From the beginning, the Kings Road Schindler House was conceived as a refuge for family and friends seeking free living and self-expression. Set in the relatively rural expanse of 1920s West Hollywood, the residence became a hub for a small but vibrant community of artists, architects, and flamboyant opera stars. Bohemians. Hipsters.

While the Kings Road site remains an important part of Los Angeles’s cultural landscape, the structure is now an architectural landmark: an artifact to be admired, studied, and preserved. Despite the location’s dynamic and inclusive programming, the house can no longer host the long days of lounging, carousing, and general acts of lying about so central to the life of any self-respecting bohemian.

The proposed project uses rented ladders, steel connectors and cables, and aluminum panels (printed with a pattern from Olbrich’s Secession Building, Vienna’s fin-de-siècle temple to artistic freedom) to create an ultra low-cost network of perches, crawling chutes, and hang-out spaces—all of which frame exterior and interior views of Schindler’s architecture. Not high modern, but perhaps a secondary modern. A temporary utopia that is part museological viewing apparatus, part play structure, part hippie haven, part Habitrail. 

A free downloadable app allows anyone to learn when part or all of the network is available, so you can grab your copy of The Dharma Bums and wile away your long summer days in the ne plus ultra location for the SoCal hanging-about crowd (while maintaining a safe, but intimate, distance from the historic building itself).

Secondary Modern is included in SchindlerLab.org, an online book of projects, proposals, and essays published by the MAK Center, March 2015.