The Most Dangerous Architect In America

2023-01-09T19:23:00-05:00

The architect wanted to create social housing in Los Angeles. Dogged by the FBI, his hope for more egalitarian architecture never came to be.

Does it surprise you that an architect dedicating his life's work for better housing for the working classes would be declared, with the pressure of the real estate industry and communism scare, a public enemy and had the FBI trying really hard to discriminate against him for years?
That architect is Gregory Ain, who developed attainable methods of egalitarian housing solutions and the architecturally beautiful examples he designed and seen them built. His illustrious but low-key career spanned from working for Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, collaborating with the Eames to figure out the plywood chair molds they famously produced, being awarded a Guggenheim on the advice of Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, working with landscape architect Garrett Eckbo on the housing projects, to teaching at USC and Penn State and later ironically "retiring" from architecture.

Photo from "Gregory Ain: Low-Cost Modern Housing and The Construction of a Social Landscape." The exhibition took...

Gregory Ain, once "the most dangerous architect in America," and the mysterious fate of his MoMA exhibition house

2017-08-11T15:36:00-04:00

Gregory Ain, a midcentury champion of modern architecture whose students included Frank Gehry, is virtually unknown outside Los Angeles today. His left-leaning politics made him the object of decades-long F.B.I. surveillance [...] Even the fate of his most important commission — an exhibition house in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art — is a mystery. That house is now the subject of “This Future Has a Past,” an installation at the Center for Architecture in Greenwich Village.

This Future Has a Past opened in July at the Center for Architecture in New York and still runs through September 12. The accompanying event Who Was Gregory Ain? on September 7 will feature the installation's producers, Katherine Lambert and Christiane Robbins, as well as other speakers.

Archinect - News

The Most Dangerous Architect In America

Gregory Ain, once "the most dangerous architect in America," and the mysterious fate of his MoMA exhibition house