Original subtitles

Architecture affects everybody,

from the hospital where you're born, to the schools,

and the grocery stores, markets, libraries, theaters.

Every part of a person's life

is based upon an architect's presence.

Architects live and die

by the images that are taken of their work,

as these images alone are what most people see.

For every person who visits a private house,

there may be 10,000 who only view it as a photo.

I'm looking at the base of the steps.

They die into the railing just where the wheel is.

It's perfect.

Photographer Julius Shulman has defined

the way we look at modernism.

First focusing his lens upon architecture in the 1930s,

Julius continues to document the evolution

of built environments and architectural forms today.

Print it.

Print. Print it.

You are now in Southern California,

two miles from Hollywood Boulevard.

Listen.

Hear that sound, just the birds.

What more can a man want out of his life?

This is Heaven.

Nothing here was planned.

It's a mish-mash, every conceivable kind of plant.

And people don't like this kind of garden.

Matter of fact, many people come here, they say,

boy I'd like to come some morning while you're still asleep

with a machete and chop, chop, chop, chop.

They want to cut back my density.

I'd chop your head off if you did that, I said.

By God, this is unbelievable.

This tree hasn't blossomed for years.

It's growing in the wrong place.

You don't plan the orange tree in the midst,

when all the other trees are shading it.

And yet, we'll probably have oranges this year.

That is fragrant. Oh.

I don't have to have a physical church.

What can be more beautiful than the church

in which you're surrounded entirely by nature?

This is my God.

I think it's significant that Julius,

after being born in Brooklyn,

before coming to the sort of city of Los Angeles,

lived on a farm in Connecticut.

And he's talked about this

as being a formative period in his life.

So great was his identity with nature and the woods.

Seven years that we lived on the farm,

until we came to California.

My father had an acquaintance who lived in Los Angeles,

telling my father that the streets are paved with gold.

We got on the Santa Fe Railroad,

and took a train across country, five days, five children.

When they moved to Los Angeles,

my father had his own room.

He said that his mother saw something in him.

History is strange.

Here, it becomes mystical.

I was ordained to become a photographer. I was destined.

He had a very inquisitive eye, navigating the environment,

whether it was people, or social events, or sporting events.

I took a photograph.

And my teacher observed that their heads

are all below the line of the second hurdle.

He said, Julius, that's a very professional photograph.

Here is a Eastman Kodak camera.

It's a great gift to give to somebody

who was 23 years old at the time.

And I have this vision of him wandering around,

whether it's in the hills, or wandering around town,

seeing the world through his camera.

You know if you're able to gather into one big picture,

all the small pictures that he took of Los Angeles

prior to his involvement in architectural photography,

you really get a sense of a pulse of the city.

I think that it's just

a beautiful way of thinking of my dad

and Los Angeles as siblings.

They really did grow up together.

He didn't know precisely what he wanted to do,

but he also knew what he didn't want,

which was just to sort of follow some conventional path.

And it seems as if his early life was about

muddling along until he found that niche for himself.

And part of that muddling along involved

going to seven years of college,

from which he didn't even get a degree.

At the end of the seven years,

I woke up early in the morning at three o'clock,

and I said, wait a minute, what am I doing here?

I've been going to university for seven years.

I think I've had enough.

And he drifted back to Los Angeles, unclear,

but not like a hopeless case,

a person with an incredible creative spirit

that just needed a channel for it.

Our guest is an environmentalist,

photographer, who has made his reputation,

I guess we could say in architecture.

Julius Schumann.

Julius, this photograph of Richard Neutra,

where you in architecture then?

Yes, I began my architectural photography,

coincidentally, by doing a photograph of one of

Mr. Neutra's houses in 1936 with a vest pocket Kodak.

And this was a rather curious experience because I had

not even seen a modern house before.

But this was one I visited with a young draftsman.

I made some eight by 10s

I gave to the young man, who showed them to Neutra.

I got a phone call, and within a week I was a photographer.

Opus one, my first architectural. March, 1936.

When they met Neutra was, I believe, 44 years old.

Schulman would have been almost two decades younger.

Neutra quickly recognized that perhaps he could

find someone who might be far cheaper,

perhaps more malleable.

He would have seen

the ability that was nascent there in Julius,

and seeing it as something that could be helpful to himself,

and to the other architects that needed to be documented.

Modernism began in Chicago,

when Louis Sullivan stated form follows function.

In the age of steel,

big windows and taller buildings were possible.

In Vienna, Otto Wagner proclaimed

that the machine age should have a style of its own,

and launch the Vienna Succession.

While Adolph Loos, a Sullivan devotee,

denounced ornament is crime.

The greatest disciple ins Sullivan's Chicago office

was Frank Lloyd Wright, who balanced

machine age functionality with the harmony of nature.

In 1911, Frank Lloyd Wright's vast portfolio

took Europe by storm, which greatly influenced

young Rudolph Schindler, and Richard Neutra,

both students of Loos.

Loos told Schindler and Neutra to seek out

Wright in Chicago, so Schindler set forth in 1914.

After serving in the first World War,

Neutra went in Berlin to work for architect Eric Mendelsohn,

just as Germany founded the Bauhaus School of Design,

and Le Corbusier was pioneering his theories

resulting in towards a new architecture.

Richard Neutra left Berlin to work with Frank Lloyd Wright

at the Taliesin studio in Wisconsin.

In 1920, Frank Lloyd Wright built the Hollyhock House

under the supervision of Schindler.

Richard and Dion Neutra

joined Schindler in Los Angeles in 1925.

