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The August 30, 1976 Alice Millard House was included in the National Register of Historic Places in United States with the name “La Miniatura” or “The Millard House”. In 1980 the New York Times said that the house was already known worldwide and therefore was one of the few buildings in Los Angeles that had become a classic of twentieth century architecture. After several years of restoration, the house is now owned by David Zander, chairman and co-founder of Morton Jankel Zander, Inc. The business of Mrs. Millard was thriving and to respond to the growth of this and visits of students who wanted to learn from her, he built a studio in the back of the house.
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Unfortunately, fabricating the blocks was not as quick and easy as Wright had hoped. While the building system was flexible, it proved to be more expensive than planned, and the house was 70% over budget, totaling $17,000. Some accounts report that the builder walked off the job, leaving Wright to pay for the remaining costs out of his own pocket.
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There’s something both larger-than-life and mysterious about these homes. They’re not unknown, but they are under-explored and under-analyzed by Wright standards, Hawthorne says. Wright was a visionary, always trying to pursue a new creative path and never taking the easy road to financial success. "The L.A. houses are also austere enough to be off-putting," writes Hawthorne. "Yet what historians and critics have generally failed to see is that they were inscrutable and even cryptlike not by accident but by design."
New Documentary Shows a Fascinating Side of Frank Lloyd Wright As Never Seen Before
By using roughly textured, earth-toned blocks, he sought to blend the house with the color and form of the trees and hillside. While the design was in most ways a departure from Wright's prior work, it was consistent with his lifelong love of natural materials and his belief that buildings should complement their surroundings. He later said that Millard House "belonged to the ground on which it stood." The main building is 2,400 square feet in size and the rooms are stacked on four levels, with the entry on the second level, which also contains a guest room and a large, two-story living room with a large concrete fireplace. The exterior and all load bearing walls are constructed of concrete blocks, interior walls consist of wooden studs and plaster finish. Most floors are either concrete or wood, and ceilings are plaster or exposed redwood.
The 1906 Millard house marks the beginning of an enduring professional relationship that led to a pivotal project initiated by a discerning and progressive client. On the first floor there’s the kitchen, the servants quarter and a dining room opening up onto a terrace with a reflective swimming pool. On the second floor, where the main entrance is situated, there’s also a guest room, a two-story living room and a balcony. On the third floor the master bedroom is located with a balcony overlooking the living room and the outdoor terrace. Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture was strongly influenced by nature and he felt that designing that way was a natural thing to do as natural forms tend to crystallize or produce repeating patterns, and modular grids provide discipline and proportion. Hawthorne’s hour-long documentary shines when it connects Wright’s previous projects with these architectural outliers.
Alice Millard was a former client who commissioned an earlier Prairie Style with her husband George Millard in Highland Park, IL, (1906). According to Wright “concrete blocks are the cheapest and ugliest material in the building world, so let’s see what could be done with that gutter-rat”. Frank Lloyd Wright’s La Miniatura is a textile block house and textile-block houses were named for their richly textured brocade-like concrete walls. The latter has two variants, solid and perforated, very similar to the concept of the prototype of the proposed Midway Gardens block. Both have a composition shaped cross in the center and overlapping squares at the corners creating a relief pattern is repeated on the wall with the addition of consecutive blocks.
A covered walkway seamlessly joins the studio to the main house using concrete block piers matching those in the original construction. Its hefty and alluring Maya facade rises like a temple from a tree-canopied hillside, just visible through an iron gate on sloping Rosemont Avenue. The Millard House was the first of Frank Lloyd Wright's four "textile block" houses - all built in Los Angeles County in 1923 and 1924. Wright took on the Millard House following his completion of the Hollyhock House in Hollywood and the Imperial Hotel in Japan. From the street, you can see and appreciate the textile blocks and part of the structure, but much of it is hidden behind fences and gates.
