The long-awaited follow-up to the now-canonical ‘Evil People in Modernist Homes in Popular Films’ (2010), ‘Sad People’ examines the filmic trope of housing unhappy characters inside of modernist architecture.

Case studies via ten characters / homes / films, from Colin Firth’s George Falconer inside John Lautner’s Schaffer Residence in Tom Ford’s ‘A Single Man’ (2009) to Brigitte Bardot’s Camille Javal inside Adalberto Libera’s Casa Malaparte in Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Le Mépris’ (1963).

Essays by Erik Benjamins, Andrew Romano, Adam Štěch (Okolo), and Mimi Zeiger. Ed. by Benjamin Critton.

A Weather Report from the City of Dreadful Joy

Only the Eameses were happy.

Charles’ Midwest smile was straight from central casting. Ray, a Sacramento daughter tucked in pinafore, was filled to the brim with Gold Rush enthusiasm for Los Angeles, Modernism, and everyday things of the world. What is a fiberglass shell chair (especially in bright yellow or aquamarine) if not a belief in progress, democracy, technology, and the sunny potential of design?

Everyone else was miserable.

The perennial myth is that everyone in L.A. is cheerful and healthy—blissed out on surf and Moon Juice. It’s a trap that the New York Times Styles section falls into at least once a year as it berates the traffic and hails avocado toast, ayahuasca ceremonies, or whatever emergent trend bubbles up like tar from the pits on Miracle Mile to entrance Brooklyn mommies. But we can also blame the Southern Pacific Railroad whose early 20th century advertisements for its Sunset Route promised golden sunshine and pristine beaches, overlooking the flophouses and oil fields described in the pages of John Fante and Raymond Chandler. Or point the finger at Hollywood, of course.

Or maybe it is Julius Shulman’s fault. His iconic photographs of California Modernism sell a singular vision of midcentury architecture conjured out of light and air. No one ever tells you that Clarence “Buck” Stahl, the client behind Case Study House #22 (1959) was a bit of an obsessive crank, determined to erect his dream home on a precarious hillside deemed unbuildable.

In the years before Shulman’s famous photograph of the design by architect Pierre Koenig—the one where the glass box seems to float over a grid of L.A. city lights—Buck labored to create a flat lot on the steep site. On nights and weekends he’d scour construction sites across the city for chunks of broken concrete, then haul the free material back to the lot. Like Sisyphus, he’d manually stack concrete fragments into walls and terraces buttressed against the slope. Imagine the lonely precarity of one man stacking found materials atop a ridge and hoping beyond hope that they’d remain stable enough to form a foundation. It’s art brut, if nothing else.

When Aldous Huxley visited Los Angeles in 1925, more than a decade before his permanent move to Southern California, he dubbed it the “City of Dreadful Joy”—a phrase that captures the delirium of a boomtown and the necessary folly of its sad dreamers. But even after becoming a west coast resident, time and psychedelics couldn’t bring joy to Huxley. British writer Christopher Isherwood described in his diaries the pallor of the Huxley abode as like a house where a murder was committed.

In his journals, émigré writer Bertolt Brecht complained that the air was scentless, there are no seasons, and that everyone is on the make. “[Y]ou sell your piss, as it were, to the urinal,” he wrote. “[O]pportunism is regarded as the greatest virtue, politeness becomes cowardice.”

H.L Menchken saw L.A. as a shallow metropolis full of crystal gazers. In a story for the Baltimore Evening Sun he derided the architecture as cheap, “with modifications suggested by the filling-stations of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey.” Adding, “the town is inconceivably shoddy.”

And it’s true. What would ultimately become the trademark of California Modernism, the ease and porosity between inside and outside, is born from a flimsy vernacular of thinness. Take, for example, the Schindler House (1922) by Viennese architect R.M. Schindler: Its minimum enclosure—a poured concrete slab, tilt-up concrete panels, and redwood framing—was modeled on nothing more substantial than a camping enclosure he and his wife Pauline stayed in when visiting Yosemite in 1921.

Considered one of the first modernist buildings in Los Angeles, the home on Kings Road is cold and drafty; its innovative open-air sleeping baskets abandoned because of the nighttime chill; the California climate proved less mild than predicted. It is no wonder the uncomfortable house played host to parties, discord, and affairs.

Built for two couples, each with a L-shaped wing and shared kitchen, the design predates reality TV, but it was seemingly made for conflict. The Schindlers’ friends Clyde and Marian Chace were the first Guinea pigs in the experiment in co-living, but they decamped for Florida after only two years. Architect Richard Neutra and his wife Dionne moved in 1925 and almost immediately clashed with the proto hippie vibe. They didn’t want to use the communal kitchen. The regular bohemian revelries were too loud and went on too late. And there was the general rivalry between Neutra and Schindler, both who were gunning to establish themselves after working for Frank Lloyd Wright.

But it was Schindler’s compulsive womanizing that may have driven wedge between the two young architects. Schindler had a fling with Leah Lovell, wife of health guru Philip Lovell and one of his clients. Schindler had designed several houses for him, including the Lovell Beach House in La Jolla. Perhaps catching wind of the affair or unhappy with the leaky beach house, Lovell famously gave a new commission of the Lovell Health House to Neutra. That design would put an ambitious Neutra on a trajectory to the national stage, and leave an embittered Schindler behind.

Later, Schindler and Pauline separated, but remained at Kings Road house, each in a formerly communal wing. They traded barbs in typed letters, arguing over what color the interior walls should be painted or who was responsible for running over the dog in the driveway.

Inside, they may have been miserable, but outside the weather was always great.