the total number
doubling between 1920 and 1921, from approximately 300 to 600, then doubling again
by 1923, with 1,434 new tracts recorded.
16

12
“Lessons in Art: Clever Instructors in Designing to Aid Summer Students,” Los Angeles Times, 27 June
1919.
13
Harrington, “A Dream Come True,” 14-15, 26-27.
14
Forstall, Richard L., “California, Population of Counties by Decennial Census: 1900 to 1990,”
Population Division, US Bureau of the Census, Washington, DC. For a study of Los Angeles’s growth in
the 1920s, see Sitton, Tom, and William Deverell, ed., Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001).
15
Hise, Greg, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1997), 23.
16
Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles, 23-24.
25

At USC, following the initiation of the Department of Architecture in 1919, the
enrollment increase reflected this expansion. A patchwork of available sources helps
illustrate the rate of enrollment expansion and hints at the school’s need to add faculty
and studio space.
17
Between 1919 and the fall of 1924, enrollment increased from 12 to
120. This number jumped another 20 percent between the academic years of 1924/25
and 1925/26, rising from 120 to 150. By 1929, the department had grown to 182,
including 71 architecture majors and 111 pre-majors. (Enrollment at USC overall
mirrored this trend; from 1921 to 1931, enrollment increased threefold, from just over
5,600 in 1921 to over 16,100 by 1931.)
18

The need to expand the faculty became especially acute when Weatherhead
announced plans for a 1924/1925 sabbatical, during which he planned to continue his
study of architectural pedagogy, visiting “architectural centers of learning” in the United
States and Europe, and to undertake, as the Los Angeles Times put it, “post graduate work
in eastern universities.”
19
The post-graduate work actually entailed the completion of a
Bachelor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, one of the leading Beaux-
Arts schools in the country at the time, led by Paul Cret. During Weatherhead’s absence,
Spaulding was to handle all architectural history courses, and Clayton Baldwin took over
the full load of drawing, graphics, and design classes.
Faced with Weatherhead’s imminent sabbatical, Spaulding drafted a letter to the
Allied Architects’ Association, requesting assistance for the expanding department at

17
In lieu of departmental records, enrollment statistics are gleaned from the following sources: for the year
1919, “Fine Arts Hall Planned,” Los Angeles Times, 10 March 1929; for the academic years 1924/1925,
“Added Courses in Architecture School Opened,” Los Angeles Times, 26 October 1925; for the academic
year 1929/1930, Johnson, C. Raimond Johnson (1930).
18
University of Southern California, “Administrative Progress,” El Rodeo Yearbook, Class of 1932, 21.
19
“Director of Art at University Is to Tour Europe,” Los Angeles Times, 14 July 1924.
26

USC.
20
In the fall of 1924, collaboration began between the USC Department of
Architecture and the Allied Architects’ Association of Los Angeles, an organization
established in 1921 to “advance the art of architecture…and secure for and provide
municipal, county, state and national governments with the highest and best expression of
the profession of architecture at the least possible cost.”
21
(Bulletins of the Allied
Architects’ Association, and subsequent coverage in the Los Angeles Times, have
erroneously asserted that this collaboration was initiated by USC President Rufus von
KleinSmid, who it is said, “asked this Association to advise and help it in the conduct” of
the Department of Architecture.
22
However, the meeting minutes from the association, as
well as Spaulding’s letter requesting assistance, reveal the USC instructor’s role in
initiating the collaboration.)
Based on Spaulding’s request, a resolution to “prepare a tentative program” to
assist the Department of Architecture was unanimously approved and passed to David J.
Witmer, the newly appointed chair of the association’s Education and Publicity
Committee (Witmer ultimately remained on the College of Architecture advisory
committee into the postwar period). In August 1924, Witmer, along with appointed
members of the advisory committee, Spaulding, W. Templeton Johnson, and Winsor
Soule, met with von KleinSmid to present their proposal for assisting the Department of

20
Allied Architects Association, “Assistance for Architectural Schools,” Minutes of Adjourned Meeting,
Allied Architects Association of Los Angeles, vol. VI (25 July 1924), 120. UCLA Special Collections,
Archives of the Allied Architects Association, Box 3.
21
Allied Architects Association, “The Organization, Purposes and Aims of the Allied Architects
Association of Los Angeles, California,” Bulletin of the Allied Architects Association of Los Angeles, vol.
II, no. 6 (April 1926).
22
Allied Architects Association, “Report of the President Concerning the Activities of the Allied Architects
Association for the Year 1924,” Bulletin of the Allied Architects Association of Los Angeles, vol. I, no. 4
(February 1925).
27

Architecture. Witmer explained to von KleinSmid that “the director Mr.
Weatherhead…would not be in attendance this school year, and that there was great need
of a program of instruction and administration and the appointment of a personnel to
carry out such a program.”
23
Spaulding addressed the group, explaining
how he had undertaken to assist in the instruction and had been drawn into this
work more and more. He stated that he found the ninety-three students working
for a degree and a score of others were very earnest in their work, but the
conditions and facilities were not adequate. He felt that this situation provided the
Association with a wonderful opportunity of assisting Architectural students and
so performing a great service to the Profession of Architecture.
24

Ten days after this meeting, von KleinSmid accepted the association’s offer to
assist in “an advisory capacity” and informed them that the University Board of Trustees
had approved the appointment of an advisory committee. Beginning in 1924/1925, the
committee included Witmer, Spaulding, Johnson, and Soule, a core membership that
remained intact until at least 1945 (the practice of inviting the city’s architects to
participate as lecturers and design critics continued well into the postwar period). In
January 1925, the advisory committee expanded to include John T. Vawter, H.F. Withey,
and Carleton Monroe Winslow, Sr., a former colleague of Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue.
Beginning in 1924/1925, during Weatherhead’s sabbatical, the advisory
committee provided upper-division design instructors and lecturers. In an arrangement
worked out with university officials, student access was provided to the association’s
drafting rooms in downtown Los Angeles. In addition, in December 1924, the

23
Allied Architects Association, “Special Committee to Cooperate with the Department of Architecture,
University of Southern California,” Minutes of Adjourned Meeting, Allied Architects Association of Los
Angeles, vol. VI (5 August 1924), 138-141; quoted here p. 138. UCLA Special Collections, Archives of
the Allied Architects Association, Box 3.
24
Allied Architects Association, “Special Committee to Cooperate,” 140.
28

Association announced plans for a “complete library on art and architecture,” consisting
of over 1,000 donated volumes to which USC students would have access.
25

The curriculum did not change as a result of this affiliation. Indeed, that the
Allied Architects’ Association would not participate in shaping the curriculum figured in
the agreement between the association and USC. But in 1925, the Allied Architects’
Association made recommendations for an expanded five-year program of study. Similar
plans to expand the curriculum and create a dedicated school had already been underway
as early as 1922, as part of the broader plans for the university.
26
In any case, the
department did become a stand-alone School of Architecture in 1925, offering a five-year
curriculum leading to a Bachelor of Architecture. With this, USC began conferring the
region’s first and only professional degree in architecture until the 1960s.
27
While the
advisory committee continued intact, the Allied Architects’ Association profile at USC
diminished through the late-1920s, as the association became embroiled in mounting
legal entanglements regarding its system of collective compensation, among other issues.
In 1925, the fledging school inaugurated a building, albeit provisional, of its own
at 659 West Thirty-Fifth Street, near the USC campus. Following the 1925 demolition of
the USC chemistry building, architecture students and faculty “appropriated the
remnants” and constructed a building for the Department of Architecture. (Figure 9,
Courtyard of USC Department of Architecture, circa 1926.) “Added to three different

25
“Architects to Open Library,” Los Angeles Times, 7 December 1924.
26
“Architects to Aid University Classes,” Los Angeles Times, 15 October 1922.
27
Other regional colleges included the Art Center College of Design, which started offering four-year
degrees in Industrial Design (but not architecture) in 1949; UCLA Graduate School of Architecture and
Urban Planning, established 1964; Cal Poly Pomona, founded by Ray Kappe in 1968; Cal Poly San Luis
Obispo, College of Architecture and Environmental Design, established 1972; and the Southern California
Institute of Architecture (Sci-Arc), founded by Ray Kappe and Thom Mayne, in 1972.
29

Figure 9. Courtyard of USC Department of Architecture, circa 1926. Exhibition of
student work showcases Academic Classicism and what appears to be, in
the center of the photo, a variation on the Taj Mahal. Source: Los
Angeles Public Library Photograph Collection, Image #31915.

30

times,” the building became something of an ongoing student project that gained “an
endearing charm” and “distinctive personality” through the years.
28
However, plans had
been in place for a building that would accommodate the varied disciplines and programs
of the school, and in May 1928, Weatherhead announced its construction:
A three-story structure is contemplated for a site opposite the museum and art
galleries of Exposition Park…[it] is to be erected around a central patio, with
interior lines kept low. An exhibition hall which extends the full height of the
building, drafting-rooms on the first and second floors extending across the rear
of the building, and a library extending through two stories with open roof
trusses…are among the features of the building.
29

The location and description of the building sound not unlike present-day Harris Hall,
still shared by the now-separate schools of fine arts and architecture (while Weatherhead
executed some initial sketches, the project architect was Southern California AIA chapter
head, Ralph C. Flewelling). With funding delayed until 1937, however, the new
architecture building was not occupied until January 1940.
Expansion of the school continued through the 1920s, with additional faculty and
coursework, in particular in fine arts. In 1928, the Los Angeles Times took note of the
USC Department of Architecture’s election to membership in the American Association
of Collegiate Schools.
30
(Figure 10, USC Department of Architecture, 1928.) The “Class
A” rating given USC was shared at the time with three other West Coast schools of
architecture: the University of Washington, the University of Oregon, and the University
of California, Berkeley. Through this membership, USC architecture graduates became

28
Harrington “A Dream Come True,” 14.
29
Watrous, Valencia, “Architect Structure Projected,” Los Angeles Times, 25 May 1928.
30
“Trojan School Given Honors,” Los Angeles Times, 16 May 1928.
31

Figure 10. USC Department of Architecture, 1928. Image of the new building,
constructed in 1925 from the remains of the demolished USC chemistry
building. Source: University of Southern California El Rodeo Yearbook,
1928, p. 38. Courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries,
University Archives.
32

eligible to receive licenses to practice architecture following three years of office
training.

Milestones: The College of Architecture, 1931 to 1939
With the onset of the Great Depression, the school’s growth slowed but did not
stop entirely. The academic year 1930/1931 brought another sabbatical for Weatherhead
and a milestone for the School of Architecture. In March 1931, the school became
USC’s seventh stand-alone “college,” offering an unbroken five-year course of study.
The new curriculum, intended to offer sequential, integrated courses, was drafted by
Weatherhead and published as the departmental catalog in January 1931. In March 1931,
the USC Board of Trustees approved the name change and curriculum. With the
college’s inaugural fall 1931 semester, members of USC’s architectural fraternity, Alpha
Rho Chi, commented on the change:
The local school of architecture grew up and became a College last spring and this
fall all of the freshmen are entering into architecture with a full program of
subjects that the Dean thinks will turn out better architects. There are no electives
on the program and many new courses have been added. Among these are
fundamentals of economics, man and civilization, public speaking, corporation
finance, and many courses in architecture. All of these changes have been made
as a result of Dean Weatherhead's tour last year on which he visited all of the best
architectural schools in the country.
31

The following year, in 1932, a graduate program leading to a Master of Architecture was
approved at USC. The year 1933 also brought another name change—this time to the
College of Architecture and Fine Arts, reflecting an expanded emphasis and coursework

31
Hoedinghaus, G.E., “Andronikos,” The Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XIII, no. 5 (October 1931): 8.
33

in the arts, including a series of classes on “Oriental Studies,” including Japanese and
Chinese art and architecture.  
Meanwhile, Weatherhead continued to advance his own academic standing, as
well. In the 1930s, Weatherhead had enrolled (apparently remotely) in a PhD program at
Columbia University in order to pursue his doctorate in the Political Science, Philosophy,
and Pure Science Department. With his long-term research project on the history of
American architectural education serving as the basis for his dissertation, Weatherhead
completed his PhD in the late 1930s.
During the Great Depression, even as construction slowed and professional
prospects dimmed, enrollment in the College of Architecture remained steady. At the
nadir of the depression, in 1933, enrollment numbers had only dipped slightly from the
1929 figures, dropping from 182 to 171 students (among them, 124 men and 47
women).
32
A consideration of the mixed fortunes of national Alpha Rho Chi chapters
offers a glimpse into how the economic slump impacted enrollment elsewhere. The June
1935 issue of The Archi (the newsletter of the national architectural fraternity) described
the welfare of active chapters of Alpha Rho Chi. Wishing to “speak frankly as to the
condition of the Fraternity,” the article reported that active chapters overall were “losing
momentum,” with six of the eight organizations either weakened, threatened with closure,
or recovering from the hardest depression years. There were two exceptions: the
University of Michigan and the University of Southern California, which, the writer said,
is “‘goin’ to town.’ It must be the Mae West spirit. We wish we had more chapters in

32
“Application for Registration of the Curriculum, College of Architecture and Fine Arts, University of
Southern California,” 31 January 1934. USC Libraries, University Archives.
34

California.”
33
(Figure 11, Alpha Rho Chi Fraternity and USC Staff and Faculty,
academic year 1935/1936.)
Los Angeles’s relative economic health during the Great Depression appeared to
help buoy enrollment figures at the College of Architecture. One snapshot of the region’s
economy in the early years of the Great Depression is provided in a 1931 survey of
national single-family housing starts. Conducted by Title Guarantee and Trust Company,
the survey showed Los Angeles leading all other metropolitan areas in the United States
by a considerable margin.
34
The survey reported that, in October 1931, Los Angeles
recorded 276 permits for single-family residences, as compared with Detroit (82 permits),
Baltimore (51), Pittsburgh (45), Philadelphia and Boston (both with 42), Brooklyn (35),
and Chicago (24). Figures for January through October of 1931 showed a total valuation
of residential permits for Los Angeles of $17,293,207, a total representing housing for
just over 6,000 families. This total was more than double that of the second most active
market seen in the survey (Detroit, with new single-family construction accommodating
2,877 families).
This data comes with two caveats. These figures of course reflect only single-
family residential starts (and, compared with the other cities in the survey, Los Angeles
had more undeveloped land for this type of expansion). The second point relates to Greg
Hise’s argument against adopting the “accepted wisdom that housing production, not
employment, led and continues to lead to urban expansion,”
35
which is implied here as a

33
Ely, Dwight, “How Things Are Going,” The Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XVI, no. 5 (June 1935): 26.
34
“Home Building Surveyed, Figures Show Los Angeles Ahead of Other Cities during October in New
Family Capacities,” Los Angeles Times, 22 November 1931.
35
Hise, Greg, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1997), 4.
35

Figure 11. Alpha Rho Chi Fraternity and USC Staff and Faculty, 1935/1936. Shown
are Weatherhead (7
th
from right), Verle Annis (6
th
from right), and
students Cliff Yates and Jules Brady (future Case Study House architect).
Courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries, University
Archives.
36

sign of economic health. In terms of broader indices, though, by the late 1930s Hise
demonstrated that “Los Angeles’ expanding economy and the rise in lower-skilled
manufacturing employment provided an unparalleled opportunity,” for housing
expansion, and this expansion provided an opportunity “for community builders to
advance the ideals and practices formulated during the interwar period.”
36

In 1937, funding for Harris Hall was made available, and construction went
forward. In 1939, the local Alpha Rho Chi chapter showed signs of good health; at the
Founder’s Banquet, “the rather astonishing report” was made that the active chapter had
“38 actives and 4 pledges.”
37
Said to celebrate the 25
th
anniversary of the school, the
Founders’ Day Banquet was thus described by Alpha Rho Chi members:
Jay Ingles introduced Prof. Clayton Baldwin, perennial “emcee,” who took charge
of the meeting. Dean Weatherhead talked briefly and interestingly on the history
of architectural education in the United States, his thesis subject for his Doctor's
degree at Columbia, concluding by giving us a verbal preview of the new building
which will house the College of Architecture on the campus next fall.
38

Weatherhead’s announcement of a fall 1939 inauguration for Harris Hall turned
out to be overly optimistic. When Harris Hall opened a semester later, in January 1940,
the celebration spanned three days of lectures, exhibits, and events. Open to the public
and covered in a series of articles by the Los Angeles Times, the three-day dedication
appeared aimed at establishing Harris Hall and its College of Architecture and Fine Arts
as the premiere arts center of the extended Pacific Southwest. Lecture topics spanned
“Art and the Public” (by Charles F. Kelley, assistant director of the Chicago Art

36
Hise, Greg G., “The Roots of the Postwar Urban Region: Mass-housing and Community Planning in
California, 1920-1950” (PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 1992), 2.
37
Latta, Graham, “Founders’ Day Again—Twenty-Five Have Gone,” The Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol.
XX, no. 4 (June 1939): 36.
38
Latta (1939), 36.
37

Institute), “The Arts of the Pacific Area” (by Arthur Woodward, director of history and
anthropology of the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science, and Art; and Edgar H.
Hewett, director of the Schools of American Research of the Archeological Institute of
America), and “Art in Southern California” (by Arthur Millier, art and architecture critic
for the Los Angeles Times).
39
A lecture series on “Contemporary Architecture” was
given by three Los Angeles architects: Richard Neutra, long-time USC faculty member
Sumner Spaulding, and Sylvanus B. Marston, Southern California AIA chapter president.
Most remembered, though, was the now-infamous address by Frank Lloyd
Wright, in which he apparently had few kind words for either the building of honor or the
purpose it served. Harwell Hamilton Harris recalled,
This was a very amusing talk. And [Wright] manipulated the crowd so
beautifully. He had driven up himself from Phoenix that day. He had gone to his
son's, Lloyd's house, had bathed, changed his clothes, had put on a dinner jacket
and, with his glasses on a black ribbon around his neck, he walked onto the stage
in a very jaunty manner. … Wright proceeded to tell the audience that he didn't
believe in schools of architecture. And he went on to tell them why. He said
things that began to get a little bit under everyone's skin. You could just feel the
temperature rising in there. And then, when it got to a certain point, Wright said
something, something amusing, that just dissolved all opposition, and everything
went back and was fine. And then in a little while I realized that the same thing
was building up again. He did it three times, and then he said, “Well, the
encouraging thing about this is that I can say what I have said here this evening
and not be thrown off the stage.”
40

Although unsurprising, given his well-known disdain for formal architectural education,
Wright’s remarks were such that Architect and Engineer’s coverage of the skirted the
issue of what Wright actually said, referring to the architect’s address as “original in
thought and word, blunt and at times caustic,” and instead devoted a majority of the piece

39
“Art Center to Be Opened, New $200,000 Studio Building at S.C. Will Be Dedicated Today,” Los
Angeles Times, 18 January 1940.
40
University of California, Los Angeles, Oral History Program, The Organic View of Design: Harwell
Harris (Los Angeles, CA: Regents of the University of California, 1985), 94.
38

to a celebration of Wright’s contributions to “the American Expression in
Architecture.”
41

With Wright’s speech part of college history, Harris Hall opened in January 1940.
The building was designed by Ralph C. Flewelling, accented with a 185-foot intaglio
painting by Barse Miller, depicting “the history of culture in civilization.”
42
In terms of
the facility’s plan, Harris Hall reflected the multidisciplinary college it housed, with
spaces tailored for industrial design, as well as ceramics, jewelry, design, painting, and
sculpture for fine arts, and drafting rooms, shops and equipment for architecture.
(Figures 12 and 13, Harris Hall, Plan and Exterior Photograph, 1940.)

Milestones: The Transitional Years, 1939 to 1945
In spite of this expression of faith in the future of the College of Architecture and
Fine Arts, and the relative health of the local economy, the professional prospects for
graduates of the class of 1939 remained mixed. While the strength of the film industry is
often cited as one factor that buoyed the local architectural profession during the Great
Depression, the number of USC graduates working in the film industry remained
relatively small. In 1939, among a sample of 123 USC College of Architecture
graduates, only 13 percent worked in the film industry, whereas nearly two-thirds, or 59
percent, worked as practicing architects.
43
The film industry did provide the second most
fruitful path for graduates, however, as governmental work (including on behalf of New

41
“Harris Hall of Architecture Dedicated,” Architect and Engineer, vol. 140, no. 2 (February 1940): 8 and
10.
42
Ibid.
43
“Partial List of Graduates of the College of Architecture and Fine Arts, with Their Present Positions as of
December 1, 1939,” Southern California Alumni Review, December 1939, 20-21. USC Libraries,
University Archives.
39

Figure 12. Plan of Harris Hall, USC College of Architecture and Fine Arts. Source:
Architect and Engineer, February 1940.
40

Figure 13. Exterior, Harris Hall, USC College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1940.
Source: Architect and Engineer, February 1940.
41

Deal agencies such as the Federal Housing Administration, Farm Security
Administration, and Works Progress Administration), contracting, and interior design
sectors employed only 5 percent each. The remainder worked as secondary-school
educators or with utility companies or in private industry.
As the 1930s came to a close, the school’s focus again shifted with the outbreak
of World War II and subsequent US entry into the war. In 1941, before the attack on
Pearl Harbor had taken place, the fall semester initiated coursework on defense-related
architecture, including camouflage strategies and the design of “bomb shelters, airports,
hospitals, and other war projects.”
44
In addition, following the establishment of the
Lanham Act in 1940, the early 1940s brought a massive infusion of federal funds for war-
related construction to Southern California (as well as the extended southwest, which
received “a disproportionate share of jobs and job seekers”).
45
Expansive undertakings in
defense-worker housing created new communities, such as Linda Vista, a community
spanning 3,000 residential units whose ground-breaking commercial center was designed
by USC graduate Whitney Smith (USC 1934), and Westchester, just north of the present-
day Los Angeles International Airport (with 3,230 residences constructed for 10,000
families).
46
Recognizing Southern California’s central role in war-time construction, the
AIA chose Los Angeles as the headquarters for its 1941 convention. Among the long-
time USC advisors and lecturers participating on the convention committee were David J.
Witmer (who along with partner Loyall F. Watson would have recently completed the

44
“S.C. Course in Architecture Altered to Fit Defense Needs, Students Will Learn to Design Bomb
Shelters, Airports, Hospitals and Other War Projects,” Los Angeles Times, 7 September 1941.
45
Hise (1997), 118.
46
For expanded discussions of federal defense-related construction and its effects on Southern California,
see Hise (1997) and Dana Cuff, The Provisional City (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000).
42

Wyvernwood Garden Apartments, one of Los Angeles’s first large-scale garden
apartment complexes aimed at providing affordable housing) and Reginald D. Johnson
(who would have been working at the time on another landmark garden city in Los
Angeles, Baldwin Hills Village, designed by Johnson and Clarence Stein).
47

In 1941, the US Corps of Engineers had forecast for the United States an
“increasing shortage” of architects; as a consequence, in December 1941, the US
Selective Service, acting upon these findings, began expanding the program for offering
service deferments for architecture students.
48
By the fall of 1942, the College of
Architecture and Fine Arts initiated a “three-semester, all year-round program…to
facilitate the grinding out of students in as short a period as possible.”
49
Describing the
war-time atmosphere on campus in 1942, Harold Basker of the USC Alpha Rho Chi
fraternity wrote that
News from Andronicus chapter is varied in text and interest. The most important
of all is, of course, the present world crisis. Its effects were deeply felt here on the
West Coast the first week of the war when ritual curtains were pressed into
service as black-out drapes, air raid precautions were broadcast over the radios
when they were transmitting, we had one complete black-out, and one was called
off before it started. Since that time the only connection we have had with the war
has been through visits from brothers graduated and in the service, and one of the
active brothers has joined and been accepted in the U.S.C. Flying Escadrille of the
Navy Air Corps. The draft is far-reaching but most of the brothers so far have
been fortunate in securing deferments until graduation… .
50

In spring 1943, Weatherhead diverted his attention from the College of Architecture to
help organize an accelerated course in Occupational Therapy Aide training, run in

47
“Huge Defense Program Lures Architects' Convention Here, A.I.A. Delegates to Be Escorted on
Inspection Tours of Projects Involving $160,000,000,” Los Angeles Times, 20 April 1941.
48
Dean, Norman D., Corps of Engineers, 5 December 1941, “Bulletin No. 135-41, Deferment of Military
Service of Students in Architecture and Graduates in Architecture,” State Headquarters Selective Service,
St. Paul, Minnesota. Cited from The Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XXIII, no. 2 (February 1942): 17.
49
Basker, Harold, “Andronikos,” The Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XXIII, no. 2 (February 1942): 36.
50
Ibid.
43

conjunction with the School of Medicine. Assisted by the College of Architecture’s
renowned ceramics professor, Glen Lukens, Weatherhead loaned the Harris Hall
auditorium for a demonstration course for the occupational therapy program.
51

The academic year 1943/1944 marked Weatherhead’s final term as dean. Besides
a line in his obituary that, after retiring, Weatherhead pursued research in industrial
design, no other sources have been located to shed light on the reasons for his resignation
or his post-1944 pursuits.
52
USC course bulletins omitted his name for the first time in
1944. In September 1945, the course bulletin inaugurated a new chapter, announcing the
appointment of Arthur Gallion as dean, the separation of the fine arts and architecture
curricula, and the inauguration of a dedicated and expanded Department of Industrial
Design (leading for the first time to a Bachelors in Industrial Design). The 1945 College
of Architecture bulletin opened with Gallion’s clear statement of the college’s new
chapter: “The challenge of the postwar world is here.”
With the foundation set by Weatherhead, Gallion led the College of Architecture,
which still offered the region’s only professional degree in architecture, during a period
of rapid expansion, not only of the college’s enrollment but the region’s built
environment. Six years later, in July of 1952, the Los Angeles Times announced the death
of Arthur Weatherhead, “founder and former dean of architecture at the University of
Southern California,” at the age of 63.
By the time of his death, Weatherhead would have watched as the program he
nurtured from a few classes, headquartered in a corner of the music department,

51
Wilson, Bess M., “Occupational Therapy Training to Be Given, S.C. Offers Educational Course to Meet
Wartime Demand for More Workers,” Los Angeles Times, 29 January 1943.
52
“Funeral Today for Former SC Architecture Dean,” Los Angeles Times, 19 July 1952.
44

blossomed into the region’s most influential training ground for architects and a hotbed
for modern thought in planning and architecture. Although it was not recognized at the
time, and not even widely recognized now, the curriculum he launched also converted the
USC College of Architecture into one of the country’s first modern collegiate schools of
architecture. This chapter, however, has only attempted to sketch the major
administrative milestones for the school and career milestones for Weatherhead. The
next chapter will detail the primary project to have occupied Weatherhead during his
professional life, architectural education, and how it shaped the program at USC.
45

Chapter 2
The Transition from Beaux-Arts to Modern:
Weatherhead’s History of Collegiate Education in Architecture, in Context

This chapter serves the dual purpose of sketching the results of Arthur
Weatherhead’s research on architectural pedagogy, as well as the emerging debate on
educational reform. Beginning in the post-World War I era, the debate pitted champions
of the Beaux-Arts educational system against those arguing for a more pragmatic
approach in the classroom. The Beaux-Arts’ focus on classicism and design problems at
an increasing remove from social realities triggered concerns that the old methods would
only serve as a path to obsolescence for young architects. While American educational
reform was heavily influenced by the European work of Gropius and Mies at the
Bauhaus, by the time of their arrival in the United States, the German émigrés joined a
conversation about modern pedagogy that was already underway. As this chapter argues,
the exigencies of the Great Depression and the advent of World War II provided the
decisive push toward reform.
When it comes to pedagogical reform in 1930’s Los Angeles, Weatherhead
emerges as the most instrumental figure. The scope and detail of his book, The History of
Collegiate Education in Architecture in the United States, illustrate the extent to the topic
dominated his professional focus. Encyclopedic in scope, the book aimed to provide a
comprehensive study of US colleges of architecture because, as Weatherhead wrote, no
similar study existed.
1
Dividing schools into three chronological periods, the book

1
Weatherhead cites just two other studies, both written in 1932 after his research was underway: F.H.
Bosworth, Jr. and Roy Childs Jones, Study of Architectural Schools (1932), and Thomas Larrick, “A
46

provides micro-level histories for each school in existence as of approximately 1939,
detailing pedagogical features and techniques, as well as introducing school leaders and
faculty. Introductions to each period provide macro-level contexts for trends, issues, and
conflicts in the profession and in architectural history.
While this chapter draws liberally from Weatherhead’s book, the dean’s views on,
for example, the Beaux-Arts system are intended less as a primer in traditional methods
than as a window onto the type of program he intended to establish at USC. Following a
brief sketch of the Beaux-Arts system, this chapter introduces early US experiments in
modern pedagogy, beginning in 1919 through the mid-1930s. The concluding section
offers an overview on the national debate on architectural education, with a focus on the
transitional era from circa 1919 to 1940.

The Beaux-Arts: A Brief Sketch and Early Critiques of the System
A brief sketch of several of the principal features of the Beaux-Arts system will
help place the departures from it in context. On one side, proponents of the École des
Beaux-Arts argued that its time-tested theories of design and history would raise
educational standards and, with them, the beauty of American architecture. On the other
side, those who opposed the Beaux-Arts argued that the best way forward for American
architectural education was through the autonomous innovations of the schools
themselves, responding to local conditions and the realities of the profession.

Modern School of Architecture,” unpublished Master of Art’s thesis, University of Kansas, Lawrence,
Kansas.
47

With American architectural education in its infancy, the Beaux-Arts system, as
promoted by the New York-based Society of Beaux-Arts, provided a ready-made
response to concerns over inconsistent educational standards. In 1902, these concerns
had prompted the AIA to amend its by-laws to include the requirement that only
graduates of approved schools, or students passing a special examination, were eligible to
apply for AIA membership.
2
For its part, the AIA Committee on Education supported the
standardized system, stating that the goal of American schools should be to educate
students as “‘gentlemen of general culture with special architectural ability.’”
3
The AIA
also commended the emphasis on classicism, claiming that “Of prime importance are the
classic orders, not for what they are in themselves, but because they are the terms, the
language, in which a very large part of our architectural heritage is expressed.”
4

By 1912, the Society of Beaux-Arts system had been widely adopted by US
schools. According to the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, by this time
the Beaux-Arts’ “standard had become a groove systematically moulding nearly all
projected schools.”
5
Indeed, in 1912, 80 percent of US schools of architecture, or 16 out
of 20, maintained a connection with the Society of Beaux-Arts.
6
To help handle the
demand, the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design (BAID), an extension of the society, was

2
Draper, Joan, “The Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Architectural Profession in the United States: The Case
of John Galen Howard,” in Spiro Kostof, ed., The Architect: Chapters in the History of the Profession
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 209-237; quoted here p. 216.
3
Ibid, 217.
4
“Report on the Committee on Architectural Education,” 40
th
Annual Convention, American Institute of
Architects (Washington, DC: Gibson Brothers Press, 1907). Cited from Weatherhead, Arthur Clason, The
History of Collegiate Education in Architecture in the United States (Los Angeles, CA, 1941), 152.
5
Weatherhead, The History of Collegiate Education, 88-89.
6
Ibid, 157.
48

created in 1916 to teach architecture and further the society’s goal of creating a national
school of architecture.
Weatherhead acknowledges that the Society of Beaux-Arts and BAID provided
the means for much-needed standardization in the profession’s early years. From the
perspective of 1939, as he finalized his book, he wrote that the traditional approach had
outlived its usefulness. He argued for a contemporary, pragmatic approach drawn from
and reflecting “present-day conditions,” his oft-repeated leitmotif through the years. The
dean’s summary of the Beaux-Arts or “Eclectic Period” reads like a litany of
shortcomings and highlights well what he sought to avoid at USC: apart from an
overemphasis on Academic Classicism, traditional methods emphasized “unreality” and
gave “little encouragement of creative ability…lack of integration among the subject
groups…lack of instruction in the business phases of architecture…lack of a transition
between the school and the office.”
7
In Weatherhead’s view of the Beaux-Arts system,
the emphasis on Academic Classicism and “unreality” meant that
very little consideration was given to the increasing number of important
requirements of common American life, nor to the architectural possibilities of
modern science, materials and structural processes. The education of Eclecticism
was chiefly concerned with the aesthetic expressions of an ancient profession
rather than with present-day realities.
8

The use of artificial design problems and the exclusion of professional practice,
Weatherhead reasoned, left students ill-prepared for the realities of the field. Although
this could be mitigated through organized collaboration between practicing architects and
students, to ease the “transition between school and office,” overall Weatherhead found

7
Ibid, 171-172.
8
Ibid, 172.
49

“very little organized effort to provide this valuable early contact with the offices.”
9
The
lack of integration or continuity in the subject areas, as well, made for a disjointed
education.
Weatherhead reserved his strongest criticism for Beaux-Arts-modeled design
instruction, which in his view reduced architectural expression to “complete plagiarism”
and gave students “little opportunity…for the development of creative ability.”
10
Given
his conviction that design problems should reflect local conditions – not only with respect
to regional character but also to social need – the prospect of having a central authority
write design programs for colleges was particularly untenable. The fanciful problem sets
were hopelessly removed from contemporary practice, Weatherhead wrote. Citing
several of the 1911 BAID-authored problems—“Theological Seminary, An Island
Pavilion, A Reception Room for the President, A Supreme Court Building, A Conclave
Building for the Election of a Sovereign pontiff”—Weatherhead observed that “It would
be impossible to choose subjects that were much farther removed from the life and
comprehension of an American college junior and senior.”
11
Thus liberated from the
constraints of actual sites, and disassociated from local context, the BAID problem sets
represented “purely a pedagogical device and often omitted elements of function without
which no designer in practice would attempt to plan a building.”
12

Proponents of this approach, on the other hand, celebrated the fantasy written into
the problems as setting free the designer’s creativity and imagination. As architect

9
However, as Weatherhead wrote, “all schools advised summer office experience and three made it a
requirement” (with USC being one of the three). Ibid, 173.
10
Ibid, 172.
11
Ibid, 154-155.
12
Ibid, 154.
50

Richard Wallace Tudor reflected on his Beaux-Arts education, realism did not often
intrude in the classroom:
Occasionally there was a short excursion into the field of reality, but this was
considered by our teachers and ourselves as a humdrum, uninspiring sort of place,
for, seemingly (and as a matter of fact), it had little to do with the goal for which
we were striving. On and on we were led into that region of dreams, the land of
the great monumental baths, the pantheons, the great establishments for the
reception of royal guests, into the land of unreality.
13

John Galen Howard, the founder of the West Coast’s pioneering architecture program at
the University of California, Berkeley, struck a similar tone. Following a disappointing
trip in the late 1880s to Southern California and unsatisfying stint working in the Los
Angeles office of Caukin and Haas (which he regarded as crassly profit-driven), Howard
travelled to Europe, he wrote, “not primarily to attend any school…but to come into
contact with the noble monuments which other ages have bequeathed our own. … I, an
architect, turn to Europe, that vast library of architectural knowledge and
accomplishment.”
14
The Piranesian tone of course provided an easy target for criticism
(especially in the wake of the Progressive Era and social reforms of the 1920s), as the
realm of architectural design and education became increasingly disconnected from the
“humdrum” (but increasingly pressing) needs of the profession and society at large.

13
Tudor, Richard Wallace, “The Circian Shadow,” Journal of the American Institute of Architects, vol. 6,
(May 1918): 225.
14
Howard, John Galen, Correspondence dated 10 July 1888. Cited from Draper, “The Ecole des Beaux-
Arts,” 219.
51

Pioneering American Departures from the Beaux-Arts System, 1919 to 1935
While the changes ushered in by the Great Depression signaled the decisive but
slow-moving end for the Beaux-Arts system, World War I brought its own language of
caesura and calls for reform in the academy as well as the profession.
15
As William
Littmann observed,
Architectural education at American universities entered a particularly
contentious and dynamic period between the First and Second World Wars.
Universities such as Columbia and Harvard began to abandon the educational
methods associated with the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and revamped their
curricula to reflect the aims of the modern movement.
16

Launched in 1930, Weatherhead’s “experiment” at USC actually pre-dates those
undertaken by Joseph Hudnut at Columbia University (in 1934) and Harvard University
(in 1935). But as dean of an architecture department in 1919, Weatherhead confirms the
climate described by Littmann. World War I, Weatherhead writes, “brought about a
period of almost complete inactivity in architectural education,” and with the end of the
war, “a general re-evaluation in architectural education was inevitable.”
17
Summing up
the self-reflective mood of the time, Clarence H. Blackall, a 1877 graduate of the
University of Illinois School of Architecture, wrote in 1919 that, when it came to the
architect,

15
Several studies exploring the question of professional reform and modernization in the early twentieth
century include Bentel, Paul Louis, “Idealism and Enterprise: Modernism and Professionalism in
American Modern Architecture, 1919-1933,” PhD Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(Cambridge, MA: 1992); Hyungmin, Pai, The Portfolio and the Diagram: Architecture, Discourse, and
Modernity in American (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); and Bannister, Turpin, The Architect at Mid-
Century, commissioned by the American Institute of Architects, Commission for the Survey of Education
and Registration (NY: Reinhold, 1954). An architectural historian, Bannister was one of the founding
members of the Society for Architectural Historians.
16
Littmann, William, “Assault on the Ecole: Student Campaigns Against the Beaux Arts, 1925-1950,”
Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 53, no. 3 (February 2000): 159-166.
17
Weatherhead, The History of Collegiate Education, 175.
52

[w]e know what he was before the war: an idealist, an individual whose mission
was to make over the world in what he considered the most beautiful guise, a man
entrusted with large opportunities coming in often faster than he could master
them and striving his best to keep up with the tremendous increase in the
requirements and the possibilities of modern construction, a dream and strictly a
professional man. It was a splendid ideal and all honor to those who strove so
nobly to uphold this exalted plane, but that the architect of after the war is a
different man is evident on every hand. The point of view is changed not only
because of the war but because it was in the process of changing before.
18

At the same time, the socially conscious modernism taking root across Western Europe
had become known in the United States. In Weatherhead’s book, he presented his
version of a primer on modernism, describing the work of architects such as Otto
Wagner, H.P. Berlage, and August Perret in Europe and Frank Lloyd Wright and Eliel
Saarinen in the United States. He also described as the “second generation” of European
modernists Peter Behrens and the triumvirate of Charles Édouard Jeanneret (Le
Corbusier), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius, all of whom had passed
through Behren’s office. With a cursory pass over the US developments of the “tall steel
building,” the transitional work of Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue and Eliel Saarinen, the
focus of his primer, though, related to architectural education. Weatherhead reserved
glowing passages for the Bauhaus, calling it the “great German school” with the foresight
to see “art and technique as a new unity.” Indeed, in the passages on modernism,
Weatherhead’s devoted more time to the Bauhaus educational method than he did to the
nascent avant-garde in Los Angeles.
The earliest American experiments in architectural education grew out of this era.
In 1919, the School of Architecture at the University of Oregon (Weatherhead’s former

18
Blackall, Clarence H., “What Is an Architect?,” American Architect (1919). Cited from Hyungmin
(2002), 74.
53

college) became the first American school to abandon the Beaux-Arts system and adopt
an alternative approach. The new teaching methods used at the School of Architecture,
which was established in 1914 by Ellis F. Lawrence, emphasized the allied arts and “an
entirely non-competitive, individual approach” to design.
19
Weatherhead broke from his
usual dry, academic tone in his descriptions of the Department of Architecture at the
University at Oregon, in which his obvious admiration for Lawrence came through.
Indeed, given the book’s tone overall, the fact that the author himself was one of the
educators described in its pages could easily escape the casual reader. With Lawrence as
a “guiding spirit,” Weatherhead wrote, the University of Oregon School of Architecture
had become “one of the outstanding institutions in the country” and “the first school in
the United States to adopt, completely and successfully, these two basic elements of the
modern movement in architectural education,” a close affiliation between the allied arts
and a noncompetitive approach to design.
20

Lawrence’s program at the University of Oregon provided the template to follow
for Weatherhead, who spent the academic year 1918/1919 at the University of Oregon,
during the university’s transition. How closely Weatherhead modeled the USC approach
on that of the University of Oregon is apparent when considering Lawrence’s comments
on his school’s philosophy vis-à-vis design projects – which, he stated, should be
the vehicle for teaching sociology, politics, education, economics, and ethics, as
well as the structure, hydraulics, illumination, and the laws of design. …
Architecture is a projection of the society it serves. To teach it well it cannot be
separated from the ideals and standards of society.
21

19
Weatherhead, The History of Collegiate Education, 193.
20
Ibid, 127.
21
Lawrence, Ellis F., “President’s Address, Twenty-first Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate
Schools of Architecture,” May 14-15,1934, Washington, DC. Cited from Weatherhead, The History of
Collegiate Education, 212.
54

By 1935, among the 45 American schools of architecture, eight had launched
what Weatherhead termed to be “significant” experiments in modern architectural
pedagogy. Although differing in execution, the shared basic features included an
emphasis on “realism,” whether in design classes, field experience, or both, and the close
integration of architecture with allied arts. In 1919, this latter feature was introduced at
Yale University by Dean Everett V. Meeks (in 1943, Meeks offered William Wurster his
first teaching position, after the Californian architect had moved east to pursue a
doctorate in planning at Harvard University).
22
In 1922, the University of Cincinnati
Department of Architecture aligned the architecture and allied arts departments and
launched a cooperative program balancing coursework and apprenticeship. As led by the
head of design, Ernest Pickering, the department divided students into two groups, which
alternated between the classroom and field. Working alongside practicing architects,
students undertook a
carefully arranged sequence of types of experience from labor on construction
jobs, through various contacts with materials and the allied crafts, to practice in an
architect’s office. In this manner, the two necessary branches of the complete
training for the practice of architecture, the foundation in school theory and the
office experience, were…coordinated and integrated.
23

Pragmatism at Cornell University, in 1929, took the form of rewriting first-year design to
encompass “the design for a complete building instead of the traditional elements of
architecture” and a gradual de-emphasis on “external decorative phases of architecture.”
24

22
Peters, Richard C., “W.W. Wurster,” Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 33, no. 2 (November
1979): 36-41, cited here p. 38.
23
Weatherhead, The History of Collegiate Education, 195.
24
Ibid, 195.
55

In 1930, the fifth “experiment” was launched at University of Southern
California, “under the general direction of the author,” Weatherhead wrote.
25
His
description of the program reflects the close alignment with the University of Oregon
initiatives. At USC, Weatherhead writes,
A prolonged experiment has been conducted in an attempt to discover a more
successful modern approach to the study of design in which the beginning
projects were based upon very familiar situations that lower division students
were able to comprehend.

