Olive Hill (Barnsdall Square) • 2013
Landscape architect Sonia Brenner and I collaborated to create a speculative archive of souvenirs and photography centering on Barnsdall Square Shopping Plaza, built in the 1950s on the last remaining plot of land still owned by the family of Aline Barnsdall, for the Plan Your Visit. exhibition curated by Anthony Carfello and Adam Peña at the MAK Center Los Angeles (Schindler House).
Olive Hill, best known as Barnsdall Art Park and the Hollyhock House, is a geographic feature bordered by Vermont Ave, Hollywood Blvd, Sunset Blvd and Edgemont Ave. It had been planted with olive groves for commercial cultivation and served as a popular location for Easter sunrise when philanthropist and architecture patron Aline Barnsdall purchased it in 1919. When Barnsdall brought Frank Lloyd Wright to Southern California to build the Hollyhock House and utopian arts complex she later deeded to the City of LA, she also planted the seeds for the future of the built environment in Southern California when FLW protegés RM Schindler and Richard Neutra moved west to work at the site.
Installation view of Plan your visit. Photography by Mimi Teller, 2013.
When we undertook the project in January 2013, none of the historic Frank Lloyd Wright structures were open to the public*. Our tourist explorations instead centered on the entire parcel of what was once originally considered Olive Hill - landscaped park views from the top of the hill towards Griffith Park as well as the 1950s era street facing structures that cut into the hillside along its perimeter as their own form of postwar modernist utopia: the aging Barnsdall Square Shopping Plaza (a mid-century retail dream with plentiful and easy parking by Stiles O. Clements and Associates that was a late era manifestation of original FLW plans for a shopping arcade), the Kaiser Permanente campus (advertised as ‘the hospital of the future’ with WW2 roots in Kaiser Steel shipbuilding and later home construction), and middle-class apartment blocks on Edgemont (pools and patios for California Living™).
Unlike a carefully restored house museum, the mid-century utopia on the hilltop’s edges was never a static landmark but an everyday evolving place that bears physical evidence of cultural, social and political contexts that have impacted Los Angeles.
These included immigration (Thai, Central American and Armenian communities that migrated to LA in their home political contexts of the 1970s and 1980s), the Watts and LA Uprisings of 1965 and 1992, deindustrialization, the dismantling and rebuilding of rail, 1990s retail consolidation, and more.
Beyond the vitrine of trinkets and photographs in the installation, we offered a guided tour of the hill in March and a self-guided tour map along with a timeline in the installation from February-April.
Site based research was conducted in person by speaking with storeowners, the property owner, and other representatives of Barnsdall Square Shopping Plaza as well as former Hollyhock House director Jeffrey Herr, and using the City of Los Angeles, Los Angeles Times, and the Metro Library archives.
*FLW’s Hollyhock House and Residence A, now designated as UNESCO World Heritage Sites, have since reopened to the public in 2015 and 2021.