Today's Stories

July 31 - August 2, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Biden and Clinton Mutinies

July 30, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Victims of a Covert Tit-for-Tat War

Gareth Porter
Afghanistan's US-Backed Child-Raping Police

Saul Landau
Summer of Denial

Greg Grandin
Honduran Coup Over?

Ray Bourgeois / Margaret Knapke
School of Coups

Diane Farsetta
Pentagon Pundits Get a Pass

Stephen Soldz
The King Case, the APA and the Missing Ethics Investigation

Alan Farago
Learning How to Survive in a Depression From "Weeds"

David Macaray
Cops and Labor Unions

Mike Howells /
Jay Arena
Volunteerism Will Not Rebuild the Gulf Coast

Christopher Brauchli
Oatmeal Envy

Website of the Day
Changing the SOFA

July 29, 2009

Carl Ginsburg
Our Crisis, Their Gain

Clifton Ross
From Tegucigalpa to El Paraiso: a Voyage From Curfew to State of Siege

Paul Craig Roberts
How Fake is the "Recovery"?

Franklin C. Spinney
Winning Hearts and Minds, Pentagon Style

James Bovard Lackawanna Six: Bogus Charges and Martial Law

Anthony DiMaggio
Health Care, the Media and Public Opinion

Bouthaina Shaaban
How Will Arabs Wake Up?

Greg Moses
A Catch and Trade Policy for Labor Costs

Wajahat Ali
No Racism in Obama's Post-Race America?

Gary Leupp
Beer Will Not Solve This

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
Musharraf, Imran Khan and Overseas Pakistanis

Website of the Day
Why Single-Payer Gets No Respect

July 28, 2009

Jean Bricmont
Bombing for a Juster World?

Uri Avnery
Obama, Netanyahu and the Settlements

Dean Baker
Right to Rent: a Remedy for the Foreclosure Crisis

Heather Gray
Stupid Cop Tricks: Driving Too Close to a White Female and Other Episodes in Racist Policing

Jonathan Cook
Can an "Arab Soul" Yearn for Israel's Anthem?

Winslow T. Wheeler
Beyond the F-22: the Future of Pentagon Reform

Belén Fernández
Thomas Friedman Does Afghanistan

Carl Finamore
The Hotel Workers' Kickass Local 2

Eli Jelly-Schapiro
Striking the World Cup

Harvey Wasserman
We All Stand Before Peltier's Parole Board

Website of the Day
Behind the Wheel

July 27, 2009

Ishmael Reed
Gates: Post-Race Scholar Yells Racism

Patrick Cockburn
Elections Shake Kurdistan

Roger Burbach
Hillary and Obama Nix Change in Honduras

Steve Breyman
Bomber Joe and Russia: Why is Biden Channeling Cheney?

Ramzy Kysia
Gaza: On the Right of Resistance

Stephen Soldz
Will the American Psychological Association Renounce the Nuremberg Defense?

Raymond J. Lawrence
Sexual Hocus Pocus in the Episcopal Church

Greg Moses
The Color Line is Black

Binoy Kampmark
Swine Flu Panic

Kim Ives
Lavalas and Haiti's Student Union Unite

Website of the Day
Meet the Paid Assassins of Health Care

July 24-26, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
"A Damned Murder, Inc."

Clifton Ross
Surreal Honduras

Patrick Cockburn
Party of "Change" Challenges Old Guard in Kurdistan

William Polk
Report Card on Obama From a New Frontiersman

David Sterritt
Screening the Politics Out of the Iraq War

Ray McGovern
Hooded in Bush's Hood

David Lindorff
Cops Gone Wild

Hannah Mermelstein
"The War is With the Arabs"

Carl Ginsburg
The Actually Existing Health Care System

Helen Redmond
The Selling of Single-Payer Features

John Ross
The Song of the Guerrilla

Bill Simpich
Fair Play for Cuba and the Cuban Revolution

Mark Weisbrot
Learning From China on How to Beat the Recession

Lee Sustar
U.S. Labor in Crisis

David Macaray
Union Workers Forced to Accept Massive Cuts

Felipe Matsunaga
Obama's Slow (and Familiar) Dance With Cuba

Sara Mann
Why Health Care Will Kill My TV

Martha Rosenberg
Which is Worse? Germs in Our Food or the Antibiotics That Kill Them?

