“˜Tree House’ balances individual lives with community
By John Guigayoma
Oct. 22, 2008 9:13 p.m.
On Strathmore Drive and Gayley Avenue, there sits a giant mushroom garden.
A walk up the steep earthen staircase leads to the first few mushroom dwellings: giant round caps centered atop their own separate pillars, their residents suspended above the street below.
A few more steps pull a visitor higher, winding around a thick tree trunk and dilapidated fishponds. Upon reaching the top ““ the penthouse, apartment six, the largest mushroom of them all ““ there resides one reason why The Sheets (L’Horizon) Apartments, more popularly known as “Tree House,” are known as one of the most alluring pieces of real estate in Westwood.
Past the wall-sized windows and onto the cantilevered patio, the tree that sprouted from the courtyard bares its leaves, its branches framing the city, from the UCLA campus to the West L.A. skyline.
Southern California architect John Lautner, the man behind what he once termed the “mushroom” buildings, designed with enough balance for a tightrope walker. As a student of celebrated architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Lautner’s buildings diminish the division between architectural opposites: inside and outside space, the natural and the artificial, the individual and the community.
His ultimate goal was to strike a balance between the singular lives within each unit and a cohesive family within the whole structure: “to keep the infinite variety of individual life within some kind of total world.” It was a direct challenge to the traditional concept for an apartment complex ““ individual residences stacked like blocks in a square tower ““ a method both claustrophobic and isolating.
“That’s one of the most interesting things about this project, in the way that it functions as both,” architect Frank Escher said. “It functions both as a project for the whole city, this kind of endless city. He was interested in developing units that would accommodate a small family and units that would be part of a larger community and allow for social interaction.”
Escher and historian Nicholas Olsberg curated the exhibit “Between Heaven and Earth: The Architecture of John Lautner” which was on display at the UCLA Hammer Museum. The show contains blueprints and concept sketches of the apartments before UCLA students began storming in.
Sculptress Helen Sheets first conceived of the Tree House idea in the 1940s as a home for bourgeoise artists and intellectuals, and the final product seems different than the original plans.
The building has seen it’s share of drunken college parties, high turnovers due to shifting residents, and renovations to stuff more students within its walls. But 60 years past the conception of the Tree House, Lautner’s plan has not disappeared. As the present residents of the Tree House can tell you, as much as residents have shaped the house, the house has shaped them.
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