The earliest versions of these houses built of concrete blocks in Los Angeles around 1921 to 1924 can also be seen in the cabins-Arizona Biltmore. The Millard house is one of just five homes in Los Angeles that Wright produced during his brief stint out West in the early 1920s. Following a successful career in the Midwest designing the Prairie style homes that made him famous, Wright moved to Los Angeles at the age of 55 in January 1923 to reinvent himself as a West Coast architect. He abandoned the sensitive, low-level homes that seem to have grown from the prairie landscape in favor of a dramatic pre-Columbian design built from stacked concrete blocks.
This is configured by the concrete blocks are integrated into the environment of the forest. The house, therefore, is not intended to take a leading position in the place, but to adapt to it, closing the pan and turning our gaze toward the lower end of the pond or to the upper limit of the treetops. As a result, the Millard house has fared better through the years of weathering and earthquakes. The blocks were created in wooden molds with patterns on the outside and smooth on the inside and featured a symmetrical pattern of a cross with a square in each corner. The blocks were specially cast to Wright’s specifications and could carry custom-designed patterns, making the ornament an integral part of the house design.
Some accounts state that the builder walked off the job, “leaving Wright to finish the project himself, out of his own pocket”. Never mind that Wright, who never visited actual Pre-Columbian Central American architecture sites, was engaged in his own myth-making, says Hawthorne. These styles and patterns fit together with the new concrete block building system he wanted to experiment with, and the notoriously self-confident architect undertook the challenge of creating a contrarian building in a landscape he barely knew. The project was able to use the cheapest building material of an architectural way.
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To date, the Los Angeles Times has named the home one of Los Angeles' 12 most significant landmarks, and in 1980, The New York Times ranked it among the few buildings in Los Angeles that "have become classic works of the 20th Century". To date, the Los Angeles Times has named the home one of Los Angeles’ 12 most significant landmarks, and in 1980, The New York Times ranked it among the few buildings in Los Angeles that “have become classic works of the 20th Century”. I would rather have built this little house than St. Peter’s in Rome. Vertical spaces created between exterior columns outline casement windows and doors, contributing to the building's general upward thrust. The low ceilings so familiar to fans of Wright are here too, a challenge to anyone taller than 6 feet. In 1980, The New York Times noted that the Millard House was known around the world and ranked it among the few buildings in Los Angeles that "have become classic works of the 20th Century."
A fact that demonstrates the importance of this work in the whole career of Wright is the architect visited the construction every day, inspecting the concrete mix itself. Due to its constant supervision, Wright realized an aesthetic quality over textile blocks. The concrete mix did they acquire different shades according to them incidiera sunlight. Another example of this work has an important place in the career of the architect is that of the amount of time he devoted to the construction of the project, also invested a considerable amount of money to see it completed. Moreover, in his autobiography he devoted many pages to explaining the details of the design process and construction of the work with which he managed to unite construction and architecture.
The lower floors, to be more protected by the vegetation of the site have more generous openings. Mrs. Millard had bought a plot for the construction of the house, however, Wright convinced that the neighboring properties, where there was a ravine, was better. The project was for a home / studio that covered the business needs of Alice Millard, selling books. Back in 2009, La Miniatura was placed on the market for $7.7 million but couldn't find a buyer.
A lovely remembrance by Huntington Library curator Robert O. Schad, reprinted in the NRHP nomination form, points out that young collectors and students would stop by to see her objets d’art. Even after the home’s completion, Millard kept thinking about how to expand its role as a space for cultural interchange. In 1926, she hired Frank’s son Lloyd Wright to design her a studio/exhibition space in the style of the main house, to store more stuff and host more guests. In 1926, Wright’s son, Lloyd Wright, added a detached studio to the property. It contains space to display the owner’s collection of antiques, as well as additional guest quarters. A covered walkway connects the studio to the main house using matching concrete block piers.
The Millard House, also known as "La Miniatura," was one of Frank Lloyd Wright's small handful of "textile block" houses, designed just after World War I in the Los Angeles area. These residences continued Wright's California exploration of Mesoamerican architecture and broke new ground in his use of concrete blocks knitted together by a network of steel reinforcing rods. Wright pierced the blocks to enable light to create delicate patterns on the interior and exterior.
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