Missy Beattie
Cha-ching Culture

David Ker Thomson
Empty Nest: a Natural History of Now

Ron Jacobs
United4Iran, a Footnote

Stephen Martin
The Crying of Lots 1 Thru 50

David Yearsley
Psst, I Show You a Feelthy Gluck

Gilad Atzmon
Bruno: a Glimpse Into Zionism?

Kim Nicolini
Guilty Laughter in the Dark: Seeing Brüno Twice

Poets' Basement
Kakak and McLellan

Website of the Weekend
Dead Prez: Summertime

July 23, 2009

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Masters of Perfidy: AIG and the System

Saul Landau /
Nelson Valdés
Hypocrisy and the Honduran Coup: Term Limits Only Apply When Governments Help People

Jonathan Cook
The Reality of Israel's "Open" Jerusalem

Nadia Hijab
Israeli Warships in the Red Sea

Dave Lindorff
Living in a Police State: the Gates Incident

Laura Carlsen
21st Century Coups d'Etat

Steve Breyman
Bankers Beware?

Ellen Brown
How California Could Turn Its IOUs Into Dollars

Norman Solomon
Spinning Health Care

Jorge Mariscal
Youth Activists Demand Military-Free Schools

Website of the Day
Copy-Editing Sarah Palin

July 22, 2009

Bernard Chazelle
How to Argue Against Torture

Nikolas Kozloff
The Coup and the U.S. Airbase in Honduras

Carl Ginsburg
The Recovery, Phase Two

Clifton Ross
Back to the Future? Return to El Salvador

Anthony DiMaggio
Health Care, Media and the Case for Socialized Medicine

Michael Donnelly
The Whoppers Behind WOPR

Nadia Hijab
Memoirs of a Lost Arab World

Dedrick Muhammad
Structural Inequality: News Not Fit to Print?

Charles Thomson
Cronyism at the Tate

Alan Farago
Ted Williams and the Florida Keys

Website of the Day
Himmelstein: Howard Dean is a Liar

July 21, 2009

Sasan Fayazmanesh
The Iranian Election and Its Aftermath

Uri Avnery
Breaking the Silence on Israeli War Crimes

Dean Baker
Séance on Wall Street

Jonathan Cook
Team Twitter: Israel's Internet War

Dave Lindorff
Saving Private Bergdahl

Andy Worthington
Interrogating the Uighurs

David Macaray
Heat, Dust and OSHA

Carl Finamore
The Deferential Party

Harvey Wasserman
Cronkite and Three Mile Island

Walter Brasch
The Marie Antoinettes of Health Care

Website of the Day
Linebaugh: Magna Carta and the Commons

July 20, 2009

Pam Martens
Judicial Apartheid

Nikolas Kozloff
Honduras and the Big Stick: Obama's Bullish Behavoir in Latin America

Paul Craig Roberts
Threatening Iran

Deepak Tripathi
Obama's Policy on China and Iran

Ira Glunts
Netanyahu's Time Bomb: Building in the Vineyard of the Mufti

P. Sainath
Put Your Money Down, Boys

Binoy Kampmark
The Moon Landing and the Cold War

Stephen Fleischman
The First Anchorman

Norman Solomon
Cronkite and Vietnam: Beyond the Hype

Andy Worthington
Predictable Chaos as Gitmo Trials Resume

Ron Jacobs
Out of the Haze, Into the Darkness: Recalling 1979

Website of the Day
Why Publishing Can't be Saved (as it is)

July 17-19, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
"Watch What We Do, Not What We Say"

Nikolas Kozloff
Chiquita in Latin America: From Arbenz to Zelaya

Joanne Mariner
CIA Apples: Bad at the Top of the Tree

Joe Bageant
America's White Underclass

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Road Signs: Wiping Arabic Names Off the Map

Saul Landau
Why So Much Sympathy for Madoff's Dupes and So Little for the Poor?

