Schindler’s Bubeshko Apartments: Syntax and Sensation
January 19, 2013
In 1941, modernist architect R.M. Schindler completed a pair of apartment buildings on a hillside on Griffith Park Boulevard in Los Angeles for Anastasia Bubeshko and her daughter Luby. The buildings comprised five units that stepped down the hillside, each with a large terrace atop the unit below. Schindler designed the five units so that they could be divided into seven, and, in two later alterations, further subdivided.
Sixty-four years later, in 2005, Luby Bubeshko sold the property to a young family who was willing to hire an architectural firm to study Schindler’s sketches, drawings, correspondence, and notes and rehabilitate the buildings as Schindler himself would have. The rehab employed Schindler’s choice of inexpensive natural materials and his original details and color palette.
The firm hired for this project was DSH // architecture in LA, and our January speaker, Eric Haas, is the H in DSH. He is also an adjunct faculty member of the USC School of Architecture and curator of its annual design-build workshop, and a senior lecturer at the Otis College of Art and Design in LA.
Come to the Friends of San Diego Architecture meeting in January and see why DSH’s Bubeshko project deserved its Residential Architect Merit Award, LA Conservancy Preservation Award, AIA/LA Design Honor Award, and plaudits from the governor of California, AIA/California, and LA Business Council. Mr. Haas is obviously doing well in rehab.
(John Mann)