The basic contours of this approach included a design program tailored to realistic, “local
situations,” with Southern California as the canvas for study; a de-emphasis on paper
presentations and focus on three-dimensional modeling and visualization; and pragmatic,
hands-on coursework in materials, building sciences and technologies, and professional
practice. In this way, as Weatherhead explained, “Comprehensive projects are evolved
out of everyday, physical and technical reality.”
26

All of these features figured prominently in the three other experiments from the
first half of the 1930s: the first in 1932 at the University of Kansas under Joseph M.
Kellogg, and the latter two at Columbia (1934) and Harvard (1935) Universities under
Joseph Hudnut. As at USC, Kellogg at the University of Kansas rewrote lower-division
design courses to de-emphasize paper techniques and focus on three-dimensional
visualization through the use of modeling and perspective studies. At Columbia
University, Hudnut fashioned a contemporary alternative that emphasized pragmatism,
technical skills, and collaborative work. As Jill Pearlman demonstrated, the approach
was steeped in the educational theories of early twentieth-century philosopher and

25
Ibid, 196.
26
Ibid, 245.
56

Columbia University professor John Dewey.
27
Although no sources have yet been
identified confirming a direct debt to Dewey’s theories on the part of the other educators
discussed here, such as Lawrence or Weatherhead, the parallels are unmistakable and
appear part and parcel of evolving progressive views on education and social reform. As
Sachs pointed out,
In proposing alternative pedagogies, architects looked to a wide range of sources,
and the resulting programs are in some cases strikingly different from each other.
Many architects, however, drew on the educational theories of John Dewey and
his insistence on ‘real life’ situations and a balance between individual and social
development. This emphasis coincided with the architects' effort to make the
economic and social conditions in the United States - or more specifically, the
practical knowledge that developed in response to these conditions - an inherent
part of architectural education.
28

Although Hudnut had served as acting dean as of 1933, coming to Columbia
University at the invitation of his former instructor and dean, William Boring (as
Pearlman pointed out), Hudnut did not remake the curriculum until Boring had departed
and Hudnut assumed the deanship in 1934. In the curriculum launched by Hudnut, a
noncompetitive atmosphere was encouraged in which students worked collaboratively on
“practical design problems that confronted the exigencies of contemporary life” and
considered “the demands of an actual site, economy, and function;” presentations were
carried out “in a straightforward way, in simple sketches, models, and working
drawings.”
29
Pearlman claims that this marked “the first time in an American
architecture school” that the “elaborate and conventionalized renderings of the French

27
Pearlman, Jill, “Joseph Hudnut’s Other Modernism at the ‘Harvard Bauhaus,’” Journal of the Society of
Architectural Historians, vol. 56, no. 4 (December 1997): 452-477.
28
Sachs, Avigail, “Research for Architecture: Building a Discipline and Modernizing the Profession” (PhD
Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2009), xix. Sach draws here from Anita Cross’s 1983
article “The Educational Background to the Bauhaus,” published in Design Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 43-52.
29
Pearlman, “Joseph Hudnut’s Other Modernism,” 457.
57

system” were not employed in design presentations.
30
This might not have been the case,
however. The de-emphasis, and in some cases full-scale abandonment, of the Beaux-Arts
system by several of the schools described above—including the University of Oregon,
USC, and the University of Kansas—and the fact that these experiments predated
Hudnut’s assumption of the deanship at Columbia University, call for further
clarification.
Pearlman joins Sachs and Littmann in the critique about the overemphasis on
heroic émigrés, observing that the literature on Harvard GSD has focused so exclusively
on Gropius that Hudnut, who in fact founded of the school and launched its modern
experiment, has been largely ignored in the literature. However, some of the article’s
statements show Pearlman falling into the same trap she criticizes. In addition to the
claim that Columbia University was the first American school to fashion a
straightforward, non-Ecole des Beaux-Arts approach for presentations—which seems
unlikely, given the extent and character of the experiments already underway by 1934—
she also claims that Hudnut was the first American educator during the Great Depression
to “attack the French system in a decisive way.”
31
Given that, fifteen years before Hudnut
became dean at Columbia in 1934, Lawrence had already broken decisively with the
Beaux-Arts at the University of Oregon (and other educators were either following suit or
writing their own programs), this claim appears overstated. Further research would help
clarify Pearlman’s argument. However, given that it is driven by the question of who
arrived where first, in an era in which many locally-driven alternatives to the Beaux-Arts

30
Ibid, 457.
31
Ibid, 457.
58

system began emerging throughout the United States, arguments about who got where
first are ultimately of limited value.
In Weatherhead’s estimation, the underlying principles of the Columbia
University experiment were “those of the German movement,” with a design program
tailored to the conditions of “present-day practice” and a classroom environment re-
creating the atmosphere of an architect’s office. Technical coursework in modern
materials, building finance, and building sciences were balanced out by an underlying
philosophy that “beauty was to remain the transcendent aim of architecture.”
32
At
Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design (GSD), Hudnut expanded these ideas in
a five-year graduate course unifying the fields of architecture, planning, and landscape
design (though Garrett Eckbo, who graduated from GSD in 1938, complained that, while
“architecture was ‘going modern’…landscape architecture and city planning clung to
tradition”).
33
In the architecture department, however, Hudnut took decisive steps,
including divesting the library of all books on history and stripping features from the
1904 McKim, Mead, and White-designed building the school occupied, in his attempt to
purge the school of all pedagogical and physical traces of the Beaux-Arts.
For his part, while Weatherhead criticized the Beaux-Arts system as unresponsive
to the needs of contemporary society, he struck a tone of evolution, not revolution. Given
the social shifts from the 1910s through the 1930s, Weatherhead seems to have regarded

32
Weatherhead, The History of Collegiate Education, 198.
33
Eckbo, Garrett, “Autobiography of a Designer,” 1974, Garrett Eckbo Collection, Environmental Design
Archives, University of California, Berkeley, Project/Folder, Autobiography, c. 1974, I.1. Studies on
Eckbo include, for example, Treib, Marc, and Dorothée Imbert, Garrett Eckbo: Modern Landscapes for
Living (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), and Alofsin, Anthony, The Struggle for
Modernism: Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning at Harvard (New York, London:
W.W. Norton & Company, 2002).
59

modernization and educational reform as inevitable. Providing the final push for reform,
Weatherhead wrote, the crisis and changes provoked by the Great Depression—which
triggered a drop in enrollment at American schools of architecture—prompted a
“healthy” re-evaluation of teaching methods among the colleges, with the early
experiments serving as templates for reform.
The first steps toward reform were often tentative, however. One example of this
is seen in a 1930 article by Ohio State University professor Herbert Baumer. Published in
the national Alpha Rho Chi newsletter, the article captures the transitional moment of the
early 1930s in its cautious endorsement of modern educational methods. In his article,
Baumer wrote that
something more than five years ago [architectural educators] began to be
uncomfortably jolted out of the quiet tenor of their ways. They began to realize
that a certain spirit of revolt, that boded ill for them, was loose in the land. For
years this spirit had been gathering force under the guidance of a few widely
scattered leaders-under the Perret brothers and Frank Lloyd Wright and various
able Scandinavians and Germans…

I have heard many reasons advanced as to why this modern should be banished
from our schools and ateliers-it has no grammar and is therefore incapable of
expression-a student when he cribs in this modern is of necessity a plagiarist
whereas when he cribs in the past he is, I suppose, nothing worse than an
archaeologist…

For the general good, there is today, I believe, less confusion in the subject of
architectural design…and in my opinion [this has] been brought out largely by the
fact that in dealing with this thing called modern that has no tradition or weight of
precedent or sentimentality connected with it both teachers and pupils have been
obliged to judge things more on their fundamental qualities and less on their
superficial ones. I believe that this modern is…a much better medium for the
teaching of design than any historic style could possibly be and this for the very
shortcomings--lack of tradition, lack of grace, lack of whatnot--that its opponents
charge it with.
34

34
Herbert Baumer, “The Professor Says, ‘Say It with Modern,’ A Better Medium for Teaching Design
Than Any Historic Style,” The Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XII, no. 1 (October 1930): 2-3.
60

Baumer is quick to qualify this endorsement, however:

In this I wish not to be misunderstood. Although I have an opinion on the matter
I am not here stating that this modern brand is better architecture for today than
some other brand might be. I am a teacher and like the shoemaker am sticking to
my last. I am only saying here that, for teaching purposes, it is better.

While Weatherhead did not equivocate in his support of modern educational
methods, he, like Baumer, skirts the issue of modern style (though possibly for different
reasons). While evolution, not revolution, led to a contemporary approach, Weatherhead
believed, the idea that all paths led to a given stylistic mode does not enter into the
narrative. In his writing, Weatherhead presented modern architecture as a social rather
than stylistic movement and focused infrequently on the art of architecture; his initiatives
at USC reflect these views.
By 1939, Weatherhead argues, these early experiments had produced a “distinctly
American type of education,” representing a middle-ground between the Beaux-Arts and
the more “radical” approach advocating a total break with tradition. His summary of this
national “readjustment” in education included, unsurprisingly, many of the features he
launched at USC: an integrated, sequential program of study, emphasizing pragmatism
(as seen in coursework on materials and processes, building construction, equipment, and
costs estimating, and professional practices). In the service of “sociological
development,” Weatherhead observed an improved “foundation for some understanding
of present-day civilization” and the “study of conditions…inherent in present-day needs
of human beings.” He argued that the architectural profession itself was increasingly
seen through the lens of the “larger problems of the community.” Of the nine features of
modern pedagogy Weatherhead detailed, only one related to design: “The plagiaristic
61

methods of study of Eclecticism are being abandoned,” and the “more artificial devices of
the Beaux-Arts system are being supplanted or, at least, suppressed.” The ultimate
widespread modernization of schools of architecture would depend upon some degree of
national oversight, he wrote, “to insure…coordination and control of the different
element which make up the complete preparation for practice.”
35
In other words, though
the early experiments documented in his book approached reform in a variety of ways,
Weatherhead foresaw the need for ultimate standardization.
In spite of Weatherhead’s faith in evolution, a certain degree of revolution was
necessary, as, for example, Littmann’s work on the University of California, Berkeley,
demonstrated. The basic educational philosophy outlined by Weatherhead in 1939
reflected, by the postwar period, conventional wisdom about American architectural
education. The fact that these ideas had already shaped US pedagogy and were in place
by 1939 shows the importance of the transitional but relatively under-researched decade
of the 1930s.

Art versus Pragmatism: The Debate on Architectural Education
The character of the early USC College of Architecture reflected the national
debate about architectural pedagogy. As the debate gained momentum in the 1920s and
1930s, two primary arguments emerged. In addition to the ongoing controversy on
Beaux-Arts Classicism (whose influence had begun to falter around 1910, with the

35
Weatherhead, The History of Collegiate Education, 244-245.
62

decline of the White City Movement),
36
a primary point of contention was the role of
“realism” in the classroom (as reflected in the list of technical and professional practices
courses recommended by Weatherhead in the synopsis above). Advocates for more
pragmatism believed that students needed to graduate with a working knowledge of the
realities of office practice. Opponents of this approach argued that students would have
ample time to learn about everyday practice, under the tutelage of a working, licensed
architect. The more pressing issue for education, they argued, was imparting the art of
architectural design.
It is unclear if, prior to the publication of his 1941 book, Weatherhead
participated in this debate on a national scale (though his writing in the Los Angeles
Times suggests a high degree of local involvement in raising public awareness and
acceptance of modernism). On the national scale, however, William Boring, a founding
member of the Society of Beaux-Arts and, as stated above, dean of the Columbia
University School of Architecture from 1915 to 1934, articulated the views of those
favoring the status quo. In a 1924 speech delivered before the International Congress on
Architectural Education, Boring declared that architects were not merely craftspeople but
“men of culture, of science, of good taste” who “move in the highest intellectual circles,
as they did in Greek times;” thus, schools of architecture had little time to waste time on
the technical and practical aspects of architecture as a profession:
The time we have to instruct pupils is too valuable to devote to petty details of the
business of an office. It seems better to inspire students to work for an ideal of
beauty than to equip them to take positions as technical assistants.
37

36
Mumford, Lewis, Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization (New York,
1924), 62; cited from Bentel (1992), 61. Bentel’s dissertation includes an in-depth study of the Beaux-Arts
system and modern movement from the profession’s perspective, circa 1919 to 1933.
37
“Expert Declares Planning Is Basis of Architecture,” The Washington Post, 5 October 1924.
63

In his 1941 book, Weatherhead countered the argument against pragmatism by writing
that
It has…been the universal experience at the institutions which have attempted this
emphasis that a broad foundation in reality interfered with neither freedom nor
imagination. It tended to direct the student during his successive projects to a
consistent idealism and a vital scholarship in design.
38

Hudnut, Boring’s successor at Columbia University and then-dean of Harvard
University’s GSD, was less sparing. Declaring before the AIA in 1935 that the “laxity of
technical education,” in which students emerged unprepared for professional practice,
had created a dynamic in which
the competitor for an architectural award is not able to build even a part of the
structure which he has designed. Hocus pocus is especially prevalent in that
quaint activity which we call architectural education. For example, in New York
City the processes of architectural education are controlled by a most enthusiastic
society of architects who have imported from Paris a collection of ingenious
conceits and conventions so formidable that no one has even dared to ask what it
is all about.
39

How this early debate played itself out among students in Los Angeles or at USC
is difficult to trace. On a broader scale, however, warnings had begun being raised in the
1920s that the social and professional disconnect of the Beaux-Arts educational system
would only provide a path to obsolescence. This unease was fully confirmed by the
Great Depression. With the backdrop of deprivation and social problems, the BAID-
authored problem sets seemed distastefully removed from the realities of daily life. As
Littmann observed, in the case of the College of Environmental Design at the University

38
Weatherhead, The History of Collegiate Education, 212-213.
39
“Lax Architects Scored, Dean Hudnut Assails ‘Hocus Pocus’ Technical Education,” New York Times, 13
October 1935. The editors of the New York Times appear not to have read Hudnut’s comments in detail,
given that Hudnut’s talk of course “assails” the lack of technical education in architecture schools.
64

of California, Berkeley, the onset of the Great Depression left “many students
disillusioned with the Ecole approach” and mobilized them to “advocate for a more leftist
version of modernism.”
40
Describing the design problems assigned to his class in 1937 at
the University of Pennsylvania, Joseph Esherick recounted that
I can think of no better way to give a feeling for the way the BAID saw the world
from its Olympian heights than to list the titles of the projects and esquisse-
esquiesses given that year: A Summer Hotel, A Public Garden for Refreshments
and Music, A Banquet and Ballroom, A Building to Enshrine the Chalice of
Antioch… I cannot avoid the feeling that at least one of the reasons for our
disenchantment lay simply in the kinds of problems we were given. It is
impossible to understand now and it was difficult to understand then how anyone
could, in 1937, become deeply concerned about a building to enshrine the chalice
of Antioch.
41

Throughout the 1930s, the advent of New Deal programs and initiatives further
altered the professional landscape, and gave students and educators new reasons to
protest the gulf between the classroom and office practice. The problem of the
“Minimum House,” for example, had become a focal point for new housing construction
by the mid-1930s, yet students and practicing architects complained that the profession
appeared slow to stake claims on this territory. In 1935, an editorial in the national Alpha
Rho Chi newslettter complained that
by far the greatest field for architecture in this country is the designing of houses
costing from three to five thousand dollars. How many American architects are
engaged in this enormous - field? Scarcely a handful. Most architects disdain it
because they have never formulated ways and means to do such work on a
profitable basis. … How many architects are inspired to work out the most
economical methods of building and save their clients money instead of lavishly
spending it? Scarcely any. As a consequence the architect is generally regarded
as a luxury.
42

40
Littmann, “Assault on the Ecole,” 161.
41
Esherick, Joseph, “Architectural Education in the Thirties and Seventies: A Personal View,” in Spiro
Kostof, ed., The Architect: Chapters in the History of the Profession (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1977), 238-279; quoted here p. 272-273.
42
“Meditating beneath the Keystone,” vol. XVI, no. 3 (February 1935): 9 and 11.
65

Given Los Angeles’s single-family housing expansion, as noted in Chapter 1, this issue
would have been especially salient for students at USC.
Whereas such openly critical stances had been uncommon in the 1910s and 1920s
in the Alpha Rho Chi newsletter (in particular in articles about the AIA, which usually
sounded a much more reverent tone), throughout the 1930s students issued increasingly
open critiques not only of the universities but also the AIA. In 1934, for example, an
Alpha Rho Chi editorial states that
A great deal has been said, and somewhat less has been written, about the efficacy
of the American Institute of Architects as the only national organization
purporting to provide leadership for the architectural profession. Most of the
criticism is decidedly adverse and, in the writer's opinion, is generally justified.
After years of apparent lethargy and indifference to the problems of the average
practitioner, the institute within the past few years has seemed to become
conscious of its shortcomings and action taken at the last annual convention was
very encouraging to those who believe that the Institute should play a larger and
more significant role in the profession.
43

During the 1930s, the social shifts that began determining the direction of the
USC design curriculum also began changing the profession’s focus. When it comes to
the AIA, the organization did address in some fashion the possible impact of the social
and economic crises of the 1930s. In 1934, AIA president E.J. Russell declared that the
architect likely to survive the Great Depression was the architect “who had sufficient
imagination and fortitude…to adjust himself to the new conditions.”
44
Throughout the
mid- to late 1930s, the organization’s attempts at adaptation are reflected in the topic
chosen for annual AIA conventions. These included, in 1935, a primer on the “Minimum

43
Taylor, Walter A., “Does the Future of the A.I.A. Rest In Our Hands?,” The Archi of the Alpha Rho Chi,
vol. XVI, no. 1 (October 1934): 2.
44
“Architect’s Welfare Told, Head of American Institute Sees New Opportunity in Practice of
Architecture,” Los Angeles Times, 30 September 1934.
66

House” and how to negotiate the new governmental agencies, with FHA officials in
attendance to explain the “various phases of the Federal housing, building, and work
relief programs.”
45
In 1937, the “Minimum House” became the focus of the AIA’s
annual meeting.
In apparent response to the 1937 Housing Act (the Wagner-Steagall Act), by
which federal subsidies were provided for low-cost public housing, the centerpiece of the
AIA’s 1938 meeting was a discussion on the housing shortage. The association proposed
the creation of a coalition of builders, manufacturers, city planners, and architects – as
well as the Association of the Collegiate Schools of Architecture – to attack the housing
crisis as a unified front. The AIA focus included small residences, low-cost housing, and
the issue of “slum clearance”—though the conference documents carefully distinguished
between slum clearance/low-cost housing and privately financed small-home
construction, the latter of which was seen as an economic engine and therefore the
priority.
46

While each of these initiatives directly impacted the USC curriculum, it is unclear
how far this social responsiveness extended to AIA attitudes about architectural
education. For its part, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture had changed

45
“U.S. Architects Meet Tuesday at Milwaukee, 67
th
Annual Convention of American Institute to Last
through Friday,” The Washington Post, 26 May 1935.
46
“Architects Plan to Spur Building,” New York Times, 17 April 1938. Parallel to the new mortgage
structure, the HOLC assessments of “security risk” had begun in this period; driven by the now-notorious
system of racial profiling and “red-lining,” the HOLC survey maps might deem an entire neighborhood a
high investment risk for the presence of any ethnic minorities. The HOLC security maps institutionalized
racist lending practices by mortgage lenders but also exacerbated problems of urban decline, subsequently
identified for “slum clearance.” The 1938 AIA conversation about slum clearance, for example, references
the “serious situation” of neighborhoods deemed to be deteriorated for which residents could not obtain
mortgage insurance. For extended comments on HOLC redlining practices and public housing initiatives in
Los Angeles, see Dana Cuff (2000) and Becky Nicolaides, “‘Where the Working Man Is Welcomed’:
Working Class Suburbs in Los Angeles, 1990 – 1940,” The Pacific Historical Review, vol. 68, no. 4
(November 1999): 517-559.
67

gears by the late 1930s, updating its earlier embrace of BAID standards and instead
“encouraging experimentation.”
47
In 1938, the same year he presided over the AIA
convention on the housing crisis in New Orleans, AIA President Charles D. Maginnis
addressed the graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of
Architecture. The topic of his address seems surprising, coming from the leader of the
nation’s professional association of architects in the context of the time. Maginnis largely
ignored the problems facing the profession and, as the Christian Science Monitor
reported, made a “plea for beauty in architecture”:
The new order in architecture, built around modern steel construction, “is without
eloquence” and “in its individual enterprise and under the sole government of
mathematics can arrive at the ugliness of railroad bridge.”

“If architecture is still an art and not a by-product of engineering, beauty cannot
be a dispensable interest. Is it conceivably beyond the scope of the new
materials? …[S]teel has little genius for romance, for with all its sinewy
capabilities it cannot make for interesting ruins, and ruins have their eloquent
importance. …One can only speculate on the degree to which national
individuality will permanently submit to a uniformity which makes no
acknowledgment of race or clime or geography. …The architecture which is
impending is without eloquence and its meager geometry will presently appear a
poor exchange for the arches and vaults of the old masonry.”
48

While Maginnis emphasized art over employability, one of the earliest figures at
MIT to address the issue of the “transition from student to jobholder” was university
president Karl T. Compton. Several months after Maginnis’s speech, in October 1938,
Compton issued his own statement on the direction he expected for the MIT School of
Architecture. As Elizabeth Finch noted, Compton stated that while “‘design’ would
always be ‘the central theme of all good architecture,’” he added, in apparent response to

47
Weatherhead, The History of Collegiate Education, 249.
48
“Tech Class Hears Plea for Beauty In Architecture,” Christian Science Monitor, 7 June 1938.
68

Maginnis’s address, that “the techniques of its application must continually adapt
themselves to the evolution of the technical and social environment.”
49
The MIT School
of Architecture began actively heeding this call in 1939, when Walter R. MacCornack
(William Wurster’s predecessor) became dean.
50
As of 1939, as Finch observed,
MacCornack identified “two major deficiencies” for MIT’s educational approach: “‘the
almost complete absence of training in the fundamentals of the practical economics of the
building industry field and the failure to appreciate the basic problems involved in the
economic, social, physical, and political decay of our cities.’”
51
The year 1939 appears to
have been a turning point for MIT. That same year, John Ely Burchard, then director of
housing research for the Bemis Foundation (and co-author of the 1933 installation of
Albert Bemis’s influential series, The Evolving House) invited Alvar Aalto to MIT, as
Stanford Anderson noted, “to conduct his own research on housing and settlements.”
52

(During Wurster’s tenure as dean in the late 1940s, he invited Aalto once again to MIT.
By the postwar period, MIT had become one pole in what Anderson described as a “Bay
Region axis,” linking UC Berkeley, MIT, and the work of Scandinavian architects such
as Kay Fisker and Alvar Aalto in the pursuit of “alternative modernism.”
53
)

49
Compton, Karl T., MIT Bulletin, President’s Report, 1937-1938, vol. 74, no. 1 (October 1938), 20. Cited
from Finch, Elizabeth, “Languages of Vision: Gyorgy Kepes and the ‘New Landscape’ of Art and Science”
(PhD Dissertation, The City University of New York, 2005), 197-198.
50
Finch, “Languages of Vision, 198-199.
51
W.R. MacCornack, “School of Architecture,” MIT Bulletin, President’s Report, 1942-1943, vol. 79, no. 1
(October 1943): 123. Cited from Finch (2005), 198-199.
52
Anderson, Stanford, “The ‘New Empiricism-Bay Region Axis’: Kay Fisker and Postwar Debates on
Functionalism, Regionalism, and Monumentality,” Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 50, no. 3: 197-
207, quoted here p. 205.
53
Given the degree of exchange and affinity between the Bay Area and Los Angeles architects and
academies, further research might consider the role in such a network of the USC School of Architecture
and Southern Californian regional modernists, who were also preoccupied with an “alternative
modernism.” These architects shared not only a common architectural heritage (of the broader California
Arts and Crafts movement) but also an admiration for the work of Harris, Wurster, his fellow dean at MIT,
69

While the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture had shifted positions
by the late 1930s, conservative educators held onto the Beaux-Arts system in the face of
calls to modernize. Increasingly, calls for reform issued from the students themselves.
Littmann demonstrated how a student movement from below, rather than administrative
changes from above, had finally propelled change at the University of California,
Berkeley, in the 1940s. On the topic of students’ awareness of the problem, Sachs
provides insights from Serge Chermayeff. Observed Chermayeff,
It is the student body itself which has realized that the old education was less
conducive to employment than merely a good family or business connection, a
thick skin, the ability to hold large quantities of liquor, or a repertoire of good
stories, and certainly less useful that a professional integrity flexible enough to
allow one to take a hand in what was quaintly known as “honest building.”
54

In 1938, the Alpha Rho Chi newsletter published the extended—and in its words
“particularly timely”—comments of a recent graduate reflecting on the education he
received at the University of Michigan. The student’s comments – on the importance of
“actual conditions,” the social scope of architecture, the problems of housing and
planning, and practical aspects of office practice – reflect the degree to which these ideas
had come to embody the ideas of contemporary educational alternatives. In an article
entitled “Does the Future of the AIA Rest in Our Hands,” the student, Frank Lee
Cochran, wrote that during the final two years of college,

Oregon architect Pietro Belluschi, and Scandinavian architects such as Aalto. Further research could
clarify this north-south exchange; Wurster for example corresponded with many of the USC faculty,
including Drake, Troedsson, and Gallion, for whom he wrote in support of Gallion’s 1957 advancement to
fellowship in the AIA. This points suggest a more complicated “axis” than the three poles described by
Anderson.
54
Chermayeff, Serge, “Present Position of Architecture or Architectural Crisis,” April 1940, Serge Ivan
Chermayeff Architectural Records and Papers, 1909-1990. Department of Drawings & Archives, Avery
Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University. Box 33 Folder ID Administrative 1947,
“President's Report,” 11 March 1947. Cited from Sachs, “Research for Architecture,” xxxvi, footnote 14.
70

it became more and more apparent to the writer and many of his classmates that
there was something wrong with their attitudes that might reasonably be laid at
the door of their education. …

It is true that the depression brought with it a different attitude toward life in
general, and that some of the apathy of our class was caused by his change. But
there was something more fundamental than the depression at work on our minds.
We were, consciously or unconsciously, becoming aware that some of the things
we were learning did not check with actual conditions. Not that the conflict was
over matters of mechanics, or even over design, but rather over the role of the
architect in society, and how a living was earned. These were questions never
taught in class, except by inference, and as a result we all had a picture of the
practice of Architecture in our minds which was made up of a few half-truths and
a lot of pure fancy. But things were heard about the world outside, and there was
much speculation as to what it was like out there. … We were more concerned
with what was to become of us when we had left school than we were about the
wranglings over design problems which seemed to have characterised [sic] our
forebears. …

In the modern world, there is ample space for the architect, if we mean by the
term, men trained in the techniques of building. And these techniques must be
considered in the broadest sense as including the resolving of basic architectural
problems in a way complementary to the problems of society in general. If we
mean by the term the traditional picture of the impeccable professional man,
trained in the superficial solution of architectural "problems," then the signs all
point to his rapid obsolescence… The problems in housing and widespread
planning are not going to be solved by the traditional professional man, because
he rarely understands that there are such problems, or if he does, he sees them in
their academic aspects.
55

Cochran argued that the schools had failed to grasp or teach the “social scope of
architecture,” in particular with respect to housing and planning, and instead perpetuated
the idea of the architect as a remote “professional man, much like the doctor” – and of
architecture as the design of only “specific buildings, preferably big ones.” Similarly, a
student commenting on the 1942 congressional hearings on the Lanham Act expressed
displeasure that several congressmen still thought of architects as the “facelifters” or
“beauticians,” and not

55
Cochran, Frank Lee, “Reflections of a Recent Graduate upon His Education,” The Archi of Alpha Rho
Chi, vol. XIX, no. 3 (April 1938): 19.
71

experts in basic planning and construction of buildings, adapted to particular
conditions. This is not a reflection upon the intelligence of the gentleman from
Texas, but upon the whole architectural profession, which has, in large measure,
failed to ‘sell’ the more important aspects of our services.
56

By the early 1940s, when Weatherhead’s book was published, calls for reform
had gained momentum. The lessons of the Great Depression had become impossible to
avoid – and, in fact, prepared the profession for another round of adjustment with the
advent of World War II. While just emerging in the 1930s, Weatherhead’s ideas (about
the study of social conditions, a diversified curriculum considering planning, housing,
and building technologies, collaboration rather than competition, and creative design
drawing on but not copying historic precedent) had become conventional wisdom on
modern architectural education by the early 1940s.
While students had long since heeded the call, the AIA appears to have been
slower to modernize. An exchange of letters published in the Journal of the American
Institute of Architects in 1947, between Walter Gropius and Joseph D. Leland, then
director of the AIA New England District, reveal something of a generation gap between
the opposing sides. Accusing the AIA of conservatism, Gropius commented that
At present the professional training is very uneven throughout the States...
Intelligent integration of the social, technical, economic and formal problems of
design into a consistent entity—so indispensable for the betterment of our
physical surroundings—is rarely taught, though it seems to be of so much greater
importance than the training of any special skill or knowledge.

The greatest deficiency, however, is the utter lack of field experience. For
instance, of the many mature students coming into my Master course at Harvard,
the great majority had never seen a building being built. All the training they
received was at the platonic drafting-board only. But flashing and roofing, of
course, as well as methods to straighten out the usual frictions between

56
“Architecture Makes Congress,” The Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XXIII, no. 2 (February 1942): 36.
72

subcontractors working together on a job, can be learned in the field only. At
Harvard, evidence has shown that a young architect who has had opportunity to
work at lease for a summer as an assistant to a foreman or a supervisor in the
field, during the first or second year at school, is able to absorb further training
faster, since he is now in a position to relate it to actual experiences of his own.
57

In a April 1948 announcement, which had the effect of making the AIA sound
like someone arriving to a party at least a decade too late, the organization announced
that a “reappraisal of the aims and objectives of architectural education” was needed:
According to preliminary findings, the architects of the future will face a task far
more complicated than any of their predecessors. Because of scientific and
technical achievements in the field, they will have to coordinate the various skills
of the building industry and also keep abreast of changing concepts. Just how the
schools can help architects meet these responsibilities will be detailed in the
study.
58

By the late 1940s, widespread educational reform was a fait accompli. By this
time, after nearly twenty years of shaping its curriculum according to societal shifts and
needs, the College of Architecture could offer its students a set of skills that allowed them
to participate fully in all aspects of postwar urban expansion. Late hold-outs in the
Beaux-Arts system, such as the University of California, Berkeley, ceded to pressure
from the student body, which by the late 1940s included returning GIs who “demanded to
be taught skills they could put to use in office practice.”
59
Interest in the Ecole des
Beaux-Arts as a whole on the part of US students had declined enough that, in 1949, the
Ecole des Beaux-Arts announced a new policy with respect to the admission of American
students to the Parisian atelier:

57
Gropius, Walter, “A Frank Letter and Its Answer,” Journal of the American Institute of Architects (April
1947): 198-203; quoted here p. 199.
58
“Architectural Education Subject of National Study,” New York Times, 11 April 1948.
59
Littmann “Assault on the Ecole,” 164.
73

In a step intended to revive interest on the part of American students of
architecture in courses offered at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris…an
agreement has been reached whereby selected graduates of American schools will
be admitted by the well-known French institution without examination.
60

The “almost negligible numbers of enrollments by American students at the Beaux-Arts”
were attributed by the official to the “great progress in architectural education” in the
United States, to which, he added, the French had even begun looking “for new
construction methods.” “The new agreement reflects international recognition of the high
standing of architectural education in the United States.”
61

Like Maginnis, Weatherhead criticized what he termed the “ultra-modern” in
architectural design for its rejection of historic precedent and for a presumption (which it
shared with the Beaux-Arts system) of a set of universal aesthetics. He criticized the
Beaux-Arts system for “plagiaristic” methods that discouraged creative thought and
design. But the heart of Weatherhead’s program, as the next chapter shows, was a focus
on pragmatism, contemporary design inflecting regional identity, and an emphasis on the
social context of modern architecture.

60
“Architects Revive Beaux-Arts Studies,” New York Times, 2 October 1949.
61
Ibid.
74

Chapter 3

The USC Experiment: Core Ideas behind the Curriculum, 1930 to 1944

According to Arthur Weatherhead, a “disciplined sense of realism” should drive
modern pedagogical reform.
1
During his tenure at USC, “realism” was shaped by
nothing more decisively than the Great Depression, programs and policies of the New
Deal, and a shift in the national conversation about architecture, in particular with respect
to planning house (both small-house design and multifamily). Weatherhead’s success in
fashioning a socially responsive curriculum, both reflective of and shaped by present-day
conditions, is seen in the consistency of the college’s philosophy through the tumult and
readjustment of the 1930s and the about-face brought by World War II.
This chapter examines publications of the College of Architecture (including
departmental bulletins, course listings, and yearbooks), as well as local press coverage, in
order to characterize the type of program Weatherhead intended to build at USC.
Beginning in 1919, as the Department of Architecture was founded, the Los Angeles
Times began publishing articles on the department that seemed part public service
announcements (usually coinciding with the start of each semester) and part self-
promotion for Weatherhead and his staff. The frequency of the newspaper coverage, as
seen in Chapters 3 and 4, also reflects the increasingly pivotal role played by the USC
College of Architecture in introducing and establishing contemporary ideas about
architecture and planning in Southern California.

1
Weatherhead, Arthur Clason, The History of Collegiate Education in Architecture in the United States
(Los Angeles, CA, 1941), 196.
75

The Philosophy behind the USC “Experiment”

A visual depiction of the College of Architecture’s evolution toward a modern
curriculum, at least in terms of its evolving sense of graphic style and self-promotion, is
seen in USC’s El Rodeo yearbook (Figures 14 through 27, College of Architecture, El
Rodeo Yearbooks, 1930 through 1958). While Weatherhead did not use the term
“modern” in the department’s statement of purpose until 1931, the ideas of hands-on
pragmatism, including technical coursework in modern materials and processes, began
shaping the curriculum as early as the 1920s. The notion that the classroom should build
ties to office practice appears to have been in place since the department’s inception in
1919. While a summer-long internship in an architect’s office had required for graduation
as early as 1919,
2
in 1922 Weatherhead announced a related initiative:
To establish a closer relation between the students of the architectural department
of the University of Southern California with the practicing architects of the city,
Prof. A.C. Weatherhead, head of the department, is arranging for his students to
do practical work both on plans and models for architects and to have well known
architects criticize their work as well as deliver lectures before the students of the
department.
3

By the academic year 1923/1924, Los Angeles architects “acting as guest patrons” had
begun teaching design courses and offering project critiques alongside faculty members.
4

This initiated the long-term collaboration between USC and Los Angeles architects such
as Sumner Spaulding and Carleton Winslow, Sr. and created professional networking
possibilities for students (many of whom went to work for their former instructors). In

2
USC Yearbook 1919-1920, vol. XV, no. 1, 146. USC Libraries, University Archives.
3
“Architects to Aid University Classes,” Los Angeles Times, 15 October 1922.
4
USC Yearbook 1923-1924, vol. XIX, no. 1, 60. USC Libraries, University Archives.
76

Figure 14. School of Architecture, 1930, El Rodeo Yearbook. Kudos for
Weatherhead and mention of the Vagabond Tour to Europe. Courtesy of
University of Southern California Libraries, University Archives.
77

Figure 15. College of Architecture, 1933, El Rodeo Yearbook. In the new integrated
curriculum, after exterior and interior studies of the buildings are done,
“Complete working drawings of the construction are then made just as
would be done in professional practice.” Courtesy of University of
Southern California Libraries, University Archives.
78

Figure 16. College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1934, El Rodeo Yearbook. “Sensitive
to the fact that a new era is opening in the field of architecture…, the
College of Architecture and Fine Arts is preparing its students for the
advent of a post-depression architecture.” Courtesy of University of
Southern California Libraries, University Archives.

