Designers · Encyclopedia
32 names that built the look
The architects, builders and furniture designers behind mid-century modern, from the tract houses of Palm Springs to the chairs in your living room. Arranged A to Z.
Alvar Aalto
Aalto bent birch plywood into furniture that felt warm where Bauhaus steel felt cold. His Paimio Sanatorium (1933) came with its own Paimio armchair, and his three-legged Stool 60 (1933) is still made by Artek, the company he co-founded in 1935. In the United States he built Baker House, a dormitory at MIT (1948).
Look for Paimio chair · Stool 60 · Villa Mairea (1939)
Gregory Ain
Ain trained under Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler and spent his career on a harder problem: good modern houses for people of modest means. His Mar Vista Tract (1948), designed with Joseph Johnson and Alfred Day and landscaped by Garrett Eckbo, gave postwar buyers flexible plans, sliding partitions and real gardens.
Look for Mar Vista Tract · Dunsmuir Flats (1937)
Buff & Hensman
The Pasadena partners built hundreds of warm post-and-beam houses across Southern California, heavy on exposed wood, glass and garden. With Calvin Straub they designed the Bass House, Case Study House No. 20 (1958), whose curved plywood vaults made it one of the program's most humane entries.
Look for Bass House · Pasadena's Poppy Peak neighborhood
William F. Cody
Cody designed the desert's country-club life: clubhouses, hotels and houses laid out around fairways, pools and cocktail hour. His Del Marcos Hotel (1947) was one of the first modern hotels in Palm Springs. His own favorite may have been St. Theresa Catholic Church (1968), where he designed everything down to the pews.
Look for Del Marcos Hotel · St. Theresa Catholic Church · Palm Springs Public Library (1975)
Charles & Ray Eames
The husband-and-wife team turned wartime plywood-molding experiments into the LCW lounge chair (1946), then built their own steel-and-glass Eames House, Case Study House No. 8 (1949), from off-the-shelf industrial parts. For Herman Miller they produced the fiberglass shell chairs and the Lounge Chair and Ottoman (1956).
Look for LCW · shell chairs · Lounge Chair and Ottoman
Joseph Eichler
Eichler was a builder, not an architect, but he hired good ones, including A. Quincy Jones, Anshen & Allen and Claude Oakland, and built more than 11,000 homes in California between 1949 and the mid-1960s. Eichlers are known for atriums, walls of glass, radiant-heated slabs and post-and-beam roofs. He also sold to buyers of any race when many developers would not.
Look for Open atriums · low-slung roofs · nearly windowless street fronts
Craig Ellwood
Self-taught and relentlessly stylish, Ellwood made light steel frames look effortless. He built three Case Study Houses (Nos. 16, 17 and 18) in the 1950s and capped his career with the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena (1976), a black steel-truss building that spans a ravine like a bridge.
Look for Case Study Houses 16–18 · Art Center College of Design
Albert Frey
Swiss-born, Frey worked in Le Corbusier's Paris studio before coming to America, where he co-designed the all-metal Aluminaire House (1931). He settled in Palm Springs and stayed six decades, co-designing Palm Springs City Hall, the Aerial Tramway's Valley Station (1963) and the swooping Tramway Gas Station (1965). His hillside Frey House II (1964) is built around a boulder.
Look for Frey House II · Tramway Gas Station · his Christian Science church, now a theater
Harwell Hamilton Harris
Harris studied sculpture before turning to architecture, apprenticed with Richard Neutra, and developed a warmer, wood-grained California modernism of his own. His Havens House in Berkeley (1941) cantilevers dramatically off a hillside. In the 1950s he led the University of Texas architecture school, where his faculty shaped a generation of teachers.
Look for Havens House · redwood, deep eaves, screened porches
Arne Jacobsen
Jacobsen designed Copenhagen's SAS Royal Hotel (1960) down to the door handles and cutlery, and for it created the Egg and Swan chairs (1958). His stacking Ant chair (1952) and Series 7 chair (1955), both of molded plywood, are among the most copied chairs ever made.