John Ross
Jurassic Fallout in Mexico

Sue Sturgis
Senator Sessions, Race and Impartiality

Anita Sinha /
Daniel Farbman
The Ricci Case and the Myth of Special Treatment

Peter Morici
Obama's Donut Economics

Pervez Hoodbhoy
Whither Pakistan? A Five-Year Forecast

Ramzy Baroud
Gaza and the Language of Power

Greg Moses
The Real Demand Crisis

Kia Mistilis
The Niger Delta Crisis

Missy Beattie
The Placebo President

David Ker Thomson
How Not to See: Things to Tell Your Eyeballs

James G. Abourezk
Evil Spirits: the Booze Strip in Indian Country

Paul Richards
Why Does Jon Tester Want to Log Wild Montana?

Dave Lindorff
Dark Days for Working People (With Three Small Rays of Light)

Marc Levy
Just Like Hanoi Jane

Matt Siegfried
The Good War Goes Hot

Stephen Martin
Panopticon Blues

Ben Sonnenberg
Sembène's Faat Kiné

David Macaray
Casablanca: When Melodrama Trumped History

Charles R. Larson
A Pakistani, Victorian Novel Celebrating Women

David Yearsley
That's Women for You: Abbas Kiarostami's Così

Lorenzo Wolff
Death Rattle and Roll: the Sound From England's Gutters

Poets' Basement
Payne, Anderson and Williams

Website of the Weekend
Hitler Learns of Sarah Palin's Resignation

July 16, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
What Economy?

Afshin Rattansi Iranian Planes and the Hidden Toll of Economic Sanctions

Gregory V. Button
The Search for Environmental Justice in Perry County, Alabama

Evan Knappenberger
Profile of a Deserter

Michelle Bollinger
Why is Leonard Peltier Still in Prison?

Russell Mokhiber
White House to ABC News: No Obama Single-Payer Doc

Belén Fernández
Iranian Penetration, Oh My!

Alice Walker
What is Torture Like? A Letter to Obama

Nicholas Dearden
Paying the Climate Debt: the G-8's Troubling Model

Albert Osueke
Sotomayor and the Identity Mountain

Website of the Day
Sotomayor for the Prosecution

July 15, 2009

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Assassination Bureau

Vijay Prashad
A Political Recession

Dean Baker
Stimulus Arithmetic

Ray McGovern
Cheney Sweating Bullets

Jonathan Cook
Jenin's Model of "Economic Peace"

David Rosen
Shouts From the Gallery: the Sotomayor Hearings and the Culture Wars

Eric Walberg
Uighurs vs. Afghans: a Study in Contrast

Greg Moses
Three Dimensions of a Complete Stimulus Plan

Sousan Hammad
Decolonizing Israel

Binoy Kampmark
The Trial of Charles Taylor

Tracy McLellan
The Story of My Arrest

Website of the Day
11 Days in Saudi Gitmo

July 14, 2009

Eamonn McCann
The Emperors of Bombast: Bono, U2 and the Crisis of World Capitalism

Joanne Mariner
Obama's New Euphemism

Franklin Spinney
The Taliban Rope-a-Dope

Steve Heilig
Walking Mount Tam: an Interview with Gary Snyder

Ali Abunimah
Hamas' Choice

Dave Lindorff
The End of "Nice" Health Care Reform

Nikolas Kozloff
The Politics of Destabilization: McCain and Honduras

Ellen Brown
From Golden State to Subprime State

Alice Slater
How US Missile Defense Plans Sabotaged Nuclear Disarmament Talks With Russia

Ron Jacobs
Protest U.S. Aggression

Joe Allen
The Fight to Save James Hickman in Jim Crow-Style Chicago

Website of the Day
Mel Brooks Does the French Revolution

July 13, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Essence of the Regime