79

Figure 17. College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1935, El Rodeo Yearbook. “Dean
Weatherhead’s policies have been enthusiastically supported by the
fraternal organizations and the entire student body.” Courtesy of
University of Southern California Libraries, University Archives.
80

Figure 18. College of Architecture, 1936, El Rodeo Yearbook. Praise for
Weatherhead, who “has been responsible for the remarkable national
standing of this SC branch” and announcement of new Industrial Design
courses, led by Paul Frankl, “nationally known modernist.” Courtesy of
University of Southern California Libraries, University Archives.
81

Figure 19. College of Architecture, 1937, El Rodeo Yearbook. “Southern California is
rapidly developing into the art center of the west, not only in Fine Arts,
but in modern industrial design.” Courtesy of University of Southern
California Libraries, University Archives.

82

Figure 20. College of Architecture, 1938, El Rodeo Yearbook. “One of the most
progressive schools of its kind in the country,” the College of Architecture
offers students “a practical rather than an historical approach to the work
in their chosen profession.” Courtesy of University of Southern California
Libraries, University Archives.
83

Figure 21. College of Architecture, 1939, El Rodeo Yearbook. “With a new building
in the process of construction…and with a course of study which permits
practical working contact with the newest movements in the profession,
the College of Architecture…continues its development as one of the most
progressive schools in the country.” Courtesy of University of Southern
California Libraries, University Archive.
84

Figure 22. College of Architecture, 1940, El Rodeo Yearbook. The College of
Architecture “endeavors to prepare students for practice under present-day
conditions. Being situated as it is in a metropolitan area, the college
enables the students to observe and student contemporary achievements in
all of the branches of the subject.” Courtesy of University of Southern
California Libraries, University Archives.
85

Figure 23. College of Architecture, 1941, El Rodeo Yearbook. The College
“continues its aim to prepare students for actual practice under present-day
conditions.” Courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries,
University Archives.
86

Figure 24. College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1943, El Rodeo Yearbook. “Bomb
defense buildings, airport layouts, and bomb proofing instruction was the
curricula sign of the times in the College of Architecture. Fine Arts
students studied the intricacies of war camouflage. Embryo architects
emphasized model cities planned for a peaceful future.” Courtesy of
University of Southern California Libraries, University Archives.
87

Figure 25. College of Architecture, 1946, El Rodeo Yearbook. Dean Arthur Gallion,
1945 through 1961: “The challenge of the postwar world is here.” This
marks Harwell Hamilton Harris’s first and only appearance in the
yearbook at a faculty member. The year 1946 also brings the split
between Fine Arts and Architecture and introduces a separate Department
of Industrial Design. Courtesy of University of Southern California
Libraries, University Archives.
88

Figure 26. College of Architecture, 1947, El Rodeo Yearbook. “To meet the
challenge of the postwar world the College of Architecture was
streamlined this past year. … Undergraduate studies give the student a
practical rather than exclusive historical approach to the work in his
chosen profession.”
89

Figure 27. School of Architecture, 1958, El Rodeo Yearbook, Gallion, Straub, and
Waldo Kirkpatrick. “Headed by Arthur Gallion, the faculty includes some
of the prominent practicing architects in the city. The dean, who believes
in progressive and practical building, has been at SC since 1945.”
90

1924, this network expanded with the program of collaboration launched between the
Allied Architects’ Association and USC, including the core advisory committee group of
architects David Witmer, Edwin Bergstrom, Sumner Spaulding, W. Templeton Johnson,
Windsor Soule, and Henry Nickerson. During the first semester of its involvement, the
Allied Architects’ Association estimated that the advisory committee, as well as members
such as Myron Hunt, S.O. Clements, R.E. Coate, and Pierpont Davis had devoted
“considerably over a total of 100 hours” to the Department of Architecture, primarily in
the preparation, direction, and critiques of upper-division design.
5

In 1923, the department took a tentative step away from historical methods and
introduced the idea of “present conditions.” While hardly striking a revolutionary tone,
the phrase (and variations on it) would become Weatherhead’s oft-cited leitmotif,
signaling the social responsiveness of the curriculum, through the 1930s and early 1940s.
Taking a first step in this direction, Weatherhead wrote that the USC Department of
Architecture was designed
to give a broad understanding of the various phases of architecture, and to develop
the student by this fundamental training so that he may have the ability to solve
the problems of the architect. Great care is taken to inform the individual of the
problems of the past, with their solutions, impressing him at the same time with
the facts that our present conditions are different, and that the problems of history
should form merely a basis of inspiration.
6

By “present-day conditions,” though, Weatherhead did not mean a general Zeitgeist to be
intuited. Rather, “present-day conditions” implied that behind every architectural
problem lay a set of social, economic, and architectural conditions that needed to be

5
Allied Architects Association, Bulletin of the Allied Architects Association of Los Angeles, “Report of the
President Concerning the Activities of the Allied Architects Association for the Year 1924,” vol. I, no. 4
(February 1925).
6
USC Yearbook 1923-1924, 60.
91

analyzed and considered in design solutions. Throughout his tenure as dean, Weatherhead
relied on this idea to promote a Department of Architecture that could adapt to the needs
of contemporary society and prepare its students for everyday office practice.
One also sees in this preliminary step the beginning of the school’s cautious
relationship with architectural history and stylistic precedent. Although the curriculum
included an exploration of “the problems of the past,” the basis of the approach was that
the needs of contemporary society had changed and that “the problems of history should
form merely a basis of inspiration.” In 1935, Weatherhead explained that the design
philosophy at USC sought to include “the rich heritage of the past as a general inspiration
rather than as a system of outworn conventions to be revered and imitated.”
7
Throughout
Weatherhead’s term as dean, the college’s design philosophy continued to rely on this
balance; in 1939, Weatherhead said that “We need a modern art to reflect our own age,
but at the same time to show a consciousness of other ages.”
8

Regional identity was key in this philosophy. The idea of a nexus between
regional identity and artistic expression had its roots in California’s late nineteenth-
century Arts and Crafts movement, locally seen in the “Arroyo” culture out of which the
College of Fine Arts had been founded by William Lee Judson.
9
(Figure 28, William Lee
Judson, circa 1910, College of Fine Arts founder.) A native of England, Judson was a
stained-glass artist steeped in the philosophy of the Arts and Crafts Movement (Judson

7
USC Bulletin, College of Architecture, 1935-1936, vol. XXIX, no. 21 (1 January 1935), 40. USC
Libraries, University Archives.
8
Harrington, Johns, December 1939, “Southern California—An Art Center,” Southern California Alumni
Review, 16-21 and 24. USC Libraries, University Archives.
9
Two books by Jane Apostol explore the Arroyo Arts and Crafts culture and Judson Studios: El Alisal:
Where History Lingers (Los Angeles, CA: Historical Society of Southern California, 1994), and Painting
with Light: A Centennial History of the Judson Studios (Los Angeles, CA: Historical Society of Southern
California, 1997).
92

Figure 28. William Lee Judson, circa 1910, painting on the banks of the Colorado
River. Judson, a painter and stained-glass maker, was the founder of the
Arts and Crafts-inspired Judson Studios and the USC College of Fine Arts.
Source: University of Southern California Libraries, Special Collections,
Digital Archive, California Historical Society, image CHS-4237.
93

was born in 1842, in fact, eight years after William Morris). In 1897, Judson founded the
family studio for handcrafted stained-glass at 200 South Avenue 66, in present-day
Highland Park, a community located between Los Angeles and Pasadena along the banks
of the Arroyo Seco.
10
When Judson founded his studio, he chose a location just two
miles away from El Alisal, Charles Fletcher Lummis’s Arts and Crafts homage to
Southern California. The stained-glass creations of Judson (whose slogan “Only the best
is worthwhile”
11
served as the motto for the College of Fine Arts throughout the 1910s)
adorned ecclesiastical, commercial, and residential buildings throughout Southern
California, including the designs of Greene and Greene and Frank Lloyd Wright.
Continuing this tradition, an explicitly Pacific Southwestern identity (rather than
universal applicability of the Beaux-Arts system) shaped the design ethos at the new USC
Department of Architecture:
By studying the monuments of the countries whose geographical and climatic
conditions are similar to ours, the department hopes to aid in the development of
an architecture in Southern California, harmonious with the location, without
being provincial in its scope.
12

In February 1924, Weatherhead announced that the Department of Architecture was
“writing its own program,” tailored to regional conditions and the realities of
architectural practice.
13

10
Judson Studios, located at 200 South Avenue 66 in Highland Park, was designated a Historic Cultural
Monument (HCM No. 62) in the City of Los Angeles in 1969 and listed in the National Register of Historic
Places in 1999.
11
Apostol, Painting with Light, 1.
12
USC Yearbook 1923-1924, 60.
13
“Architect Prizes Are Announced, Awards Being Offered to Students of University of Southern
California,” Los Angeles Times, 17 February 1924.
94

In the early 1920s, collaborative efforts had begun between the Department of
Architecture and Allied Architects’ Association. In these early years, one sees hints of
disagreement on the part of some association members and Weatherhead, with the points
of contention mirroring the debate on the Beaux-Arts system. Whereas Weatherhead’s
focus had already become pragmatism and the conditions and characteristics of the
“Pacific Southland,” comments by several Allied Architects’ Association members
reflect a desire for a local school of architecture capable of competing with the “great
eastern universities”
14
and, closer to home, the University of California at Berkeley,
15
a
Beaux-Arts modeled department established by John Galen Howard in 1903. This focus
on East Coast institutions and architectural firms had preoccupied the Allied Architects’
Association from its early days. Indeed, the 1921 establishment of the association
coincided with the controversial awarding of the Los Angeles Public Library commission
to the “eastern” firm of Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, a commission for which the Allied
Architects’ Association had also vied.
Shortly after the University Board of Trustees accepted their proposal, the Allied
Architects’ Association invited Howard to offer a lecture on architectural education
before the association’s 24 October 1924 group meeting. Several months later, in a
special issue of the association bulletin devoted to the USC Department of Architecture,
Howard expressed his views on architectural pedagogy, arguing that architects are born,
not necessarily taught, and education can stymie creative impulse. However, he wrote,
artistry in design draws from, and depends on, an encyclopedic knowledge of historic

14
“Architects to Open Library,” Los Angeles Times, 7 December 1924.
15
“Plan Architects’ Building,” Los Angeles Times, 7 September 1925.
95

precedent. While this field of knowledge is vast, Howard admitted, “some professions,
including that of the architect, must be so.”
16
Imparting that vast field of knowledge,
Howard said, “is where the universities come in.” In terms of evaluating the “specific
attainment” of students, Howard said, one must establish “the facts” with regard to
consistent standards – but, he wrote, with the help of the Beaux-Arts standards, this
challenge was “by no means insuperable”:
Take architectural design, for example. The school faculties can easily establish
the academic value of work done for the Beaux Arts Institute of Design. This
function of establishing the facts as to adequate attainment is one for which the
university is peculiarly fitted and it should be recognized as one of its greatest
privileges and services to the community.

The faith Howard places in the Beaux-Arts system as a standard against which design
could be measured contrasts with Weatherhead’s own contribution to the same issue of
the Allied Architects’ Association bulletin. Rather than highlighting the “vast, unwieldy
accumulations” of the past, Weatherhead wrote that the challenge of architectural
education (which he characterized as an emerging “modern experiment”) lay in
addressing, as he put it,
the lack of connection…between the design problems of the school and the actual
building programs represented. Within the seclusion of the classroom, the student
has often acquired only a bookish knowledge of the problems of architectural
design, having been prone to regard his drawings and matters of presentation as
an end in themselves, rather than to conceive of them in terms of the final mass in
which the spirit is to be embodied. A young man trained entirely in this manner is
certainly not properly equipped to become of much immediate value to his
employer nor to enter any phase of his professional career without a prolonged
period of office practice.
17

16
Howard, John Galen, “Degree Or No Degree,” Bulletin of the Allied Architects Association of Los
Angeles, vol. II, no. 5 (March 1926).
17
Weatherhead, Arthur C., “The Value of Criticism by Practicing Architects in the School,” Bulletin of the
Allied Architects Association of Los Angeles, vol. II, no. 5 (March 1926).
96

In highlighting the “lack of connection” between a “bookish” design curriculum and
actual architectural practice, Weatherhead takes clear aim at the Beaux-Arts system.
Weatherhead also criticizes the classroom dynamic in which paper presentations are
regarded as “an end in themselves.” However, in terms of emphasizing paper
presentations, association member and USC faculty C. Raimond Johnson does just that in
the article following Weatherhead’s. Based on his evaluation of student drawings,
Johnson wrote, he felt that efforts to “maintain a higher standard of work” at USC had
been successful (the projects he described included a Country Club, an outdoor
swimming pool for the estate of Harold Lloyd, and a church interior adopting either an
Italian, Gothic, Romanesque, or Byzantine ornamental style).
However, if a philosophical difference of opinion existed, it appears to have been
a gentleman’s disagreement. Not only did Weatherhead and Johnson teach together for
twenty years, but Weatherhead had high praise for both Howard (whom he described as
“a brilliant young New York architect”)
18
and the school of architecture he founded at the
University of California, Berkeley. John Galen Howard, Weatherhead wrote,
[t]hrough his educational background, the refinement of his architecture, and his
devotion to the highest ideals of his profession…created a school in the extreme
West that was recognized as comparable in every respect to the better schools of
architecture in the East. …The school at the University of California was
definitely a product of the architectural philosophy of the Eclectic Period at its
best.
19

Sounding the tone of evolution, not revolution, Weatherhead commented that at the
University of California, Berkeley, as run under Howard, “Little attention was given to
the fine old architectural traditions of California,” but, Weatherhead added, “this was to

18
Weatherhead, A History of Collegiate Education, 113.
19
Ibid, 116.
97

be expected during the period of Eclecticism.”
20
In Berkeley the “fine old architectural
traditions” would have included the work of Bernard Maybeck, one of the earliest
masters of what Esther McCoy called the “California school” of architecture, with its
search for an indigenous architecture expressive of site, environment, and local materials.
(Maybeck’s contemporaries Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene, among
others, led the Southern Californian response to these same questions and exerted a
strong influence in the work of early twentieth-century modernists in Los Angeles.) As
Littmann observed, however, the UC Berkeley faculty emphasized European travel for
students, to view the monuments of antiquity and the Renaissance, and “placed for less
emphasis on the importance of Bay Area architects, despite the presence of works by
Julia Morgan, Bernard Maybeck, and Willis Polk.”
21

As the 1920s progressed, though, the USC Department of Architecture moved
decisively toward contemporary architecture. The year 1924 introduced the department’s
first annual “Vagabond Tour” of Europe, with a maiden voyage in the summer of 1924 to
Britain, France, Italy, and Spain. Led by Weatherhead, the six-unit study tours served as
a means of introducing the currents of European architecture to students and faculty;
while including sojourns to the American Academy in Rome and Paris’ École des Beaux-
Arts, the buildings of the modern movement provided the main attraction. Announcing
USC’s 1930 trip, Architectural Record wrote that the “latest trend in modern architecture
will be studied by the students in various cities and countries, emphasis being placed on

20
Ibid, 116.
21
Littmann, “Assault on the Ecole,” 160.
98

American work as contrasted with that of other nations.”
22
In addition to this surprising
national coverage for USC, the quantity of local coverage reflects a heightened profile for
the fledging department and its program of study. In the summer of 1931, the “traveling
class in modern architecture” visited “England, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and
Holland.”
23
An Alpha Rho Chi member commented on the 1931 tour:
Dean A.C. Weatherhead's vagabond tour was a big success this summer and all of
the fellows and the girl (there was one) that followed the Dean all over Europe
were very well pleased with the trip. Special emphasis was placed on the study of
modern architecture in the different countries that were visited.
24

While the tours continued throughout the 1920s and into the early 1930s, the 1932 tour
was cancelled in deference to events planned around the Los Angeles Summer Olympics;
after this point, announcements of the annual study tour in the Los Angeles Times, as well
as Architectural Record and the Alpha Rho Chi newsletter, cease appearing, suggesting
that the yearly European trip became a casualty of the Great Depression.
While European modernism remained a touchstone, the need to imbue
architecture with regional, and increasingly “American,” character remained essential.
But in this era, the stance did not merely reflect an act of rebellion against the formalistic
understanding of the International Style. Rather, it represented a continuation of the
“quest for a national style” rooted in the American (and in particular, Californian) Arts
and Crafts movement, as well as contemporaneous meditations on regional identity such
as the Spanish Colonial Revival or southwestern architecture (more ornamental, but also

22
“Notes in Brief and Architects’ Announcements,” Architectural Record, vol. 68, no. 2 (August 1930):
154.
23
“What Architects Are Talking About,” American Architect, vol. 139, no. 2596 (June 1931), 112.
24
G.E. Hoedinghaus, “Andronikos,” The Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XIII, no. 5 (October 1931): 7-8.
99

reflecting the desire to express local identity in architecture).
25
The divide between
indigenous architecture on the one side and universal aesthetics on the other was
recognized, but Academic Classicism (not the “International Style”) represented the
approach to avoid.
Although Weatherhead criticized the unrootedness of the ultra-modern in either
historic precedent or place, he believed that the idiom represented a fresh expression of
contemporary life rather than the “fossilized” Beaux-Arts. This idea comes across in a
1928 Los Angeles Times article, in Weatherhead’s article about Western European
modernism:
Many lovers of architecture have welcomed the freshness and originality in the
inspirations of the so-called modern style. From a dry thing of crystallized and
over-refined columns, and molded stone arches as interpreted by the French
Beaux-Arts of the last decade, architecture has been rejuvenated and brought into
line with a natural expression of this day. The results are at least virile and full of
life, which is a quality always to be preferred to the cut-and-dried, fossilized
condition of a dead style which has ceased to be pertinent or representative.
26

In this way, “virile” European modernism offered an up-to-date alternative to the
irrelevant French Beaux-Arts. The new idiom frankly expressed contemporary
conditions, Weatherhead wrote, and the “function of steel and reinforced concrete as it is
used in modern building.” He parts ways with the “ultra modern” on the question of
historic precedent. Without naming architects or buildings (though Corbusier’s early
writing and work certainly come to mind), Weatherhead criticizes as “unlovely and

25
Wilson, Richard Guy, “American Arts and Crafts Architecture: Radical through Dedicated to the Cause
Conservative,” "The Art that is Life": The Arts & Crafts Movement in America, 1875-1920, Wendy Kaplan,
ed. (Boston, MA: Museum of Fine Arts, 1987), 101-131, quoted here p. 109.
26
“Modern Design Spreading, Western European Countries Produce New Type of Architecture Linking
Old and Present Day,” Los Angeles Times, 15 July 1928.
100

discordant” the ultra-modern, arguing in favor of a design idiom that reflected
contemporary life without discarding the past entirely:
To claim…as many ultra-modernists persist in doing, that we should abhor that
which savors of precedent is foolish. The best that has been done in the past must
always have its influence upon the present.

This country, with its system of great architectural schools…will never recognize
or be fully satisfied with the unscholarly and unlovely forms depicted in much of
the so-called ultra-modern design.

Weatherhead’s view reflected the larger debate on “organic” modernism,
reflecting place as much as time, versus a history-free machine-age aesthetic. As
Kenneth Frampton pointed out, in Europe in the early 1910s, this divide between
normative design/mass production versus individuality/artistic expression dominated the
debate over the Werkbund’s direction during the organization’s first years and mirrored
the later debate in the United States.
27
In the 1920s, then, the goals of European
modernism to express present-day conditions, and the integrated, multidisciplinary
approach of the Bauhaus, provided touchstones for the program at USC—but with an
injection of regional character and history.
In his 1928 article “Architecture and Life,” addressing modern vocations for
young people, Weatherhead strikes a booster’s tone for both the profession and Southern
Californian architecture, stressing how regional setting shapes architecture, and how few
settings rival that of Southern California:
Can one deny that the New Englander who has lived in a severely formal, white
colonial house is a different person from his brother who has built for himself a
gaily colored ranch house on a sunny hillside in California? Perhaps it can be

27
Frampton, Kenneth, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 4
th
edition (New York: Thames and
Hudson Inc., 2007), 111.
101

argued that the house represents the man, his tastes and his social or economic
status, but eventually in the interplay of influences, the man comes to reflect the
house in which he dwells.
28

The “California, land of opportunity” tone brings to mind late-nineteenth-century
advertisements by Southern California business concerns, in particular the railroads,
aimed at boosting tourism and settlement. Much like the boom of the 1880s, the roaring
1920s had indeed transformed Southern California, and as of 1928 there were few signs
that it would stop. Driven by the optimism of the era, Weatherhead promoted in this
article the ideas of a regionally-inflected architecture expressive of “present-day
conditions” and of a multidisciplinary profession that was viable and expanding:
In few parts of the world is it possible for architects to play such an important role
in the social life of man as in Southern California. Here is offered the supreme
opportunity to create freely and beautifully…few physical obstructions have had
to be conquered, while the climate offers every encouragement to freedom in
design and variety of material. …

Just as California is taking the lead in the development of a distinctive and
beautiful type of architecture, so it is advancing the art of community planning
through the development of some of its great subdivisions and townsites, and the
art of landscape architecture through the transformation of once-barren hillsides
and sun-baked valleys into broad terraces and beautiful gardens.

Given Southern California’s “strategic position as the capital of the motion-picture
world,” Weatherhead adds in the 1928 article, trained architects could also enjoy the
“vast” professional opportunities offered through the film studios (Figure 29, USC
School of Architecture Goes Hollywood):
Without its proper architectural background no motion picture can create in the
minds of its audience the desired atmosphere, or clearly and successfully interpret
the historical period it seeks to portray. …The creation of a proper architectural

28
Weatherhead, Arthur C., “Architecture and Life,” Los Angeles Times, 22 April 1928.
102

Figure 29. USC School of Architecture Goes Hollywood: “Students of the School of
Architecture at the University of Southern California present the first
results of their work in fitting themselves for motion-picture work as
directors and designers of stage sets and costumes.” Professor Clayton
Baldwin appears in the photo, fourth from the right. Source: Los
Angeles Times, 1 January 1928.
103

setting is one of the important factors in the success of any picture and the
average spectator fails to appreciate the wealth of attention that has been
expended upon this phase of the production. Again, this entirely new field of
architectural endeavor is of particular importance to this community.

Sixteen months following the publication of this article, the roaring twenties came
to an abrupt end with the October 1929 stock market collapse. The socioeconomic crisis
of the Great Depression, as Weatherhead argued, triggered a national re-evaluation of
teaching methods among American schools of architecture. While it is unclear whether
the crisis played a role in the timing of the changes made at USC, by offering the latitude
for experimentation, Weatherhead launched the new curriculum in 1930 and, by January
1931, the revised program had been accepted and published. Weatherhead thus
introduced the new College of Architecture in the 1931 catalog:
The present trend of architecture is unmistakably towards a more vital and
creative expression of present-day conditions, and in this movement Southern
California is taking an important place. With its old Spanish traditions, its
colorful environment, and its freedom from the extremes of heat and cold, the
Southwest offers an excellent field for the development of modern architecture,
including the closely related fine arts. In many respects this art is rapidly
becoming distinctive of the locality.
29

Throughout the 1930s, the ideas transforming the new College of Architecture
mirrored the local and national conversation about architecture – a conversation that
focused on modernizing residential design (both small-house and multi-family), planning
for the neighborhood and city, and the rise of scientific research and technology as the
means to both. This shift in focus was of course fueled by the myriad programs and
policies of the New Deal. Although the landmark National Housing Act, passed in 1934,
and subsequent creation of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) were not

29
USC Bulletin, College of Architecture, 1931-1932, vol. XXV, no. 18 (15 January 1931), 11. USC
Libraries, University Archives.
104

specifically designed to trigger “a revolution in homebuying,” as Greg Hise observed, the
restructuring of mortgage instruments to include government-guaranteed loans, along
with longer terms and lower interest rates, did indeed facilitate “home ownership to a
new demographic and income stratum.”
30
The new focus at the College of Architecture
and Fine Arts reflected these changes, in particular FHA forays into codifying standards
for the small residence. In addition, with heightened awareness of regional and
community planning issues, triggered by the work of Catherine Bauer, Lewis Mumford,
and Clarence Stein, as well as the FHA’s attempts to standardize planning ideals (as
promulgated in its bulletin series beginning in the 1930s), regional and community
planning issues became a staple of USC design courses as early as 1934.
While the conversation was national, California played a prominent role in its
early evolution. In 1964, James Marston Fitch participated in Columbia University’s
second biennial Symposium on Modern Architecture, which was devoted to “an historical
reappraisal of the architecture” of the 1930s.
31
For his conference presentation, Fitch
undertook a survey of architectural trade magazines from 1929 to 1939, looking for
patterns in how the press “reflected, reacted to, the rise of modern technology.”
32
During
this period, Fitch, who in the 1930s worked as an editor at an architectural trade
magazine, observed a “great shift in editorial positions” after 1929, as the field came “to
recognize the role of modern industrial technology as making possible the new

30
Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles, 40-41.
31
Collins, George R., and Adolf K. Placzek, “Introduction, MAS 1964: The Decade 1929-1939,” The
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 24, no. 1 (March 1965): pp. 3-4.
32
Fitch, James Marston, “The Rise of Technology, 1929-1939,” The Journal of the Society of Architectural
Historians, vol. 24, no. 1 (March 1965): 75-77, quoted here p. 75.
105

architectural idiom. The same issues of these magazines were full of new buildings
which illustrated what visible forms this new idiom would assume.”
33
Fitch writes that
we editors had, of course, to prove that this new movement was thoroughly
“American.” I remember very clearly that on the magazine on which I worked
there were always sharp limits as to how much foreign material we dared include.
Each month it was a struggle; each month we tried to present a picture of evenly
balanced progress right across the country. Actually, there were about three states
in the whole nation – New York, Illinois, California – which gave any evidence of
this progress. So we were continually trying to juggle eight houses from
California, one from the east coast and then, if possible, a bowling alley or a
drive-in of something from the Middle West to afford at least the pretense that we
were reporting on a national movement.

Yet none of us doubted for a moment that there was a national movement, that its
future was assured and that technology was the means whereby it would be
accomplished.
34

The philosophy developing at USC reflected these concerns. While the 1934
course bulletin strikes the familiar chord of a new architecture that is “distinctive of this
locality,” in 1935 modern architecture was described as signifying “an unmistakable
movement toward a new American art and architecture.” In the Los Angeles Times, long-
time USC design instructor Clayton Baldwin also framed the department’s design
philosophy in terms of the nation, rather than the region:
The glories of the past should be used only as stepping stones. By all means we
should develop a style truly American, that is alive to the present needs, and not
continue to build tombstones to an age that is dead.
35

Given the timing, Baldwin and Weatherhead’s evocations of an “American” architecture
seem aimed at addressing objections to the “foreignness” of the Museum of Modern Art’s

33
Ibid, 75.
34
Ibid, 75.
35
“American Development of Architecture Urged,” Los Angeles Times, 1 April 1934.
106

1932 International Style exhibit. (Local receptions of the exhibit, which travelled to Los
Angeles in July 1932 in conjunction with the Tenth Summer Olympiad in Los Angeles’s
Exposition Park, are described in the next section.)
Given Weatherhead’s reticence about discussing style per se, or individual
architects to emulate (or not), discerning his views on avant-garde modernism requires a
fair amount of conjecture. While he rejected the prescriptive ideas about style of the
Beaux-Arts educational system, he avoided idealizing avant-garde modernism. This
reticence extended to commenting on the work of the region’s modernist architects or
events such as the 1932 Museum of Modern Art exhibit on the International Style in New
York and, that same year, Los Angeles.
While Weatherhead’s engagement in the local community of avant-garde
architect and artists appears to have been fairly limited, his sympathies lay with the
modern movement. In the 1930s, the dean initiated and taught coursework in modern
architecture and shifted the architectural history curriculum to post-1900 work. Since the
late 1920s, Weatherhead’s public lectures had covered topics such as Californian
modernism, innovations in residential design, and the effect of the skyscraper on the
architecture of the west. In 1933, Weatherhead and several members of his staff
(including the German architect and designer, Kem Weber) participated in a lecture series
on “the American home,” in a six-week series covering the “architecture of the home,
interior design and furnishing, financing the new home, landscaping the home, and the
California home of the future.
36

36
“American Home Lecture Topic,” Los Angeles Times, 15 October 1933.
107

In addition, when Pauline Schindler guest-edited an issue of Architect and
Engineer, devoted to California’s modern architecture, she invited Weatherhead to
contribute an article on the USC curriculum. In 1936, Weatherhead, along with Richard
Neutra and Rudolph Schindler, offered several public lectures on California’s
contemporary architecture. Organized as a local response to the 1935 Museum of
Modern Art exhibition “Contemporary Architecture in California,” the lectures were
sponsored by the Los Angeles Art Association.
37
In addition, in 1942, according to
Thomas Hines, the USC College of Architecture and Fine Arts invited Raphael Soriano
(a USC alumni, but from what Weatherhead called the “eclectic period” of the 1920s) “to
become a part-time lecturer, an experience he enjoyed.”
38

However, even when Weatherhead commented on the art of architecture, he
avoided citing architects either to follow or reject. As for USC students in the 1930s,
Weatherhead wrote, they had become “intensely conscious of a new American
architecture” but “[t]he word, modern, is now seldom mentioned. When designs develop
logically out of living situations, they lead automatically to a sound modern
expression.”
39
Although Weatherhead claimed that students no longer needed to utter the
word “modern,” the college’s rejection of traditional methods and aesthetics had become
a calling card for potential students. According to USC alumni and architect William
Krisel, the atmosphere at the USC College of Architecture by the early 1940s was
actively “anti-traditional,” and the students indeed admired the range of heroes of the

37
Millier, Arthur, “Art and Artists,” Los Angeles Times, 5 January 1936; Cage, Crete, “Program Repeated
on Architecture,” Los Angeles Times, 31 January 1936.
38
Hines, Thomas H., Architecture of the Sun: Los Angeles Modernism, 1900-1970 (New York, NY:
Rizzoli, 2010), 439.
39
Weatherhead, Arthur C., “Note on Education in Architecture,” Architect and Engineer, ed. Pauline
Schindler, vol. 123 (December 1935): 69.
108

modern movement such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Marcel Breuer.
Commenting on his decision to attend USC rather than Cornell University (to which he
had also been accepted), Krisel said:
What I liked about Weatherhead was that he completely threw out the Beaux Arts,
and of course I hated the Beaux-Arts and if that’s what they were going to teach,
that isn’t what I was going to do. So I really appreciated SC’s approach to the
Bauhaus and modernism.
40

Commenting on his first visit to USC, Krisel said,
I knew about USC and its [approach to] modernism when I visited the School of
Architecture in my senior year [of high school]. I saw the projects that the
students in architecture were doing and was most impressed with the various
techniques of presentation but mainly that each project I saw was in the modern
language.
41

This, according to Krisel, helped win him over to USC, which he entered in 1941 and,
after serving in World War II, graduated from in 1949. In terms of design instruction,
though, Krisel recalled, “I didn’t find SC pointing or leading or teaching you any specific
style of architecture. You defined your own self.”
42

Weatherhead’s focus remained on the social aspects of modern architecture. As
he wrote in 1941 on the reform of US architectural education, a shift in style alone
“would have been insignificant if it had not inaugurated a much more comprehensive
movement.”
43
Pragmatism, and preparation for the everyday realities of office practice,
formed the heart of pedagogical reform at USC. Introducing the new College of
Architecture in 1931, the dean wrote that the program aimed to “prepare students for the
many grave problems with which they will be confronted in modern practice. Basic

40
Krisel, William, interview with author, 22 February 2010, Los Angeles, California.
41
Krisel, William, Personal communication with author, 15 July 2010.
42
Krisel, interview.
43
Weatherhead, The History of Collegiate Education, 175.
109

principles are stressed in the present-day methods of drawing, construction, building
finance, and professional practice.”
44
By 1935, the program had crafted a balance
between design (focused on “original expression”), building sciences and technical
coursework, and professional practices, covering the details of working drawings and
“the economic forces that control and challenge the designer’s ingenuity.” Also
emphasized by Weatherhead in 1935 was the “three-dimensional product rather than the
pictorial qualities of the sketch.”
45
This balance as of 1935 captures the essence of the
school’s approach and philosophy through the early 1960s.
As reform began at USC, one sees a corresponding shift in tone throughout the
1930s in the USC El Rodeo yearbook and also in student publications. The character of
the changes reflects the Great Depression’s imprint on the college’s philosophy, as the
Beaux-Arts system was phased out. In the early 1930s, acknowledging that a “new era”
had begun in the field of architecture,
46
yearbook updates and descriptions of the college
focused less frequently on social functions and sporting events (topics described in the
yearbook as well as the Alpha Rho Chi newsletter in the 1920s) and far more on the
challenges of “preparing students for the advent of a post-depression architecture.”
47
The
1933 El Rodeo Yearbook described the new approach of the College of Architecture:
“Due to a new policy, the architectural courses in design, construction and professional

44
USC Bulletin, College of Architecture (15 January 1931), 11.
45
USC Bulletin, College of Architecture (1 January 1935), 15.
46
University of Southern California, El Rodeo Yearbook, “College of Architecture and Fine Arts,” 1934,
75.
47
El Rodeo Yearbook, 1934, 75.
110

practice have been correlated. …Complete working drawings of the construction are
then made just as would be done in professional practice.
48

Signs of discontent with the new curriculum, in particular with respect to the
elimination of Beaux-Arts problem sets, were initially expressed by students. In the
newsletter of the national architectural fraternity, Alpha Rho Chi, USC architectural
fraternity members voiced their disapproval, albeit gingerly, of the direction of the design
courses:
This year the students are going to have a chance to compare their work with that
done at other institutions, due to the fact that they are taking the Beaux Arts
problems. The Beaux Arts program does not comply with that of the University,
but the students have agreed to give up some of their vacations to take the
problems.
49

It is worth pointing out that not all architecture students would have belonged to the
Alpha Rho Chi fraternity (but the fraternity newsletter offers one of the few sources from
the students themselves). Nevertheless, the subtle complaint was that students felt
disconnected from colleagues at other universities, since they lacked the opportunity to
compete in BAID-written problem sets—and they were willing to sacrifice vacation time
in order to participate.
Several years later, in 1934, an assertion of student support for “Dean
Weatherhead’s policies” had the unintended effect of drawing attention to initial
unhappiness with his changes to the curriculum. In 1935, the El Rodeo yearbook
reasserted that the dean’s policies “have been enthusiastically supported by the fraternal

48
University of Southern California, El Rodeo Yearbook, “College of Architecture and Fine Arts,” 1933,
291.
49
Miller, George A., “Andronicus,” The Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XII, no. 2 (December 1930), 11.
111

organizations and the entire student body;” the yearbook went on to describe the
environment in the school:
To realize an atmosphere of sincere cordiality and friendliness is to work and
study among the students of the College of Architecture and Fine Arts. The lack
of formality accompanied by the serious desire to create new things…has
definitely established this school as the leading Architectural and Fine Arts
College of the West.
50

In 1935, Weatherhead summed up a ten-year period at USC, admitting that the
“readjustment in architectural education is a large order.”
51
However, he also suggested
that, when it came to the modernization of architectural pedagogy, widespread national
reform was inevitable and the early “experiments” in how to get there had come of age.
His article, “A Note on Education in Architecture,” appeared in the special issue of
Architect and Engineer, guest edited by Pauline Schindler and devoted to West Coast
modernism. Covering the points he’d been developing for over a decade—on present-
day conditions, a pragmatic, integrated curriculum, and contemporary design not as a
style but a response to “living situations”—Weatherhead began the article by describing
the 1925 “advent of the modern,” which he said initially sparked “very little change in
architectural education in this country”:
The schools merely adopted the shell of so-called modernism; and the
resulting architecture was often very superficial. The criticism which followed
forced educators to take stock of their methods, and a thorough readjustment
has been taking place.
52

In Weatherhead’s estimation, based on this readjustment, schools of architecture had
begun returning to a “fundamental principal” that had been the basis of “every great

50
University of Southern California, El Rodeo Yearbook, “College of Architecture and Fine Arts,” 1935,
30.
51
Weatherhead, “Note on Education,” 69.
52
Ibid, 69.
112

period of the past”: “architecture must grow out of the conditions existing in the
civilization which it serves and that training for the practice of this architecture must be
governed by the same approach.” After nearly five years of watching how students
adapted to the new approach, Weatherhead observed that
It is quite impossible to train architecture students also to be engineers; but they
may be taught from the first to think structurally in their designs and to begin to
appreciate the character of contemporary materials. School designs were never so
brilliant and creative as they are today. The natural qualities and limitations of
modern materials and the varied and complex functions of modern buildings
when carried even to details are proving to be no hindrance to the student. On the
contrary.

Throughout the remainder of the 1930s and into the early 1940s, the college’s
success in fashioning a pragmatic, socially responsive curriculum is evidenced in the
consistency of its philosophy in spite of the social shifts of the era. By the late 1930s, the
idea of the “experiment” appears to have become part of the college’s self-image. In
1938, the entry in El Rodeo proclaimed that the College of Architecture and Fine Arts
had become “One of the most progressive schools of its kind in the country,” offering
students “a practical rather than an historical approach to the work in their chosen
profession.”
53
(In 1947, Gallion used the same language, describing the USC program as
offering “a practical rather than exclusively historical approach to the work in his chosen
profession.”)
54
The late 1930s brought a construction boom to Southern California,
triggered largely through New Deal programs and defense-related construction. In an
apparent reflection of this, in the early 1940s the College of Architecture began
promoting the idea of Los Angeles itself as an extension of the classroom (an idea that

53
University of Southern California, El Rodeo Yearbook, “College of Architecture and Fine Arts,” 1938,
25.
54
University of Southern California, El Rodeo Yearbook, “College of Architecture,” 1947, 44.
113

persists to the present). The 1940 El Rodeo stated that the College of Architecture
“situated as it is in a metropolitan area…enables the students to observe and study
contemporary achievements in all of the branches of the subject.”
By the early 1940s, Weatherhead’s innovations at USC and research in
architectural pedagogy had garnered national attention. In 1940, the dean presented the
keynote address at the annual meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of
Architecture in Louisville, Kentucky; the same year, at the American Institute of
Architects’ meeting, he presented a talk on the “program of architecture training at
Southern California.”
55
In 1941, Weatherhead again discussed the modern USC
curriculum before the AIA, in a report presented before the group’s 73
rd
convention held
that year in Yosemite and Los Angeles. In this report, offered just three years prior to his
retirement, Weatherhead described his career-long project at USC for a national audience
of architects and educators in characteristically low-key fashion, reiterating the points in
development since the 1920s:
The courses are for the most part very realistic, with programs based upon vital
local situations and usually with actual sites which the students visit. Los Angeles
and its environs afford an ample and varied supply of such material. In most of
the projects we now are providing either one or two weeks of preliminary
investigation, both in the library and in the field. There is always a one-week
preliminary sketch with criticism and a judgment before the final study period is
attempted. Our thought is to stress good, practical planning and at the same time
to develop a sense of structure.
56

Even with the 1941 advent of World War II, as the College of Architecture and Fine Arts
(among other schools in the region) began offering courses in camouflage and defense-

55
“Weatherhead Attends Parley,” USC Daily Trojan, 17 May 1940.
56
“S.C. Architecture Class Uses City as Laboratory,” Los Angeles Times, 27 April 1941.
114

related design and construction, the philosophy remained the same. Explaining the war-
time changes to the curriculum in 1941 to the Los Angeles Times, Weatherhead said that
It has always been our plan to make the teaching of architecture practical, using
fundamentals in design and structure in making them apply to the modernization
of community or the improvements of city areas. …And with today’s defense
programs offering untold opportunities for practice design, we are adopting our
class projects to fit current needs.
57

In Weatherhead’s writing throughout his tenure as dean, he remained so
consistently on message that one wishes for an extended manuscript or interview in
which he expresses uncensored opinions on the aesthetics of the modern movement. As
stated earlier, the emergence of the modern movement in Los Angeles paralleled the
development of a modern design curriculum at the College of Architecture and Fine Arts,
and both shared central design concerns and principles. In the context of Weatherhead’s
era, though, style became a second-order concern because of the need to distance the
college’s design philosophy from the style-prescriptive 1920s and staid traditions of the
Beaux-Arts. An alternative window onto Los Angeles’s emerging movement in
contemporary architecture and housing (and the mainstream reception and co-optation of
these ideas) is provided through local press coverage. The following section explores the
1930’s coverage of contemporary architecture and the emerging housing movement, as
seen in the largest mass-market newspaper of Southern California in the 1930s, the Los
Angeles Times.

