Of the hill

Norman Lykes House, Palm Canyon, Phoenix, Arizona, 1959, Frank Lloyd Wright.
Upper photo courtesy of Toptenrealestatedeals.com. Lower photo by Steve Hoge, courtesy of Flickr.

I knew well that no house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and home should live together each the happier for the other.

— Frank Lloyd Wright

In his lifelong quest for an organic architecture that did not dominate the land as its Classical, Gothic and Victorian precursors did but integrated itself with it to become one with the Mother Earth that originated its materials, Wright combined site with structure in many of his designs. This allowed each to benefit from the other. The building mirrored and abstracted its environment's natural forms in its architecture while conserving its site to preserve nature's ecosystems and offer the picturesque natural views many a homebuyer would desire.

Photos courtesy of L'autre carnet de Jimidi.

The Norman Lykes House near Phoenix, Arizona, realizes his goal fully. Begun before his death in 1959 and completed in 1966, it seems to hibernate in the hill, curve with its contours, crag with its cliffs, and swoop with its sweep, affording its owners a wraparound panorama of Palm Canyon's mountainous desert country while providing fluid spaces that reflect human circulation patterns.

In the following images the house is so "of the hill" that it resists the urge to be "king of the hill." It defers to the hill's earthly dominion by not only letting its pool-users and porch entrants enjoy hill views but also not letting them forget the nature that originally created the house, as if it were a logical continuity of the hill.

Photo courtesy of Alexandru Luca of Pinterest.

Photo courtesy of L'autre carnet de Jimidi.

Notice how "on the hill" its neighbor is compared to the "belongingness" of the Lykes House. The neighbor diverts our attention from the nature onto itself with a white façade that counters the warm earthtones the Lykes House borrows from its rocky environs. Also, the neighbor's linear geometry, clearly man-made, clashes with the nature-made feel of the Lykes House's organic curves.

But Wright did not originate the "of the hill" ideal. Civil Engineering Discoveries, a New York-based "learning platform for all over the world," often posts images of hill-bound housing from all over the world that show us how diverse cultures have used the hill and mountain to best advantage for views, natural resources, health, remoteness, and unification of their homes with nature's majesty.

For example, these one-level houses on the Faroe Islands, a constituent country of the Kingdom of Denmark, have roofs sodded like the grass of the hill they stand on, bringing them closer to the ground than the Danish tradition of earth-hugging low-scale homes. This also enables the peaked gables to pay homage to the peaked mountains in the distance.

An earthier example: a Welsh house that reprises the Faroe Islands' sodded roof and one-story stature but takes its belongingness to the hill a step further by mimicking the hill's contours. It slopes up from the ground and slants slightly down to become more hill-like, allowing for a patio and hot-tub, though that mars the "eyelid" effect that would have made the house even hillier. But the fieldstone walls augment the house's earthiness by honoring its natural resources.

This residential community on the Amalfi Coast in Italy is arguably on the hill, built in the Classical, Italianate and Renaissance architectural traditions that Wright deemed notorious for counteracting nature's spontaneously organic fluidity with monumentally manmade pretension. 

Yet I think they're of the hill in their own way. For one, they sit precariously on a steep elevation, mirroring the craggy rocks of the adjoining cliffs, appearing just as vulnerable to nature's meteorological disruptions as nature is itself. But this siting is beneficial, too, stacking them down the cliff, which affords generous sun and sea air for all concerned. Also, their wide variety of colors reflect the diversity of flora that grows in those parts. 

Here is a more unified example of Italian hillside development, in Gangi, Sicily. 

Here the rowhouses are of a more uniform design and are more consistent in height, and the slate roofs are colored to reflect the terrain of the neighboring mountains. This makes them even more "of the hill" than the previous example. 

Furthermore, the variations in the roof heights seem to imitate the unevenness of natural mountain curves and undulations, while the roofs resemble the unified hue of the mountains, and the steep slope of their hill allows all of the houses the generous sunlight that pours onto the mountains, baking them into a golden brown.

Hobbiton, Matamata, New Zealand, built for Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit films. Photo by Jackie.lck (CC BY 2.0).

Bilbo Baggins' hobbit-hole, Hobbiton Movie Set. Photo by Tom Hall (CC BY 2.0).

What would most delight Wright regarding of-the-hill habitation would be Hobbiton in Middle-earth (as constructed in Matamata, Waikato, New Zealand, as a movie set for Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit films), the location of Bilbo Baggins' earth-tunneled hobbit-hole, as J.R.R. Tolkien himself described it in The Hobbit:

The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill—The Hill, as all the people for many miles round called it—and many little round doors opened out of it, first on one side and then on another. No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining rooms, all were on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage. The best rooms were on the left-hand side (going in), for these were the only ones to have windows, deep-set round windows looking over his garden and meadows beyond, sloping down to the river.

