The Park Planned Homes, Altadena housing, CA. (1946-1948). Destroyed by fire.

Architect: Gregory Ain.

Gregory Ain (1908-1988) was a local student / assistant to both Schindler and Neutra. He hardly ever left California and manged to achieve a small number of grouped housing schemes during the late1940s before his work was terminated by McCarthyism. 

During WW2 he had been the only qualified architect member of the “Eames team” that developed moulded plywood splints and gliders on an industrial scale. 

He was particularly important in ‘Californian Modernism’ due to his preoccupation with detailed attention to domestic needs in housing design and achieving economy of scale through prefabrication.

The Park Planned Homes, Altadena of 1946-1948, one of his best grouped housing schemes, has been completely destroyed by fire.

It created a clear and flexible, transitional social space between back of curb and front door by the pairing of two houses and the positioning of garages to provide privacy to single storey bedrooms.

It used a variety of shallow, monopitched roofs with over-hanging eaves, together with clearstory windows to provide efficient light and ventilation to all rooms and internal spaces. 

It was unique in the use of single storey, flat-surfaced, windowless external walls combined with carefully planted indigenous shrubs and trees to beautiful scenic effect. (Garrett Eckbo, landscape consultant). 

It used the hilly gradient of Altadena to achieve both privacy and economy with individual house plot proximity.  

Sadly, the above may have been what made it so vulnerable to spread of fire?

PB. 16/01/25

The author has written more on Gregory Ain for Docomomo UK here