Mike Whitney
The Deflating Economy

P. Sainath
How the World Depression Hits Orissa

Gareth Porter
A US / Iraq Conflict on Iran

Paul Moore
Rap in the Streets, Rap in the Suites

Tim Wise
Off the Deep End: Private Clubs, Public Prejudice

Andy Worthington Former Insider Shatters Credibility of Military Commissions

David Macaray
Cartoon Voices: Serf's Up in Hollywood

Cal Winslow
The Healthcare Worker War

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Spring in the Time of Obama

Website of the Day
Washington's Deep Game with China

July 10-12, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's Biden Problem

José Pertierra
The Cuban Five: a Cold War Case in a Post-Cold War World

John Ross
After the Honduran Coup

Conn Hallinan
The Settlements and the Quartet

Nikolas Kozloff
C Street Band: Sex Scandals, Moral Hypocrisy and the Far Right Agenda in Latin America

Clifton Ross /
Marcy Rein
U.S. and Honduras: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Good Neighbor

Carl Ginsburg
Summers' Clouded Crystal Ball

Michael Neumann
Say It Loud, Say It Proud: There is No God!

Gilad Atzmon
The Left and Islam: Thinking Outside of the Secular Box

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Parable of the Golden Parachute

Ellen Hodgson Brown
California Dreamin': How the State Can Beat Its Budget Woes

Jim Goodman
Rural America Needs More Than Listening Sessions

Christopher Bickerton
Europe's New Politics of Hard Times

Wendell Potter
Health Care Industry Adopts Tobacco Lobby's Tactics

Dave Lindorff
CIA Lies: Why Isn't Congress in Open Revolt?

David Ker Thomson
Switchbacking Toward Bastille Day

Anthony DiMaggio
The Michael Jackson Feeding Frenzy

Raymond Lawrence
Michael Jackson as Sexual Pervert: the Calumnies of Peter King

Walid El Houri
Neda and Marwa: a Tale of Two Murdered Women

Stephanie Westbrook
Yes, We Camp

Roger Gaess
The Shades of Highgate Cemetery

David Yearsley
Tara, America's Dream House

Kim Nicolini
Caution: Men at Work, Robbing Banks

Poets' Basement
Five Poems From the Japanese

Website of the Weekend
Free Tiga and Hugh!

Weekend Edition
July 31 - August 2, 2009

The Ennis House as Imperial Ruin

Frank Lloyd Wright in Hollywood

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Driving up Vermont Avenue in LA, 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.

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 region. "No house should ever be on a hill or on anything,” Wright preached. “ It should be of the hill.  Belonging to it.  Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other."

To a large degree, his vision of the Ennis House confirms to this ideal. The main house, the adjacent chauffeur’s quarters and the massive retaining wall are composed more than 24,000 concrete blocks, made on site, from blasted granite excavated on the lot, each block woven together by an unseen net of steel reinforcement bars.

His southern California homes seem to cling to the hillsides and canyons of LA like the pueblos of the Southwest. At a distance, the Ennis House, jutting up over its rampart-like retaining wall, bears an uncanny resemblance to the pueblo of Acoma in northern New Mexico. Even Wright wondered, somewhat cheekily, “if these houses could be considered modern.” By then, he’d already given up on modernism.

He wasn’t alone in view the houses as sophisticated throwbacks. Two of Wright’s most famous apprentices, Rudolf Schindler and Richard Neutra, followed Wright to LA. These young Viennese architects were infatuated with Wright’s prairie designs, the linear planes and discreet manipulation of interior spaces. But both were aghast at the bulky masses and extravagant ornamentation of Wright’s LA structures.

Schindler, who supervised the construction of Hollyhock House, split from Wright shortly afterwards. He and Neutra went on to found the sleek and austere modernist style that came to dominate LA architecture for the next forty years. Today, Wright’s LA houses stand as relics of the road not taken in southern California architecture.

Wright first came to LA in 1915 at the urging of his son Lloyd Wright. Lloyd was an accomplished architect in his own right. He was thought drafting skills by his father and executed many of the beautiful drawings in the collection of the Prairie house designs for the German Wasmuth press—this is the book that excited Schindler and Neutra, then young students of Aldof Loos in Vienna.

