Crestwood Hills: The Chronicle of a Modern Utopia by Cory Buckner
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Southern California Living—Baldwin Hills Village/Village Green, Channel Heights
Housing, Community Homes, Avenel Cooperative, Broadacre, Eichler, to name a
few—are widely chronicled by historians, coveted by Modernists, and too often
mourned by preservationists.
Author and architect Cory Buckner tells
the story of the optimistic Crestwood Hills, a Brentwood community conceived in
1947 by four musicians who founded the Mutual Housing Association (MHA), which
sold plots for 500 homes. Buckner is known from her previous bookA. Quincy Jones(Phaidon Press, 2002), the
Modern master’s first monograph. This book and community are very personal to
Buckner. She had restored two Crestwood Hills homes prior to moving there, and
went on to work on seven more, including her own that she restored with her
late husband Nick Roberts, AIA.
The first part of the book beautifully
presents the history, process, and challenges of the development. Architects
Whitney R. Smith and A. Quincy Jones, FAIA, engineer Edgardo Contini, and
landscape architect Garret Eckbo created multiple house plan options for the
Modern community. The second part of the book reviews and describes individual
homes with archival and current photography. Restoration architects are noted,
but stating the date would have been helpful. Also included are “infill
houses,” those built after MHA disbanded, and designed by Ray Kappe, FAIA,
Craig Ellwood, Rodney Walker, and Richard Neutra, FAIA.
“Despite virulent opposition from local
authorities all the way up to the Federal government, Crestwood Hills was built
as conceived: people lived in architecturally significant structures, and
people continue to live in those homes in the twenty-first century,” says
Buckner in the introduction. A mere 47 of the original homes remain extant,
with 18 of them declared—with Buckner’s help—City of LA Historic-Cultural
Monuments.
