Craig Ellwood Homage to Albers as a Diptych

Rarely have rectangular boxes looked as elegant as in the mid-century modern homes designed by Craig Ellwood Associates of Los Angeles. 

Unabashedly influenced by the work of Bauhaus visionary Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Ellwood’s houses were long, low and strong boned, made of steel beams and expanses of glass. Dramatically sited on oceanfront properties or in eucalyptus groves, they gave the borrowed architectural formalism of European modernism a distinctly California flavor.

A local legend in his time, Ellwood is not as well known today as Richard Neutra, Charles and Ray Eames, Albert Frey or any number of postwar architects working in Southern California, although his office designed more than 100 buildings from the late 1940s through the mid-1970s. Several were Case Study Houses, part of an experimental building program sponsored by Arts + Architecture magazine that was intended to encourage the use of industrial materials and techniques for residential construction — a commonplace now but revolutionary then.

Born in Texas, Johnnie Burke (Ellwood’s given name) was a World War II army vet, a student of engineering at UCLA and a male model when he took a night class in construction cost estimating. 

“The next thing he knows, he’s working on the Eames Case Study House and John Entenza’s house next door,” says Michael Boyd, referring to the editor and publisher of the influential Arts Architecture magazine, who became a champion of Ellwood’s work. “That’s where he learned the grammar of form.”

Boyd, a designer and preeminent modernism-preservation specialist, edited Making L.A. Modern: Craig Ellwood (Rizzoli, 2018), which aimed to give Ellwood’s impressive body of work its due.

Burke soon reinvented himself as Craig Ellwood. Accolades rolled in for the designer even as he never earned a license to practice architecture. The fact that a self-taught practitioner was responsible for so many important postwar buildings didn’t sit well with the architectural establishment. 

By the late 1960s, things had changed for Ellwood. Unable to get commissions and tossed out of his own firm by disgruntled partners who felt cheated of proper credit, he retired to a farmhouse in Tuscany, and, for the next two decades, turned out abstract geometric paintings in a vivid Op Art mode.

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