57
“S.C. Course in Architecture Altered to Fit Defense Needs, Students Will Learn to Design Bomb
Shelters, Airports, Hospitals and Other War Projects,” Los Angeles Times, 7 September 1941.
115

Contemporary Architecture and “California Living”: Local Press Coverage
The character of 1930’s and early 1940’s coverage in the Los Angeles Times
mirrors the issues shaping the USC College of Architecture in its formative years,
especially in terms of the housing movement and interpretations of modern architectural
thought and design. In particular, the columns of arts and architecture critic Arthur
Millier show a close affinity with the views of Weatherhead and the USC approach and
design philosophy, especially vis-à-vis regional identity and the emphasis on the social
aspects of modernism. This section considers this press coverage, which reflected a
growing awareness and acceptance of the new ideas, and sketches their development
through the decade.
Beginning in the early 1930s in the Los Angeles Times, architectural coverage had
begun to be dominated by contemporary trends in domestic design, as seen in the latest
demonstration house exhibits or ready-made house plans. Whether a high-end modern
residence or a replicable house planned for a 50-foot-wide lot, a common vocabulary
evoking the good California life promoted a range of approaches to contemporary
residential design. So omnipresent was the topic in the Los Angeles Times that it was not
uncommon to find entire articles devoted to trends such as the elimination of a formal
dining area (reflecting a growing desire for informal living spaces and the rise of the
servantless home), repositioning the living room away from the street and toward a
landscaped garden (reflecting both the taste for indoor-outdoor integration and the rise of
the automobile on the street), or rethinking the wisdom of an adjacent driveway and
garage. While promoted or discussed interchangeably as “modern” and “contemporary,”
the character of this press coverage serves as a reminder that a growing appetite for
116

modern convenience and innovations in residential design did not necessarily translate
into a taste for modern forms.
Indeed, as the notion of “modern” became the signifier for contemporary living
(though not necessarily avant-garde design), commentators of the era, such as Pauline
Schindler in the issue of Architect and Engineer cited above, for example, sought to
distance “true” modernism from the superficially modern. Of interest to this study,
however, is the shared vocabulary invoked by a variety of actors in the 1930s to express
how residential design should reflect a cultural backdrop regarded as categorically
different from that of the 1920s. The character of this press coverage brings to mind
what David Smiley termed the “overlapping modernisms” of the US “domestic culture
industry;” in his 2001 study, Smiley examined the “combined efforts at interpreting
modernity” by “a vast array of cultural actors including architects, builders, professional
magazines, real estate organizations, museums, and schools.”
58
The “domestic culture
industry” emerging in 1930’s Southern California fits this description.
The most common feature used to brand contemporary living, though, became
Southern Californian identity itself. In newspaper coverage of housing exhibits, plans,
and new construction, expressing regional identity became synonymous with the good
life in a changed, modern age. Figuring prominently in this coverage was the notion that
contemporary architecture (in particular residential design) should be “suited” for and
stamped by Southern Californian identity (even as the work shared central principles with
the larger national movement in housing, such as an increased informality in the plan and

58
Smiley, David, “Making the Modified Modern,” Perspecta, special issue on “Resurfacing Modernism,”
vol. 32, (2001): 39-54.
117

indoor-outdoor integration).
59
Although the period-eclectic styles of the late-nineteenth
and early-twentieth century also relied on Southern Californian branding for their
promotion (in particular, the Mission Revival, Spanish Colonial Revival, and quasi-
Mediterranean spin-offs), in the early 1930s expressing regional identity in design came
to signify a fresh alternative to the cut-and-paste period-revival styles of the 1920s (and
increasingly formulaic expressions of the Streamline Moderne and Art Deco, as seen in
particular in Los Angeles’s commercial architecture).
One layer in Southern California’s “overlapping modernisms” is seen in the work
of Los Angeles Times arts and architecture critic Arthur Millier. Just as Weatherhead
launched his experiment in modern architectural education, Millier appears to have
launched a largely one-man battle against period-revivalism. Although his Los Angeles
Times columns throughout the 1920s focused primarily on the arts, in the late 1920s and
early 1930s Millier began commenting more frequently on architecture, taking issue with
Spanish Colonial and Mediterranean revival styles, as well as the emerging Art Deco and
Streamline Moderne. In June 1929, Millier criticized the proliferation of Art Deco in
commercial design, describing its monotony of “vertical and horizontal bands of artificial
stone where previously one saw stucco. …Instead of Academie des Beaux Arts we must
now read L’Art Moderne. Either way we are still lisping bad French.”
60
But the late
1920’s reinvention of the Spanish Colonial Revival, as seen in William Mooser’s 1929
Santa Barbara County Courthouse, also failed to inspire Millier. Responding to a
colleague’s comment that the Santa Barbara Courthouse was “the prettiest building in the

59
In addition to the comments by Fitch (1965), Elizabeth Mock’s 1944 Built in USA offers a
contemporaneous comment on the national scope and pre-1945 roots of the movement toward a regional
variations on, and interpretations of, modernism.
60
Millier, Arthur, “Arts Working Together,” Los Angeles Times, 2 June 1929.
118

West,” Millier wrote in 1930 that, while the building did indeed make “a pretty
picture…pictures are not buildings”:
California’s orgy of imitative Mediterranean architecture may sober up eventually
in a style but that will not come until the fundamental law of building is once
more obeyed. Style—whether it be Mediterranean, Californian or anything else—
does not come from imitating the shapes of buildings or their details in entirely
different materials. Style comes from using certain materials in accordance with
their natures and the purpose for which you are using them. …

If young architects, instead of being educated by drawing the picturesque details
of old European buildings, were taught how to cut and lay stone, to figure strains
and loads while mixing and pouring concrete, to build with wood and steel and
brick instead of passing the buck to the engineer and contractor…we might get
somewhere in this matter of California style.
61

Here Millier, evoking the Arts and Crafts notion of defining a native style, captures the
essence of what Weatherhead sought to establish at USC. (Although Millier spoke at the
1940 inaugural ceremonies for the USC College of Architecture’s new building, Harris
Hall, no evidence has yet been located to suggest more than an acquaintanceship between
the two.) As an art critic, Millier engaged the topic of style more directly than did
Weatherhead (and therefore his writing offers a valuable glimpse into the growing
mainstream awareness of contemporary architecture). Like Weatherhead, though, Millier
rejected the idea of style as the architect’s driving motivation, emphasizing instead
regional identity:
An architect should be an artist who has mastered the science of building. If he is
an artist he will scorn to misuse materials and will be so happy making them work
according to their nature and the purpose for which he is building that he will
forget to be “Spanish,” “Norman,” “Moderne,” or any of the other meaningless
things that, at the moment, pass for styles. Thus immersed in his problem he
would unconsciously and inevitably be Californian.
62

61
Millier, Arthur, “Architecture and Style,” Los Angeles Times, 31 August 1930.
62
Ibid.
119

In this way, Millier shares Weatherhead’s emphasis on what is “Californian” as a
driving force in design. Millier also articulates here several basic ideas about modernism
but frames them as representing a local issue and a local (rather than national) movement.
Indeed, when Millier saw reason for hope in 1929, it arrived in the form of Parkinson &
Parkinson’s Bullock’s Wilshire building (Figure 30, Bullock’s Wilshire Building,
Parkinson & Parkinson, 1929). Although this design evokes Bertram Grosvenor
Goodhue’s iconic (and nationally influential) Nebraska State Capitol, Millier wrote that
the Bullock-Wilshire building was “unusually well suited to and expressive of Southern
California.”
63
In the article, entitled “Building Reflects Region,” Millier wrote that
now that the trend toward “modern” styles in business architecture has so
definitely come to town, the architect and designer have on their hands the
responsibility of developing an architecture for Southern California which is at
once modern structurally and in matters of light, air, heating and convenience, and
harmoniously related to the region it springs from and serves.
64

In the climate of the 1930s, even marketing for ready-made house plans relied on
notions of the contemporary good life and regional identity, in particular in descriptions
of plan innovations, plentiful air and light, and indoor-outdoor integration (features that
are also described later as unique to Southern California regional modernism as practiced
by USC graduates and faculty). The rhetoric of regional exceptionalism also extended to
the emerging historicist styles of the 1930s. Southern Californian branding was applied
to the use of balconies and courtyards, quoting the Spanish heritage, seen in the Monterey
Style popular in the 1930s, or the low-slung horizontality, informality, and openness to
and integration with the landscape seen in the emerging Ranch House. At the Architects’

63
Millier, Arthur, “Building Reflects Region, New Bullock’s Structure Held Step Toward Architecture
Harmonious with Southern California,” Los Angeles Times, 30 June 1929.
64
Ibid.
120

Figure 30. Bullocks-Wilshire Building, Parkinson & Parkinson, 1929. Los Angeles,
California.
121

Building Material Exhibit in downtown Los Angeles (established in 1914 as a showcase
and permanent exhibit for emerging products in the building trades), regular displays
introduced the public and practitioners to “trends in modern residential design.”
65
As
happened with the USC design curriculum (as Chapter 4 shows), site-specific design and
integration with landscaping and the outdoors became a method for injecting regional
character. This is reflected, for example, in a five-room, $5,300 proto-Ranch House,
meant to reflect “the early California style of architecture,” whose low-slung
horizontality, “built close to the ground,” gave a “feeling of belonging to its natural
setting.”
66
(Figure 31, “Home Nestled Amid Foliage,” J. Robert Harris’s Proto-Ranch
House, 1931.) Harris’s use of a central landscaped patio, onto which the home’s primary
rooms opened via large-panel glazing and French doors, reflected the trend of using
outdoor spaces as a “livable part of the house” (another feature that is later characterized
as a unique signifier for Southern Californian modernism).
In July 1932, MOMA’s International Style exhibit premiered in Los Angeles at
Bullocks Wilshire. Millier’s coverage of the event also mirrored to a surprising degree
the movement and approach at USC. In a month-long series on the exhibit, Millier
focused less on Hitchcock and Johnson’s style-driven tour of the machine-age than the
companion contribution on modern housing by Lewis Mumford and Catherine Bauer.
Millier highlighted Mumford and Bauer’s essay on modern social housing, site and

65
Such articles appeared regularly in the Los Angeles Times throughout the early 1930s. For example, see
“Efficiency Stressed in Home Plan,” Los Angeles Times, 18 October 1931, “Plan Depicts Modern Trend to
Rear Living Room,” Los Angeles Times, 8 November 1931, and, quoted here, “Designs of Residences on
Exhibit,” Los Angeles Times, 21 June 1931.
66
“Home Nestled Amid Foliage,” Los Angeles Times, 28 June 1931.
122

Figure 31. “Home Nestled Amid Foliage,” J. Robert Harris’s Proto-Ranch House,
1931. Exhibit at the Architects’ Building Material Exhibit, Los Angeles.
Source: Los Angeles Times, 28 June 1931.
123

neighborhood planning, and prefabrication as a means to economy (ideas also of central
concern in the design curriculum and emphasis at the USC College of Architecture):
[T]he really important thing the exhibit accomplishes is to demonstrate that the
international style is not in its intentions, just a “style”—as in hats or shoes, but an
attempt to solve a problem which the nineteenth century neglected—the problem
of minimum cost housing for low incomes. …

The real aim behind the “international style”…is to give the necessities of modern
life in their most economical form consonant with good structural methods.
…The trend…is to make good modern living possible to all, in the interest of the
whole community.
67

In aesthetic terms, Millier portrays the basic ideas of the International Style as adaptable
to the region and argues that, in Los Angeles, such an idiom already existed:
The structural basis of the international style is that of steel supports and
cantilevering, making possible all the openings and glass desired. Walls are then
just sheathes. Orientation gives sun and light to every room. Given these
essentials, the architect arranges them to look well. Where planting has been
developed one sees these simple ingredients can make a very satisfactory effect—
once the eye has stopped preferring extraneous ornament or sentimental historical
effects to clean, plain building. …

Perhaps this is not an “international style.” One can look about in California and
see many simple houses obeying similar principles. Certainly different regions
would evolve different effects. But the principles are sound, similar to those on
which we conduct our modern enterprises.

Millier’s comment about the “many simple” California houses already reflecting
these principles brings to mind Fitch’s observation about the state’s leadership in
residential design. In California, north and south, the move toward defining an informal,
indigenous residential design, expressive of site, environment, and the “simple life,” had
a long tradition stretching back to the late-nineteenth century. Sally Woodbridge

67
Millier, Arthur, “New Architecture Analyzed: Simplified, Unornamented, ‘International Style’ Called
Solution for Minimum Cost Housing Adaptable to Low Incomes,” Los Angeles Times, 31 July 1932.
124

observed that this early fascination was fueled by the widespread promotion of the
idyllic, healthful California lifestyle, by railroad concerns in particular:
As portrayed by sincere apostles and hired evangelists, California Living had
become, by the end of the 19
th
century, synonymous with the American vision of
the Good Life. California’s architects have aspired ever since to build the “ideal”
home for the citizens of this new Eden.
68

As Woodbridge observed, the ideal of “California Living, with its implicit assumption of
leisured affluence in a lush natural setting, is as far from the daily experience of as many
people in California as it is in New York.”
69
This fact, however, did not diminish the
enthusiasm for the ideal when it came to residential design.
Architects such as Bernard Maybeck in the Bay Area and Greene and Greene in
Southern Californian proposed some of the earliest and most influential examples of an
indigenous Californian architecture, expressive of the “simple life” (though, in most
cases, initially for elite and/or well-educated clients). In Berkeley, as Maybeck’s simple,
brown-shingled homes emerged in the Berkeley Hills, a group of residents formed the
Hillside Club in the 1900s to celebrate their love of the good life as conferred through
residential design; the group motto stated that “‘Hillside architecture is landscape
gardening around a few rooms for use in case of rain.’”
70
Woodbridge added that
Maybeck, “ever determined to fuse indoor and outdoor living,” was the first architect to
develop the sliding glass door.
In Southern California, Greene and Greene’s high-style Arts and Crafts spawned a
national movement, of course, in affordable “California Living” as embodied in the

68
Woodbridge, Sally B., “The California House,” The Wilson Quarterly, vol. 4, no. 3 (summer 1980): 83-
91; quoted here p. 83.
69
Ibid, 91.
70
Ibid, 91.
125

Craftsman Bungalow. Craftsman kit-houses spread the gospel of informal, woodsy living,
in an affordable, replicable version of the typology. By 1910, “bungalows were
ubiquitous and, while known at times as peculiarly southern Californian, they appeared in
suburbs all across the country.”
71
Even then, commentators emphasized that “bungalows
were not an architectural style but a housing type…adaptable to different regions and
styles.”
72
The work of the early practitioners in this movement, as well as the link
between the work of 1930’s intermediaries such as Harwell Hamilton Harris and William
Wurster, has of course been well documented.
In the progressive 1920s, as the Craftsman Bungalow had fallen from favor in
deference to a wide menu of period-revival styles and the Spanish Colonial Revival, the
national housing shortage fueled the fascination with “homes of the future.” As Hise
argued, in the wake of the Great Depression, even as building slowed nationally, this
fascination “only intensified during the 1930s,” as demonstration houses and advertising
promoted the latest in modern residential design: “For the majority of Americans the
dissonance between material conditions and the promise of improved housing and better
living conditions only increased throughout the second half of the 1920s and the 1930s.
73

In Southern California, population expansion helped fuel the housing shortage and
demand, as Los Angeles County’s population grew more than tenfold between 1900 and
1930, from approximately 170,000 to 2,208,000.
74

71
Wilson, “American Arts and Crafts Architecture,” 115.
72
Saylor, Henry H., Bungalows (New York: McBride, Winston, 1911), 40-41. Cited from Wilson,
“American Arts and Crafts Architecture,” 115.
73
Hise, “Roots of the Postwar Urban Region,” 30.
74
Forstall, Richard L., “California, Population of Counties by Decennial Census: 1900 to 1990,”
Population Division, US Bureau of the Census, Washington, DC.
126

A notion of California’s leadership in innovative residential design prevailed in
much of the local coverage. As Fitch observed, and Elizabeth Mock confirmed in the
1944 Museum of Modern Art exhibit and 1945 book, Built in USA, California indeed
produced a disproportionate share of the modern residential design earning national
attention for its mediation between the avant-garde and regional character and precedent.
However, while many of the features of Southern California’s emerging idiom mirrored
national trends (for example, indoor-outdoor integration, site-specificity, a closer
connection to nature and landscaping, and informality of plan), certain characteristics
came to be understood as singular to the region.
By 1941, Millier observed a growing popular awareness (if not wholesale
acceptance) of the contemporary architecture. In an article entitled “You Can’t Stop the
Modern Trend,” Millier described the shift in attitudes toward modern architecture that
he had observed unfolding throughout the 1930s. Southern California, he wrote, had
become a “proving ground” for the debate between the “followers of tradition and those
who like to break rules.”
75
Illustrated with images of the work of Harris, Millier appeared
to aim the article at those still concerned that modernism lacked “charm” and was not
suited to residential design. Millier posed a series of theoretical questions for his readers:
How permanent is this “modern” style in architecture? How good is it for homes?
Does a “modern” home cost more or less than a period one? Let’s get one thing
clear… Aside from all the argument about this or that detail of “modern”
architecture, ours is veritably a new age in history and the kind of building style
which we call “modern” is the architecture that is being born of our age.
76

75
Millier, Arthur, “You Can’t Stop the Modern Trend,” Los Angeles Times, 16 March 1941.
76
Ibid.
127

In order to illustrate the shift in attitudes that had taken place in the 1930s, Millier tells
the story of a well-respected local architect who, the year before, had been named an AIA
fellow. When the architect (whom Millier does not name) went to the podium to accept
the honor, Millier wrotes, he made a “most unusual speech of acceptance,” saying
“something many of his colleagues felt in their hearts, but carefully suppressed”:
Throughout my career I have aimed at this highest honor an architect can
receive—a fellowship in the American Institute of Architects. To win it I sent to
the national council in Washington a selection of photographs and drawings of
buildings I have designed during many years. When these were returned to me,
with the news that I had won, I studied them with a critical eye. I was ashamed of
them. They were not architecture. They were mere imitations of architecture. I
thereupon said to myself, “You have received a fellowship in the American
Institute of Architects for what? For tacking an imitation French window onto an
imitation English house? For stealing a Spanish doorway and faking it onto an
imitation Venetian palace?”

Gentlemen, I am through faking. Architecture is a simple matter. Given a
complex purpose for which a building must be erected, architecture is the art of
choosing the right materials and so combining them as to serve that purpose well.
That is all there is to architecture. There isn’t any more.
77

Millier describes the architect as returning to his seat “amidst a profound sensation.”
Although Millier never names his source, based on the two biographical details provided
about him (he was the one-time president of the Southern California American Institute
of Architects and advanced to AIA fellowship in 1940), the architect was Pierpont
Davis,
78
a lecturer in upper-division design at the USC Department of Architecture in the
1920s and one of the founding members of the Allied Architects’ Association. Davis’s
story not only reflects the context of the transitional 1930s, as modern ideas about

77
Ibid.
78
According to the records of the American Institute of Architects, and the organization’s Southern
California chapter, Pierpont Davis was the only former president of the local chapter whose advancement
to AIA fellow occurred in 1940.
128

architecture began taking root, but also offers one glimpse into the evolving ideas of the
faculty and advisors of the USC College of Architecture.
The literature often describes an overall optimism, in the postwar era, that modern
technology and materials, as well as new ways of thinking about aesthetics and lifestyle,
would lead to a higher quality of life. As we see in this overview of the 1930s, both from
within academia and outside of it, the pre-war period shared a sense of optimism based
on the same ideas (though the resources to implement the new ideas were lacking).
Weatherhead’s faith in present-day conditions to guide the profession to a brighter future
appeared unwavering through his 30-year term as dean. Millier, in closing his 1941
article, expresses a similar level of faith in the movement’s future, writing that the
modernism of circa 1941
is more genuinely modern and less modernistic than it was 10 years ago. And
whether it extends to the whole house or creeps in via modernizations of
individual rooms, it is increasingly favored by home builders. Time, popular taste
and regional differences will modify modern architecture. But, because it is a true
child of this mechanical age, it will eventually dominate the field of home
design.
79

 
 
While postwar architects shared this idealism, the average consumer ultimately
preferred housing with some degree of direct historical quotation. Weatherhead’s
“experimental” curriculum at USC, though, did take hold. By 1941, when Weatherhead
published The History of Collegiate Education in Architecture in the United States, the
architectural program he launched in 1930 had come of age. The program’s basic
contours had responded to the readjustments of the Great Depression and New Deal, and
advent of World War II. Chapter 4 will illustrate how Weatherhead’s philosophy

79
Millier, “You Can’t Stop the Modern Trend.”
129

translated into a program of study that became one of the United States’ earliest
experiments in modern architectural pedagogy.
130

Chapter 4

The USC Experiment: Curriculum, Faculty, Projects, 1930 to 1960

As of 1930, among the 45 American universities offering a professional
curriculum in architecture, just five had begun to break decisively from the Ecole des
Beaux-Arts educational system. With an eye toward the first four, Weatherhead launched
a curriculum in 1930 based around a core group of ideas: (1) an emphasis on
contemporary design, focused on “creative expression” and regional identity as much as
the honest expression of function, materials, and structure; (2) pragmatism and an
emphasis on technical proficiency and the realities of office practice, in order to build a
bridge between the classroom and office; (3) a socially responsive curriculum, reflective
of “present-day conditions,” including changes in the profession of architecture and the
needs of the society it served; and (4) an association with allied fields, such as planning,
landscape architecture, and industrial design.
Once established in the late 1930s, the USC architecture curriculum remained
largely intact, in terms of class content, sequence, design projects, and methodology, until
the early 1960s. Through this period, the program’s philosophy reflected the balance
Weatherhead sought to achieve (and Arthur Gallion maintained) between “original
expression” and regional identity in design, a hands-on understanding of construction
techniques and materials, and present-day conditions, both in terms of the architectural
profession and the needs of the society it served.
This chapter includes six sections: Section 1, Pre- and Postwar Snapshot,
Comparison of 1937 and 1957; Section 2, Design Curriculum; Section 3, Traditional
131

Methods and Historical Precedent; Section 4, Pragmatism and Bridging the Gap between
Classroom and Office; Section 5, Social Responsiveness: The Great Depression, New
Deal, and World War II; and Section 6, Allied Fields: Industrial Design.

Pre- and Postwar Snapshot: 1937 and 1957

A brief comparison of 1937 and 1957 course catalogs illustrates the level of
continuity in the pre- and postwar Bachelor of Architecture curriculum (though
similarities extend beyond these years). In 1937 and 1957, students would have spent a
majority of their lower-division coursework attending basic design and a range of
graphics classes (including freehand drawing, graphics, and descriptive geometry/shades
and shadows). The design sequence in both 1937 and 1957 spanned each year of the
five-year program. Design and graphics coursework, supplemented by general education
classes in subjects such as English, mathematics, economics, and sociology, preceded
coursework in architectural history, a change implemented by Weatherhead to encourage
creative expression rather than faithful emulation. Upper-division coursework introduced
students to a technical core of classes (including Building Equipment Engineering,
Modern Materials/Materials and Processes, Mechanics and Strength of Materials, and
Estimating and Construction Costs), a concentration that remained the heart of the
technical coursework from the 1930s through the early 1960s.
In 1937 and 1957, a three-year series in professional practices anchored each
student’s upper-division studies. Forays into landscape architecture had begun in the
1930s but appear to have been curtailed by the advent of World War II (when the war-
time curriculum began). Students in 1937 could take landscaping and plant identification
132

courses, whereas by 1957 a separate emphasis in landscape architecture was offered
through the School of Architecture. Initiated in the postwar period by Gallion, the
landscape architecture program was designed and led by Garrett Eckbo, whom Gallion
hired in 1946.
The continuity in the pre- and postwar faculty, and the predominance on the roster
of USC graduates, suggests that consistency in the educational approach was intentional.
As of 1947, two years into Gallion’s term as dean, 10 of the 18 faculty and instructors in
the newly christened School of Architecture had graduated from USC (8 of these from
the prewar period): Clayton M. Baldwin and C. Raimond Johnson from the 1920s, as
well as Henry C. Burge and Roy Johnston (1935), George Brandow (1936), Gordon C.
Drake (1941), Calvin C. Straub and Byron Davis (1943), Robert Schoenberner and
Norwood Teague (1946). Among the instructors on staff since the 1920s, Baldwin, who
joined USC in 1920 and became the de facto press liaison for the College of Architecture
in the 1930s, continued to teach lower-division design and architectural history through
the 1950s, until his death in 1958. Johnson, on staff since 1924 and a 1926 USC
graduate, and Verle Annis, on staff since 1928, also continued to teach under Gallion.
As the roster expanded and evolved through the postwar years, reflecting both
Gallion’s leadership and the rapid expansion of the school, the common thread remained
the prominent presence of USC graduates on the faculty roster. In 1955, for example,
even after Gallion had led the department for a decade, among instructors for whom
biographical information is available, more than one-third of the faculty and visiting
critics (14 out of 39) graduated from USC. Alumnae who taught classes or led design
critiques in 1955 included Thornton Abell (1931), John Rex (1932), Whitney Smith,
133

Alfred Boeke, and Raphael Soriano (1934), Henry Burge (1935), Carl Mastopietro, who
later changed his last name to Maston (1937), Calvin Straub (1943), as well as postwar
graduates Walter Dorwin Teague (1946), Emmett Wemple (1950), Arthur O’Leary
(1951), Conrad Buff III (1952), and Randell Makinson (1954).

Design Curriculum: Out with Classicism, in with Pragmatism, Planning, and
“Creative Expression”

Classes

Between circa 1930 and 1960, the most substantial change in the design
curriculum, as reflected in course catalogs, occurred during the first five years of
Weatherhead’s experiment, between 1930 and 1934. During this period, descriptions of
design classes gradually shifted from a focus on classical orders to “original creation”
and rational, practical solutions, tailored to the particulars of the site. Beginning in the
early 1930s, in order to foster “creative expression,” the study of “any reference to
traditions” was postponed until “the more advanced years.”
1
This change was reflected
in the design curriculum as well as architectural history classes (which were shifted from
lower to upper division). In design class descriptions, between 1929 and 1934, references
to the classical orders were initially scaled back, then shifted to second-year design, and
finally eliminated. Throughout this time, the increasingly common catchphrases
describing the design philosophy were “original expression” and “sociological
development.”
As of 1929, lower-division design included a “study of the classic orders,” as
applied to buildings planned for contemporary uses, as well as Class B Analytiques of the

1
Weatherhead, Arthur Clason, The History of Collegiate Education in Architecture in the United States
(Los Angeles, CA, 1941), 196.
134

Beaux-Arts Institute of Design and faculty-written problems.
2
By 1931, the centrality of
classicism in design had diminished, as first-year design included problems in “some of
the best classic elements” alongside exercises in “original creation based upon the
fundamental principles in design.”
3
At the time, though second-year design continued to
draw on Class B Analytiques, projects involving the adaptation of classical forms to
modern needs were eliminated from upper-division design courses; instead, upper-
division design classes began to adopt a broader, integrated view of composition and
planning. As Weatherhead launched the “experiment” in modern education, the rewritten
design curriculum for upper-division design from 1931 presented:
Third year: simpler problems in architectural planning and composition, wherein
a more detailed knowledge of design and the presentation of drawings must be
brought into play.

Fourth year: More advanced problems in planning and composition, wherein the
study of important buildings and groups of buildings is undertaken.

Fifth year: A continuation of fourth year, the problems being of an advanced and
comprehensive nature.
4

By 1934, Beaux-Arts problem sets had been eliminated from the design
curriculum. The only lingering mention of classical precedent was found in first-year
design, which included studies of “some of the best classic elements;” second-year design
in 1934 presented exercises on “the theory of simple planning, followed by more

2
USC Bulletin, College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, 1929-1930, vol. XXIV, no. 2, 67. USC Libraries,
University Archives.
3
USC Bulletin, College of Architecture, 1931-1932, vol. XXV, no. 18 (15 January 1931), 28. USC
Libraries, University Archives.
4
USC Bulletin (15 January 1931), 31.
135

complete studies in design and the application of rendering techniques.”
5
By 1935, the
emphasis on classicism had been replaced by projects written to foster “a broader range
of imaginative and creative expression” and to reflect “the needs of human life and
progress in sociological development.”
6

Placing architecture in the service of “sociological development” appears to have
been an idea ahead of its time. Joseph Esherick’s reflections on the differences between
American architectural education of the 1930s (when he attended the University of
Pennsylvania) and the 1970s (when he was a faculty member at UC Berkeley) offered
context on this aspect of USC’s “experimental” design curriculum. When comparing the
1930s and 1970s, Esherick wrote,
[T]he greatest contrasts are, on the one hand, the insistence in the thirties that
architecture’s primary alliance was with art, and in the seventies that the alliance
is with the social sciences; and, on the other hand, the belief in the thirties that
design and designing were central and that everything else could and would be
picked up by the student on his own as needed, possibly later, and the implicit
belief in the seventies that it is perhaps quite the other way around and that it is
design and designing that will be picked up.
7

These comments by Esherick also provide further context for Weatherhead’s apparent
disengagement with the “art” of architecture, an idea the dean appears to have
consciously avoided.
As Weatherhead directed the USC design curriculum toward “sociological
development,” city and regional planning began to occupy a prominent place in the

5
USC Bulletin, College of Architecture, 1934-1935, vol. XXVIII, no. 21 (1 January 1934), 35. USC
Libraries, University Archives.
6
USC Bulletin, College of Architecture, 1935-1936, vol. XXIX, no. 21 (1 January 1935), 40. USC
Libraries, University Archives.
7
Esherick, Joseph, “Architectural Education in the Thirties and Seventies: A Personal View,” in Spiro
Kostof, ed., The Architect: Chapters in the History of the Profession (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1977), 238-279; quoted here p. 275.
136

design curriculum. Beginning in 1934, annual semester-long “field trips” to the cities
and communities of the region introduced students to planning issues such as
redevelopment, modernization, and the mitigation of traffic and parking problems. In
addition to the incorporation of planning into design class projects, by 1942, descriptions
of upper-division design began to emphasize planning explicitly, with fourth-year design
introducing “comprehensive projects in the theory and practice of modern planning; the
social and economic factors and the problems of community and regional planning,” and
fifth-year design continuing in the “broader phases of planning to meet contemporary
social, economic, and industrial requirements.”
8
By 1943, the statement of the school
reflected what Weatherhead regarded as the shifting professional demands that would be
placed on the postwar architect, in particular in “the vital field of postwar planning” in
which “the architect should assume an important role.”
9
In the postwar period, Gallion
updated but retained this overall emphasis, writing that USC’s diversified curriculum
encompasses the technical and economic aspects of creative building, the cultural
relation of architecture to contemporary life, the exacting requirements of the
building industry, and the expanding field of planning and urban development. In
the architectural design courses, there is continual emphasis upon postwar
planning and during the last two years special courses are devoted to urban
planning and housing.
10

The similarities in the pre- and postwar period extended to design coursework.
Other than a shift in numbering to make room for a new two-year planning series
initiated in 1945, the description and scope of design classes remained largely unchanged

8
USC Bulletin, College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1942-1943, vol. XXXVI, no. 16 (1 November
1941), 41. USC Libraries, University Archives.
9
USC Bulletin, Circular of Information, 1943-1944, vol. 38, no. 9 (September 1943), 13. USC Libraries,
University Archives.
10
USC Bulletin, Circular of Information, 1945-1946, vol. 40, no. 8 (September 1945), 11. USC Libraries,
University Archives.
137

through the early 1960s. USC graduates such as Straub, Buff, Wemple, Makinson, Don
Hensman, and Pierre Koenig continued to lead design through the 1950s into the early
1960s.
In addition to the incorporation of planning into the design curriculum,
supplemental courses offered through the departments of Public Administration and
Trade and Transportation had become part of the curriculum by 1937. In 1945,
supplemental coursework in Problems of City Planning continued as a requirement,
offered through the Public Administration Department. By 1946, Gallion had hired
Simon Eisner to lead the in-house planning curriculum, and in 1955, alongside Eisner and
Henry Reining, Jr., dean of the School of Public Administration, Gallion co-founded a
graduate program in city and regional planning at USC, jointly administered by the
Schools of Architecture and Public Administration.
11

Projects
With the integration of planning into its design curriculum in the early 1930s, the
USC College of Architecture and Fine Arts joined the earliest schools of architecture in
the United States to align the two fields. Weatherhead commented on the emerging trend
(which he regarded as the result of “contemporary social needs”) in his study of
collegiate architectural education, observing that, as of 1935, just six of the forty-five US
schools of architecture had established links with associated departments of city or
regional planning.
12
In Weatherhead’s view, city and regional planning was of vital
interest to the “modern design project” and “directly concerned with architecture, the fine

11
Gallion, Arthur, and Henry Reining, Jr., “The Planning Curriculum, University of Southern California,
1955/1956,” n.d. USC Libraries, University Archives.
12
Weatherhead, The History of Collegiate Education, 210.
138

arts, engineering, economics, law and government.”
13
By 1956, associating the two
fields had become an identifiable, though not universally adopted, trend in US schools of
architecture. A 1956 survey conducted by the Association of Collegiate Schools of
Architecture showed that 38 percent of schools responding to the survey (18 out of 47)
reportedly offered a curriculum in city planning (though 59 percent, or 28 of 47, did
not).
14
Half of the responding schools reported that “special city planning problems” had
been incorporated into architectural design curricula and approximately 75 percent
required “at least one course in planning.”
15

As mentioned above, beginning in the 1930s, the USC College of Architecture
launched annual design projects, referred to as “field trips,” introducing issues in regional
and city planning. The inaugural field trip came in the spring of 1934, when fifth-year
design students, led by Raymond M. Kennedy, a 1916 graduate of Cornell University and
assistant professor at USC since 1930, were tasked with the design of a unified city plan
for Elsinore, a city approximately 80 miles south of Los Angeles. (Figure 32, Professor
Raymond Kennedy and Students of the College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1937.) In
the national Alpha Rho Chi newsletter, architectural fraternity members described the
study trip to Elsinore, which included forty students and four faculty members:
Local organizations entertained the group, some of whom lectured on various
phases of architecture, especially as it related to Elsinore conditions. This was
followed by a clinic on local building problems, replacements and improvements.
A planning commission was appointed to work with fifth-year students in
developing a city plan. Dean A.C. Weatherhead of the College of Architecture
said concerning the trip: “As far as I know it is something entirely new in that it

13
Ibid, 210.
14
Beal, George, “The Place of Planning in the Architectural Curriculum,” Journal of Architectural
Education, vol. 12, no. 1, 42
nd
Annual Convention of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture
(autumn 1956): 18-24.
15
Beal, “The Place of Planning,” 18-24.
139

Figure 32. Professor Raymond Kennedy and College of Architecture and Fine Arts
students, 1937. Raymond Kennedy pictured in the center; Carl Maston
(nee Mastopietro) and Lee Klein pictured third and fourth from the left,
respectively. Courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries,
University Archives.
140

combines an excellent form of academic education with a program of educating
the public.” Similar trips are planned for the future.
16

While follow-up study trips continued to generate local press through the 1930s
and 1940s, the 1938 Santa Ana project garnered detailed coverage in Architect and
Engineer, thereby offering a glimpse into the college’s design methodology. The 1938
project focused on the re-design of the early twentieth-century core of Santa Ana, a city
approximately 30 miles south of Los Angeles in Orange County. Characterized by the
instructor, Clayton Baldwin, as a practical experiment in architectural education, students
were to propose a redevelopment plan that went beyond suggestions for stylistic upgrades
and focused instead on “the practical needs of the future in creating better business and
thereby helping the employment situation of that community.”
17
(Figures 33 to 34, Santa
Ana Downtown Redevelopment, 1938, USC Design Project.) This project shows how
Weatherhead’s ideas about “sociological development” and present-day conditions
implied a set of social, economic, and aesthetic concerns to be studied prior to any
sketching or modeling.
As described in Architect and Engineer, the course began by separating students
into three groups: the “Maps and Statistics” group prepared maps based on historic,
current-day, and projected conditions, as well as real estate valuations, parking facilities,
and proposed highway lines; the “Drawings” group drafted plans and elevations of
“present and proposed” buildings; and the “Model” group was tasked with depicting “in
three-dimensions the results of the combined efforts of the class.” Providing the ultimate
touch of realism, projected costs were to remain within a fixed budget (an assignment

16
“Andronicus Field Trip,” The Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XV, no. 4 (April 1934): 23.
17
Baldwin, Clayton, “Streamlining in Architectural Education,” Architect and Engineer, vol. 139 (October
1939): 26-28.
141

Figure 33. “Architects to Finish Santa Ana Rejuvenation,” Bob Meyers and Mickey
Frary of the USC College of Architecture and Fine Arts. Santa Ana
Downtown Redevelopment, 1938, USC Design Projects. Source: USC
Daily Trojan, 7 April 1938. Courtesy of University of Southern California
Libraries, University Archives.
142

Figure 34. Editorial Cartoon, “Santa Ana Bound.” USC College of Architecture and
Fine Arts, Design Projects: Santa Ana Downtown Redevelopment, 1938.
Source: USC Daily Trojan, 4 May 1938. Courtesy of University of
Southern California Libraries, University Archives.
143

drawing on coursework in estimating and construction costs). Although the plans were
ostensibly for Santa Ana, Baldwin wrote, the results “with proper study” were meant to
be applicable to cities with similar conditions. Amply covered in the local press, the
study trip was kicked off with a banquet, featuring talks by the mayor of Santa Ana and
G. Gordon Whitnall, founder and director of the City of Los Angeles Planning
Commission.
By the early 1940s, the USC planning field trips, still offered through the regular
design curriculum, had branched into issues of traffic and circulation. One such project
took place in 1940, as students took on the re-use and redevelopment of a roughly nine-
block area in Hollywood, near Highland Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard. The
assignment focused on proposing solutions for the mitigation of traffic congestion and
parking problems along Hollywood Boulevard. Students created scale models,
underwritten by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, to illustrate their
recommendations, such as converting underutilized areas behind commercial buildings
into landscaped parking areas.
18
(Figures 35 and 36, Planning Hollywood, 1940, USC
Design Projects.) The class project culminated in a day-long event at the Hollywood
Bowl, featuring exhibitions of student drawings, plans, and scale models, and a banquet
and presentation attended by the public, local politicians, the Hollywood Chamber of
Commerce, and Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher C. Bowdon, who gave the evening’s
keynote address.
19
The scale-models and plans created by students became the

18
“Students Map New Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, 5 May 1940.
19
“Mayor Bowron Speaks at Architecture Dinner, Model Project of Hollywood Business Area Will Be
Exhibited by Students,” USC Daily Trojan, 10 May 1940, 1. USC Libraries, University Archives.
144

Figure 35. Planning Hollywood, 1940, USC Design Projects. In this photo, from left
to right, Edward Killingsworth, Clayton Baldwin, and Bates Elliott pose
above a scale-model of the USC architecture students’ proposed solution
for traffic and parking problems along Hollywood Boulevard. Source:
University of Southern California Daily Trojan, 22 May 1940. Courtesy
of University Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.
145

Figure 36. Planning Hollywood, 1940, USC Design Projects. In this photo, Mary
Kane “studies a model showing how the backs of business houses can
afford convenient access from parking lots” to mitigate parking problems
on Hollywood Boulevard. Source: University of Southern California
Daily Trojan, 22 May 1940. Courtesy of University Archives, University
of Southern California Libraries.
146

centerpiece in a campaign on “Hollywood’s Parade of Progress,” led by the Hollywood
Chamber of Commerce to promote improvements planned for the city.
The focus on planning in the early 1940s took on a tone similar to the housing
projects of the Great Depression, in which the curriculum was shaped in anticipation of
the future demands of the profession. In 1934, Weatherhead spoke of preparing students
for the post-Depression building boom, in particular in response to the housing shortage.
By 1942, the dean spoke of preparing students for the post-World War II boom, arguing
for “thoughtful planning” rather than purely profit-driven developments that drained
cities of their vitality. This issue represented what Weatherhead believed to be the
greatest challenge to postwar architects. In an article in the USC Daily Trojan,
Weatherhead explained that USC architecture students consider planning improvements
for congested cities because “so many American communities are strangling themselves
socially and economically.”
20
(Figure 37, Planning Culver City, 1942, USC Design
Projects.) In the 1942 project, for which students prepared a unified community plan for
Culver City, students focused on anticipating and mitigating traffic congestion and
parking shortages. In terms of methodology, Weatherhead again emphasized that
background research preceded design and model preparation, explaining to the Daily
Trojan that the “yearly projects entail many man-hours of work in research prior to the
actual construction of the model.”
While little material exists to illuminate the planning ideas forwarded by students,
descriptions of class projects reflect a tendency to follow the trends of the times,
including, for inner city areas, “redevelopment” driven by “slum clearance” or demolition

20
“Goodbye Traffic Jam,” USC Daily Trojan, 15 October 1942. USC Libraries, University Archives.
147

Figure 37. Planning Culver City, 1942, USC College of Architecture and Fine Arts,
Design Projects. Basil Pantages and E. Baer Fetzer, USC architecture
students, pictured with their plans for Culver City. Source: USC Daily
Trojan, 15 October 1942. Courtesy of University Archives, University of
Southern California Libraries.

