The How House

In 1926, Dr. James Eads How and his new wife and secretary, Ingeborg, commissioned Rudolph Schindler to design a house in Los Angeles. How was a psychiatrist, a wealthy philanthropist, an ardent socialist and a strong advocate for the homeless and had a particular attraction to a “hobo” lifestyle. After two years in the house, Ingeborg, unhappy with her husbands’ lifestyle, divorced him and Dr. How left the home, lived homelessly as a hobo, traveling on trains, and died soon thereafter from pneumonia.

In this video, that dissolution of a one modernist domestic construction collides with one portrayed in the opening scene of Antonioni’s film, L’Eclisse. This scene from the film, carefully situated within a mid-century European modernist apartment, functions to resolve and simultaneously interrogate some of the gaps created by unwritten histories of the house, of Ingeborg, of James and of the dissolution of the marriage.

At a moment when modernist residential architecture is highly valued and fetishized, I am interested in re-inserting elided histories and exploring the repressed unconscious of architecture.