In 1911 Lloyd landed a position with the famous landscaping firm of Olmstead and Olmstead. A year later they sent him to San Diego to supervise the preparations of landscaping for the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915. It was at this crucial expo where Lloyd and his father were introduced to the architectural heritage of Meso-America. Indeed within a few weeks of visiting the expo, FLW dashed off a plan for a warehouse in his birthplace in Richland, Wisconsin that incorporated several design and structural elements from the Mayan House of Three Lintels at Chichén Itza.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s initial impression of Los Angeles wasn’t favorable. In a crabby letter to his son, he referred to the city as “a desert of shallow effects.” For the next six years, much of Wright’s life and work would be spent in Japan, consumed by the design and troubled construction of the Imperial Hotel.

Lloyd, however, fell in love with southern California and soon hired on as a landscape designer with the great San Diego architect Irving Gill, who had worked side-by-side with FLW 20 years earlier in Chicago at the firm of Adler and Sullivan. Gill went on to become one of the preeminent architects on the West Coast, designing austere stucco houses, churches and apartment complexes that resemble the Taos pueblo and early Spanish missions.

Lloyd later worked as a set designer for Paramount Pictures and designed several parks in LA, including the concrete animals at the La Brea tar pits and the awning for the Hollywood Bowl.

In 1919, Wright was summoned back to LA by the oil heiress Aline Barnsdale, whom Wright had come to know in Chicago through their interest in radical theater. Barnsdale was leftist and pacifist, dubbed by the ferociously right-wing LA press the “parlor room communist.”  She had bought a 40-acre tract of land on Hollywood Boulevard called Olive Hill, which she wanted Wright to develop into an artist colony and theater complex.

Here was a potential gold mine. An heiress with extravagant tastes, a big chunk of land and the desire for lots of structures. Working mainly from his studio in Tokyo, where he was working on the Imperial Hotel, Wright designed the centerpiece of the Olive Hill complex, Aline Barnsdale’s house, called Hollyhock, after her favorite flower. Wright used an semi-abstract Hollyhock pattern ornamentation throughout the design.

Hollyhock House looked like a new kind of architecture, far removed from his own Prairie houses or the arts and craft bungalows that then dominated Los Angeles’s residential neighborhoods. Here the Mayan-inspired forms took shape: the imposing house seems to extrude from the like the spine of the earth, revealing a stucco and concrete temple. From the exterior the look is foreboding and monumental; inside the house is open and filled with sunlight. The house is anchored by a large living room with a vaulted ceiling and a dramatic fireplace surrounded by a moat of water. Its u-shaped plan encloses a courtyard, with lush gardens and a small stream.

Barnsdale, the friend of Emma Goldman, was a difficult and meddling patroness. She regularly imposed what Wright termed “arbitrary conditions” on his work. For example, she told him that she “didn’t want the house to look green, but feel green.”

In any event, Wright passed on most of the business of dealing with Barnsdale’s whims to his son Lloyd and Schindler, who designed a beautiful Prairie style house for the site. Barnsdale hired Lloyd to design and construct billboards supporting the cause of Tom Mooney and Sacco and Vanzetti which she had Lloyd erect on Hollywood Boulevard. Then she grew bored with the project and the house. Only Hollyhock, Schindler’s Prairie house, another house (now destroyed) designed by Wright, a spring house and a kindergarten were built. After a few years Barnsdale left for good and donated all of Olive Hill to the city of Los Angeles.

Wright later dismissed the entire project. “Let’s forget it,” he wrote to Lloyd. “The damned thing will float away some day and be forgotten. It was a transition building.”

After the trials of the Imperial Hotel, Wright found himself in a dry spell. He was physically exhausted and emotionally spent. Little work flowed his way. He was 58 years old and even though the greatest work of his career lay before him, at the time it must have appeared to him as if he was being by-passed by the young Turks of the International School.