148

of deteriorated areas; in the Hollywood project, for example, students concluded that
“many structures” between Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards “could easily be razed to
provide parking space for Hollywood shoppers.”
21
Another student project, completed in
1943 by Straub, reflected the ideas of the garden city, with a self-contained urban
community arranged in a circular plan, along radial streets, with traffic and residential
areas separated. At Straub’s 1943 graduation ceremony, he won special honors for this
model “city of future,” planned for Chatsworth, California,
as an urban community for 6500 population, with civic center or “organic
design,” separate units for business and social and residential areas together in
circular form. Streets are arranged to resemble the spokes of a wheel, without
traffic hazards, off the main highway, leading to the business center as the hub.

Divided into segments, the plan provides for a section to house transients whose
labors will be required during the harvest seasons. Parks surround the central
business district, with ample provision for auto parking. Fanning out from the
hub is the residential area, while on the circumference of the circle is located the
heavy and light industry section. Subsistence farms are located on the outskirts.
The young architect did not overlook the recreational and sports needs of the
community, but provided for them in a special locality.
22

Within five years, Straub had become a faculty member at USC, where he taught
these same ideas to students. As Greg Walsh (USC 1954) noted, one semester of
Straub’s third-year design class focused on planning. Class discussions drew liberally
from, among other sources, the FHA pamphlet Planning the Neighborhood, which
reflected the ideas seen in Straub’s own 1943 student project. Walsh recalled an emphasis
on the ideal neighborhood size and configuration, including zoning and the “complete

21
Ibid.
22
“Valley City, Chatsworth Ideal Site for Young Architect’s Model Future Village,” Van Nuys News (Van
Nuys, CA), 26 October 1943.
149

separation of traffic and pedestrians.”
23
This interest stayed with Straub throughout his
career. Three decades later, Straub, by then a faculty member at the Arizona State
University College of Architecture, followed Weatherhead and Gallion through his
ongoing engagement in regional planning issues.
24

Another USC project in the postwar period demonstrates the continuing
engagement with the field of planning, a research-driven methodology, and also the
ongoing engagement of prewar alumnae in the postwar school. In 1948, USC graduates
and architects Jules Brady (USC 1936) and Edward Killingsworth (USC 1940, and one of
the students featured in the Daily Trojan coverage of the Hollywood planning project, as
seen in Figure 35), approached Dean Gallion with a suggestion
that USC prepare a model of one section of [Long Beach]... Approving of the
suggestion, Dean Gallion adopted the idea as a project for all fifth year and
graduate classes. However, instead of just concentrating on one section of the
city, the college has made a study of all of Long Beach.

For one entire semester, the students concentrated on investigating Long Beach.
They made their survey with the help of Werner Ruchti, city planning director,
and his staff and prepared maps on zoning, land use, and topography. …Classes in
city planning, architectural design, industrial design and landscaping are
cooperating in making the scale model.
25

The scale model created by the class, which measured 33 feet by 44 feet, was ultimately
put on display by Long Beach’s Junior Chamber of Commerce as a model for how “this
city might be redeveloped in the future.”
26

Design Curriculum: The Aesthetics of Landscape, Site, and Topography

23
Walsh, Greg, interview with author, 29 May 2009, Santa Monica, California.
24
Kornman, Sheryl, “Thoughtful City Planning Called for by Architect,” Tuscon Daily Citizen (Tuscon,
AZ), 18 March 1971.
25
“Jaycees to Display Scale Model of City,” Long Beach Independent, 9 May 1948.
26
Ibid.
150

While idealized notions of Southern Californian identity continued to promote a
range of contemporary residential design options throughout the 1930s, the understanding
of regional identity that came to influence the design ethos at USC drew inspiration more
fundamentally from the place itself—landscape, topography, and site. While the work of
pioneering architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Rudolph M. Schindler, and Harwell
Hamilton Harris had already begun suggesting directions for avant-garde expressions of
an indigenous architecture, as noted earlier, neither the USC course descriptions nor
faculty articles during this period suggest an explicit look toward the avant-garde (or the
Arts and Crafts movement, for that matter). While Weatherhead believed in using the
best in historical precedent, he rarely cited his preferred sources. Rather, during his
tenure, societal conditions, the problem at hand, and the need to prepare students for
office practice determined problem sets and classroom methodology. This translated into
a focus on the economical, well-designed house, whether for single lots or tracts,
multifamily dwellings, and neighborhood and regional planning.
Three projects ranging from the late 1930s through the 1940s illustrate how the
aesthetics of place and landscape, and a focus on site-specific design, began to influence
the USC design approach. One particular challenge in Southern California, given the
region’s topography, is the hillside lot. In 1941, students tackled this problem in first-
year design. (Figure 38, “Class at S.C. Designs Cabins to Suit Landscapes,” 1941, USC
Design Project.) As described by Baldwin, the assignment began with selecting a small,
sloped hillside lot, on which students were to propose designs for “inexpensive mountain
cabins, tailor-made to become a part of terraced landscapes.”
27
As presented by Baldwin,

27
“Class at S.C. Designs Cabins to Suit Landscapes,” Los Angeles Times, 22 June 1941.
151

Figure 38. “Class at S.C. Designs Cabins to Suit Landscapes,” First- Year Design,
1941. Source: Los Angeles Times, 22 June 1941. Courtesy of University
of Southern California Libraries, University Archives.
152

solutions proposed by students showed a focus on site-specific design, with indoor-
outdoor integration now considered essential. Designs incorporated “large areas of glass
for sunlight and views,” as well as “sleeping porches, provision for a car port, barbeque
pits or ovens, and streamlined roofs.”
In addition, the mountain cabins proposed an economy of materials through the
use of native stone “for foundations and wall areas” and plywood “because of its strength
and ease of transportation.” This early use of plywood (in 1941) shows USC students
experimenting with structural applications of a new material within a few years after its
development. Just six years earlier, in 1935, Forest Products Laboratory (a division of
the US Department of Agriculture) had constructed the first “stressed skin” plywood
house, which became “the most widely known experimental house of the period.”
28
As
Hise observed, the work of Forest Products Laboratory (in developing plywood and
exploring its use as a structural element) and the John B. Pierce Foundation (in, among
other things, carrying out residential space-and-motion studies) pioneered ideas in how to
place industry and science in the service of better living. In this way, students and faculty
at USC participated in the national (but decentralized) movement in the 1930s to
“simplify the house and streamline its construction.”
29

A similar class project applied the problem of the inexpensive vacation home to
the topography typical of Los Angeles’s periphery, the desert. Leading the project was

28
Hise, Greg, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1997), 128.
29
Hise, Greg G., “The Roots of the Postwar Urban Region: Mass-housing and Community Planning in
California, 1920-1950” (PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 1992), 89. In early
1940s, the availability of still-experimental plywood products would have increased with the 1942
establishment of Woodcraft Engineering Company in Los Angeles, said to be the region’s first
manufacturing plant devoted to precision molded plywood; while production focused on plywood for
aircraft subassembly during World War II, in the postwar era the plant would have presumably been an
important developer and supplier of new pressed-wood products.
153

Swedish architect Carl Birger Troedsson, whose arrival at USC in 1937 was heralded as
“bringing to the college the latest European movements in architectural design.”
30

Troedsson, who remained on staff through circa 1944, attended the Royal Institute of
Technology in Sweden during an era in which Erik Gunnar Asplund served on the
faculty. While a student, Troedsson specialized in architectural construction methods and
modern housing experiments in Europe. During his seven years at USC, Troedsson taught
design and professional practices, and offered public lectures on modern city planning
31

and European currents in low-cost housing, such as Sweden’s “successful experiment in
low-cost housing.”
32

In an article in the Los Angeles Times describing the project, Troedsson explained
that the assignment posed the problem of an inexpensive desert home “with special
attention given to the problem of outdoor living and recreation.”
33
Reporting on the
project, the Los Angeles Times marveled at the “new type of desert home” designed by
students, who proposed “removable roofs and outdoor dining-rooms”:
Varying radically from the conventional “week-end cottage,” the houses are being
planned to provide a maximum of fresh air and sunlight, declared C.B. Troedsson,
instructor in architecture. Modernistic in design, some of the homes are planned
to hug the earth, while others provide second-floor living quarters. All are so
arranged that they can be constructed for very little cost. Small cardboard models
of the houses, placed on display in the college of architecture and fine arts [sic] of
the Trojan institutions, have attracted much attention.
34

30
Harrington, Johns, “Southern California, An Art Center,” Southern California Alumni Review, December
1939, 20. USC Libraries, University Archives.
31
Force, Daniel, “Modern Cities Antiquated by Construction Changes, Instructor Contends,” USC Daily
Trojan, 27 April 1938. USC Libraries, University Archives.
32
“Troedsson Will Talk at Library,” USC Daily Trojan, 5 April 1938. USC Libraries, University Archives.
33
“Trojan Students Design New Type of Desert Home,” Los Angeles Times, 24 March 1938.
34
Ibid.
154

In 1949, four years into Gallion’s term as dean, the problem of the site-specific
desert home was revisited in second-year design. Led by Baldwin, the class again
addressed the problem of an economical desert house with site challenges posed through
either “sloping hills or rock formations.”
35
In addition to the similarities in the problem
itself, the method used in the assignment was very similar in both 1938 and 1949.
Baldwin explained to the Los Angeles Times that the objective was to provide pragmatic
training in “true California” design: “The problem of adapting tailor-made home planning
to meet specific conditions in true California style is one faced by most architects, and we
believe that training of students should be practical as well as theoretical.”
36
The desert
homes, Baldwin said, were meant to be tailored to their sites, both aesthetically and
environmentally: in terms of design, the homes were to “portray the spirit of the
California or Arizona desert.” In terms of environment, the designs were to incorporate
climatic controls for heat, cold, and “continuous bright sunlight.”
Continuing the tradition of using three-dimensional visualization prior to sketch
work, students in 1949 first created models “to give perspective” and anticipate any
“unforeseen problems of construction as the design progressed.” The 17 class models,
which as in the 1938 class project were exhibited at the School of Architecture, called for
features such as wide roof overhangs for shade protection, generous window spans to
capitalize on the views (but placed at an angle to diminish the heating effects of the sun),
and materials such as plywood panels “for ease of handling” and native rock “to decrease
construction costs.” In addition, students in the class considered cantilevered

35
“SC Students Present Ideas for All-Season Desert Home,” Los Angeles Times, 6 February 1949.
36
Ibid.
155

construction as a construction technique allowing for sweeping views “uninterrupted by
posts or beams.” The 1949 article offers far more detail than that of 1938, and reflects a
broader awareness of and interest in contemporary residential design; but in terms of the
USC design philosophy, one sees here more continuity than change.
Regarding the issue of site-specific design, Esherick provides a point of contrast
between USC and the University of Pennsylvania in the 1930s. Esherick wrote that, in
spite of a directive from Paul Cret that students carefully consider and study how
buildings were used,
Curiously, though, we were never given problems with real sites. The nature of
the site, its physical characteristics and general appearance, might be described,
but it was never a real site one could go to and look at and stomp around on. That
the sites in the programs issued by the BAID in New York should all be
hypothetical is understandable because the programs were being distributed all
around the country, but such was not the case in Grade C [third year], where the
programs were written at the school and worked on only there.
37

The focus on site specificity at USC, in combination with technical coursework in
architectural engineering and construction, provided students with a method for
approaching sites considered unbuildable (an oft-cited characteristic in the work of
postwar architects such as Buff, Straub, and Hensman, for example). This
resourcefulness toward site planning had become increasingly important in Southern
California because, as USC graduate (1941) and lecturer Gordon Drake pointed out in
Architectural Forum in 1947,
Geographically, many California cities are located upon land so mountainous that
they defy the usual gridiron plan; thus, sites have the grace of vista, sun, wind and
privacy. … Today, new residential building is forced to the surrounding hills or to
satellite cities miles away. Site considerations, then, are most interesting. From

37
Esherick, “Architectural Education,” 264.
156

almost any height, a view is given of a sprawling city—particularly magnificent at
night—the ranges of mountains, or the sea to the west.
38

The occasion for the Architectural Forum article on Drake was the inclusion of
his 1947 Presley House, located in the Los Angeles hills, in an article on outstanding
postwar residential design throughout the United States. The article title itself, “Modular
House in Pacific Coast Capitalizes on the Area’s Famous Topography, Climate and
Materials,” reflected a growing national awareness of California’s modern residential
architecture. In the Presley House, Drake capitalized on hillside views while also
providing seamless indoor-outdoor integration, the requisite feature in contemporary
residential design. Drake wrote, “there also must be the completely sheltered garden that
becomes part of the living area” and landscaping to “interpenetrate the living space and
thus relate the garden to the house.”
39
(Figures 39 and 40, Gordon Drake, USC Class of
1941, Presley House, 1947, Los Angeles.)
The Presley House would have put to the test Drake’s training in designing for
challenging sites. As Architectural Forum described the Presley House,
Hugging the north side of the Los Angeles’ steepest hills, this house is a
compromise in design between the free planning suggested by the ruggedness of
the site and the rigidity of an eminently simple construction system. Although its
design was also influenced by the rather lush requirements of a well-to-do client,
the house is a mock-up of a modular, panelized building which may eventually be
prefabricated for the average family and the average site.
40

Indeed, a year before completing the Presley House, Drake had already translated
these ideas into his own modest one-room home, sited in Los Angeles mountains. Within

38
Drake, Gordon, “Modular House in Pacific Coast Capitalizes on the Area’s Famous Topography,
Climate and Materials,” Architectural Forum, vol. 87 (September 1947): 100-116.
39
Ibid, 110.
40
Ibid, 112.
157

Figure 39. Gordon Drake, USC Class of 1941, Presley House, 1947, Los Angeles.
“Modular units are the basis of a house built as a working experiment in
order to develop plans practical for mass-housing. Architect Gordon
Drake designed it for Mr. & Mrs. David Presley, Los Angeles, California,
using prefabricated panels wherever possible. The advantages of this
system include the economies which result from easy, speedy construction
and the flexibility of the plans you can have when you use interchangeable
parts.” Source: House and Garden, February 1947.
158

Figure 40. Gordon Drake, USC Class of 1941, Presley House, 1947, Los Angeles
Plan and Terraces. “Fitted snugly into its hillside, the house has two
terraces.” Bottom photos show (on left) the outdoor living room and (on
right) the bedroom terrace. Source: House and Garden, February 1947.
159

a year of completing the residence, Drake had won first prize for the design in the 1947
Progressive Architecture design awards (one of Drake’s fellow USC alumnae, Whitney
Smith, earned a mention in the 1947 competition). Completed in 1946, the house was
one of Drake’s first projects after finishing architecture school; following graduation,
Drake had served in the US Marines until 1945. Upon seeing the “simple richness” of
Drake’s hillside residence, Progressive Architecture editor Thomas H. Creighton later
recalled the jury meeting at which the building was considered, writing that “I shall never
forget the simultaneous enthusiasm of Eliel Saarinen and Fred Severud when we
‘discovered’ Drake’s first to-be-published house.”
41
(Figures 41 to 43, Gordon Drake,
USC Class of 1941, Architect’s Residence, 1946, Los Angeles.) Progressive Architecture
chose this small residence as the first prize winner in private residential design for its
imaginative contribution as an architectural concept as well as for its brilliant
plan. The house is a minimum home—hardly more than a single room… Yet
within these modest confines, plus the nicely schemed outside living terrace, it
achieves the living amenity of a house many times its size.
42

In Drake’s work, the lessons of resourceful, site-specific design, indoor-outdoor
integration, and simplicity in materials and structure found poetic expression. His
treatment of materials and spatial arrangements recalled Harris, whom Drake had taken
as a summer design critic at USC in 1940 and in whose office Drake had worked for
several years. Drake’s interpretation of modular post-and-beam construction was
economical (capitalizing on prefabricated plywood panels) and exquisitely conceived,
striking “a rhythm similar to that which you get from a drumbeat repeated all the way
through a piece of music. Just as the drumbeat will pull together a musical composition

41
“Designer’s Own House, Los Angeles, California, Gordon Drake, Designer,” Progressive Architecture,
July 1947, 45-52.
42
Ibid..
160

Figure 41. Gordon Drake, USC Class of 1941, Architect’s Home, 1946, Los
Angeles. Source: Doug Baylis, The California Houses of Gordon
Drake. Source: J. Paul Getty Trust. Used with permission. Julius
Shulman Photography Archive, Research Library at the Getty
Research Institute (2004.R.10).
161

Figure 42. Gordon Drake, USC Class of 1941, Architect’s Home, 1946, Los
Angeles. Source: J. Paul Getty Trust. Used with permission. Julius
Shulman Photography Archive, Research Library at the Getty
Research Institute (2004.R.10).
162

Figure 43. Gordon Drake Residence, 1947, Los Angeles. The home “took four
months to complete…for the amazing cost of $4,500, which included
built-in furniture. The plan was compact but spacious in concept and
feeling; the structural system was simplified to be built by inexperienced
labor; the results were sensational, since this is what many returning GI’s
hoped to buy.” Source: Doug Baylis, The California Houses of Gordon
Drake.
163

and give it a sense of discipline and order, so Drake’s visible regular module gave his
architecture a sense of discipline and order.”
43

In addition to Harris’s obvious imprint, though, Drake cited his former design
teacher Troedsson (who arrived at USC the same year as did Drake, in 1937) as a guiding
influence in his work. Reflecting on Troedsson’s influence, Drake once told Progressive
Architecture editor George A. Sanderson that “Troeddson taught me that architecture was
a thing of the spirit. I still think he was right.”
44
In addition, Drake shared with
Troedsson a concern for well-designed, low-cost architecture. In 1947 Drake wrote,
The time has now come when decent living no longer should be the exclusive
right of the wealthy or the intellectual, but, rather, must be shared with the great
mass of America that cannot afford the luxury of the architect. Realizing the
social needs of his time, the architect must accept the responsibility of leadership
in this field regardless of a minimum schedule of fees or any other consideration
which has heretofore acted as a moral barrier.
45

Drake evoked the College of Architecture design philosophy when wrote on another
occasion: “Through research arrive at honest planning. Build. Evaluate. Give these ideas
and developments to the community as they desire them. Create that desire.”
46

For his part, Troedsson reflected on the idealism of Drake and his classmates in
the late 1930s, writing that
The class of architectural students to which Gordon belonged at the University of
Southern California was an interesting, stimulating one. The years were
depression years, the depression-ridden years that so many try to gloss over and
forget. To the already restless and searching youth was added the worry of the
uncertainty as to their future—work for graduates of architectural schools was
non-existent. To the architectural students, at least at U.S.C., they were hard

43
“Gordon Drake, 1917-1952,” House & Home, March 1952, 98.
44
Sanderson, George A., “About This Book,” in Baylis, Douglas, and Joan Parry, California Houses of
Gordon Drake (New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1956), 8.
45
Drake, “Modular House in Pacific Coast,” 110.
46
“Gordon Drake, 1917-1952,” 95.
164

years—the struggle to find money for tuition and for the daily meal was a very
serious one; all of that, however, seemed to be compensated for with the interest
that they showed in their study of architecture. …

As in all schools of all times, I suppose, that class showed the individuals who
were merely trying to get through…and a more searching minority—and that
minority in Gordon’s class was particularly searching and particularly serious
about its search and pursued it with great intent. …In that class there were many
who were holding their hands cupped to their ears—intent, purposeful, their eyes
opening with a new understanding—and one of the most intent, serious and
searching was Gordon.
47

The slightly elegiac tone expressed by Troedsson for his talented former student was due
to Drake’s death in 1952, at the age of 34, in a skiing accident in the Sierra Nevada. In
spite of his short career, Drake became one of the architects trained in the pre-1945
College of Architecture who was instrumental in garnering national attention for a
residential idiom that came to be seen as distinctly Southern Californian (though Drake
continued to develop these ideas in his Northern Californian practice in the late 1940s
and early 1950s).
By the time Drake’s Presley House was published in Architectural Forum in
1947, he had joined the faculty at USC as a lecturer in design, at the invitation of Arthur
Gallion. After relocating to the Bay Area in the late 1940s, Drake continued exploring
ideas for affordable, modern housing prototypes in his modular, wood post-and-beam
Unit House. Constructed in Hayward, a city approximately 20 miles south of Berkeley,
the Unit House capitalized on prefabricated materials and modular design to create an
inexpensive ($5,600) home intended to expand in stages along with the family.
48
As in
his Southern California projects, Drake expanded the living space and integrated interior

47
Troedsson, Carl Birger, in Baylis, California Houses, 81.
48
“This Home Was Designed to Grow,” San Francisco Chronicle, 18 November 1956.
165

and garden spaces through transitional spaces and the extensive use of terraces and
gardens, in what House and Home called “five zones for California living.”
49
(Figure 44,
“Five Zones for California Outdoor Living,” Gordon Drake Unit House, 1950.) Drake’s
Bay Area collaborator, Douglas Baylis, designed the landscaping for the Unit House,
which represented for Drake the realization of his wish to apply good design to middle-
class housing.
The ideas driving the Unit House and Drake’s other work mirrored the national
movement in modern housing, in particular in the focus on indoor-outdoor living, site-
specific design, an informal, expandable program, and prefabrication as a means to
economy. This approach also epitomized the mature design approach and philosophy at
USC. One example of the affinity between Drake’s Unit House and the USC approach is
seen in the “USC Study House,” a student project published in 1952 in a special issue of
the Los Angeles Times Home magazine. (Figures 45 and 46, “Tomorrow’s Architect”
presents the USC Study House, 1952.) Eight articles, written by faculty members,
presented the results of a student design project centered on the modern, affordable
1,800-square-foot home. The language used to describe the project (which posed to
students nothing less than the problem of, “What is the home?”) reflected the era’s sense
of possibility and conviction that new ideas would ultimately shape modern middle-class
housing. Beyond postwar optimism, though, the USC Study House reflects the school’s
continuing emphasis on the social utility of architecture. Gallion writes that USC
students, “as representatives of the future architects who will design the homes of

49
“Five Zones for California Outdoor Living,” House and Home, March 1952, 37.
166

Figure 44. “Five Zones for California Outdoor Living.” Gordon Drake, USC Class
of 1941, Unit House, 1950, Alameda, California.

Planned with landscape architect Douglas Baylis, the expandable Unit
House offered “five distinct zones for California outdoor living.” The
ideas of the Unit House, such as expanding the living space through the
use of terraces and gardens, an economical, expandable plan, modular
design making use of prefabricated materials, are all mirrored in the 1952
“USC Study House,” published in the Los Angeles Times. Source: House
and Home, March 1952.
167
 
Figure 45. “Tomorrow’s Architect.” USC School of Architecture students demonstrate
the “USC Study House.” On the left is USC alumni and faculty member
Conrad Buff III. Source: “Tomorrow’s Architect,” Los Angeles Times
Home, 14 September 1952.

168

 
Figure 46. Model of USC Study House. “Roof removed, you are looking into tiny
model of USC School of Architecture’s ‘House of the Future.”
Source: Los Angeles Times, 14 September 1952.
169

tomorrow” offered in the USC study house new ideas that “may provide provocative
material for those who will build those homes”:
As you turn these pages, you will perceive that the home is no longer conceived
as a square box surrounded by four walls and a roof. It is a structure enclosing the
interior space arranged to serve each function of family life. But it is more than
that. The structure is designed in relation to the exterior space which it adjoins.
50

Like Drake’s expandable Unit House, the USC Study House featured a three-
stage plan for construction, which would grow as the family (and its income) also
expanded. (Figures 47 to 49, Three-Stage Plan, USC Study House.) Central to the
house’s design were the needs of the family. Straub writes that “the fundamental patterns
of home life, the amount of space a family needs for good living” provided the starting
point for the design; here, as in Straub’s design classes, separate “zones” for living
defined spaces for social activities or seclusion. In an acknowledgement of the new
socioeconomics of postwar housing, Straub wrote that, in proposing a centralized, open
kitchen,
we were aware it was in this area that the greatest changes had occurred. No
longer was it only the workplace for servants…neither is it just an efficiency
laboratory as in the 20s…now once again we find the family returning to the
home and so to the kitchen.
51

Site specificity and indoor-outdoor integration remained the textbook features of
the USC Study House. Commenting on site-specific design in his contribution to the
series was visiting critic Edgardo Contini (who would have just completed work on the
iconic Mutual Housing Association development in Crestwood Hills, along with Eckbo,
Whitney Smith, and A. Quincy Jones, all Contini’s colleagues at USC at the time). In his
article, “Structure: Framework for the Future,” Contini explains that the students’ site-

50
Gallion, Arthur B., “Tomorrow’s Architect,” Los Angeles Times, 14 September 1952.
51
Straub, Calvin, “Plan: A Flexible House for Family Growth,” Los Angeles Times, 14 September 1952.
170

Figure 47. Stage 1 of the USC Study House, “designed to meet basic needs of the
young family.” Source: Calvin Straub, “Plan: A Flexible House for
Family Growth,” Los Angeles Times Home.

171

Figure 48. Stage 2, USC Study House. Source: Straub, “A Flexible House.”
172

Figure 49. Stage 3, USC Study House. “As can be seen in the plan, the house actually
extends into and becomes a part of the total garden space.” Source: Straub,
“A Flexible House.”
173

specific planning provided the key to balancing between “prefabrication and
individualism.”
52
Even for tract homes, Contini writes, “The combination of mass
production, good architectural design and sound land planning can create an extremely
desirable environment.” In his article, Eckbo echoed this, writing “The entire lot space
must be planned in one continuous operation” in order to avoid “wasted space” and “poor
interconnections between house and garden,” resulting in what Eckbo calls “impaired
livability.”
53

In terms of indoor-outdoor integration, Straub writes, the USC Study House
“actually extends into and becomes a part of the total garden space, the most important
extension of the house being the great screened porch that opens from the family
room.”
54
Straub’s 1949 Sedlachek House illustrates the seamlessness Straub intended for
indoor-outdoor integration. (Figure 50, Calvin Straub, Sedlachek House, 1949.) In the
USC Study House, the t-shaped plan facilitates this integration, with arms extending to
enclose the onsite trees (as in Buff, Straub & Hensman’s Frank House, as shown in
Figure 4, though the home spanned more than twice the square footage). The t-shaped
plan allowed for what Eckbo called “a house with five patios,” recalling the “five zones
for California outdoor living” seen in Drake’s Unit House. “Nearly every room in the
house has a possible supplementary space outside,” Eckbo wrote, a feature that provided
the “most direct and intimate connection” between indoors and out and increased
“livability at relatively small additional cost.”
55

52
Contini, Edgardo, “Structure: Framework for the Future,” Los Angeles Times, 14 September 1952.
53
Eckbo, Garrett, “A House with Five Patios,” Los Angeles Times, 14 September 1952.
54
Straub, “A Flexible House.”
55
Eckbo, “A House with Five Patios.”
174

Figure 50. Calvin Straub, Sedlachek House, 1949. Source: Courtesy of the
Getty Research Institute, Julius Shulman Archives.
175

In his introduction to the issue, Gallion places these features in the context
emphasized at USC since the 1930s, that of planning on the level of the neighborhood
unit:
Just as the house itself is planned as an integral part of its lot, so the lot is
conceived to be a part of the neighborhood in which it is situated. …The idea that
the house and lot are…a part of the neighborhood…anticipates a time when we,
as enlightened urban citizens, will insist upon our cities being planning as groups
of neighborhoods in which the individual family may retain its identity as
effective and responsible citizens.
56

None of these articles mentions style as a driving factor in the architectural
solution reached. The only reference (albeit indirect) to style came not from the USC
faculty but rather the Home magazine editor, Jack Lester, who that “using Contemporary
design and available new materials, it is possible to design a house at least 50 years ahead
of the general level of public acceptance.”
57
For his part, Straub, though presumed to be
one of the authors of the “USC style,” later claimed that aesthetic effect was a second-
order concern in his work. Reflecting on the atmosphere of the 1950s, Straub described
the basic ideas he would have learned and taught at USC:
My intent was to recognize the unique nature of each client and program, site and
orientation, without preconception or following any style or fashion cliché, to
produce each individual and direct design solution.”
58

As for Drake, even after his death, his ideas continued to influence the USC
approach. According to alumnae Greg Walsh, Straub spoke often in design classes about

56
Gallion, “Tomorrow’s Architect.”
57
Lester, Jack, “Your Future Home?,” Los Angeles Times Home, 14 September 1952.
58
Kappe, Shelly, “Idiom of the Fifties: What Really Happened in Los Angeles,” Architecture California
(November/December 1986): pp. 15-17.
176

Drake, expressing admiration for his work and naming him a key influence in his own
ideas about architecture.
59

The Role of Traditional Methods and Historical Precedent
Three-Dimensional Visualization: Shades and Shadows and Descriptive Geometry

With the establishment of the Department of Architecture, the academic year
1919/1920 introduced a staple of the Ecole des Beaux Arts system, a graphics course in
Shades and Shadows. From 1919 until circa 1965, Shades and Shadows and descriptive
geometry classes remained lower-division requirements aimed to help meet
Weatherhead’s goal of emphasizing three-dimensional visualization. (Figure 51, USC
Shades and Shadows Course, 1933, Lee Kline illustration.) By 1965, though the USC
architecture curriculum continued to require freehand drawing, Shades and Shadows and
descriptive geometry courses appear to have been eliminated.
From 1928 through at least 1961, the instructor whose name became synonymous
with Shades and Shadows was Verle Annis. Annis graduated from the University of
Pennsylvania, where he likely met Weatherhead when the dean took his 1924 sabbatical.
After completing his Bachelor of Architecture in 1924 and Master of Architecture in
1926, Annis joined the USC Department of Architecture in 1928, where he began
teaching lower-division descriptive geometry, first-year architectural design, and (by the
late 1930s) classes in Spanish Colonial architecture.
60
For many students, the challenging
coursework inspired a love-hate relationship; in retrospect, USC alumnae describe Annis

59
Walsh, Interview with author.
60
“Architectural Group Honors SC Professor,” Los Angeles Times, 27 January 1957.
177

Figure 51. USC Shades and Shadows Course, 1933, Lee Kline illustration. Marked
with Annis’s red-ink stamp, “Received on time.” Courtesy of University
of Southern California Libraries, University Archives.
178

as a no-nonsense taskmaster who demanded much and, in return, had much to offer. For
architect William Krisel (who entered USC in 1941 and completed his studies after
World War II), descriptive geometry coursework “opened up a world of three
dimensions” and Annis “was just terrific. Nobody liked him, but I thought he was great.
Because I learned so much from him, and it served me so well in life.”
61
Eugene Flores
(USC 1962) agreed, recalling that Shades and Shadows was about “learning how to draw,
learning how to read drawings, learning how to understand drawing...it really weeded out
a lot of people.”
62
Flores described Annis as a “drill master,” recalling that the instructor
gave assignments to be completed in class, then would “walk around and see what you
were doing, and he’d put a check on it if it was wrong, but he wouldn’t tell you what was
wrong!” Said Flores,
the biggest advantage of [descriptive geometry coursework] that I find lacking
nowadays…since I’ve taught some architecture courses…[is] that the graphics
would help you see better, to visualize better. To understand, because you had to
go through these revolutions and bring everything back to a two-dimensional
paper. It would help you begin to understand spatially… I think Verle Annis was
very instrumental in giving people some very technically important visualization
skills.
63

Throughout this period, descriptions for Shades and Shadows and descriptive
geometry remained fairly uniform, presenting in 1931 “the theory of shades and shadows
as applied to practical methods in expressing the third dimension in architecture, ”
including methods of drawing “architectural perspectives” and the “perspective of
shadows.”
64
In 1934, the course was offered as “Graphics,” presenting “the principles of
descriptive geometry as applied to problems of architecture and fine arts. Mechanical

61
Krisel, William, Interview with author, 22 February 2010, Los Angeles, California.
62
Flores, Eugene, Interview with author, 23 June 2009, Pasadena, California.
63
Ibid.
64
USC Bulletin, 1931-1932, 28-29.
179

delineation and representation in three dimensions by means of shades and shadows, and
perspective.”
65
In the postwar period, descriptive geometry expanded to two years,
presented in two classes: Graphics, introducing “technical drawing and descriptive
geometry; orthographic projections, revolution, developments; shades and shadows,
mechanical perspective” and Shades and Shadows, covering the “application of
descriptive geometry to shades and shadows on architectural forms.” From the 1940s
through the early 1960s, the course descriptions changed very little.
In Esherick’s comparison of the 1930s and 1970s, he echoed the views of USC
alumnae in recalling descriptive geometry coursework as valuable for his later practice,
saying that the coursework taught “about light in the kind of rendering that you did, that
you simply don’t get if you’re putting something in on the computer and then you push
the key that says, ‘Sun’ and then it casts shadows.”
66
He added, “it’s kind of an irony
that the Beaux Arts education was supposed to be telling you about classical forms. What
I learned from it was not the orders and the classical forms, but how the light fell on those
things, because it was a very exaggerated style.”
67

For his part, Weatherhead appears to have had mixed feelings about retaining this
feature of the Beaux-Arts system. Although the cornerstone of his experiment was a de-
emphasis on paper techniques (which he believed to be “one of the great weaknesses” of
the Beaux Arts system) and focus on three-dimensional visualization, in his 1941 book
Weatherhead questioned the efficacy of descriptive geometry as a tool for teaching
visualization. Although descriptive geometry taught orthographic projection and

65
USC Bulletin, 1934-1935, 34.
66
Ibid, 42.
67
Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, Joseph Esherick: “An Architectural Practice in the San
Francisco Bay Area, 1938 to 1996” (Berkeley, CA: University of California, Berkeley, 1996), 188.
180

drafting, Weatherhead wrote, it had “never been proven” that the discipline helped
students learn how to “visualize correctly a three-dimensional situation represented by
two-dimensional orthographic projections.”
68
In Weatherhead’s 1935 Architect and
Engineer article on architectural education, however, he wrote that “Many elements of
traditional methods have long proven their excellence; and educators are reluctant to
discard them until better ones are discovered.”
69

Architectural History and International Currents in Art and Architecture
Once the 1930 experiment was launched, Weatherhead’s initiative to postpone
students’ exposure to “tradition” meant a reorganization of coursework in architectural
history. Whereas in 1929, architectural history and history of ornament classes began in
the second year, by 1931 architectural history had been moved to the third year, and the
history of ornament course had been eliminated. In 1929, History of Architecture
covered “the origin and development of the styles of architecture with their historic
backgrounds, beginning with Egyptian architecture and ending with the Romanesque”; a
concurrent year of History of Ornament explored “the origins, developments, and
relations of the styles of ornament; the chief motives employed and their applications in
architecture.”
70
In 1931, architectural history had become upper-division coursework,
and the History of Ornament class had been eliminated. The architectural history series
devoted a year each to surveys of “Egyptian, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Early

68
Weatherhead, The History of Collegiate Education, 165.
69
Weatherhead, Arthur C., “Note on Education in Architecture,” Architect and Engineer, ed. Pauline
Schindler, vol. 123 (December 1935): 69.
70
USC Bulletin, 1929-1930, 67.
181

Christian, Byzantine, and Romanesque architecture” and of “Medieval and Renaissance”
architecture.
The most substantial change made by Weatherhead to architectural history,
though, was reflected in the content. As Krisel noted, Weatherhead “remodeled
the required course, ‘history of architecture’ by shortening the influence of pre-1900
history of architecture…thereby having a greater importance for the history of
architecture after the year 1900.” In this way, Krisel says, “the Bauhaus could be
endorsed as a true architectural movement worthy of study.”
71
Toward this end,
Weatherhead introduced in 1931 a new course in architectural history covering
“European and American architecture and allied arts from the French Revolution to and
including the so-called modern expression of the present day.”
72
This trend continued,
and from 1942 until at least 1961, the final year of architectural history generally covered
the architecture of the “modern period,” beginning with the “Industrial Revolution and its
results, Contemporary European movements and the problems of readjustment in the
United States, Influential architects, their contributions to the development of modern
architecture, and important examples of their work.”
73

In the summer of 1932, coinciding with the International Style exhibit in Los
Angeles at Bullock’s Wilshire, Weatherhead began teaching a course entitled
Appreciation of Modern Architecture (which by 1934 had been renamed Modern
Architecture). As Weatherhead told the Los Angeles Times, the course introduced the

71
Krisel, William, Personal communication with author, 15 July 2010.
72
USC Bulletin, 1931-1932, 30.
73
USC Bulletin, 1942-1943, 39.
182

“important movements in twentieth-century architecture”
74
and drew on Weatherhead’s
“study during the past three years of American and European architectural tendencies.”
75

Until his departure in 1944, Weatherhead taught a majority of the architectural history
courses. After Weatherhead’s retirement, Baldwin handled architectural history courses,
which still spanned two years in the postwar period, until his death in 1958.
Throughout the 1930s, while the architectural history requirements for
undergraduates had decreased by 1937 from three to two years, the offerings in
architecture’s sister department, Fine Arts, grew more diverse. Part of this diversity grew
out of a renewed emphasis on Fine Arts in the early 1930s; in 1933, a name change, to
the College of Architecture and Fine Arts, reflected this emphasis; in 1934, the college
initiated a new graduate degree in Fine Arts. Given the proximity to the Fine Arts
division, architecture students could avail themselves of expanded offerings in
international currents and traditions. In 1934, University College offered, for example,
Art and Architecture of the Far East (including the arts of China, Japan, Tibet) as well as
a course entitled Further India, offering a “comparative study of the architecture of these
countries.”
76
Separate courses on Chinese Art and Architecture and, in 1936, Japanese
Art and Architecture, which continued to provide an important touchstone in the work of
graduates and faculty, rounded out the offerings.
In the late 1930s, Annis drew on his own extensive travels through Latin America
to begin offering a course in Spanish Colonial Architecture. The course, which continued
through the early 1940s in the Fine Arts side of the College of Architecture, was likely to

74
“Summer Class in Designing Opens Friday,” Los Angeles Times, 12 June 1932.
75
Ibid.
76
USC Bulletin, 1934-1935, 41.
183

have drawn from Annis’s extended trips to Latin America, including tours in 1933 to
Mexico and in 1938 to Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Panama.
77
In 1945, when Gallion
separated the disciplines of Architecture and Fine Arts, and the College of Architecture
and Fine Arts became the School of Architecture, coursework in international arts and
architecture would have been available as electives through the School of Fine Arts.