Look for Egg chair · Swan chair · Series 7
A. Quincy Jones
Jones did as much as anyone to bring modern design to the tract house. With his partner Frederick Emmons he designed thousands of homes for Joseph Eichler. In Rancho Mirage he designed Sunnylands (1966), the Annenberg estate that has hosted presidents and heads of state. He later served as dean of USC's architecture school.
Look for Eichler homes · Sunnylands
Finn Juhl
Juhl treated chairs as sculpture, floating seats and backs on carved teak frames. His Chieftain Chair (1949) remains his signature. He designed the Trusteeship Council Chamber at the United Nations in New York (1952), and Baker Furniture's American production of his designs helped bring Danish Modern into U.S. living rooms.
Look for Chieftain Chair · sculpted teak arms
Hugh Kaptur
Kaptur arrived in Palm Springs in the 1950s and developed an earthy, organic version of desert modernism, heavy on stone, wood and deep shade. He designed Palm Springs Fire Station No. 3 (1962), hotels and apartments, and houses for stars including Steve McQueen and William Holden. He is one of the last architects of the town's golden age.
Look for Fire Station No. 3 · the Steve McQueen house
Edward Killingsworth
Killingsworth brought a formal, almost classical elegance to the post-and-beam house: tall doors, reflecting pools, floating roofs. His Frank House, Case Study House No. 25 in the Naples neighborhood of Long Beach, and the nearby Opdahl House are textbook examples. He went on to design luxury hotels across Hawaii and Asia and planned the Cal State Long Beach campus for four decades.
Look for Case Study House No. 25 · Opdahl House
Florence Knoll
Trained under Eliel Saarinen and Mies van der Rohe, Florence Knoll ran the Knoll Planning Unit and, with her husband Hans, built Knoll into the company that defined the modern office. She brought Eero Saarinen, Harry Bertoia and Mies into the catalog and designed crisp, rectilinear sofas and tables of her own.
Look for Knoll sofa · the open-plan executive office
Pierre Koenig
Koenig believed steel and glass could make houses faster, cheaper and more open. His Stahl House, Case Study House No. 22 (1960), cantilevered over the Hollywood Hills, became the defining image of midcentury Los Angeles through Julius Shulman's night photograph. His Bailey House, Case Study House No. 21 (1958), is ringed by reflecting pools.
Look for Stahl House · Bailey House
William Krisel
Krisel gave the postwar tract house personality. For the Alexander Construction Company he designed some 2,000 houses in Palm Springs, varying rooflines (butterfly, flat, gabled) and setbacks so no two streets looked alike. His House of Tomorrow (1960), built for Robert Alexander and later famous as Elvis Presley's honeymoon house, is his showpiece.
Look for Butterfly roofs · Twin Palms and Vista Las Palmas neighborhoods
John Lautner
An apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin, Lautner designed some of the most daring houses of the century: the octagonal Chemosphere (1960), perched on a single concrete column; the Sheats-Goldstein House (1963); and, in Palm Springs, the Elrod House (1968), with its petaled concrete dome. His Googie's coffee shop (1949) gave a whole style its name.
Look for Chemosphere · Elrod House · Sheats-Goldstein House
Cliff May
Often called the father of the California ranch house, May was a self-taught designer who blended Spanish hacienda plans with modern glass and indoor-outdoor living. With architect Chris Choate he developed prefabricated Cliff May Homes, built by the hundreds at Lakewood Rancho Estates in Long Beach in the 1950s. He also designed the Robert Mondavi Winery (1966).
Look for Low gabled roofs · board-and-batten · walls of sliding glass
George Nelson
As Herman Miller's design director from 1945 to 1972, Nelson brought in Charles and Ray Eames, Isamu Noguchi and Alexander Girard. His own studio produced the Ball Clock (1948), the Bubble Lamps (1952), the Coconut Chair (1955) and the Marshmallow Sofa (1956), often with staff designers such as Irving Harper doing key work.
Look for Ball Clock · Bubble Lamps · Marshmallow Sofa
Richard Neutra
Vienna-born Neutra arrived in Los Angeles in 1925 and treated glass, steel and landscape as a kind of therapy. His Lovell Health House (1929) announced modernism in America. In Palm Springs, the Kaufmann Desert House (1946), made famous by Julius Shulman's twilight photograph, is still the benchmark for desert living.