He was lured back to LA by the booming real estate market and the opportunity to work with his son, Lloyd, with whom he planned to open a permanent office in Hollywood. Soon after Wright arrived back in LA in 1923, he planted a story in the local papers announcing his intention to launch a large new development in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains. Apparently, this was a reference to an area of hills and narrow canyons in Beverly Hills known as Doheny Ranch. The development had been commissioned by Lawrence Doheny, an LA oil baron.

For the Doheny Ranch development, Wright laid out an entire community of concrete block houses, roads, tunnels, parks and bridges. All of the houses were to have been constructed out the same materials, but each structure would uniquely designed according to the site. In his plans, Wright took pains to disturb as little of the terrain and vegetation as possible.

The project never materialized. It withered away after Doheny became ensnared in the great Teapot Dome scandal of 1924. But the designs and the concrete block construction method resurfaced over the next few years in his great LA Mayan houses, La Miniatura, the Freeman House, the Storer House and the Ennis House.

For Wright, the fatal erosion of his creation occurred before the first block was laid. He clashed with the Ennises, who he sneered were nouveau riche, over nearly every detail, from the ceilings to the floorings to the furniture and lighting.

Wright split in a huff, leaving his son Lloyd to deal with Mr. and Mrs. Ennis and to supervise the construction. By all accounts, it was a thankless assignment.

Construction of the giant stepped retaining wall began on May 1, 1925. Within weeks, there were serious problems, largely resulting from a flawed survey of the property commissioned by the Ennises. The wall bulged at its base and several blocks on the upper run developed cracks. The Ennises grumbled and Lloyd Wright wrote his father for advice. FLW was dismissive. He wrote back saying he believed that “cracks nor bulge of no great significance.”

Among other things, Wright was a great salesman, the PT Barnum of architecture. He had to be. He didn’t enjoy big corporate commissions and his radical politics (he was on Hoover’s watch list for the last 40 years of his life) meant he didn’t get any government contracts. His office in his glorious house in Oak Park, where he seduced his clients with his genius, is one of the great salesrooms in America.

With the Ennises, he set the hook with this letter: "You see, the final result is going to stand on that hill a hundred years or more. Long after we are all gone, it will be pointed out as the Ennis House and pilgrimages will be made to it by lovers of the beautiful from everywhere." It’s classic Wright: grandiose, unflinchingly egotistical and dead on.

Nearly all of Wright’s houses leak. He grew to dislike pitched roofs and loathed gutters. Some clients dealt amiably with the moisture as a kind of signature feature of living in a Wright house. Other clients were less understanding and took matters into their own hands, often with disastrous results for the structure. That’s precisely what happened at the Ennis House.

Irritated that the occasional drips (this is LA, after all, not Seattle) might run their Persian rugs, the Ennises slathered the house in a thick coat of sealant. This was later followed by paint. It did stop the leaking, but it also  trapped moisture in the blocks, accelerating the deterioration of the concrete blocks and corrosion of the web of reinforced steel that knits the blocks together.

I’d scrutinized the Ennis house at a distance for years, poring over the plans, the exquisite presentation drawings, and photographs of its construction taken by Lloyd Wright.

Then one day in late January a few years ago Franklin DeGroot offered to provide a guided tour. DeGroot is an architect and executive director of the Trust for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage, the nonprofit group working to restore the house and its grounds and open it to the public.

On the drive up twisty and narrow Glendower Avenue, the house emerges and disappears from view, and then suddenly the road takes you past a cement block wall that conceals the entrance to the courtyard of the sprawling complex.

On this overcast and gloomy day, the house looks like a set from a DeMille movie. In fact, the Ennis House has been featured in dozens of films, most memorably in Blade Runner.  The house is looms and hulks, large and ungainly. It staggers awkwardly across the hillside. It’s a menacing illusion. Most of the mass is non-structural, as if meant to intimidate the uninitiated.