Pragmatism: Bridging the Gap between Classroom and Office
Technical Core of Classes
In its founding years, the College of Architecture curriculum was shaped by equal parts
art and science: art, based on the origins in the College of Fine Arts, and science, based
on proximity and association with the USC College of Engineering. In 1919, as the
department was launched, the initial program reflects the beginnings of a
multidisciplinary program balancing the two:
In the curriculum the essentials of a liberal education are provided with as much
specific training in freehand drawing, design, history of architecture, and
construction as a four year course will permit. This plan of study recognizes that
architecture is essentially a fine art, the practice of which necessitates a broad
knowledge of structural and building equipment engineering, and that design is
the most essential subject in preparing students for the profession.
78

Beginning in the 1910s, in addition to the requirement for a three-month
internship in an architect’s office, pragmatism in the classroom was introduced through a
series of technical classes. The coursework, which evolved along with technological and
material advances of the day, included Building Equipment Engineering and Mechanics
and Strength of Materials (both introduced in 1919), Architectural Construction (circa

77
“Editor’s Mail Box,” Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XVII, no. 2 (December 1935): 7.
78
USC Yearbook 1919-1920, vol. XV, no. 1, 145. USC Libraries, University Archives.
184

1931), Architectural Engineering (circa 1934), Estimating and Construction Costs (circa
1935), and Modern Materials (which later became Materials and Processes) (circa 1937).
As of 1961, all of these courses remained part of the USC Bachelor of Architecture
curriculum.
Given its proximity to the USC Civil Engineering program, the Department of
Architecture offered in its inaugural year a full complement of technical coursework,
cross-listed through the College of Engineering. These courses included Materials of
Construction, Contracts and Specifications (one semester), Structural Design (one year,
upper division), and Reinforced Concrete (one year, upper division). Throughout the
1930s, technical classes began to be offered from within the Department of Architecture
itself that reflected the changing demands of the profession. The first of these, Building
Equipment Engineering, introduced students to the principles of mechanical systems; on
the course list from 1919 to at least 1961, the course description evolved through the
years as technologies changed for heating, sanitation, ventilation, and lighting systems.
In 1931, the year-long course in Architectural Construction presented “a study of the
general principles of structural design from the standpoint of the architect; wood and steel
construction and reinforced concrete as a basic element in modern architecture.”
79

In order to help architectural draftsmen expand their skills during the Great
Depression, a review course in Architectural Engineering had been introduced at the USC
extension, University Park, for “experienced architectural draftsmen who desire to
qualify in engineering subjects relating to the practice of architecture;” the year 1935 also
introduced the year-long course in Estimating and Construction Costs, which offered

79
USC Bulletin, 1931-1932, 32.
185

instruction in carrying out “estimate surveys including costs of labor, materials, and other
elements entering into building construction.”
80
(By 1965, Estimating and Construction
Costs had been eliminated from the curriculum.) In 1937, a class in Modern Materials
(renamed Materials and Processes in 1942) rounded out the technical core of classes.
Focused on “elementary construction, the processes of shaping, assembling, and
finishing” modern materials, by 1949 Materials and Processes had expanded to two years.
By 1965, the course material appears to have been incorporated into the three-year series,
Structures.

Professional Practices

The keystone in Weatherhead’s bridge from classroom to office, and one of the
features that contributed to a perception that College of Architecture graduates were
imminently employable, was a three-year series in Professional Practices. Although
limited coursework in working drawings, detailing, and “professional relations” had been
offered as early as the 1910s, the year 1931 launched the three-year, six-course sequence.
Required for third, fourth, and fifth year students, this course remained intact in the
curriculum well into the 1960s (though, by 1965, it had been reduced to one year).
Designed as a continuous sequence, the series aimed to prepare students for
modern office practice; the course description itself offers the best illustration of what
Weatherhead intended when he described the “transition between school and office
practice” the curriculum at USC aimed to provide. In its introductory year, 1931, the
professional practices series aimed to provide a complete portrait of office practice. The

80
USC Bulletin, 1934-1935, 36.
186

first year covered “the preparation of working drawings, details, specifications, and
contracts,” as well as “simple plans and specifications of work already executed” and the
onsite “inspection of buildings under construction and their materials.” The second year
brought the “advanced study of the preparation of working drawings,” including “a close
study of building ordinances covering all classes of structures.” In the final year, students
attended lectures and discussions on “professional relations, the organization of office
management, legal aspects, and building finance as the subjects relate to the profession of
architecture.” The staple of the series were visits to the offices of local architects, an
initiative facilitated by the long-term collaboration between USC and the city’s architects,
who since the 1920s served as design critics and advisory committee members. Between
1931 and 1949, the one significant change in the Professional Practices series was the
specification that working drawings would “especially” focus on steel and concrete
construction for fourth-year students.
From 1931 through 1945, most of the three years of Professional Practices was
taught by C. Raimond Johnson, a former employee in John Galen Howard’s San
Francisco office, a 1926 graduate of USC’s Department of Architecture, and acting dean
during Weatherhead’s sabbaticals. Through the late 1930s and early 1940s, those sharing
teaching responsibilities included Troedsson and long-time faculty member Sumner
Spaulding. In the postwar period, two USC graduates led Professional Practices; among
alumnae interviewed for this study, by the late 1950s and early 1960s, their names had
become synonymous with the three-year series: Henry Charles Burge, who led the
Professional Practices beginning in 1947 and graduated from the USC College of
Architecture in 1935 (Burge also served as interim dean of the School of Architecture
187

from 1961 to 1963, following Arthur Gallion’s departure). The second USC graduate to
lead Professional Practices, following his own graduation in 1951, was Arthur O’Leary,
who joined Burge as a lecturer in 1953 and remained with the School of Architecture
until at least 1963.
The Professional Practices series appears to have been one of the features of the
USC curriculum that made its graduates employable and the program experimental.
Several points of comparison put this in context. In a 1955 survey of the Association of
Collegiate Schools of Architecture, just under half the schools responding reported that
they required coursework in working drawings that incorporated modular coordination, a
deficiency the author equated with offering “a very fine course in internal medicine, but
no course in pharmacology.”
81
While these results were filtered through the sub-topic of
modular design, the subject of instruction in working drawings was revisited during a
question and answer session with the presenter, D. Kenneth Sargent, dean of the
University of Syracuse School of Architecture:
Scheick: From your talk I got the impression that a good many architectural
schools don’t even teach working drawings.

Sargent: I’m afraid you’re right. I can’t understand this philosophy, and as you
can gather, I don’t particularly condone it. On the other hand I’d like to
make it clear that I don’t think that a school of architecture should teach
working drawings, just as a subject. I think working drawings should be
taught as a means of communication for the other subjects which the
student is forced to learn and study, such as the nature of materials and
their assembly, which is a very important factor in building, and of
course in design. Many schools do not teach working drawings simply
because they feel this verges on trade school formation.
82

81
Sargent, D. Kenneth, “Educational Programs on Modular Coordination,” in Building Research Institute,
The Current Status of Modular Coordination, Publication No. 782 (Washington, DC: National Academy of
Sciences, National Research Council, 1960), 23.
82
Ibid, 30.
188

Similarly, a 1958 survey of US architecture schools, conducted by the Construction
Specifications Institute (CSI), showed that fewer than one-third of responding schools (12
of 38) reported that their curricula offered coursework in architectural specifications.
83

In addition, at the University of California, Berkeley, as of 1953, the program
curriculum shows that, three years after Wurster became dean, coursework in working
drawings and professional practices remained limited to graduate-level work, though the
undergraduate curriculum required a full complement of technical classes.
84
Similarly,
Esherick commented that, while the University of Pennsylvania offered a “carefully
coordinated and integrated program,” including coursework in construction, drawing,
rendering, and history, he concluded that “all parts tied together supporting the design
courses which dominated the curriculum.”
85
The notion of carrying a project through
from beginning to end, as covered in USC’s Professional Practices series, for example,
did not come into play. “We studied very little of putting all that together,” said
Esherick, since the buildings they designed “were looked on as such impossible, grand
dreams,” not actual projects you would go and build.
86
Esherick recalled that, as a
student,
I was always yelling at the faculty to tell me how you actually build it. You draw
all these wonderful things and put the stone joins in, but I didn’t understand how
you kept the water out, and I mean, how you really detailed it and solved all the
obvious problems. …The Beaux Arts stuff sort of loaded the building up with

83
“Report on the Building Research Institute, Minutes of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Association of
Collegiate Schools of Architecture,” Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 15, no. 3, (autumn 1960): 3-
67, quoted here p. 32.
84
“School of Architecture, University of California,” January 1953, University of California, Berkeley,
School of Architecture. Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley, C.W. Moore
Collection, Project/Folder, Wurster Advising Curriculum Electives.
85
Esherick, “Architectural Education,” 241.
86
Joseph Esherick: “An Architectural Practice,” 57.
189

stone facing—you didn’t really build a stone building, you just made it look as
though you had built one.
87

Social Responsiveness: The Great Depression, New Deal, and World War II

Transfer Students and Adult Education

With the economic decline of the Great Depression, the College of Architecture
expanded its offerings of evening coursework aimed at adults. Some of these courses
were offered through the USC extension program, University College, whose open-
enrollment policy and relative independence appears to have offered a level of flexibility
that might not have been possible in the fixed professional curriculum of the College of
Architecture.
In September 1930, the Los Angeles Times announced the addition of new
evening classes at both the college’s 35
th
Street facilities and University College, housed
at the time in the Transportation Building in downtown Los Angeles.
88
Taught by long-
time staff Clayton Baldwin and Verle Annis, the night courses were promoted as adult
education, designed as preparation for the California State Board examination in
architecture. In January 1932, the Los Angeles Times announced that USC would be
“providing unusual study opportunities” that semester, with “evening adult classes” in a
range of fields, including architecture, real estate, journalism, civics, and international
relations.
89
Striking a balance between the pragmatic and academic, announcements for
University College architecture classes described coursework providing both “a

87
Ibid, 48.
88
“Architectural Courses Open, University Offers Four Night Classes in Design,” Los Angeles Times, 14
September 1930.
89
“College Lists New Courses, USC Providing Unusual Study Opportunities, Evening Adult Classes to
Cover Many Fields,” Los Angeles Times, 3 January 1932.
190

thoroughly scholarly approach to the modern program” and “special attention…to the
practical needs of students who are already engaged in the professional fields.”
90
In the
summer of 1931, the College of Architecture revived its summer program, offered at the
college’s 35
th
Street site.
During the Great Depression, an increasing number of students appear to have
transferred into the College of Architecture and Fine Arts from junior colleges. By 1932,
the trend had become noticeable enough that the architectural fraternity at USC
commented on the demographic shift reflected in incoming pledges; the change,
however, was attributed to the strength of California’s community colleges (which very
well might have been a factor) rather than the price of tuition, room and boarding at USC.
In 1931/1932, attendance costs for the College of Architecture ran $285 for annual
tuition, as well as approximately $200 for yearly housing and meals. The total of $485
represented almost 30 percent of the average American wage for 1932, estimated to be
$1,500 a year (a 40 percent drop from 1929 wages).
91
Commenting in the Alpha Rho Chi
newsletter, an architecture student wrote that
It is interesting to note that the majority of the pledges of the Andronicus chapter
this fall are older men. The junior colleges in California have become very strong
during the past four years. Consequently the last few years have been rather
“lean” for Andronicus men, but now they are starting to get the junior college
graduates. Out of the eleven pledges, three are straight freshmen and the other
eight have gone to junior college or some other university.
92

90
USC University College, “College of Architecture and Fine Arts, Spring Quarter, March 28 to June 11,
1932.” USC Libraries, University Archives.
91
Washburne, Carol Kott, ed., America in the 20th Century, 1930-1939, vol. 4 (North Bellmore, NY:
Marshall Cavendish, 1995).
92
“Junior Colleges Strong in the West,” The Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XIV, no. 2 (December 1932), 11-
12.
191

In response to this demographic shift, in 1937 the College of Architecture and
Fine Arts added a transitional course in “intermediate” design for “transfers from junior
colleges and other institutions.”
93
Taught by Baldwin in 1937, the one-year course
bridged lower and upper division design for transfer students by covering the “general
subject matter” from Architectural Design I and II, with “creative exercises in three-
dimensional architectural form followed by problems involving the theory of simple
planning.”
94

Federal Housing Administration Policies and Focus on Housing

Small-Home Design

Fueled by the acute housing shortage and New Deal policies (including the 1934
establishment and 1937 expansion of the National Housing Act), explorations in housing,
both small home and multifamily, decisively shaped the college’s design curriculum well
into the postwar period.
Central to the emphasis on residential design was the small, well-designed house.
Beginning in the fall of 1937, in response to the programs and policies of the Federal
Housing Administration, University College began offering “Residential Planning and
Finance,” a class “designed to aid prospective home builders or those planning to
remodel their houses under the Federal Housing Act.”
95
Announcing the class in 1937,
the Los Angeles Times wrote that “trends in architecture, planning the small home,
ordinances, and the selection of the site are features of the course, with costs and methods

93
USC Bulletin, College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1937-1938, vol. 31, no 21 (January 1937), 36. USC
Libraries, University Archives.
94
USC Bulletin, 1937-1938, 36.
95
“U.S.C. Offering Night Course to Aid Home Builders,” Los Angeles Times, 12 September 1937.
192

of finance also included.”
96
The 1941 course catalog described the scope of the class,
which was taught by Baldwin and remained part of the curriculum until 1942:
especially adapted to the needs of those interested in planning or building the
small house. Contemporary trends in architectural design. Selection and
requirements of the site. Materials entering into the construction and decoration
of the home. Importance of landscaping and environment; ordinances as they
apply to planning and construction; cost and methods of finance.
97

After being discontinued in 1942/1943, Residential Planning and Finance was revived in
1944 as Planning the Postwar Home (in a continuation of the 1930’s emphasis on the
“modern home of the future”). In 1945, the course became part of the professional
curriculum, reflecting an early gearing up for postwar residential expansion; Planning the
Postwar Home was designed as a
nontechnical course in architectural planning for the prospective home owner.
Analysis of the site and orientation. The planning of space as related to modern
living in single or multiple dwelling types. New developments in the use of
materials and methods of construction. Landscaping, cost analysis, and
financing.
98

Both the pre- and postwar iterations of this nontechnical class show a focus on
landscaping, the environment, and site selection and design, ideas that came to
characterize contemporary residential design (though they were already considered
requisite features of the modern house) well into the postwar period.
By the late 1930s, the national upswing in construction, fueled by liberalized
mortgage policies for single-family residences, had translated into a construction boom in
Southern California. As Hise pointed out, the 1939 Annual Report of the Federal
Housing Administration (FHA), which published data on “homes and their purchasers,”

96
“U.S.C. Offering Night Course to Aid Home Builders” (1937).
97
USC Bulletin, Harris College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1940-1941 (December 1940), 37-38. USC
Libraries, University Archives.
98
USC Bulletin, 1945-1947, 30.
193

showed that Los Angeles led “in the national recovery and in the provision of low-cost
homes for wage-earners.”
99
Fueling this construction boom, the FHA expanded its
lending policies in February 1938 to include incentives for homes carrying a mortgage
principal of less than $2,500, as well as the expansion of mortgage eligibility (from 80 to
90 percent of appraised value) and repayment periods (which could span “a maximum of
twenty-five years on owner-occupied homes valued under $5,400”); this policy
expansion resulted in a rapid jump in private-sector residential construction “surpassed
only in the boom of 1923.”
100

One local example of the FHA-inspired boom was the newly minted subdivision
of Santa Anita Village, a residential community in present-day Arcadia, east of Pasadena.
Spanning 200 acres of the former Rancho Santa Anita, Santa Anita Village’s “low-priced
residential community” reflected the expanded FHA lending policies (with the model
house, at $5,000, priced to qualify for the new long-term loans) and also the continuing
public fascination with contemporary exhibition housing. In the fall of 1939, Santa Anita
Village provided the laboratory for Baldwin’s second-year design course. In the
assignment, students explored two aspects of residential design that remained central in
the postwar approach: site- and program-driven design, in which features such as
orientation, topography, and landscaping, as well as client needs, served as the point-of-
departure for the architectural solution. (Figure 52, Small-Family Housing, Santa Anita
Village, 1939, USC Design Project.) Santa Anita Village was selected for the project,

99
The FHA figures cited by Hise show that “31 percent of the new homes accepted for mortgage insurance
in Los Angeles were valued below $4,000. By contrast, of the largest twenty metropolitan areas in the
country, only St. Louis had greater than 10 percent of its FHA homes within that range.” Hise, “Roots of
the Postwar Urban Region,” 245.
100
Ibid, 244.
194

Figure 52. Small-Family Housing, Santa Anita Village, 1939, USC Design Project.
In the Santa Anita Village project, USC architecture students use a three-
step process: “first they consider the requirements of a family that is to
occupy a house, the best amount of room space and the exact suitability of
the dwelling to the site; then they make a model of the home.” Source:
“Architecture Students Get ‘Streamline’ Instruction,” 1940, Los Angeles
Times.
195

Baldwin told the Los Angeles Times, because it represented “one of Southern California’s
outstanding examples” of a planned community of modestly priced homes incorporating
architectural standards.
101
Ultimately, the students’ model for Santa Anita Village was to
be incorporated into the demonstration housing. Calling the USC design project “one of
the most significant studies relating to Southland residential design,” the Los Angeles
Times described the project as “stressing ‘three-dimensional thinking’ for architectural
students in the planning of ‘space for living’”:
Nineteen students are being guided by Prof. Clayton M. Baldwin in an experiment
which may bring about development of a new approach toward home design to
meet not only the requirements of the family that is to occupy a planned dwelling,
but also to fit the home to its site with the greatest possible degree of exactness.
102

In the project, coordinated with subdivision developer Raymond A. Dorn Company,
students drew lots for a given home-site and “proceeded to consult with a family in the
role of client.” Baldwin described the class approach to the Los Angeles Times:
Working with the client, each student then was required to study the site and its
environment before going ahead with the project… The next step, the making of
a preliminary model of the home, was based on a desire to develop three-
dimensional thinking by the students. Instead of merely working with two
dimensions on the routine drawing board, the student was asked to consider each
room in the house as space for living, producing a rough model of the entire
home, room by room.

In the Santa Anita Village project, one sees that comprehensive studies “of our
present-day order and needs” continued to drive the design approach, as students made
repeated field trips to Santa Anita Village to study construction methods and
materials in use on the many homes rising there. Photographs were taken of
construction processes and details of structure, as well as of completed homes. A

101
“S.C. Students to Design Santa Anita Village Homes,” Los Angeles Times, 29 October 1939.
102
“Architecture Students Get ‘Streamline’ Instruction,” Los Angeles Times, 4 February 1940.
196

thorough study was undertaken of building ordinances and protective architectural
restrictions in effect at the property.

The practical experience working with “architectural restrictions” (in this case,
presumably FHA standards) allowed students to “work directly with reality, rather than
with dreams on drawing boards” in the creation of working drawings, cost estimates, and
models; the Los Angeles Times reported that “So widespread has been the interest
aroused in this experiment in architectural education that arrangements are being worked
out by the Santa Anita Village developers to place the home models in display upon their
completion.”
103

While no photographic evidence of the 1939 model home has yet been located, a
similar student project, in 1948, resulted in the construction of a model home still
standing in Los Angeles’s Baldwin Hills (itself home to a landmark Garden City complex
constructed in 1941 by Reginald D. Johnson and Clarence Stein). The “Villageaire”
home (a name chosen by USC student Bill Hines in a university-wide contest)
104
was
designed by four fifth-year architecture students, Jerald King, Jack Strickland, Paul Tay,
and Harry Wilson, working under Gallion and USC design instructor and alumni, Henry
Burge. (Figures 53 to 56, The “Villageaire Model Home,” USC Student Project,
1948/1949, Village Gardens, Baldwin Hills, Los Angeles.) Continuing the long USC
emphasis on the “practical study project,” the $16,500 home was financed by California
Federal Savings and Loan Association and constructed on a lot acquired by the developer
of Village Gardens, Walter H. Leimert Company.
105
As with the Santa Anita Village

103
“S.C. Students to Design Santa Anita Village Homes,” Los Angeles Times.
104
“SC Model Home Name Selected,” Los Angeles Times, 1 January 1950.
105
“Home Designed by SC Students Nears Finish,” Los Angeles Times, 27 November 1949.
197

project, the objective appears not to have been cutting-edge design but FHA backing and
consumer acceptability. The design of the residence, which students dubbed a “Ranch-
type dwelling,” was the result of six months of discussion among the students, faculty,
the funding agency, and real estate professionals, during which students sought to “learn
of features preferred by prospective buyers.”
106
In this way, the USC Study House would
have been a closer representation of the general design philosophy at the school, given
that the project proposed an ideal prototype rather than a house guaranteed to win FHA-
backed mortgage insurance.
However, the Villageaire home incorporated many of the same design principles
as the USC Study House. Consisting of two adjacent wings, oriented away from the
street, the interior was planned to make maximum use of its 1,400 square feet while also
maintaining “complete separation of living and sleeping quarters.”
107
An open dining-
living room anchors the one-story wing, which offered the requisite feature of indoor-
outdoor integration through a full wall of large-pane glazing and glass doors, leading onto
the patio and garden. The adjacent wing, elevated over a garage, contained the bedrooms,
bathroom, and den. Open beamed ceilings were used throughout the home, which was
appointed in “informal, modern” furnishings provided by Barker Brothers. USC
promoted the Villageaire model in an illustrated brochure extolling the home’s “comfort,
convenience and charm” and modern amenities, such as a “New Freedom Gas Kitchen”
provided by Southern California Gas Company. In turn, the manufacturer of the stove
used in the “New Freedom” kitchen, Gaffers & Sattler, capitalized on this product

106
Ibid.
107
“The Villageaire Home, Designed by the School of Architecture, University of Southern California,”
n.d. (circa 1949). USC Libraries, University Archives.
198
 
 
Figure 53. The Villageaire Model Home, USC Student Project, 1948/1949, Baldwin
Hills, Los Angeles. After opening to the public, a reported 45,000 visitors
viewed the two-bedroom, 1,400-square-foot demonstration home.
Courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries, University
Archives.
199

Figure 54. The Villageaire Model Home, USC Student Project, 1948/1949. Village
Gardens, Baldwin Hills, Los Angeles. Courtesy of University of Southern
California Libraries, University Archives.
200
 
 
 
 
Figure 55. Villageaire Model Home, USC Student Project, 1948/1950, Los Angeles.
As the home appeared in circa 1950 (top) and 2010 (bottom). With the
exception of an addition on the rear elevation, original exterior features
and materials appear intact. Sources: “Villageaire Home, School of
Architecture,” courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries,
University Archives, and Kenneth Breisch, 2010.
201

Figure 56. Plan, Villageaire Model Home, USC Student Project, 1948/1949, Village
Gardens, Baldwin Hills, Los Angeles.

Consisting of two adjacent wings, oriented away from the street, the
interior was planned to make maximum use of its 1,400 square feet while
also maintaining “complete separation of living and sleeping quarters.”
An open dining-living room anchors the one-story wing, which offers the
requisite feature of indoor-outdoor integration through an extended wall of
large-pane glazing and glass doors, leading onto the patio and garden. The
adjacent wing, elevated over a garage, contained the bedrooms, bathroom,
and a den.

Source: “Villageaire Home, School of Architecture, University of
Southern California.” Courtesy of University of Southern California
Libraries, University Archives.
202

placement in its own advertisements.
108
(Figure 57, “See the Gaffers & Sattler at
‘Villageaire’ Model Home in Baldwin Hills.”) According to the agreement with
California Federal Savings and Loan, following the four-month demonstration period,
any proceeds from an ultimate sale were to return to the School of Architecture for a
research fund.
The Villageaire opened for public viewing on January 8, 1950. Within a week of
its premiere, 5,000 visitors had reportedly toured the property,
109
which was promoted by
USC, the local press, and the manufacturers whose products, including furnishings,
appliances, carpets, and drapes, completed the USC students’ ideas for a consumer-
friendly contemporary home. (Figure 58, “Villageaire, Model SC Home, Draws
Visitors,” Los Angeles Times coverage of Villageaire’s January 1950 debut week.) By
April 1950, when Villageaire closed for public viewing, an estimated 45,000 visitors had
toured the modest two-bedroom residence.
110
Based on this success, a similar project,
directed by Gallion and Burge, was launched in 1952 in Monterey Park, for another
1400-square-foot home to be constructed on a lot donated by the companies developing
the subdivision as a whole (Kenbo Corporation and Contempo Homes).
111

While modest in size and artistic pretension, the Villageaire model home (as well
as the subsequent project in Monterey Park) represents an example of the continuing
fervor for demonstration housing and the “ideal home of the future.” Constructed for a
cost of $16,500, with an eye toward securing mortgage backing, the home represented an

108
Display Ad 137, Gaffers & Sattler, Los Angeles Times, 26 February 1950.
109
“Villageaire, Model SC Home, Draws Visitors,” Los Angeles Times, 15 January 1950.
110
“Villageaire Home to Close,” Los Angeles Times, 9 April 1950. For estimates of visitors to the
demonstration home, see also “SC Student Architects to Erect Model Home,” Los Angeles Times, 18 May
1952.
111
“SC Student Architects to Erect Model Home.”
203
 

Figure 57. Advertisement by Gaffers & Sattler, the manufacturers of the stove in
Villageaire’s “New Freedom Kitchen.” “See the Gaffers & Sattler at
‘Villageaire’ Model Home in Baldwin Hills… Designed and built by
U.S.C. School of Architecture.” A small sketch of the USC student
designed home completes the advertisement. Source: Los Angeles Times,
26 February 1950.

204

Figure 58. Los Angeles Times coverage of Villageaire’s January 1950 debut week,
during which 5,000 visitors reportedly tour the home. To the right of this
photo, the entrance and foyer are shown, separated from the house by a
glass partition. Villageaire Model Home, USC Student Project, 1948/1949.
Source: Los Angeles Times, 15 January 1950.
205

everyman’s Case Study House. In addition, the project reflects the local impact of USC’s
long pedagogical tradition of hands-on student projects and a socially responsive
curriculum (in this case, as seen in the continuing focus on FHA-backed small-house
design).
Continuing this tradition, and following in the footsteps of his former design
instructor Baldwin, Straub, by then a design instructor at USC, explained to the Los
Angeles Times the approach for a 1955 School of Architecture design project focusing on
the small, well-designed house. (Figure 59, Small House Design, 1955, USC Design
Project, Calvin Straub.) Referring to the 1930’s housing movement, Straub claimed that
“In the last 25 years an astounding change has occurred in architecture, a new direction
almost without parallel in the history of building. The trained architect has begun to
participate in the design of small houses.” While this assertion might be overstated, it
reflects a continuation of the school’s 1930’s focus. In addition, Straub’s words on
planning mirror what had become a focal point in the College of Architecture’s design
curriculum for over twenty years:
housing and house design have become one of the most important aspects of the
new architectural education. …But even beyond this is a greater challenge, that
of the relationships in planning and design between the house, its neighborhood
and community. Safe and convenient walks to schools and shopping centers,
parks and recreational facilities, reasonable privacy and sociability with one’s
neighbors…all these and other concerns of reasonable planning are absolutely
necessary for good living.
112

Multi-family Residential Design

112
Straub, Calvin, “Small-House Tracts, A Challenge to Tomorrow’s Architect,” Los Angeles Times, 20
November 1955.
206

Figure 59. USC Design Project: Small House Design, 1955, led by USC alumni
(1943) and design instructor Calvin C. Straub. Third-year design instructor and USC
class of 1943 alumni Calvin Straub presents USC student projects. Source: Los Angeles
Times, 20 November 1955.
207

In the late 1930s, the 1937 Housing Act (the Wagner-Steagall Act) established
funding mechanisms for federally subsidized, low-cost housing. In response, in the late
1930s, USC design classes began focusing on multifamily dwellings. One such project in
1939 posed the problem of the design of a 16-family apartment house, sited on four
adjacent lots close to USC. (Figure 60, Multi-family Residential Project, 1939, USC
Design Project.) As with the planning project in Santa Ana, prior to design work, student
teams prepared economic, demographic, and market studies of the area. Said Baldwin,
the approach was meant to give students experience in the collaborative process that
architectural practice had become. Modern architectural practice, he wrote, included
“more than just drawing pretty facades,” and every architect should be prepared to
participate in “questions that must be solved collectively” and “discussions that should
make [the architect] alert to the conditions of today and not, as under the old school
regime of the Beaux-Arts Analytique, to adapt problems of ancient Greece and Rome.”
113

Offering students a new “perspective of reality,”
114
the project posed the problem
of designing “multiple dwelling structures so as to yield maximum income without
sacrificing spaciousness of living accommodations, architectural beauty and outdoor
living requirements.”
115
The design solutions show an attempt to incorporate key features
of contemporary single-family residential design into multifamily housing. In Los
Angeles Times coverage of the project, the students were said to have reached a
“consensus” that “modern architecture is making full use of sun-decks, patios, glass brick

113
Baldwin, Clayton, “Streamlining in Architectural Education,” Architect and Engineer, vol. 139 (October
1939): 26-28.
114
Baldwin, “Streamlining in Architectural Education,” 26-28.
115
“Class Builds House Models, Actual Construction Methods Studied,” Los Angeles Times, 11 June 1939.
208

Figure 60. Multi-family Residential Project, 1939, led by Clayton Baldwin.
“Professor Clayton M. Baldwin, USC College of Architecture, explaining
model of 16-family apartment house.” This student model, which appears
to draw inspiration from the International Style and the 1927 Weissenhof
housing exhibit in Stuttgart, was also highlighted in the Los Angeles Times
article reporting on this class project, as shown in Figure 61 below.
Source: Architect and Engineer, October 1939, p. 28.

209

and a profusion of windows.”
116
The student project highlighted in press coverage of the
class owes a clear debt to the International Style, in a design configuration and detailing
that recalled contributions to the widely published Weissenhof exhibit in Stuttgart,
Germany, in 1927. (Figure 61, USC College of Architecture, 1939, Second-year design
class tackles problem of modern multifamily housing.)

World War II
With the outbreak of World War II in Europe, prior to the US entry into the war,
the College of Architecture and Fine Arts again shifted gears and launched defense-
related coursework, beginning in 1941 with Fundamentals of Camouflage and Protective
Concealment of Industrial Plants. The curriculum shifts aimed to introduce students to
concepts in the design of defense-related projects such as bomb shelters, hospitals, and
airports. (Figure 62, USC War-time Curriculum, 1942, Dean Weatherhead and student
pose before a design of an airport.) The Los Angeles Times described the changes to the
college’s curriculum in 1941:
Theoretical enemy bombers would have difficulty in locating their camouflaged
targets in this area if designs by students in the College of Architecture and Fine
Arts…are carried out. For camouflage along with other defense measures of
emergency housing, the designing of wartime hospitals and structural protection
of civilians against bombardment are to be features of class projects in
architecture.

From studies in the experiences of England the S.C. students will be assigned
projects in planning bomb shelters—not merely holes in the ground but places of
refuge designed to suggest pleasant surroundings and affording relaxation from
mental stress.
117

116
Ibid.
117
“S.C. Course in Architecture Altered to Fit Defense Needs, Students Will Learn to Design Bomb
Shelters, Airports, Hospitals and Other War Projects,” Los Angeles Times, 7 September 1941.
210

Figure 61. Multi-family Residential Project, 1939. USC College of Architecture,
1939. Second-year design class tackles problem of modern multifamily
housing. Source: Los Angeles Times, 11 June 1939.

211

Figure 62. USC War-time Curriculum, 1942: Dean Weatherhead and student pose
before a design of an airport. Source: USC Daily Trojan, 24 September
1942. Courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries, University
Archives.

212

Design classes took on defense-related projects such as large-scale hospitals
“designed to care for large numbers of persons in the quickest possible time” and
“properly camouflaged” factories, “planned for speed in production.”
118
Courses in the
“art of camouflage” focused on how to create “false shadows and confusing colorings
and combinations of materials,” partly through “utilizing paints that will not fade and
objects that will not be detected by enemy aerial photographers. A study of optics also
will be included in the class projects.”
119
Weatherhead also previewed for the Los
Angeles Times the topics of upcoming design classes:
Population evacuation, emergency housing, the designing of arsenals, airports and
the building of emergency communities for workers are lessons to be learned by
the S.C. embryo architects who at the same time are given instruction in
architectural principles of graphics, engineering, material studies, estimating and
construction costs and research.
120

In 1943, the El Rodeo Yearbook reflected a College of Architecture fully in war-
mode:
Bomb defense buildings, airport layouts, and bomb proofing instruction was the
curricula sign of the times in the College of Architecture. Fine Arts students
studied the intricacies of war camouflage. Embryo architects emphasized model
cities planned for a peaceful future.
121

Other colleges in the region, such as the University of California, Los Angeles, the Otis
Art Institute (run under the auspices of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), and the
Art Center School, responded similarly by instituting a variety of defense-related
construction or graphics projects. In 1943, in response to the need for additional trained

118
Ibid.
119
“S.C. Course in Architecture Altered to Fit Defense Needs.”
120
Ibid.
121
University of Southern California, El Rodeo Yearbook, 1943, “College of Architecture and Fine Arts,”
18. USC Libraries, University Archives.
213

occupational therapy aides, Weatherhead, assisted by ceramics instructor Glen Lukens,
diverted his attention from the College of Architecture and Fine Arts to help organize an
accelerated six-month course, to meet the demand for more aides. Courses were taught
by instructors with the medical training (including Lukens, who attended two years of
pre-medical school coursework), and Weatherhead led the effort to organize the
accelerated course.
122

Descriptions of the methods employed in USC’s war-time curriculum offer an
example for how the college’s design approach flexed and responded to the needs of the
day and sought to forward “sociological development.” One reflection of its success in
meeting this objective is seen in how little the college’s overarching philosophy, already
rooted in pragmatism and present-day conditions, needed to change, in spite of the
magnitude of the societal shifts and demands.

Close Associations with Allied Fields: Industrial Design

In his 1941 book, Weatherhead observed the modern trend among US schools of
architecture of establishing and strengthening ties with allied fields such as planning,
landscape architecture, and industrial design. As shown in this chapter, an active
engagement with planning had already begun at the College of Architecture in the early
1930s that continued and expanded in the postwar period. While coursework in
landscape architecture debuted in the mid-1930s, the advent of World War II and
defense-related coursework curtailed this initiative until the postwar period. Another

122
Wilson, Bess M., “Occupational Therapy Training to Be Given, S.C. Offers Educational Course to Meet
Wartime Demand for More Workers,” Los Angeles Times, 29 January 1943.
214

1930’s initiative to expand the College of Architecture’s offerings in the allied arts,
however, that did succeed was the introduction of a curriculum in industrial design.
Whereas in 1931 industrial design represented one of several themes explored in
general Fine Arts’ design classes, by 1934 the College of Architecture and Fine Arts
offered a dedicated three-year series in Industrial Design. From circa 1934 through 1939,
the three-year design courses offered
Design I Creative design in actual materials. Construction of forms in at least ten
of the leading fields of the industrial arts and interior design. Development of
hand skills for the purpose of acquiring a sensitivity for fine organization in direct
use of materials as a basic training in design.

Design II A series of problems involving design for various branches of industry.
The designing of furniture and architectural interiors. Field trips to the shops and
studios in the city.

Design III More comprehensive problems in industrial design and in the
complete architectural interior.
123

Throughout the 1930s, two modernist industrial designers, both European-born
and trained, served as the College of Architecture’s principal lecturers in industrial
design. Leading the series in 1934 was Kem Weber, an acclaimed architect and artist
educated at the Berlin Kunstgewerbeschule (Academy of Applied Arts), where he studied
under Werkbund member and co-founder, Bruno Paul. While at USC, which he joined in
1932, Weber debuted his famous Airline Chair, a work earning him the praise of art
critics Sheldon and Martha Cheney as “the first West Coast designer to bring a tradition-

123
USC Bulletin, 1937-1938, 45.
215

free, machine-age creativeness to American interior design.”
124
(Figure 63, USC
Industrial Design Lecturer, Kem Weber, Airline Chair, 1934.)
By the mid-1930s, the industrial design curriculum featured prominently in the
college’s self-promotion, as seen in newspaper articles and the annual yearbook. In 1936,
for example, El Rodeo Yearbook expressed kudos for Weatherhead, who “has been
responsible for the remarkable national standing of this SC branch,” and announced new
coursework in industrial design led by Paul T. Frankl, “nationally known modernist.”
125

In 1937, El Rodeo Yearbook again highlighted the arrival of Frankl and offerings of the
industrial design program, writing that
Southern California is rapidly developing into the art center of the west, not only
in Fine Arts, but in modern industrial design. The College of Architecture and
Fine Arts is striving to meet one of the outstanding needs of the community in its
courses in ceramics, interiors, fabrics, and pottery work, as well as in other
industrial fields which are daily becoming ‘design conscious’.
126

A native of Vienna, Frankl studied architecture and painting in Paris before
emigrating to the United States in 1914. For twenty years he lived and worked in New
York City, but, after a 1934 visit to California, he decided to love New York from afar
and relocate to Los Angeles: “He had found a place where he could enjoy the climate
instead of suffering from it. He became a Californian.”
127
Two years later, in 1936,
Frankl joined the faculty at the USC College of Architecture and Fine Arts. As Weber
before him, Frankl engaged the topic of style more directly than did Weatherhead; but, in

124
Cheney, Sheldon, and Martha Cheney, Art and the Machine: An Account of Industrial Design in 20
th

Century America (New York: Acanthus Press, 1936).
125
University of Southern California, El Rodeo Yearbook, 1936, “College of Architecture and Fine Arts,”
88. USC Libraries, University Archives.
126
University of Southern California, El Rodeo Yearbook, 1937, “College of Architecture and Fine Arts,”
81. USC Libraries, University Archives.
127
“Studio and Sanctuary, Los Angeles, Paul Frankl, Designer,” Interiors and Industrial Design, vol. CVII,
no. 2 (September 1947), 90-91, cited here p. 90.
216

Figure 63. USC Industrial Design Lecturer, Kem Weber, Airline Chair, 1934.
Featured in 2010 as an auction item on Christie’s, selling for $7,000 to
$10,000. Source: “Architonic, The Independent Resource for
Architecture and Design,” http://www.architonic.com.
217

doing so, he articulated the design ethos of the College of Architecture with respect to
“modern” design embodying not a set of stylistic tropes but “present-day requirements”
and the application of “common sense to our building and decorating program.” Writing
in California Arts and Architecture, in an article entitled “Modern Will Live,” Frankl
wrote in 1938 that
What we are striving for is a new organic architecture, a new conception of
building that approaches our present day requirements as closely as possible. The
new house is no longer broken up into a lot of rooms with insufficient light and
air, but is a house in which space flows into space—every room a “living” room,
and every room a “sun” room… That house, like a tree, must be rooted in the soil
it springs from, it must fit its environments and serve its purpose. Its floor plan
must be clear, clean-cut, logical, and suited to its needs. The intrinsic beauty of
the materials used in its construction must be preserved and this house, like a tree
even without foliage blossoms, will be beautiful in its stark honesty.

