Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s

It was not until 1955 or 1956, about the time of his last Case Study House, that Ellwood began to look at Mies. ¹ Having never studied architecture, his architectural horizons had hardly extended beyond California and so he had remained unfamiliar with Mies’s Chicago and European work. The publicity that emanated from Mies’s 1947 limited retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York had probably bypassed Ellwood, coming a year or two too early, even though Charles Eames had reviewed it in Arts & Architecture, the one magazine Ellwood might reasonably be thought to have seen. ² It was also reviewed in Architectural Forum ³ and a number of art and foreign journals. ⁴ The review is interesting, because it is clear that it was not the individual exhibits – “most of the few examples shown here have been seen many times before” – which best conveyed the feeling of Mies’s work, but rather the experience of seeing the exhibition, of actually walking through it. Thus had Ellwood read of the exhibition, it is unlikely that it would made much impression.