The exterior of the house is meant to exude power. But this is LA and nothing here is for real. Rising from the grand retaining wall, the house is a projection, an exaggeration of mass. Inside, it is much smaller than it looks. The Ennis House is a self-conscious imitation of power—at least for Wright and Schindler, if not the owners and crowds that might, one day, prowl its halls on the way to Grauman’s Chinese Theater or Universal Studios. It is a folie, an in-joke about pretense and ambition, at the Ennis’ expense. Thirty years after the construction of the Ennis House, Wright confessed that the palatial building in the Hollywood Hills was over-scaled: “the house was way out of concrete-block size. It was out of bounds.”

The debt to Mayan temples is unmistakable, although Wright, always the most adamantine when committing the grandest plagiary, quaintly refused to admit to any influences, even from anonymous Indians dead for centuries. In fact, as noted above,  Wright had fallen  under the spell of the Mayans in LA at the 1915 Exposition, where he saw for the first time photographs and models of the great Mayan temples and cities of Palenque and Chichen Itza.  Here in the Hollywood Hills, the courtyard, around which the mansion and the chauffeur’s house and garage, gives the game away.  The courtyard is stark, barren, a place fit for the dark ceremonies of Hollywood moguls.

The telescoping pavilions and battered walls are stretched and elongated a narrow mass, linked by the ingenious 100 foot-long loggia on the north side of the house, which connects all the major rooms of the house and provides a tremendous view of the cityscape.

You enter from below. The initial view of the interior is fragmented and disorienting. Inside, the Ennis House is dark, cool, one is tempted to say tomblike. Here we break from the Mayan model. This is a desert house, chilled by the interplay of shadow and stone. The architectural debt here is owed more to Chaco and Mesa Verde than Palenque.

You rise into the light, up a flight of stairs to central axis of the house. The gorgeous, sun-dappled dining room to the right and to the left, sunk behind colonnades, the massive fireplace with a bronze hood featuring the fire-god Xiuheuctli. It is a space that throbs with ritual allusions.

But it all proved too much for the inhabitants, who disfigured the austere lines of the house with Edwardian chandeliers, Victorian furnishings, cabinets, wood paneling and hideous velours-covered furniture. Too often Wright’s houses were made only for Wright to live in.  The Ennis’s lived here for a few years, then the house passed to film producer John Nesbitt who had made a mint from his series known as the Passing Parade. Nesbitt tracked down Wright to redesign the place in his own image, starting with a new name. They called the new palace: Sijistan, after the castle of a Persian hero.  For a few thousand dollars, Wright generated some beautiful sketches to redesign the interior of the house, ideas that would later be deployed with revolutionary effect in Fallingwater. 

The Ennis house completed the transition from monumental home to simply a monument. It’s an entry on the National Historic Register.

LA is brutal to its own architectural heritage. The city can’t stomach outward signs of disrepair, age, deterioration. Buildings either get facelifts or euthanized with a wrecking ball. In recent years, structures designed by Irving Gill, Rudolf Schindler and Richard Neutra, the three great California modernists, have been demolished without remorse.

In 1994, the Northridge earthquake shattered the foundation and buckled the retaining walls of the house. Extensive repairs were made funded largely by the Ennis House Foundation. With a grant from the Getty Foundation, giant i-beams were sunk under the house, where the massive structure finally achieved a perilous balance. Then in 2005 disaster struck once again when torrential winter rains and floods savagely eroded the hillside, leaving the house vulnerable to a fatal landslide.

This all proved too much for the private foundation that had tried so valiantly to save Wright’s notorious Hollywood romanza. Since neither the city nor the state could be enticed into taking custody of the house, the Foundation is now searching for a private owner through Christie’s “Great Estates” international marketing service. Perhaps there are some deep pockets left somewhere in the world.

The endeavor to save and rehabilitate the Ennis house was a worthy project, but I wonder if there’s not another option, one more in synch with Wright’s organic vision. Why not stabilize the house, so that it doesn’t slide off the hill, and then let nature run its course?

What’s an imperial city without a ruin?

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest book, Born Under a Bad Sky, is just out from AK Press / CounterPunch books. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net. 

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