[T]he question is not “Shall we go modern?” but rather “Shall we apply common
sense to our building and decorating program?” By applying common sense to
your problem, you will help to develop a style of our own quicker, surer, and
more convincingly than the talk about Art, Style, and Modernity.
128

For Frankl, a common-sense interior combined the craftsmanship and also
Japanese inflection of the California Arts and Crafts with interwar notions of function
and reform (through, for example, the use of built-in furniture and storage). (Figures 64
and 65, USC Industrial Design Lecturer Paul T. Frankl, Studio, Los Angeles.) Of
Frankl’s Los Angeles studio, which resembles the work of postwar USC graduates such
as Buff, Straub, and Hensman, Interiors + Industrial Design wrote that
It takes courage to design as simple an interior as this. Sliding doors of wood-
framed Temlite add to the Oriental effect. Frankl’s color scheme, subdued and
also faintly Oriental, was a combination of naturals, pale yellows and golds, with
brown trim and occasional accents in dark green plants, cinna bar-red carvings.
129

128
Frankl, Paul T., “Modern Will Live,” California Arts and Architecture, March 1938.
129
“Paul Frankl, Designer,” Interiors + Industrial Design, 91.
218

Figure 64. USC Industrial Design Lecturer, Paul T. Frankl, Studio, Los Angeles. “It
takes courage to design as simple an interior as this. Sliding doors of
wood-framed Temlite add to the Oriental effect. Frankl’s color scheme,
subdued and also faintly Oriental, was a combination of naturals, pale
yellows and golds, with brown trim and occasional accents in dark green
plants, cinna bar-red carvings. Frankl used the ubiquitous Temlite
screening both horizontally and vertically.” Source: “Studio and
Sanctuary, Los Angeles, Paul Frankl, Designer,” Interiors + Industrial
Design, September 1947.
219

Figure 65. USC Industrial Design Lecturer, Paul T. Frankl, Studio, Los Angeles.
“Paul T. Frankl Associates, Bolts of Cloth and Storage, Beverly Hills, CA.
Source: Maynard L. Parker Collection, Huntington Library.

220

In 1939, the industrial design curriculum was expanded to a four-year course,
leading to a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a concentration in industrial design. Actively
promoting the new program in the Los Angeles Times, at the start of the first semester,
Weatherhead emphasized that the new program made USC one of a few colleges in the
country offering a professional degree in industrial design.
130
Leading the new curriculum
was Hudson B. Roysher, a graduate of the Cleveland School of Art and “for many years a
prominent industrial designer” in Chicago; before coming west, Roysher had led the
University of Illinois Department of Industrial Design.
131
The goals of the Industrial
Design program reflected Weatherhead’s concern for the realities of everyday practices
and the employability of his graduates. (Figure 66, USC Industrial Design Students,
1939, “They’ll Design for You in Years to Come.”) At the close of the first semester, the
Industrial Design program was thus described in another article in the Los Angeles Times:
These boys and girls, members of the Industrial Design class at the University of
Southern California, are preparing themselves for apprentice employment in
various manufacturing lines calling for expert designers… They make and study
models of radios, furniture pieces, inlaid table tops, lamps, package designs,
containers for perfumes—many other articles also closely connected with home
and other building equipment.

This four-year course was instituted at S.C. last September; already has a large
membership. Prof. Hudson G. Roysher, formerly of the University of Illinois,
inaugurated the course; supervises instruction. The training given is seen as
powerfully furthering the campaign launched here to place young people in lines
of work for which they are adapted, that they like and that will bring them steady
employment throughout the years of their work careers after they leave school.
132

In a reflection of the expanded industrial and commercial design curricula, the
newly inaugurated Harris Hall incorporated equipment and shops for industrial design,

130
“New Courses Planned at S.C., Industrial Design Classes Scheduled for Opening in Fall,” Los Angeles
Times, 6 August 1939.
131
Ibid.
132
“They’ll Design for You in Years to Come,” Los Angeles Times, 24 December 1939.
221

Figure 66. USC Industrial Design Students, December 1939. “They’ll Design for
You in Years to Come.” Source: Los Angeles Times, 24 December 1939.
222

which Roysher led until circa 1944. When Gallion arrived in 1945, he established a
separate Department of Industrial Design, leading for the first time to a Bachelor of
Science in Industrial Design.

Conclusion

This chapter has demonstrated that, at the USC College of Architecture,
pedagogical reform and the establishment of a contemporary, pragmatic curriculum (one
that became closely associated with the region’s Mid-Century Modern architecture) had
its origins not in the caesura of 1945 but the climate of reform and social upheaval of the
1930s. In addition to the similarities in coursework, class projects in the pre- and postwar
periods employed similar methodologies, such as emphasizing three-dimensional
modeling and visualization exercises over paper techniques, and a focus on planning and
housing. The multidisciplinary program, which was well established by the late 1930s
and remained intact until the early 1960s, reflected the balance Weatherhead sought to
achieve—and Gallion maintained—between “original expression” in design, a practical,
hands-on understanding of the technical side of architecture, and present-day conditions
and regional identity.
223

Chapter 5

“The Challenge of the Postwar World Is Here”:
Continuity and Change in the Postwar USC School of Architecture

By the summer of 1945, Arthur Weatherhead had retired and Arthur Gallion had
accepted the deanship of the College of Architecture. In his inaugural bulletin, published
in September 1945, Gallion frankly addressed the new chapter, writing that “The
challenge of the postwar world is here…and it demands active leadership by the architect
and industrial designer in shaping the future physical environment for the well-being of
man.” With the foundation laid by Weatherhead, Gallion led the College of Architecture
during a period of rapid expansion of not only the college’s enrollment but the region’s
built environment. Whereas the departmental statements through the 1930s and 1940s
referred to the future era in which architects would design and plan for a post-Great
Depression world, then a post-World War II world, the postwar statements reflected the
sense of possibility that the era of expansion had finally arrived. The strategy for
preparing young architects, according to Gallion, remained a pragmatic, multidisciplinary
approach:
The advanced training in Architecture includes the technical and economic
aspects of creative building, the cultural relation of architecture to contemporary
life, the exacting requirements of the building industry, and the expanding field of
planning and urban redevelopment. In the architectural design courses there is
continual emphasis upon contemporary trends, and during the last two years
special courses are devoted to urban planning and housing.
1

1
USC Bulletin, School of Architecture, 1951-1953, vol. 46, no. 17 (1 October 1951), 11. USC Libraries,
University Archives.
224

While these departmental statements did not change radically from the late 1940s
through the 1950s, one of the significant shifts brought by Gallion was not one of
philosophy as much as leadership style. Gallion, born in 1902 and a full generation
younger than Weatherhead, was old enough that his career had been shaped by the Great
Depression but young enough that his tenure initiated a more informal environment in
terms of faculty-student relations. USC alumnae interviewed for this study recalled that,
while Weatherhead appeared to be more remote, Gallion sought to erode the traditional
divide between faculty and students, with many of his former students recalling Gallion
as having been accessible and interested in their studies and progress.
2

One concrete reflection of this shift is seen in Gallion’s hiring policies. While he
retained a large share of the prewar staff, many of them USC alumnae, Gallion also hired
a number of recent USC graduates, in many cases within a year after completing studies.
Examples include Gordon Drake, Calvin Straub, Byron Davis, Walter Teague, Arthur
O’Leary, Conrad Buff III, Donald Hensman, Randell Makinson, and Emmett Wemple,
who was said to have become the “father confessor” for students.
3
The staffing expansion
also reflects, of course, the rapid increase in the college’s postwar enrollment. But
Gallion’s specific additions to the faculty suggest an understanding of the school’s
philosophy and an intention to continue it.

2
The following USC alumnae, as well as local architects and historians, gave generously of their time in
interviews carried out by the author in the course of this study: Rudi DeChellis, Ena Dubnoff, Eugene
Flores, Frank Gehry, John Grist, Ray and Shelley Kappe, John Kelsey, William Krisel, Randell Makinson,
Carl McLarand, Ed Niles, John Reed, Frank Sata, Dennis Smith, Greg Walsh, Eugene Weston III, and Chet
Widom. The results of this ongoing oral history project will be published as a separate volume with
transcribed interviews.
3
Timme, Robert, “Preface,” in Steele, James, ed., Buff & Hensman (Los Angeles, CA: USC Architectural
Guild Press, 2004), 10.
225

While the curriculum and continued focus on residential design, planning,
prefabrication, and economy reflected the pre-WWII program, the postwar manufacturing
advances and building boom impacted the school’s approach and the work of its
graduates. In the postwar period, economy and prefabrication increasingly translated into
modular design, a movement with roots in the 1930s that took off in the postwar period
following the 1945 adoption of the 4-foot module as the American Standard
Measurement, or ASM, for manufacturers.
4
At USC, the ideas of modular post-and-beam
construction, diagrammatic planning (to ensure economy of space and functional
program), as well as site-specific design and indoor-outdoor integration continued to be
developed in the design philosophy. Straub, who became the anchor of the design faculty
under Gallion, became one of the strongest proponents for modular coordination,
expressed in wood post-and-beam design. (Figures 67 and 68, Greg Walsh, “A Panel
House,” circa 1952/1953. Third-Year Design Project for Calvin Straub.) The emphasis
on modular coordination continued into at least the early 1960s; as Eugene Flores (1962)
said, the students’ motto at the time was, “When in doubt, modulate.”
5

Administratively, Gallion’s first order of business was the separation of the
architecture and fine arts curricula. This initiated another name change for the program,
to the “College of Architecture,” and the transfer of the Department of Fine Arts to the
College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences. In 1949, one final name change christened the
“School of Architecture,” reflecting the present name. The 1945 split between fine arts

4
Greg Hise describes the origins of the movement for “a new conception of modern houses,” and the work
of Farwell Bemis, one of the early authors of the movement to place manufacturing technology in the
service of housing. Hise, Greg, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 56-85.
5
Flores, Eugene, Interview with author, 23 June 2009, Pasadena, California.
226

Figure 67. Greg Walsh, “A Panel House,” circa 1952/1953. Third-Year Design
Project for Calvin Straub. The modular, post-and-beam design featured
indoor-outdoor integration and diagrammatic “zones for living.” Reprinted
courtesy of Greg Walsh.

Figure 68. Greg Walsh, “A Panel House,” circa 1952/1953. Third-Year Design
Project for instructor Calvin Straub. Living room section, shows
landscaping and transitional space between indoors and out. Reprinted
courtesy of Greg Walsh.
227

and architecture was a collegial “Hollywood divorce,” as sculptor and long-time faculty
member Merrell Gage described it: “The School of Fine Arts was separated from
Architecture,” he said, but “we are still on extremely good terms with our spouse, under
the same roof. Very pleasant to see old friends as we pass on the patio.”
6

Gallion launched three major initiatives in his first several years: the
establishment of a stand-alone Department of Industrial Design and in-house programs in
planning and landscape architecture. With the 1945 inauguration of the Department of
Industrial Design, the college offered for the first time a Bachelor and Master of Science
in Industrial Design. (The year 1939 brought a four-year program in Industrial Design,
but the conferred degree was a Bachelor of Fine Arts with an Industrial Design major.)
While in the 1930s industrial design classes were available as electives, architecture
students beginning in 1945 were required to take one year of basic industrial design,
covering “three-dimensional studies in form with emphasis upon the physical qualities,
possibilities, and limitations of various materials.”
7
By 1949, the industrial design faculty
had expanded to include Harry Greene, Hunt Lewis, and Salvatore Merendino, with an
advisory committee led by Raymond Loewy and Walter Teague, in a basic staffing
configuration maintained throughout the 1950s.
Planning remained part of the regular design curriculum but also became the
subject of a required two-year series. In Gallion’s first year at USC, he led the series,
which covered “the effect of changing civilizations and cultures on the form and design
of cities, contemporary urban planning, principles of large-scale planning and housing” in

6
“The Annual Dinner,” Journal of Architectural Education (1947-1974), vol. 12, no. 1, 42
nd
Annual
Convention of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (autumn 1956): 51-52.
7
USC Bulletin, Circular of Information, 1945-1946, vol. 40, no. 8 (September 1945), 33. USC Libraries,
University Archives.
228

the first year and “studies in city and regional planning, urban redevelopment and
housing” in the second.
8
In 1946, after Eisner had joined the faculty, he began leading
planning classes. In 1955, alongside Eisner and Henry Reining, Jr., dean of the School of
Public Administration, Gallion co-founded a graduate program in city and regional
planning at USC, jointly administered by the Schools of Architecture and Public
Administration.
9

In addition to the expansion of planning and industrial design, one of Gallion’s
important early initiatives was the establishment of USC’s landscape architecture
program. Gallion’s years with the San Francisco office of the Federal Housing Authority
(FHA) would have coincided with Garrett Eckbo’s tenure from 1939 to 1942 at the Farm
Security Administration (FSA), also in San Francisco. (Eckbo and Whitney Smith also
overlapped at the FSA in the mid-1930s; the two later formed a partnership, along with
Eisner and Wayne Williams, called the Community Facilities Planners, based in South
Pasadena.) While the details of their meeting are not known, Eckbo became one of
Gallion’s first additions to the faculty in 1946. For his part, Eckbo had just moved to Los
Angeles from the Bay Area. “This was heresy for a Bay Area native,” Eckbo later wrote
to Esther McCoy, “and the reasons were complex—weather better for my health, south
more open and dynamic, more opportunity there.”
10

Shortly thereafter, Gallion and Eckbo began discussing plans for a possible
Department of Landscape Design. In June 1947, Eckbo detailed his ideas in a memo to

8
USC Bulletin, 1945-1946, 32.
9
Gallion, Arthur, and Henry Reining, Jr., “The Planning Curriculum, University of Southern California,
1955/1956,” n.d. USC Libraries, University Archives.
10
Eckbo, Garrett, 1984, Letter to Esther McCoy, Garrett Eckbo Collection, Environmental Design
Archives, University of California, Berkeley, Project/Folder, Correspondence of Esther McCoy 1984, II.10.
229

Gallion, including courses, content, and sequence, as well as the justification for such a
program in Los Angeles.
11
Eckbo wrote,
There are two professional schools of landscape design on the west coast—one at
the University of California at Berkeley and one in Oregon. Thereafter the
nearest are in the middle west. Southern California, with is climate, its outdoor
living, and its tremendous interest in gardens and landscaping, is the natural place
for a professional landscape school of national prestige.
12

Yet, with no program in Southern California, Eckbo argued, students went elsewhere:
“The Division of Landscape Design at U.C. at Berkeley has 60 students this year. 20 of
these are from southern California. Before the war 20 was considered a good student
body by the Berkeley Division.”
13
Given the points of similarity between northern and
southern California, Eckbo envisioned “a sound blend of co-operation and competition”
between UC Berkeley and USC (Eckbo of course went on to become chairman of the
Department of Landscape Architecture at UC Berkeley in 1965).
Eckbo’s goal for the USC program – indeed, for the profession in general – was
the complete integration of architecture, landscape design, engineering, planning, and the
allied arts.
14
Eckbo wrote that
the next logical step in the development of modern architecture is for it to expand
its design concepts to truly take in the whole site space in a detailed and specific
way, and thus release the open plan and the glass wall from their present
limitation and frustration. Architecture and landscape design belong together;

11
Eckbo, Garrett, “Memo on the Establishment of a Department of Landscape Architecture at the
University of Southern California,” 3 June 1947, and Letter to Arthur B. Gallion, Dean, College of
Architecture, University of Southern California, 5 June 1947. Environmental Design Archives, University
of California, Berkeley, Garrett Eckbo, 1990-1 Collection, Project/Folder Correspondence, USC, 1947,
III.1.
12
Eckbo, “Memo, USC Landscape Architecture Department,” 1.
13
Ibid.
14
For studies on Eckbo, see for example Treib, Marc, and Dorothée Imbert, Garrett Eckbo: Modern
Landscapes for Living (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), and Alofsin,
Anthony, The Struggle for Modernism: Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning at
Harvard (New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002).
230

they supplement and complement each other; each is fragmentary and frustrating
without the other.
15

He added that he had “begun work on a book developing the various ideas suggested in
this memo,” in an apparent reference to his seminal 1950 work, Landscape for Living.
With architecture, engineering, and landscape fully integrated, Eckbo wrote that USC
would teach
an expanded concept covering the complete organization, indoor and outdoor,
roofed and unroofed, of all the three-dimensional space within the property lines
of each specific site, and the graduates of the school would have a clear
understanding of the functional, aesthetic, and technical problems involved.
16

Even in its initial stages, Eckbo wrote to Gallion, the USC landscape program could have
“greater integration between architecture and landscape design than exists in any other
school in the country.”
17

With Eckbo on board, the year 1947 introduced a required one-year course in
landscape design. In 1949, two years following Eckbo’s recommendations to Gallion,
two new major emphases in landscape design were announced: a Bachelor and a Master
of Science with majors in Landscape Design. Reflecting Eckbo’s ideas, landscape
coursework became integrated in the design sequence, with classes focusing on design,
engineering, construction, plants and botany (each component contributing to Eckbo’s
notion of total site design).
The USC curriculum in landscape design closely reflected Eckbo’s
recommendations. Landscape design required for architecture students covered site

15
Eckbo, “Memo, USC Landscape Architecture Department,” 2.
16
Eckbo, Letter to Gallion, 2.
17
Ibid, 2.
231

planning and the “fundamentals of landscape design and its relation to architecture.”
18

Coursework required for the degrees in landscape architecture, launched in 1949,
included Landscape Construction, covering “technical design factors” for hardscaping
elements such as “paving, walls, steps, drainage, screens and shelters,” and Landscape
Plant Materials (cross listed with Botany). Advanced landscape design introduced
“comprehensive projects in the theory and practice of landscape design” and the
“integration of landscape design with architectural design and urban planning.”
19

Eckbo remained on staff until 1956, after which point Straub and Wemple began
teaching landscape architecture. USC’s coursework in landscape architecture, including
the year-long requirement for architecture majors, remained intact until at least 1961.
During Eckbo’s time in Southern California, of course, his numerous collaborations
(with, among others, USC alumnae and faculty Ain, Smith, Williams, Buff, Straub, and
Hensman) became icons of the region’s Mid-Century Modernism. As Thomas Hine
observed, Eckbo “had work shown so often in popular publications that it became
synonymous with the relaxed, indoor-outdoor ‘California living’ they celebrated almost
monthly.”
20

The Gallion Years, 1945 to 1960
To end this study on this note of Gallion’s contributions to USC (of which this
chapter only begins to scratch the surface) might wrongly suggest, to paragraph James
Marston Fitch, the full “postwar realization of the prewar dream” with respect to USC’s

18
USC Bulletin, School of Architecture, 1949-1951, vol. 44, no. 12 (October 1, 1949), 31.
19
Ibid, 31-33.
20
Hine, Thomas, “The Search for the Postwar House,” in Smith, Elizabeth A.T., Blueprints for Modern
Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989), 167-181.
232

modern program. A concluding sketch on Gallion’s career will provide closing
comments and a brief context for the College of Architecture in the postwar years, until
the dean’s resignation in 1960.
In the same way that Weatherhead’s career had been shaped by the principal
challenge of his time—crafting an educational alternative to the Beaux-Arts system—
Gallion’s was shaped by the pressing issues of the postwar period, especially in terms of
city and regional planning and redevelopment. Indeed, given Gallion’s outspoken
advocacy for a strong planning program at USC and thoughtful planning policies in
Southern Californian cities, secondary literature has often misstated the dean’s training as
in planning. Gallion in fact was an architect by education and trade. In 1924, he received
a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign,
and by 1929, served as the university’s supervising architect.
21
After graduation, he
reportedly traveled throughout Europe and was awarded a fellowship to attend the Ecole
des Beaux-Arts. Following his European travels, he worked for “leading architectural
firms in Chicago and St. Louis,” with an emphasis on research in housing and planning,
22

before moving west with his wife Pearle in the 1930s.
In the 1930s, after relocating to the West Coast, Gallion turned his attention to
low-cost housing and community development during stints with the Housing Division of
the Public Works Administration (from 1934 to 1936) and the United States Housing

21
As with Weatherhead, Gallion does not appear to have left a collection of papers or archives;
biographical information on Gallion has been culled from a patchwork of sources, including public records
(census and voter registration records, as well as birth, death, and marriage records), press coverage, and
the American Architects Directory published by R.R. Bowker from the mid-1950s through early 1970s.
Directories consulted for this study included American Architects Directory (New York: R.R. Bowker,
1956, 1962, 1970).
22
“Dean at USC Named,” Architect and Engineer, vol. 162 (July 1945): 12. See also “Federal Official
New S.C. Dean,” Los Angeles Times, 10 June 1945.
233

Authority (1938 to 1945).
23
His participation in a statewide survey of housing conditions
led to the announcement in 1938 by Gallion that the most urgent need was for subsidized
low-cost housing (for those earning less than $1,000 a year); in January 1938, Gallion
testified before the interim Committee on Social Welfare of the California State
Assembly that the need had become so acute that “private enterprises cannot afford to
provide suitable homes for these persons at a rent they could pay.”
24

This background would have made Gallion an ideal candidate for the deanship of
USC in 1945, just as the region’s long-awaited building expansion began. In 1950, five
years into his tenure as dean, Gallion was selected to design a public housing project in
Pacoima, one of nine areas in the San Fernando Valley deemed by the Federal Housing
Authority to be “blighted.” One year earlier, in 1949, his colleague Simon Eisner had
been appointed acting director of Los Angeles’s nascent redevelopment agency; in a
reflection of the optimism of the era, Eisner later recalled his initial goals for the agency:
“LA has 60 square miles of blighted area, and we were going to tackle that thing
wholesale. … I was naïve and thought that once you a federal law and lots of money, you
could do anything.”
25
As Dana Cuff observed, however, “[u]rban redevelopment, in fact,
had demonstrated just how effectively a housing program could undermine affordable
housing.”
26

The Pacoima Public Housing Project, funded through Title I of the 1949 Federal
Housing Act, reflected the pre-1945 trends observed by Hise and Cuff, respectively, of an

23
American Architects Directory, 1956, 188.
24
“Committee Is Told Need for Housing Facilities in State,” Modesto Bee and Herald-News (Modesto,
CA), 10 January 1938.
25
Cuff, Dana, The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge, MA:
The MIT Press, 2000), 301-302.
26
Cuff, The Provisional City, 302.
234

emphasis on planning the neighborhood as a stand-alone unit and of placing modernism
(in this case, a modern garden city) in the service of social housing. While Gallion, in
collaboration with Victor Gruen, engineer Edgardo Contini, and landscape architect
Francis Dean, began plans for Pacoima in 1950, the advent of the Korean War delayed
construction, and the project was ultimately not completed until October 1955. (Figures
69 and 70, Gallion and Gruen’s Pacoima Public Housing Project.)
With its self-contained garden apartment complex of 450 “modern dwelling
units,” the example of the Pacoima Public Housing Project is not meant to illustrate the
success of actors such as Gallion in creating a foothold for modern public housing (a goal
pursued at USC since the late 1930s) but rather the school’s continuing emphasis on the
social utility of architecture and good design. As has been well documented in the
scholarly literature, the ultimate failure of public housing in Los Angeles reflected the
complex, highly charged political landscape of the early 1950s.
27
In this era, of course,
architecture and aesthetics became another weapon in the Cold War. (The now-famous
flap over Elizabeth Gordon’s 1953 House Beautiful article, in which she conflated the
road to fascism with International Style modernism, offers just one example of the
rhetorical charge that was increasingly assigned to architectural style).
28

27
For studies on the ultimate fate of public housing policy in Los Angeles, see, among others, Cuff, The
Provisional City, and Cuff, Dana, “Fugitive Plans in the Provisional City: Slums and Public Housing in Los
Angeles,” in Looking for Los Angeles, Charles G. Salas and Michael S. Roth, ed. (Los Angeles: Getty
Research Institute, 2001), 97-132; Sitton, Tom, Los Angeles Transformed: Fletcher Bowron’s Urban
Reform Revival, 1938-1953 (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), and Parson,
Donald Craig, Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the Direction of Modern Los
Angeles” (Duluth, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
28
One recent study of Gordon is found in Penick, Monica Michelle, “The Pace Setter Houses: Livable
Modernism in Postwar America” (PhD Dissertation, University of Texas, Austin, 2007). However,
Penick’s work would have benefited from a more critical examination of Gordon’s politics. This acritical
stance leads Penick to question, for example, William Wurster’s strong rejoinder to Gordon’s 1953 attack
235
 
Figure 69. Urban redevelopment and public housing in Los Angeles, Gallion and
Gruen’s Pacoima Public Housing. Source: Progressive Architecture,
February 1954, p. 73.

Figure 70. Urban redevelopment and public housing in Los Angeles, Gallion and
Gruen’s Pacoima Public Housing. Source: Progressive Architecture,
April 1956, p. 120.
236

In this era, though, Gallion began to reengage the topic of aesthetics. Whereas
Weatherhead had argued that architectural precedent should influence contemporary
design, he avoided citing references. With the debate on art versus pragmatism in
pedagogy largely resolved, Gallion appears to have had license to address the topic more
freely. His comments reflect not only his views on the topic but also the degree to which
the issue had influenced progressive educators and architects of Weatherhead’s
generation. In the February 1949 issue of the Journal of the American Institute of
Architects, Gallion wrote that the field of architecture was “perched” on the “horns of a
dilemma” regarding the aesthetics of architecture: “Eclecticism drained the substance
from the tradition of architecture and imitated the hollow forms that remained. In our
search for a substitute there is a tendency to glorify the technology of our day as the
moving spirit of architecture.”
29
Gallion essentially describes the beliefs of
Weatherhead’s generation when he noted that architects, “[n]aturally reacting against the
empty and artificial esthetic formula of eclecticism, a formula of science and technology
is substituted.” The result, was an understandable but mistaken “reluctance of some
serious artists to accept “esthetics” as part of their professional vocabulary”:
Does it seem probable, for instance, that Ictinus was removed from his society
when he worked upon the Parthenon; or can we imagine that Gothic builders were
insulated from the social and spiritual character of their time? Was architecture of
the past—great or humble—conceived by men working in a social and economic
vacuum; were they simply concerned with building as a technical exercise in
stone and mortar?

on the International Style. Wurster’s pointed response, as well as his own work for the Case Study House
program, though, might have provided reasons for a more critical consideration of Gordon’s politics.
29
Gallion, Arthur, Guest Editorial, Journal of the American Institute of Architects (February 1949): 51-53,
quoted here p. 51.
237

If we were wiling to face up to reality, we might appropriately identity our
dilemma as a cultural vacuum into which technical and scientific phenomena have
been drawn—then misinterpreted as cultural itself.

Returning to the topic that most defined his professional life, Gallion argues that the
architect’s search for “human purpose” and “cultural values” lies in “his interest in the
social and economic, as well as the technical, aspects of city planning.” In this way,
Gallion writes, the architect “perceives an active connection with his society.”
A more direct comment on stylistic debts was made by Gallion in 1952, when he
contributed to and oversaw the publication of a guide to Southern California’s
contemporary architecture, compiled by USC students.
30
The 1952 project identified
architects and movements the authors believed influenced the trajectory of Southern
Californian modernism. The opening essay cited Bay Area architects Bernard Maybeck
and Willis Polk as well as the Greene brothers and Irving Gill in Southern California as
influences for Los Angeles’s current generation of practitioners. Much like David
Gebhard and Robert Winter’s oft-reprinted guide to Los Angeles’s architecture, the 1952
USC guide divided all buildings by geographical areas, illuminated by area maps.
Spanning residential, commercial, and industrial buildings, the book provided
descriptions of each building, including whether visitors could view buildings, and, if so,
whom they could call. Alvin Lustig, the art director of Arts and Architecture, designed
the book cover.
Although the heritage of the “California school” of Maybeck and the Greenes was
claimed as part of Los Angeles’s modernist heritage, the tone of regional pride was

30
Harris, Frank, and Weston Bonenberger, ed., “A Guide to Contemporary Architecture in Southern
California” (Los Angeles: 1952).
238

tempered. For example, the text asserted rather lightly that, what stood out about the
work of early twentieth-century architects in the Bay Area and Southern California was
that their work “had little connection with that which had become the tradition in the
greater United States.”
31
The influence of Frank Lloyd Wright, Rudolph Schindler,
Richard Neutra, Gregory Ain, and Harwell Hamilton Harris also played a role in the
narrative as having paved the way for modernism’s maturation. The end of World War
II, the book asserted, “seemed to signal the acceptance of this architectural expression as
a new way of living.”
32
The work of USC alumnae and faculty, such as Soriano, Ain,
Straub, Drake, and Smith were generously represented in the study.
Gallion also discussed the Japanese influence in Southern Californian modernism.
Following a six-month “research study” trip, which took him to Japan, Spain, and India,
among other countries, though, the dean looked right over the top of the Arts and Crafts
(as a line of transmission for Japanese ideas) and directly to Japan itself as an influence in
California’s modern residential architecture:
“The Japanese use of fine wood construction over the centuries, for instance, is an
example of their influence on us today, particularly in our residential areas,” the
dean said, “California outdoor living as an architectural theme has come to be
associated with the west. It is an adaptation of the 15-17
th
century culture of the
Orient.”
33

The trip also took Gallion to Chandigarh, where Le Corbusier’s capitol city was in
progress at the time. He struck a similar note as Weatherhead when he explained to the

31
Ibid, 4.
32
Ibid, 6.
33
“Ancient Oriental Architecture Influenced Southland Builders,” Independent Star News (Pasadena, CA),
20 October 1957.
239

Pasadena Independent Star News that Corbusier was “a French architect who uses ultra
modern themes.”
Of course, Cold War-era architectural discourse went well beyond style and
historic precedent, and USC felt the effects, both direct and indirect. Gallion had long
advocated for social housing but avoided the harassment that befell his associate in the
early stages of the Pacoima Public Housing Project, Frank Wilkinson (who, in 1952, was
accused of harboring communist sympathies and fired from the Los Angeles Housing
Authority).
34
For his part, Wilkinson recalled Gallion as being “socially-concerned,” as
Anthony Denzer noted.
35
Prior to his dismissal from the Los Angeles Housing Authority,
Gallion “brought Wilkinson to USC once a year to take students on slum tours of Los
Angeles.”
36
Denzer also described the blacklisting of modernist architect and USC
lecturer, Gregory Ain.
37
While Ain was not formally called before the House Un-
American Activities Committee (HUAC) during their Los Angeles meetings, his name
appeared twice on lists of the politically suspect. The subsequent blacklisting experienced
by Ain was but one in a series of events triggering the architect’s virtual withdrawal from
active practice in the early 1950s and turn toward teaching, first at USC as a visiting

34
Dana Cuff provides detail on Wilkinson’s career and firing, as well as the blacklisting and personal and
professional repercussions he suffered as a result of the HUAC accusations. Cuff, The Provisional City.
35
Denzer, Anthony, Gregory Ain: The Modern Home as Social Commentary. (New York: Rizzoli
Publications, 2008), 199-225.
36
Denzer, Gregory Ain, 202.
37
Denzer provides additional detail on the consequences of the “red scare” and professional blacklisting on
the careers of both Ain and Wilkinson, who were friends and colleagues. Denzer also offers extended
comments on this period in Ain’s career, as the architect withdrew from active practice and became
increasingly involved in architectural pedagogy, both at USC and, in the early 1960s, the University of
Pennslyvania. Denzer, Gregory Ain, 199-225.
240

lecturer from 1949 through the early 1960s, then at the University of Pennsylvania as
head of the Department of Architecture.
38

Flores recalled Gallion’s defense of Ain, as the blacklisting had led to “some
voices” calling for Ain’s removal:
[Gallion] defended Greg to the administration. …I’ve always credited Dean
Gallion for giving Greg that opportunity and taking a chance on him. And I don’t
know how he knew what his ability at teaching was, I have no idea how that
happened. …But he certainly knew his abilities to be an architectural critic of
highest regard.
39

Frank Gehry (USC 1954) recalled similar troubles experienced by Eckbo. Gehry
and his classmate (and future partner) Walsh, though, recall Gallion as taking a moderate
position and encouraging his students to do the same. On separate occasions, Gallion
took both Gehry and Walsh aside to explain, as Gehry recalls, that “there are two sides to
the road, and you can see both sides better from the middle.
40

In 1950, as mentioned in the previous section, Gallion co-authored the book The
Urban Pattern: City Planning and Design with Simon Eisner.
41
While planning issues
preoccupied Gallion, he also continued his private practice in Southern California,
occasionally partnering with recent USC graduates, such as Straub, in order to help
young architects complete commissions prior to being licensed. In March 1956, Gallion
was nominated to advancement to fellowship in the American Institute of Architects
(AIA), an honor that was subsequently bestowed in 1957. In William Wurster’s letter to

38
Ibid, 200-201. Ain’s name first appears in course catalogs as a “visiting lecturer” in 1949. While Denzer
observed that Ain was teaching full-time by 1952, the title listed for him in course catalogs throughout the
1950s indicated he was a “visiting critic.”
39
Flores, Eugene, Interview with author, 23 June 2009, Pasadena, California.
40
Gehry, Frank, Interview with author, 19 June 2009, Venice, California.
41
Gallion, Arthur B., and Simon Eisner, The Urban Pattern: City Planning and Design (New York and
London: D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc., 1950).
241

the AIA Jury of Fellows on behalf of Gallion, Wurster, by then dean of the College of
Architecture at UC Berkeley, wrote:
It is my understanding that the name of Arthur B. Gallion is before you for
advancement to Fellowship. I have known Arthur Gallion since 1940. He has a
breadth of interest in architecture which includes housing, civic design, teaching
and practice. To each of these areas he has made fine contributions and
recognition of this will be appropriate and deserved. I feel the Institute will gain
by this act.
42

In June 1960, Gallion announced his resignation from USC in order to take a
position as the director of planning for the firm Harland, Bartholemew, and Associates, in
Honolulu, Hawaii.
43
The same month he announced his departure, Gallion received the
“Silver Scarab” award from USC’s chapter of the national honorary architecture
fraternity, the Scarab Fraternity, “in recognition of his contributions to the growth and
development of architectural education in the United States.”
44
(Three years earlier, his
son, Alan, still attending USC and then-president of the Scarab Fraternity, presented the
same award to the Los Angeles Times Home magazine “in recognition of an outstanding
contribution to the profession of architecture and allied arts.”
45
)
By 1965, Gallion had returned to Southern California, where he began teaching
architecture at Long Beach State College. During this period, he continued his academic
and public engagement on the themes of planning and housing, publishing articles and

42
Wurster, William W., 19 March 1956, Letter to the Jury of Fellows, American Institute of Architects,
Washington, DC. William W. Wurster Collection, Environmental Design Archives, University of
California, Berkeley, Box 1, Correspondence, GA-GL. Wurster and Gallion were likely to have met while
Gallion lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area during the mid-1930s and early 1940s. Others to
have passed through the San Francisco Housing Authority and Farm Security Administration offices at the
time would have been Garrett Eckbo and Whitney Smith, who subsequently formed a partnership called
Community Facilities Planners, along with Smith’s partner, Wayne Williams (USC 1941), and Simon
Eisner.
43
“Pasadenan Takes Post in Honolulu,” Pasadena Independent, 24 June 1960.
44
“Obituary, Arthur B. Gallion,” New York Times, 18 July 1978.
45
“For Home Magazine, A Silver Medal,” Los Angeles Times, 30 June 1957.
242

offering public and university lectures on the topic. In the tone of these articles, one sees
the arc of optimism, in the 1940s and 1950s, receding into frank disappointment by the
mid-1960s. However, even as his tone grew increasingly critical, Gallion continued
recommending solutions for the compounding problems of traffic congestion and the
aesthetic homogeneity of mass-produced housing. Many of Gallion’s ideas, including
less dependence on automobiles, improved and expanded mass transportation, and higher
building density, still reflect best practices in urban planning and redevelopment. By
1978, when Gallion died, The Urban Pattern had become the standard textbook on urban
planning at forty US universities.
46

46
“Obituary, Arthur B. Gallion.”
243

Conclusion
This thesis has demonstrated that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the modern
USC School of Architecture has its roots in the 1930s and the shifts and readjustments of
the Great Depression rather than a postwar caesura. An attempt has also been made here
to recuperate a story that has been largely forgotten in the literature, that of Arthur
Weatherhead, and to place the contribution of the postwar dean, Arthur Gallion, in the
context of the time. In spite of the generational divide between them, Gallion and
Weatherhead had much in common, including an emphasis on the social aspects of
modernism over the art of architecture.
Once established by the late 1930s, the curriculum and design philosophy at USC
through the early 1960s continued to be defined by pragmatism (as applied to technical
topics as well as professional practices), social responsiveness, contemporary, site-driven
design, and regional identity. In order to make the argument about continuity, this study
relied heavily on course catalogs. However, the limitations of catalogs should be
acknowledged. While they may have changed little, course descriptions cannot fully
account for the content and atmosphere of the classroom. For this reason, articles, where
available, on class projects, methodology, and emphasis, helped complete the picture.
Given that the dominant narrative has long held that the pre- and post-1945 Schools of
Architecture were qualitatively different, the fact that the classes changed little from 1937
to 1957 is in itself a surprising discovery.
The introduction to this study quoted observations by Avigail Sachs and William
Littmann about the overemphasis in the scholarly literature on the influence of just “a
handful of architects” who “almost single-handedly” cast out the Beaux-Arts and initiated
244

pedagogical reform in US schools of architecture.
1
This thesis offers another case study
supporting their argument. The picture that has emerged here is not one of a modern
pedagogical approach designed by famous émigrés but rather secondary actors. These
individuals were not heroic (not even always eloquent), but they were determined. And
the change happened not overnight—as the dominant narrative on USC also asserts—but
gradually, since the 1930s.
When USC became the fifth out of forty-five US schools of architecture to begin
crafting an alternative to the Beaux-Arts system, Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van
der Rohe had not yet arrived in the United States and Joseph Hudnut had not yet launched
reforms at Columbia and Harvard Universities. Gropius’s ideas about pedagogy
influenced Weatherhead’s direction at USC, but the dean had his eye on Dessau, not
Cambridge. Chapter 2 suggested that Lawrence H. Ellis’s program at the University of
Oregon exerted the most active influence over Weatherhead’s program at USC. This was
based on Ellis’s statements about his program and Weatherhead’s attendance at the
school and sabbatical visit in 1918, just as Ellis would have been preparing to launch
Oregon’s Beaux-Arts-free curriculum in 1919.
Of all the unturned stones in this study, the University of Oregon School of
Architecture is among the most important. Not only was its architecture program the first
in the United States to abandon the dominant Beaux-Arts model, but Oregon, like
Southern California and the Bay Area, represented another hotbed for indigenous
regional modernism. This affinity was recognized by Arts and Architecture publisher
John Entenza, who regularly featured the work of, for example, John Yeon and Pietro

