Ennis House. Photo by Mike Brown, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Driving up Vermont Avenue in Los Angeles, three structures perched on the Hollywood Hills stand forth, shouting out their names to all who pass below: the vainglorious Hollywood sign, the Griffith Park Observatory, where Sal Mineo bought it in Rebel Without a Cause, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s sprawling cement block mansion for the Ennis family from Indianapolis, who had made their fortune in the clothing industry.
Squatting on a severe slope, the Ennis-Brown House, as it is now known, has been called a Mayan Temple, a concrete frivolity, a mausoleum, a goddamn monstrosity. These days it’s mainly a ruin-in-progress. A gorgeous, crumbling mess of a place. LA’s equivalent of Tintern Abbey.
The Ennis House is last and largest of four major houses Wright designed in LA in the 1920s: Hollyhock House, La Miniatura, the Freeman House and the Storer House. Wright’s LA houses mark a profound shift in the architect’s style, away from the floating planes and sharp lines of the Prairie houses toward thick masses of reinforced concrete and concrete blocks. It was a movement toward simplification of structure and mono-materials easily produced and put together. Of course, the LA houses didn’t prove to be easy or simple.
Wright argued that architecture should grow out the ecology of place, attuned to its climate, geology and vegetation. He maintained that both the design and the construction materials should be endemic to the…