Look for Lovell Health House · Kaufmann Desert House
Oscar Niemeyer
Niemeyer made concrete curve. His buildings at Pampulha in the 1940s broke modernism's right angles, and in the late 1950s he designed the landmark buildings of Brasília, including the National Congress and the Cathedral. He was also part of the team that designed the United Nations headquarters in New York.
Look for Church of St. Francis at Pampulha · Brasília Cathedral
Isamu Noguchi
Noguchi moved between sculpture, gardens and furniture as if they were one discipline. His glass-topped coffee table for Herman Miller (1947) and his Akari paper lanterns, made in Japan from 1951, are fixtures of the midcentury living room. His gardens include the UNESCO garden in Paris.
Look for Noguchi table · Akari lanterns
Eero Saarinen
Saarinen designed on every scale, from the Womb Chair (1948) and Tulip Chair (1956) for Knoll to the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and the TWA Flight Center at New York's Idlewild airport, which opened in 1962, a year after his death at 51.
Look for Tulip chair and table · Womb Chair · TWA Flight Center
Rudolph Schindler
Vienna-born Schindler came to Los Angeles to supervise Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House and stayed. His own Kings Road House (1922) in West Hollywood, built of tilt-up concrete panels, sliding canvas and open patios, is one of the first truly modern houses in America. The Lovell Beach House (1926) in Newport Beach lifts its rooms on concrete frames above the sand.
Look for Kings Road House · Lovell Beach House
Whitney R. Smith
With Wayne Williams, Smith ran Smith and Williams, the Pasadena firm behind thoughtful tract housing, Googie gas stations and garden pavilions. Their Mobil station in Anaheim (1956) and the Full Moon Tea House at Descanso Gardens (1966) show the range.
Look for Full Moon Tea House · Blue Ribbon tract homes, Reseda (1953)
Raphael Soriano
Born on the Greek island of Rhodes, Soriano worked briefly for Neutra and became modernism's most committed advocate of the steel-framed house. He designed the 1950 Case Study House and a house and studio for the photographer Julius Shulman (1950), and pushed prefabricated steel and aluminum building systems through the 1950s.
Look for Shulman House · 1950 Case Study House
Hans Wegner
Wegner designed more than 500 chairs. The Wishbone Chair (1949) has been in continuous production since 1950, and his Round Chair (1949) became known simply as “The Chair” after John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon sat in it for their 1960 televised debate.
Look for Wishbone Chair · The Chair
Donald Wexler
Wexler believed steel, glass and concrete were the right materials for the desert. With Richard Harrison he designed the Alexander steel houses (1962) and expanded Temple Isaiah, and he went on to design the Palm Springs International Airport terminal (1965) and Dinah Shore's house (1964).
Look forThe Wexler steel houses · Palm Springs airport terminal
E. Stewart Williams
Williams designed Frank Sinatra's Twin Palms (1947), then helped shape the town's civic face with Coachella Valley Savings and Loan (1961) and the Palm Springs Desert Museum (1976), now the Palm Springs Art Museum. His Temple Isaiah sanctuary dates from 1950.
Look for Twin Palms · Palm Springs Art Museum · Temple Isaiah
Paul R. Williams
Williams became the first Black member of the American Institute of Architects in 1923 and went on to design thousands of buildings, including homes for Hollywood stars. He was part of the team behind the LAX Theme Building (1961), and in the desert he designed the Palm Springs Tennis Club.
Look for LAX Theme Building · Palm Springs Tennis Club
Frank Lloyd Wright
The elder statesman of American architecture spent the midcentury developing the Usonian house, an affordable single-story home with an open plan, radiant-heated floors and a carport. Fallingwater (1937) and the Guggenheim Museum (1959) bookend the era, and his Hollyhock House in Los Angeles (1921) is what brought Rudolph Schindler to California.
Look for Usonian houses · Fallingwater · Hollyhock House
Dates and attributions are drawn from published histories and preservation records. Spot something we should correct? Let us know.
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