1
Littmann, William, “Assault on the Ecole: Student Campaigns Against the Beaux Arts, 1925-1950,”
Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 53, no. 3 (February 2000): 159-166; quoted here p. 159.
245

Belluschi (who of course followed Wurster as dean of MIT). Research on the University
of Oregon would help clarify the parallels and points of departure between the
approaches to both modern pedagogy and architectural vocabulary in both regions.
In terms of other unturned stones, comparative work on other Southern
Californian schools of art, such as the Chouinard Art Institute, would help complete the
picture. Although Chouinard does not appear to have conferred a professional degree of
architecture, lecturers who passed through in the 1930s and 1940s included Richard
Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, Paul Frankl, and Harwell Hamilton Harris, suggesting a rich
source for further context. Similarly, while it was beyond the present scope to provide
comparative material on, for example, the Cranbrook Academy (founded by Eliel
Saarinen and firmly grounded in the Arts and Crafts movement) or Black Mountain
College, such a study would help place the USC alternative in the national context of
other schools attempting to chart a path between the history-free “ultra-modern” and
historic eclecticism, or historic precedent, either in methods or style.
This study opened with Esther McCoy’s observation about the “USC style.” The
clear implication in this paper has been that, given the range of concerns driving the USC
curriculum and design philosophy, the label “USC Style” has, at best, limited explanatory
value. At worst, USC alumnae interviewed for this study were universal in their
skepticism that style had ever been the point at their alma mater. Straub’s words, in fact,
about style not serving as a driving force in his work have borne this out.
On the other hand, a USC “approach” seems to have emerged here. But this
approach was defined as much by a sense of social responsiveness as it was by high-style
design rooted in historic precedent. The work of USC alumnae identified as “USC style’
246

architects included meticulously crafted, wood post-and-beam construction, “oriented to
the mature trees of Pasadena,” as McCoy wrote, drawing a parallel with Greene and
Greene’s work. But so did the Farm Security Administration housing designed by USC
alumnae Whitney Smith incorporate economical post-and-beam construction, oriented to
the patterns of the sun and landscaping. Garrett Eckbo created site planning and
landscaping for both, after all: the “USC style” Frank House in Pasadena, designed by
Buff, Straub & Hensman, as well as Farm Security Administration resettlement housing.
These examples help complicate the picture when it comes to assigning direct lineage and
influence (such as the Arts and Crafts), especially when removed from the social context.
They might even suggest the limited utility of doing so.
The presumed divide between the “USC style” and “Case Study House style”
mirrored of course the larger ongoing debate over the machine-age aesthetic and
“organic” modernism. While USC alumnae from the 1950s and early 1960s talk about
how this divide did shape class discussions about form and materials, the founding years,
in the 1930s, offered a glimpse into a transitional time when the lines were not so clearly
drawn or politicized. As Weatherhead wrote in 1928, the “ultra-modern” might have
been history-free (a path he regarded as extreme) but it represented a “virile” expression
of modern-day life and an alternative to historic eclecticism. Moreover, if even the
practitioners of regional or “organic” modernism take issue with the divide, it is worth
questioning. In 1944, for example, Pietro Belluschi commented on the brewing
controversy over style and the schism in modernism in Arts and Architecture:
the key which can dispel much confusion and clear much of the nonsense which
has been written on modern architecture. Many realize the abstract qualities of
Frank Lloyd Wright’s work, but not to all is it apparent that Le Corbusier, Mies
247

Van der Rohe, or Gropius at their sternest are dealing with poetical elements.
Poetry may, can, usually does deteriorate in soft sentiment unless the roots are in
life itself.
2

Belluschi highlighted the shared concerns between the two, writing that “architecture,
without the poetic sense in whatever style, is not really architecture but building
construction.”
3

In terms of future study, comparative work on Southern California’s regional, or
“organic,” modernism would help undo the language of regional exceptionalism. As
Mary Corbin Sies noted, such a non-comparative perspective has occasionally led to “a
strong provincial flavor,” a la, “We have these remarkable buildings in our state, so they
must be distinctively Californian.”
4
Commentators of the day obviously recognized the
larger movement. Elizabeth Mock’s 1944 Built in USA began describing its scope. In
the immediate postwar years, as well, architectural trade magazines abound with
references to a new regionally-inflected idiom (in particular, in residential design)
throughout the United States; this work embraced qualities often understood as uniquely
Southern Californian in the literature, such as site specificity, indoor-outdoor integration,
closer links with nature, and an informal, open plan. The issue of Architectural Forum
publishing Gordon Drake’s Presley House in 1947, for example, was devoted to
documenting the national scope of the “contemporary school of architecture which has
grown and flourished in the U.S. in the past fifteen years,” in particular in the category of

2
Belluschi, “Our Houses.”
3
Belluschi, Pietro, “Our Houses,” Arts and Architecture, January 1944, 28.
4
Sies, Mary Corbin, “Review Essay, Arts and Crafts,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians,
vol. 57, no. 4 (December 1998): 490-493, quoted here p. 492.
248

“individually designed, medium-priced” homes. Drake’s Presley House represented
California. Describing the seven houses presented in the issue, the editors wrote:
One threadbare contention which is finally ripped to shreds by the work shown
here is the notion that big windows, low-pitch roofs and open planning are all
right for California but out of place in other parts of the U.S. It is no accident that
the designs chosen for this issue are so evenly distributed across the map. Even
more significant is the fact that each of the houses represents the work of not just
one architect, but of a regional group of designers all working in much the same
vernacular.
5

Even as the houses differed in execution, they were “so alike in spirit,” the editors wrote,
in their shared “logic of rational design.”
The 1951 comment of Elisabeth Kendall Thompson, Architectural Forum’s
western editor, on the “Bay Region Style” also applies to the “USC Style”:
There has been for some time an argument as to whether or not there is a “Bay
Region Style” of architecture. The individualism of each architect is almost
enough reason in itself for doubting that there is such a thing, and the whole idea
of a Bay Region Style should indeed be gravely questioned. It is true that there is
a basic similarity not only in exterior appearance, in construction, and in plan
approach, but this is due to the greater availability locally of certain materials, to
the similarity of the architectural program, and to a basic concept of design. The
last is undoubtedly the most important of these considerations because, without
ever having formalized a credo, architects of the Bay Region have for fifty years
of more, designed buildings—but more especially dwellings—with the same
fundamental principles in mind. It was natural to follow accepted construction
practice in a mild climate where structure could be simple and, according to
Eastern standards, flimsy. Redwood was easily obtained from the nearby forests
and it was natural to use it because of its availability and inexpensiveness.
Nevertheless, these factors contribute only a surface similarity; there is no “style,”
as this is understood in class definition.
6

Thompson goes on to suggest one extended region that lends itself particularly well to
future comparative analysis:

5
“Seven Postwar Houses,” Architectural Forum, vol. 37, no. 3 (September 1947): 77-116, quoted here p.
77.
6
Thompson, Elisabeth Kendall, “The Early Domestic Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Region,”
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 10, no. 3 (October 1951): pp. 15-21; quoted here p.
16.
249

All these factors do, however, contribute to a regional quality that is much more
important than is any stylistic quality. It is a quality which can be found, varying
with the individual architect and with the location, from the Mexican border to the
Canadian line—in other words, along the Pacific Coast.

Comparisons between the work of West Coast centers for regional modernism (including
as expressed in wood post-and-beam) in Vancouver, Portland, the Bay Area, and
Southern California would help illustrate what indeed is distinctive about Southern
California’s brand of regional modernism, and what fits within the larger context. Such a
study would help continue illuminating the larger “constellation” around the individual
stars.
250

Bibliography

Allied Architects Association. “Assistance for Architectural Schools.” Minutes of Adjourned
Meeting, Allied Architects Association of Los Angeles, vol. VI (25 July 1924).
UCLA Special Collections, Archives of the Allied Architects Association, Box 3.

———. “The Organization, Purposes and Aims of the Allied Architects Association of Los
Angeles, California.” Bulletin of the Allied Architects Association of Los Angeles,
vol. II, no. 6 (April 1926). University of Southern California, Architecture and Fine
Arts Library.

———. “Report of the President Concerning the Activities of the Allied Architects
Association for the Year 1924.” Bulletin of the Allied Architects Association of Los
Angeles, vol. I, no. 4 (February 1925). University of Southern California,
Architecture and Fine Arts Library.

———. “Special Committee to Cooperate with the Department of Architecture, University
of Southern California.” Minutes of Adjourned Meeting, Allied Architects
Association of Los Angeles, vol. VI (5 August 1924). UCLA Special Collections,
Archives of the Allied Architects Association, Box 3.

Alofsin, Anthony. The Struggle for Modernism: Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and
City Planning at Harvard. New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002.

American Architect. “What Architects Are Talking About,” vol. 139 (June 1931), 112.

Anderson, Stanford. “The ‘New Empiricism-Bay Region Axis’: Kay Fisker and Postwar
Debates on Functionalism, Regionalism, and Monumentality.” Journal of
Architectural Education, vol. 50, no. 3: 197-207.

Alpha Rho Chi National Architecture Fraternity. “USC Chapter, Junior Colleges Strong in
the West.” The Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XIV, no. 2 (December 1932), 11-12.

———. “USC Chapter, Andronicus Field Trip.” The Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XV, no.
4 (April 1934): 23.

———. Meditating beneath the Keystone. The Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XVI, no. 3
(February 1935): 9 and 11.

———. Editor’s Mail Box. The Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XVII, no. 2 (December 1935):
7.

———. “Architecture Makes Congress.” The Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XXIII, no. 2
(February 1942): 36.
251

Architect and Engineer. “Harris Hall of Architecture Dedicated,” vol. 140, no. 2 (February
1940): 8 and 10.

———. “Dean at USC Named,” vol. 162, no. 7 (July 1945): 12.

Architectural Forum. “Seven Postwar Houses,” vol. 87, no. 3 (September 1947): 77-116.

Architectural Record. Notes in Brief and Architects’ Announcements, vol. 68, no. 2 (August
1930): 154.

Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. “The Annual Dinner.” 42
nd
Annual
Convention of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. Journal of
Architectural Education, vol. 12, no. 1 (autumn 1956): 51-52.

———. “Report on the Building Research Institute.” Minutes of the 46th Annual Meeting of
the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. Journal of Architectural
Education, vol. 15, no. 3 (autumn 1960): 3-67.

Baldwin, Clayton. “Streamlining in Architectural Education.” Architect and Engineer, vol.
139 (October 1939): 26-28.

Bancroft Library, Oral History Office. Joseph Esherick: “An Architectural Practice in the
San Francisco Bay Area, 1938 to 1996.” Berkeley, CA: University of California,
Berkeley, 1996.

Bannister, Turpin. The Architect at Mid-Century. American Institute of Architects,
Commission for the Survey of Education and Registration. New York, NY:
Reinhold, 1954.

Barr, Alfred H., Jr., Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Walter Gropius, et al. “What Is Happening to
Modern Architecture?: A Symposium at the Museum of Modern Art.” The Bulletin of
the Museum of Modern Art, vol. 15, no. 3 (spring 1948).

Basker, Harold. “Andronikos.” The Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XXIII, no. 2 (February
1942): 36.

Baumer, Herbert. “The Professor Says, ‘Say It with Modern,’ A Better Medium for Teaching
Design Than Any Historic Style.” The Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XII, no. 1
(October 1930): 2-3.

Baylis, Douglas, and Joan Parry. California Houses of Gordon Drake. New York, NY:
Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1956.

252

Beal, George. “The Place of Planning in the Architectural Curriculum.” 42
nd
Annual
Convention of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. Journal of
Architectural Education, vol. 12, no. 1 (autumn 1956): 18-24.

Belluschi, Pietro. “Our Houses.” Arts and Architecture, January 1944.

Bentel, Paul. “Modernism and Professionalism in American Modern Architecture, 1919-
1933.” PhD Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1992.

Bills, Emily, “Regarding the Disregarded: Esther McCoy and the Contextualization of L.A.
Architecture.” Presentation at the annual meeting of the Society of Architectural
Historians, Pasadena, California. May 2009.

Cage, Crete, “Program Repeated on Architecture.” Los Angeles Times, 31 January 1936.

Cheney, Sheldon, and Martha Cheney. Art and the Machine: An Account of Industrial Design
in 20
th
Century America. New York: Acanthus Press, 1936.

Christian Science Monitor. “Tech Class Hears Plea for Beauty In Architecture.” 7 June 1938.

Cochran, Frank Lee. “Reflections of a Recent Graduate upon His Education.” The Archi of
Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XIX, no. 3 (April 1938): 19.

Cuff, Dana. The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000), 301-302.

Cuff, Dana. “Fugitive Plans in the Provisional City: Slums and Public Housing in Los
Angeles.” in Looking for Los Angeles, Charles G. Salas and Michael S. Roth, ed. Los
Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2001), 97-132;

Dean, Norman D., Corps of Engineers. 5 December 1941. “Bulletin No. 135-41, Deferment
of Military Service of Students in Architecture and Graduates in Architecture.” State
Headquarters Selective Service, St. Paul, Minnesota. Cited from The Archi of Alpha
Rho Chi, vol. XXIII, no. 2 (February 1942): 17.

Denzer, Anthony. Gregory Ain: The Modern Home as Social Commentary. New York:
Rizzoli Publications, 2008), 199-225.

Drake, Gordon. “Modular House in Pacific Coast Capitalizes on the Area’s Famous
Topography, Climate and Materials.” Architectural Forum, vol. 87, no. 3 (September
1947): 100-116.

253

Draper, Joan. “The Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Architectural Profession in the United
States: The Case of John Galen Howard.” in Spiro Kostof, ed., The Architect:
Chapters in the History of the Profession. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1977), 209-237; quoted here p. 216.

Eckbo, Garrett. “Memo on the Establishment of a Department of Landscape Architecture at
the University of Southern California.” 3 June 1947.

Letter to Arthur B. Gallion, Dean, College of Architecture, University of Southern California,
5 June 1947. Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley,
Garrett Eckbo, 1990-1 Collection, Project/Folder Correspondence, USC, 1947, III.1.

Eckbo, Garrett. “A House with Five Patios.” Los Angeles Times, 14 September 1952.

Eckbo, Garrett. “Autobiography of a Designer.” 1974, Garrett Eckbo Collection,
Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley, Project/Folder,
Autobiography, c. 1974, I.1.

Eckbo, Garrett. 1984, Letter to Esther McCoy, Garrett Eckbo Collection, Environmental
Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley, Project/Folder, Correspondence
of Esther McCoy 1984, II.10.

Ely, Dwight. “How Things Are Going.” The Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XVI, no. 5 (June
1935): 26.

Esherick, Joseph. “Architectural Education in the Thirties and Seventies: A Personal View.”
In The Architect: Chapters in the History of the Profession, edited by Spiro Kostof,
238-279. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.

Finch, Elizabeth. “Languages of Vision: Gyorgy Kepes and the ‘New Landscape’ of Art and
Science.” PhD Dissertation, The City University of New York, 2005.

Fitch, James Marston. “The Rise of Technology, 1929-1939.” The Journal of the Society of
Architectural Historians, vol. 24, no. 1 (March 1965): 75-77.

Flores, Eugene. Interview with author. Pasadena, California. 23 June 2009.

Forstall, Richard L. “California, Population of Counties by Decennial Census: 1900 to 1990.”
Population Division, US Bureau of the Census, Washington, DC.

Frampton, Kenneth. Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 4
th
edition. New York: Thames
and Hudson Inc., 2007).

254

Frankl, Paul T. “Modern Will Live.” California Arts and Architecture, March 1938.

Gallion, Arthur, Guest Editorial, Journal of the American Institute of Architects (February 
1949): 51‐53, quoted here p. 51. 

Gallion, Arthur B., and Simon Eisner. The Urban Pattern: City Planning and Design. New
York and London: D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc., 1950.

Gallion, Arthur, and Henry Reining, Jr. “The Planning Curriculum, University of Southern
California, 1955/1956.” n.d. USC Libraries, University Archives.

Gehry, Frank. Interview with author. Venice, California. 19 June 2009.

Germany, Lisa. Harwell Hamilton Harris. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
2000.

Gropius, Walter. “A Frank Letter and Its Answer.” Journal of the American Institute of
Architects (April 1947): 198-203.

Harrington, Johns. “A Dream Come True: Biography of Architecture Dean Discloses His
Vision and Efforts toward Realization of Combining Architecture and Allied Arts.”
Southern California Alumni Review, December 1939, 14-15, 26-27, quoted here p.
15. USC Libraries, University Archives.

Harrington, Johns. December 1939. “Southern California—An Art Center.” Southern
California Alumni Review, 16-21 and 24. USC Libraries, University Archives.

Harris, Frank, and Weston Bonenberger, eds. A Guide to Contemporary Architecture in
Southern California. Los Angeles, CA: Watling & Company, 1951.

James, Kathleen. Erich Mendelsohn & the Architecture of German Modernism. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Jordy, William H. American Buildings and Their Architects: The Impact of European
Modernism in the Mid-Twentieth Century. Garden City, NY: 1972.

Hine, Thomas. “The Search for the Postwar House.” in Smith, Elizabeth A.T., Blueprints for
Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses. Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press, 1989), 167-181.

Hines, Thomas H. Architecture of the Sun: Los Angeles Modernism, 1900-1970. New York,
NY: Rizzoli, 2010), 439.

255

Hise, Greg G. “The Roots of the Postwar Urban Region: Mass-housing and Community
Planning in California, 1920-1950.” PhD Dissertation, University of California,
Berkeley, CA, 1992).

Hise, Greg. Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis. Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

Hoedinghaus, G.E. “Andronikos.” The Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XIII, no. 5 (October
1931): 8.

House & Home. “Gordon Drake, 1917-1952.” March 1952.

———. “Five Zones for California Outdoor Living.” March 1952.

Howard, John Galen. “Degree Or No Degree.” Bulletin of the Allied Architects Association of
Los Angeles, vol. II, no. 5 (March 1926). University of Southern California,
Architecture and Fine Arts Library.

Hyungmin, Pai. The Portfolio and the Diagram: Architecture, Discourse, and Modernity in
American. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.

Interiors and Industrial Design. “Studio and Sanctuary, Los Angeles, Paul Frankl, Designer,”
vol. CVII, no. 2 (September 1947): 90-91.

James-Chakraborty, Kathleen, ed. Bauhaus Culture from Weimar to the Cold War.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

Johnson, C. Raimond. “University of Southern California, The School of Architecture.” Los
Angeles Times, 1 March 1930.

Jordy, William H. “The International Style of the 1930s.” Journal of the Society of
Architectural Historians, vol. 24 (March 1965): 10-14.

Kappe, Shelly. “Idiom of the Fifties: What Really Happened in Los Angeles.” Architecture
California (November/December 1986): 15-17.

Kornman, Sheryl. “Thoughtful City Planning Called for by Architect.” Tuscon Daily Citizen
(Tuscon, AZ), 18 March 1971.

Krisel, William. Interview with author. Los Angeles, California. 22 February 2010.

Lamprecht, Barbara. “Pasadena Modern.” Pasadena Heritage Tour Brochure, 2005. On file
at Pasadena Heritage, Pasadena, California.
256

Latta, Graham. “Founders’ Day Again—Twenty-Five Have Gone.” The Archi of Alpha Rho
Chi, vol. XX, no. 4 (June 1939): 36.

Lawrence, Ellis F. “President’s Address, Twenty-first Annual Meeting of the Association of
Collegiate Schools of Architecture.” 14-15 May 1934, Washington, DC. Cited from
Weatherhead, The History of Collegiate Education, 212.

Littmann, William. “Assault on the Ecole: Student Campaigns Against the Beaux Arts, 1925-
1950.” Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 53, no. 3 (February 2000): 159-166.

Longstreth, Richard. City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile, and
Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920-1950. Cambridge & London: MIT Press.

Long Beach Independent. “Jaycees to Display Scale Model of City.” 9 May 1948.

Los Angeles Times. “College Professors Prepare to Go to War if Needed.” 3 May 1917.

———. “Lessons in Art: Clever Instructors in Designing to Aid Summer Students.” 27 June
1919.

———. “Architects to Aid University Classes.” 15 October 1922.

———. “Architect Prizes Are Announced, Awards Being Offered to Students of University
of Southern California.” 17 February 1924.

———. “Director of Art at University Is to Tour Europe.” 14 July 1924.

———. “Architects to Open Library.” 7 December 1924.

———. “Plan Architects’ Building.” 7 September 1925.

———. “Added Courses in Architecture School Opened.” 26 October 1925.

———. “Trojan School Given Honors.” 16 May 1928.

———. Watrous, Valencia, “Architect Structure Projected.” 25 May 1928.

———. “Modern Design Spreading, Western European Countries Produce New Type of
Architecture Linking Old and Present Day.” 15 July 1928.

———. “Fine Arts Hall Planned.” 10 March 1929.

257

———. “Architectural Courses Open, University Offers Four Night Classes in Design.” 14
September 1930.

———. “Designs of Residences on Exhibit.” 21 June 1931.

———. “Home Nestled Amid Foliage.” 28 June 1931.

———. “Efficiency Stressed in Home Plan.” 18 October 1931.

———. “Plan Depicts Modern Trend to Rear Living Room.” 8 November 1931.

———. “Home Building Surveyed, Figures Show Los Angeles Ahead of Other Cities during
October in New Family Capacities.” 22 November 1931.

———. “College Lists New Courses, USC Providing Unusual Study Opportunities, Evening
Adult Classes to Cover Many Fields.” 3 January 1932.

———. “Summer Class in Designing Opens Friday.” 12 June 1932.

———. “American Home Lecture Topic.” 15 October 1933.

———. “American Development of Architecture Urged.” 1 April 1934.

———. “Architect’s Welfare Told, Head of American Institute Sees New Opportunity in
Practice of Architecture.” 30 September 1934.

———. “U.S.C. Offering Night Course to Aid Home Builders.” 12 September 1937.

———. “Trojan Students Design New Type of Desert Home.” 24 March 1938.

———. “Class Builds House Models, Actual Construction Methods Studied.” 11 June 1939.

———. “New Courses Planned at S.C., Industrial Design Classes Scheduled for Opening in
Fall.” 6 August 1939.

———. “S.C. Students to Design Santa Anita Village Homes.” 29 October 1939.

———. “They’ll Design for You in Years to Come.” 24 December 1939.

———. “Art Center to Be Opened, New $200,000 Studio Building at S.C. Will Be
Dedicated Today.” 18 January 1940.

258

———. “Architecture Students Get ‘Streamline’ Instruction.” 4 February 1940.

———. “Students Map New Hollywood.” 5 May 1940.

———. “Huge Defense Program Lures Architects' Convention Here, A.I.A. Delegates to Be
Escorted on Inspection Tours of Projects Involving $160,000,000.” 20 April 1941.

———. “S.C. Architecture Class Uses City as Laboratory.” 27 April 1941.

———. “Class at S.C. Designs Cabins to Suit Landscapes.” 22 June 1941.

———. “S.C. Course in Architecture Altered to Fit Defense Needs, Students Will Learn to
Design Bomb Shelters, Airports, Hospitals and Other War Projects.” 7 September
1941.

———. “Federal Official New S.C. Dean.” 10 June 1945.

———. “Home Designed by SC Students Nears Finish.” 27 November 1949.

———. “SC Students Present Ideas for All-Season Desert Home.” 6 February 1949.

———. “SC Model Home Name Selected.” 1 January 1950.

———. “Villageaire, Model SC Home, Draws Visitors.” 15 January 1950.

———. Display Ad 137, Gaffers & Sattler. 26 February 1950.

———. “Villageaire Home to Close.” 9 April 1950.

———. “SC Student Architects to Erect Model Home.” 18 May 1952.

———. “Funeral Today for Former SC Architecture Dean.” 19 July 1952.

———. “Architectural Group Honors SC Professor.” 27 January 1957.

———. “For Home Magazine, A Silver Medal.” 30 June 1957.

Lowell, Waverly, Elizabeth Bryne, and Betsy Frederick-Rothwell. Design on the Edge: A
Century of Teaching Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, 1903-
2003. Berkeley, CA: Regents of the University of California, 2009.

259

McCoy, Esther. Five California Architects. New York: Reinhold Publishers, 1960; New
York: Prager Publishers, 1975; Santa Monica, CA: Hennessey + Ingalls, 2004.

———. “Arts and Architecture Case Study Houses.” Perspecta, vol. 15 (1975): 55-73.

Miller, George A. “Andronicus.” The Archi of Alpha Rho Chi, vol. XII, no. 2 (December
1930), 11.

Millier, Arthur. “Arts Working Together.” Los Angeles Times, 2 June 1929.

———. “Building Reflects Region, New Bullock’s Structure Held Step Toward Architecture
Harmonious with Southern California.” Los Angeles Times, 30 June 1929.

———. “Architecture and Style.” Los Angeles Times, 31 August 1930.

———. “New Architecture Analyzed: Simplified, Unornamented, ‘International Style’
Called Solution for Minimum Cost Housing Adaptable to Low Incomes.” Los
Angeles Times, 31 July 1932.

———. “Art and Artists.” Los Angeles Times, 5 January 1936.

———. “You Can’t Stop the Modern Trend.” Los Angeles Times, 16 March 1941.

Mock, Elizabeth, ed. Built in USA since 1932. New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1944.

Modesto Bee and Herald-News (Modesto, CA). “Committee Is Told Need for Housing
Facilities in State.” 10 January 1938.

Moran, Brendan Daniel. “Sociological Imagination and the City: Encounters between
Architecture and Planning Education in America, 1933-1957.” PhD Dissertation,
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 2009.

Museum of Modern Art. Modern Architecture International Exhibition. New York: Museum
of Modern Art, 1932; reprint edition 1969.

Nelson, George, and Henry Wright. Tomorrow’s House: How to Plan Your Post-War Home
Now. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1945.

New York Times. “Lax Architects Scored, Dean Hudnut Assails ‘Hocus Pocus’ Technical
Education.” 13 October 1935.

———. “Architects Plan to Spur Building.” 17 April 1938.

260

———. “Architectural Education Subject of National Study.” 11 April 1948.

———. “Architects Revive Beaux-Arts Studies.” 2 October 1949.

———. “Obituary, Arthur B. Gallion.” 18 July 1978.

Nicolaides, Becky. “‘Where the Working Man Is Welcomed’: Working Class Suburbs in Los
Angeles, 1990 – 1940.” The Pacific Historical Review, vol. 68, no. 4 (November
1999): 517-559.

Parson, Donald Craig. Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the
Direction of Modern Los Angeles. Duluth, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

Pasadena Heritage Oral History Project. Interview with Donald Hensman, FAIA. Pasadena,
CA: Pasadena Heritage, 2003.

Pasadena Independent. “Pasadenan Takes Post in Honolulu.” 24 June 1960.

Pearlman, Jill. “Joseph Hudnut’s Other Modernism at the ‘Harvard Bauhaus.’” Journal of the
Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 56, no. 4 (December 1997): 452-477.

Peters, Richard C. “W.W. Wurster.” Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 33, no. 2
(November 1979): 36-41.

Pickens, Buford L. “Contemporary Regional Architecture.” Journal of the American Institute
of Architects (September 1947): 114-120.

Postal, Matthew A. “Toward a Democratic Esthetic: The Modern House in America, 1932-
1955.” PhD Dissertation, City University of New York, 1998.

Progressive Architecture. “Designer’s Own House, Los Angeles, California, Gordon Drake,
Designer,” July 1947, 45-52.

San Francisco Chronicle. “This Home Was Designed to Grow.” 18 November 1956.

Sachs, Avigail. “Research for Architecture: Building a Discipline and Modernizing the
Profession.” PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2009.

Sargent, D. Kenneth. “Educational Programs on Modular Coordination.” In Building
Research Institute, The Current Status of Modular Coordination, Publication No.
782. Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council,
1960.

261

Sitton, Tom. Los Angeles Transformed: Fletcher Bowron’s Urban Reform Revival, 1938-
1953. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2005.

Sitton, Tom, and William Deverell, ed. Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001.

Smiley, David. “Making the Modified Modern.” Perspecta, vol. 32 (2001): 39-54.

Smith, Elizabeth A.T. Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study
Houses. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989.

Southern California Alumni Review. “Partial List of Graduates of the College of Architecture
and Fine Arts, with Their Present Positions as of December 1, 1939.” USC Libraries,
University Archives.

Steele, James, ed. Buff & Hensman. Los Angeles, CA: USC Architectural Guild Press, 2004.

Straub, Calvin. “Flexible House for Family Growth.” Los Angeles Times, 14 September
1952.

———. “Small-House Tracts, A Challenge to Tomorrow’s Architect.” Los Angeles Times,
20 November 1955.

Taylor, Walter A. “Does the Future of the A.I.A. Rest In Our Hands?” The Archi of the Alpha
Rho Chi, vol. XVI, no. 1 (October 1934): 2.

Thompson, Elisabeth Kendall. “The Early Domestic Architecture of the San Francisco Bay
Region.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 10, no. 3 (October
1951): 15-21.

Treib, Marc, and Dorothée Imbert. Garrett Eckbo: Modern Landscapes for Living. Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1997.

University of California, Berkeley, School of Architecture. “Curriculum, School of
Architecture, January 1953.” Environmental Design Archives, University of
California, Berkeley.

University of California, Los Angeles, Oral History Program. The Organic View of Design:
Harwell Harris. Los Angeles, CA: Regents of the University of California, 1985.

USC College of Architecture, “Application for Registration of the Curriculum, College of
Architecture and Fine Arts, University of Southern California.” 31 January 1934.
USC Libraries, University Archives.
262

USC Daily Trojan. “Troedsson Will Talk at Library.” 5 April 1938. USC Libraries,
University Archives.

———. “Modern Cities Antiquated by Construction Changes, Instructor Contends.” 27 April
1938.

———. “Mayor Bowron Speaks at Architecture Dinner, Model Project of Hollywood
Business Area Will Be Exhibited by Students.” 10 May 1940.

———. “Weatherhead Attends Parley.” 17 May 1940.

———. “Goodbye Traffic Jam.” 15 October 1942.

University of Southern California. El Rodeo Yearbook, “College of Architecture and Fine
Arts.” 1933. USC Libraries, University Archives.

———. El Rodeo Yearbook. “College of Architecture and Fine Arts.” 1934.

———. El Rodeo Yearbook. “College of Architecture and Fine Arts.” 1935.

———. El Rodeo Yearbook. “College of Architecture and Fine Arts.” 1936.

———. El Rodeo Yearbook. “College of Architecture and Fine Arts.” 1937.

———. El Rodeo Yearbook. “College of Architecture and Fine Arts.” 1938.

———. El Rodeo Yearbook. “College of Architecture and Fine Arts.” 1943.

———. El Rodeo Yearbook, “College of Architecture.” 1947.

University of Southern California. USC Yearbook 1919-1920, vol. XV, no. 1. USC Libraries,
University Archives.

———. USC Yearbook 1923-1924, vol. XIX, no. 1.

———. USC Bulletin, College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, 1929-1930, vol. XXIV, no. 2.

———. USC Bulletin, School of Architecture, 1929-1930, vol. XXIII, no. 17 (1 February
1929).

263

———. USC Bulletin, College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, 1930-1931, vol. XXV, no. 5
(15 April 1930).

———. USC Bulletin, College of Architecture, 1931-1932, vol. XXV, no. 18 (15 January
1931).

———. USC Bulletin, College of Architecture, 1932-1933, vol. XXVI, no. 18 (15 January
1932).

———. USC Bulletin, College of Architecture, 1933-1934, vol. XXVII, no. 19 (15 January
1933).

———. USC Bulletin, College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1934-1935, vol. XXVIII, no.
21 (1 January 1934).

———. USC Bulletin, College of Architecture, 1935-1936, vol. XXIX, no. 21 (1 January
1935).

———. USC Bulletin, College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, 1936-1937, vol. XXXI, no. 6
(1 April 1936).

———. USC Bulletin, College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1937-1938, vol. XXXII, no 14
(1 August 1937).

———. USC Bulletin, College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, 1938-1939, vol. XXXIII, no. 8
(1 May 1938).

———. USC Bulletin, College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1939-1940, vol. XXXIII, no 18
(December 1938).

———. USC Bulletin, College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, 1939-1940, vol. XXXIV, no.
10 (1 July 1939).

———. USC Bulletin, Harris College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1940-1941 (December
1940).

———. USC Bulletin, College of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1942-1943, vol. XXXVI, no.
16 (1 November 1941).

———. USC Bulletin, Circular of Information, 1943-1944, vol. 38, no. 9 (September 1943).

———. USC Bulletin, Circular of Information, 1944-1945, vol. 39, no. 9 (March 1944).

264

———. USC Bulletin, Circular of Information, 1945-1946, vol. 40, no. 8 (September 1945).

———. USC Bulletin, Circular of Information, 1946-1947, vol. 41 (April 1946).

———. USC Bulletin, College of Architecture, 1947-1949, vol. 42, no. 8 (September 1947).

———. USC Bulletin, School of Architecture, 1949-1951, vol. 44, no. 12 (October 1, 1949).

———. USC Bulletin, School of Architecture, 1951-1953, vol. 46, no. 17 (1 October 1951).

———. USC Bulletin, School of Architecture, 1953-1955, vol. 48, no. 15 (1 September
1953).

———. USC Bulletin, School of Architecture, 1955-1957, vol. 51, no. 6 (1 November 1955).

———. USC Bulletin, School of Architecture, 1957-1959, vol. 53, no. 5 (15 October 1957).

———. USC Bulletin, School of Architecture, 1959-1961.

———. USC Bulletin, School of Architecture, 1960-1961.

———. USC Bulletin, School of Architecture and Fine Arts, 1965-1967, vol. 61, no. 2 (1
August 1965).

Van Nuys News (Van Nuys, CA). “Valley City, Chatsworth Ideal Site for Young Architect’s
Model Future Village.” 26 October 1943.

Walsh, Greg. Interview by author. Santa Monica, California. 29 May 2009.

The Washington Post. “Expert Declares Planning Is Basis of Architecture.” 5 October 1924.

———. “U.S. Architects Meet Tuesday at Milwaukee, 67
th
Annual Convention of American
Institute to Last through Friday.” 26 May 1935.

Weatherhead, Arthur C., “The Value of Criticism by Practicing Architects in the School.”
Bulletin of the Allied Architects Association of Los Angeles, vol. II, no. 5 (March
1926). University of Southern California, Architecture and Fine Arts Library.

———. “Architecture and Life.” Los Angeles Times. 22 April 1928.

———. “Note on Education in Architecture.” Architect and Engineer, vol. 123 (December
1935): 69.
265

———. The History of Collegiate Education in Architecture in the United States. Los
Angeles, CA, 1941.

Wilson, Bess M., “Occupational Therapy Training to Be Given, S.C. Offers Educational
Course to Meet Wartime Demand for More Workers.” Los Angeles Times, 29 January
1943.

Wilson, Richard Guy. “American Arts and Crafts Architecture: Radical through Dedicated to
the Cause Conservative.” In "The Art that is Life": The Arts & Crafts Movement in
America, 1875-1920, edited by Kaplan, Wendy, 101-131. Boston, MA: Museum of
Fine Arts, 1987.

Woodbridge, Sally B. “The California House.” The Wilson Quarterly, vol. 4, no. 3 (summer
1980): 83-91.

Woods, Mary N. From Craft to Profession: The Practice of Architecture in Nineteenth
Century American. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999.

Wright, Gwendolyn. Modern Architectures in History: USA. London: Reaktion Books, 2008.

Wurster, William W. Letter to the Jury of Fellows, American Institute of Architects,
Washington, DC. 19 March 1956. Environmental Design Archives, University of
California, Berkeley. William W. Wurster Collection, Box 1, Correspondence, GA-
GL.
266

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

A different kind of Eden: gay men, modernism, and the rebirth of Palm Springs

PDF

Mining the intangible past of Virginia City's Chinese pioneers: Using historical geographic information system (HGIS) to document, visualize and interpret the spatial history of Chinese in Montan...

PDF

Preserving the tangible remains of San Francisco's lesbian community in North Beach, 1933 to 1960

PDF

Claud Beelman's corporate modern style 1951-1963

PDF

Housing farm workers: assessing the significance of the bracero labor camps in Ventura County

PDF

The Schindler Terrace, an early modern garden: a case for conservation

PDF

A life in landscape: Howard Oshiyama and the gardens of Buff & Hensman's King residence

PDF

To answer a need: the history, significance, and future of the women's club house

PDF

Not so Little Armenia: conserving Armenian heritage sites in Los Angeles

PDF

Investigating the association of historical preservation and neighborhood status in Detroit, 1970-2015

PDF

An odyssey in B-flat: rediscovering the life and times of master architect Robert A. Kennard

PDF

Beyond significance: integrity analysis considerations for modern residential tracts of the San Fernando Valley

PDF

The enduring romance of the Rancho: Mission Viejo, 1964 to 1967

Asset Metadata

Creator Howell-Ardila, Deborah (author)

Core Title "Writing our own program": the USC experiment in modern architectural pedagogy, 1930 to 1960

School School of Architecture

Degree Master of Historic Preservation

Degree Program Historic Preservation

Publication Date 09/22/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag American architectural pedagogy,architectural education in Los Angeles,Arthur Gallion,Arthur Weatherhead,Beaux-Arts system for architectural education,Calvin Straub,Clayton Baldwin,earliest departures from the Beaux-Arts system,Gordon Drake,Great Depression and its effects on the architectural profession and schools,history of the USC School of Architecture,modern architectural education,modern architecture in Los Angeles and Southern California,OAI-PMH Harvest,reform of collegiate schools of architecture in the interwar period,regional modernism,Whitney Smith

Place Name California (states), Los Angeles (city or populated place)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Breisch, Kenneth A. (committee chair), Bills, Emily (committee member), James-Chakraborty, Kathleen (committee member)

Creator Email debihowell@gmail.com,howellar@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3464

Unique identifier UC1130170

Identifier etd-HowellArdila-3759 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-414079 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3464 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-HowellArdila-3759.pdf

Dmrecord 414079

Document Type Thesis

Rights Howell-Ardila, Deborah

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu