Frank Lloyd Wright

Rudolph Schindler worked as a draftsman for Frank Lloyd Wright from circa 1917 until circa 1921, at Wright's Oak Park office, at Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and was sent to Los Angeles to oversee work on the Ailine Barnsdall house in 1920.  

"One of the most significant of Wright's works in the period 1910-1920 was the project for a 'Workmen's Colony of Concrete Monolith Homes' at Racine, Wisconsin (1919). Wright must certainly have worked out the general scheme, as it again anticipated his precast concrete block houses of the twenties. But the stark stripped-down  rectangularity of the geometry, in the details as well as in the relationship of the volumes, could have been Schindler's contribution." Gebhard, p. 25

The James B. Irving house was a temporary home designed by Schindler while he was employed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Schindler designed the home quickly, after Irving requested a temporary home since his had been destroyed by a tornado.

The Irvings lived in this small home until 1928, when they commissioned John Van Bergen (another former associate of Wright) to design a Prairie style home. The Bergen house was on the same parcel of land as the Schindler/Wright temporary house. Both houses were extant until 2014 when the Bergen house was moved to Evanston and the Schindler/Wright house was demolished to make way for a new development.

"The planning for Olive Hill, Los Angeles, offered Wright the opportunity of designing an urban scheme of some size - something he had always longed for,  but had not been able to do. Here was an entire hill on the edge of a growing urban area. The owner, Aline Barnsdall, wished not only to build a residence for herself, but to provide a cultural centre for the growing Hollywood community. As conceived by the client, the scheme was to contain several individual houses, a theatre, studio apartments for painters, actors and writers and a group of terrace stores along Hollywood and Sunset Boulevards." Gebhard, p. 26