Now that's hill and home living together, each the happier for the other—and for Bilbo, to whom this marriage granted the luxury of one-level living and, as far as the earth could stretch, mansion-quality space he didn't have to build high on the hill to attain. Happy, that is, until the day Gandalf appeared at his perfectly circular green door...

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Balancing the Biltmores

Photo by Tony "the Marine" Santiago, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The Biltmore Hotel first piqued my interest while watching Abbott and Costello on TV when I was a kid. In one sketch, once they managed to shut both the hood and the trunk of their car (shutting one made the other open) and stuffed their raft in the back, Bud told Lou to drive them to "the Biltmore Hotel near Phoenix" for their vacation. Lou stopped at the Biltmore next door. A row ensued:

BUD: "I said the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix!"

LOU: "Well, it's the Biltmore Hotel right next to Phoenix Coffee Shop."

BUD: "I meant the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, Arizona!"

At that point my father informed me that there was also a Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, the city in which Bud and Lou lived (or barely lived; they were perpetually unemployed actors at the mercy of Mr. Fields, their cantankerous landlord) on The Abbott and Costello Show. 

So now that COVID-19 has put the kibosh on our plans to satiate our summertime wanderlusts, I thought I'd let my mind wander a bit and compare the two hotels—totally different in style, but miraculously built in the same decade—to see which might have been the better vacation resort for the legendary comedy team.
 

First of all, neither of the Biltmores looks anything like the one Lou stopped at, which confusedly intermingles the classicism of the Los Angeles Biltmore and the Art Deco of the Arizona Biltmore. (Nor was Phoenix Coffee Shop a real place.)

The Los Angeles Biltmore

L.A.'s "Biltmore Angel"—designed as a symbol of the City of the Angels its patrons were visiting—brought Beaux Arts beauty and Renaissance regalia to the city when it opened to festive fanfare in 1923. Since then it has hosted history in the making, from the Academy Awards to the arrival of the Beatles to the Democratic National Convention that nominated John F. Kennedy for President in 1960. Restored and reopened as the Millennium Biltmore in 2009, it remains the host with the most.

Photos by P.G. Roy Photography, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Leonard Schultze and S. Fullerton Weaver, architects of New York’s Pierre and Waldorf-Astoria hotels, designed the Biltmore in a mélange of Beaux-Arts, Mediterranean and Spanish-Italian Renaissance styles, befitting both L.A.’s Castilian heritage and Roaring '20s fashions.

Murals, frescoes, imported crystal chandeliers, carved marble fountains and columns, massive drapery and other delights embellish the Los Angeles Biltmore's 70,000 square feet of meeting, lounging, dining and club space, often integrating images of the “Biltmore Angel” into its lavish ornamentation.

The Biltmore's original 1,500 guestrooms included a Presidential Suite, where the Beatles stayed during their 1964 U.S. tour, accessing it by landing a helicopter on the hotel roof to avoid the hordes of screaming fans below. Latter-day renovations reduced the room count to 683 but restored the common areas to their ’20s twinkle.

Italian artist Giovanni Smeraldi, who painted murals in the Vatican and
the White House, hand-painted angels, cupids, Greek and Roman gods,
and other mythological figures on the ceilings of the Galleria...

 ...and the Crystal Ballroom, where the Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences was founded at a luncheon banquet in 1927. Smeraldi's
apprentice, Anthony Heinsbergen, restored the ceilings in the 1980s.

Reliefs of Roman deities Ceres and Neptune and Spanish conquistadors
Balboa and Columbus adorn the Palladian entrance.

The lobby retains the travertine walls, oak paneling and artificial
skylight ceiling from when it was the Music Room, where Kennedy
set up his presidential campaign headquarters.

The Rendezvous Court, the old lobby-turned-tearoom, features a
Moorish cast-plaster beamed ceiling accented in gold paint, Italian
chandeliers, and a Spanish-Baroque bronze doorway with an
astrological clock that still works.

Each ballroom is decorated in remembrance of its original function
or in keeping with the hotel's California heritage. The Emerald
Room, formerly the main dining room, has a food theme: hand-
painted animals and fish along cast-plaster ceiling beams.

The Tiffany Room, originally the Crystal Ballroom’s drop-off
corridor, features exploration-themed reliefs and sculptures of
Queen Isabella, Columbus and other Spanish explorers.

The Gold Room combines an old upper-level supper club and lower-
level palm room in an artful ambiance of hand-oiled wood paneling,
mirrored windows, and concealed liquor cabinets from Prohibition.

