There are signs that the new owners of Richard Neutra's Kronish House, in Beverly Hills, are determined to knock it down.
In most California cities, those signs would signal the beginning of a long review process. In Beverly Hills, which has refused to put even the most basic historic-preservation ordinance in place, they are cause for deep anxiety, even understandable panic, among fans of modern architecture.
That hands-off approach could spell quick doom for the low-slung, richly appointed Kronish House. It is also a reminder that even in the midst of an increasingly contentious global debate about whether historic-preservation activists have, in certain cities, gained too much power, homeowners elsewhere continue to enjoy the right to demolish great architecture with impunity.
Soda Partners, the limited partnership that bought the Kronish House out of foreclosure in January for $5.8 million, and then tried unsuccessfully to sell it for just under $14 million, has secured a permit to cap its sewer line — often a first step on the path to demolition.
The owners don't have plans to replace the house, which was completed in 1955 on a secluded, flag-shaped 2-acre lot on the north side of Sunset Boulevard, with another, more contemporary design; they have apparently concluded that the land will be easier to sell — and perhaps even more valuable — as an empty parcel. The Beverly Hills City Council has put discussion of the house on the agenda for its meeting Tuesday evening.
Built for the real-estate developer Herbert Kronish and his wife, the single-story, six-bedroom house is one of three Neutra projects in Beverly Hills and among the largest the architect's office ever produced, covering nearly 7,000 feet. It is also a rare example of Neutra's flirtation, in the latter half of his long and prolific career, with a kind of luxe modernism, pairing his trademark spare, rectilinear forms with rich, glossy materials.
Dion Neutra, one of Richard Neutra's sons and a project architect on the house, calls it a "remarkable expression of opulence." The historian Thomas Hines, author of the 1982 book "Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture," told me he saw the house in the late 1970s, when it was barely 20 years old, and recalls it as "a very good house — upscale."
Another local historian and Neutra expert, Barbara Lamprecht, describes the house as "a pinwheel plan on steroids," and "a kindred spirit" to the Kaufmann House in Palm Springs, which was completed in 1947 and is by a significant margin the architect's most influential postwar design.
The growing fears about the Kronish House's future come on the heels of separate news that L.A. preservationists cheered: the announcement that billionaire Ron Burkle has bought Frank Lloyd Wright's monumental Ennis House in Los Feliz, reportedly planning to continue its complicated restoration.
They also come as the architecture profession has embarked on a timely if also slightly messy reassessment of the role that advocates for historic preservation play in contemporary urban planning around the world. This critique — led in part by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, who organized an exhibition for the New Museum in New York earlier this year on the subject — has prompted a fresh round of arguments about what happens when the desire to protect significant landmarks begins morphing into an unreasonable bias against innovative new architecture of any sort or scale.
More than a few of Koolhaas' deliberately provocative, pot-stirring arguments tend toward hyperbole. He suggests that preservation is virtually always an obstacle to bold new design, when in fact a smartly restored landmark can be as much a catalyst for nearby construction as a shimmering Frank Gehry museum or Jean Nouvel condominium. Still, it's fair to say that these days there is a thin line in many cities between well-meaning crusades to save individual landmarks and moves to seal entire urban districts in amber.
And yet if historic preservation can turn into a proverbial slippery slope, the city of Beverly Hills can't even be persuaded — or maybe can't be bothered — to climb the hill in the first place.
There was some evidence by the end of last week that Soda Partners might be willing to delay demolition as supporters of the house, led by Dion Neutra, try to put a plan in place to move it to another location.
The temptation in this circumstance, with a significant piece of architecture in peril, is nearly always to weigh its historic value as precisely as possible. Does the Kronish House have anything like the importance of Neutra's Maslon House in Rancho Mirage, built in 1963 and knocked down in 2002?
How does it stack up against Irving Gill's Dodge House in West Hollywood, one of the most significant modern houses ever built in Southern California, and quite probably the most significant ever razed? On the dark list of Beverly Hills' finest demolished houses, which also includes John Lautner's Shusett House and Neutra's own Heller House, where does Kronish rank?
Such questions are understandable — and not always impossible to answer. No Neutra expert is prepared to argue that Kronish House (which I have not seen, unless you count standing outside its locked outer gate and craning my neck to peer down its 250-foot-long driveway) can match the Kaufmann House, or even the tiny, exquisite 1955 Perkins House in Pasadena, as an exemplar of Neutra's late style.
But ultimately this sort of calculus, the relative weighing of architectural merit, misses the larger point in Beverly Hills and cities like it, which have held fast to a laissez-faire attitude toward preservation ever as other places have moved aggressively — occasionally too aggressively — to protect their architectural treasures.
The larger point is in fact quite simple: Beverly Hills needs to put a process in place for determining when it makes sense to step in and keep a homeowner from demolishing a valuable piece of architectural history. And it needs to do so quickly, before another of its stock of important houses finds itself in the demolition cross hairs.
This review process could be looser than those in other cities, reflecting the history of Beverly Hills as a place that grants property owners wide leeway. But a complete and willful indifference to architectural history is something else entirely.
If Beverly Hills continues to insist on maintaining it, the price to pay seems certain: a growing reputation as a city prepared to sell its cultural heritage to the highest bidder.