A nautical theme dominates the indoor pool and health club. Brass
railings and window/door trim, teakwood deck chairs, and hand-laid
Italian mosaic wall and pool tiles recall 1920s cruiseliners.

The South Galleria’s Roman columns, marble balustrades and vaulted
ceiling are complemented with Pompeii-styled floral friezes.

In the Biltmore Bowl downstairs, eight Academy Award ceremonies
took place between 1931 and 1942, making Best Picture legends of
Cimarron, It Happened One Night, Mutiny on the Bounty, The
Great Ziegfeld, The Life of Emile Zola, You Can't Take it With
You, Rebecca, and How Green Was My Valley.

Since Abbott and Costello's 1941 movie Buck Privates got two Oscar nominations (Best Original Song for "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy," sung by the Andrews Sisters, and Best Original Music Score for Charles Previn), they might have felt at home at the L.A. Biltmore...had it not been for Lou's tendency to get lost in big spaces, experience supernatural phenomena such as paintings or statues coming alive, and fail to convince Bud of the truth of these tales. Besides, this hotel's sheer size might have made his cries of "HEYYYYY, AAAAABBUHHHHHHHHTT!" go unheard by his buddy.

So let's get to Phoenix...

The Arizona Biltmore

Built in 1929, the Arizona Biltmore was designed by Albert Chase McArthur in the horizontal, earthy, Prairie-School, Mayan temple-based vernacular of his former teacher Frank Lloyd Wright, who was the design consultant. Though Wright was displeased with the final design, McArthur clearly took so much from the master it's easy to mistake it for a Wright original...

All photos by Tony "the Marine" Santiago, aka Marine 69-71 (License: CC BY-SA 4.0).

...especially regarding the use of desert sand-casted concrete blocks to create surface patterns inspired by palm-tree trunks and Native American woven fabrics. Wright preferred square Textile Blocks like those on his Derby, Ennis and Hollyhock houses, but MacArthur stood his ground, and his building blocks became known as the "Biltmore Blocks" for giving the Biltmore a unique geometric pattern recalling the movement of water ripples, fish gills, billowing sails...

...or smoke rising from the fireplaces. In the Mystery Room, the billowy blocks on the mantel suggest the movement of flames in the hearth and smoke up the flue, accented by the upward pointing of the "Indian arrowhead" andirons. I also love the way the cove-lighting gilds the cornice without the application of gold paint common in the LA Biltmore.

The cove-lit cornice also complements and contrasts the Mystery Room's stained-glass ceiling, for the effect of natural light in the day and artificial light in the evening, each adding splashes of color without the need for applied décor, except for the ceiling gilding that blends with both, smoothing the day-to-night transition.

The Biltmore blocks—which do bear a slight resemblance to the ornamentation around Abbott & Costello's "Biltmore"— also contribute to the sense of fluid movement throughout the hotel's lobby, as a counterpoint to the static feel of the more vertically oriented Los Angeles Biltmore. The Arizona Biltmore lobby's spatial continuity would certainly make it easier for Lou to flee from the dangers he couldn't convince Bud of the truth of...or for his "HEYYYYY, AAAAABBUHHHHHHHHTT!" alarm to be more loud and clear along the long, continuous space.

Bud would clearly hear Lou's bawl in the Biltmore's original ballroom, the Aztec Room. A geometric mandala radiates on the carpet while copper beams, slanting gilt ceiling panels and Biltmore-Block filigrees augment the sense of upward and inward motion toward the sun, honoring the artfully domineering temples of Mexico's Aztec Empire.

The Gold Room would be another resonant echo-chamber for Lou's holler of helplessness, with its unobstructed corridor-space and its ceiling slanting to just enough of an apex for acoustic enhancement while maintaining the hotel's low-slung horizontality, helped by low-rise stairs. Geometric sconce stacks and billowy Biltmore Blocks add an Aztec aura.

Here was a place for Bud and Lou to splash their raft and join the nabobs who dipped here: the Catalina Pool. Built in the 1930s by Chicago chewing-gum king William Wrigley Jr., it was reportedly Marilyn Monroe's favorite pool. Irving Berlin wrote many songs while sunning on the deck, including "White Christmas," which opens with a nod to the climate he was in:

The Catalina Pool fountain.

The sun is shining, the grass is green,

The orange and palm trees sway.

There's never been such a day

In Beverly Hills, L.A.

But it's December the twenty-fourth,

And I am longing to be up North.

Though it was the Biltmore's Beaux-Arts bro that was actually in L.A., Berlin nailed the ambiance of the Arizona Bilt to the hilt, with a twist of irony: since winter frigidity makes us miss summer humidity, why the opposite now?

Balancing the Biltmores

 

And speaking of opposites: It's clear which Biltmore Bud and Lou preferred. Which one would best cure your summertime blues?

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!