Together, Schindler and Neutra founded

Southern California modernism.

Schindler comes out here, and becomes

the project architect on the house that we're sitting in,

The Frank Lloyd Wright Freeman House.

Not only did he oversee the construction of this house,

but he designed myriad number of pieces

of furniture for this house.

He melded, I think, influences,

Frank Lloyd Wright, European modernism, with then his own,

I think, idiosyncratic approach to architecture.

So in 1922, he built his own house,

which was a communal house,

very, very daring and adventurous.

Two couples each with their own studios,

personal studios, and communal space.

That's where he lived.

And then when Neutra came here from Europe, he an his Dion

lived upstairs in one of those screened porches.

Notice these walls, prepoured concrete slabs.

They're sloping inward.

And Schindler design the spaces to admit sunlight

between the slabs of concrete.

When I walked into the room, there is Mr. Schindler,

sitting at his desk in that corner.

He waved at me. He knew I was coming.

I was asked to photograph one of his houses.

When I came back and showed Schindler the prints,

he said, Shulman, the light you used was

so basically the same on both walls.

That's not natural.

Look around this room.

The light is different, there than it is on this wall.

But when you photograph the Dougherty House in Santa Monica,

you used floodlights, and you got the same value of light

on this wall as you have on that wall.

He gave me that wonderful correction,

which I adapted, the next house I did.

And I think that for me,

one of the really profound things about Schindler,

is that he takes three dimensional space and he

incorporates time, which is where light comes in.

And it kind of, it's the passage of time

that makes you understand space.

That's very good. That's very accurate too.

It wasn't just an indoor, outdoor living.

It was a sensitivity to a lifestyle.

Mark Schindler, hi.

Nice to see you.

You know Julius, of course. Known you for a long time.

I'm Mark Schindler.

Oh my God, I didn't recognize you.

You know, you look like the old man, except the hair.

Sit down for a while.

Yeah, have a seat. Pull up a chair.

I'm so glad you can come here today.

This is nice. It's a treat.

Even though, as I complain, it's empty, no furniture.

But nonetheless,

the spirit of Schindler is always around here,

which is where much of the controversies

arose between Schindler and Paul Ling.

He didn't know how to design a kitchen for modern living.

Well, my father never used the kitchen.

Yeah, exactly.

There you go. All right.

Women were meant to do all the cooking,

but apart from that, it was very democratic.

The first, one of the first, people to move in

was Richard Neutra and his wife.

At the very beginning, Schindler and Neutra were friends,

until Neutra managed to get a commission

from Schindler's best client, to do by far

the largest house than either of them had ever done.

And that put an end to their collaboration,

their friendship.

So they really saw each other only intermittently.

And my father had a heart attack in 1950.

And when he arrived in the room,

they're in the same room was Schindler,

who was dying of pancreatic cancer.

They spent about a week together,

kind of exchanging changing old times.

And there was a kind of a closure.

Neutra was a terrific self promoter,

a terrific engine for getting the word across.

It wasn't ideology. It was business.

And Julius, of course, helped him there.

Because Julius has a great eye,

a great sense of composition.

Julius moved into a position

of finding his own voice in photography,

to the extent even that he sometimes irritated Neutra.

Neutra could be very overbearing.

Julius could be very stubborn.

And so you had to reach a middle ground.

Sometimes I was cast into the role of ambassador.

Here are two

very self absorbed, very creative, very strong willed men.

My father would carry

half of our household furniture around with him,

which probably gave Richard Neutra a heard attack,

when he saw my father drive up with all these props,

because they would

despoil his pure, pristine architecture.

But my father wanted to make it look like

people actually lived there.

My job was to help move the furniture around,

or hold the archetypal eucalyptus branch,

much to Julius's disgust.

Julius told me once he was

setting up this photograph and all of a sudden there was

this thing wiggling in the upper right hand corner.

He didn't know what the heck it was.

And it was Neutra holding up a branch.

Neutra would collect branches of trees and plants,

and hold them in sort of over the camera,

to give the impression, not always convincing,

but that there was vegetation here.

As I got to be in my teenage years,

either I became more perceptive,

or maybe the relationship changed some.

But I remember more sort of arguments happening,

and my father grumbling on the way home about how hard

it was to get Shulman to do what he wanted him to do.

When I was photographing

the Neutra Kaufman House in Palm Springs,

I took my camera on my shoulder,

and I started going outside.

Neutra asked me, where are you going, Shulman?

He clenched my arm.

And I broke free, and ran outside, and set the camera.

After the house was published,

Neutra was once interviewed by a photography magazine.

In the interview he said, when I directed Mr. Shulman

to take that photograph, this is what came out.

However critical he might have been at times of Neutra's

behavior, he never wavered in his acknowledgement

of Neutra as the major figure, the major person

who persuaded him first, and then

taught him how to photograph buildings.

Neutra had me come here

to photograph Mrs. Miller's house, which was brand new then.

I like this paving. This is gonna be kept open?

Desert landscaping?

Yes. Good.

Well, here I'm going to have a mixture of

Palo Verde trees, maybe some olive trees,

just dotted around.

Oh, olives. Olives especially, yes.

I think olives will work very well here.

It'd be perfect.

You can plant some eucalyptus trees to hide the poles.

Wouldn't that be wonderful?

See the mountain coming down behind the house?

That's right there.

So what we have here is

almost sacred view of Southern California.

Here's the same view with more landscaping in it.

Showing how it developed from one year to another,

from 1936 to '37, '38, and '39.

She casually sent back the pictures to me

describing what she felt

I could do to improve the photography,

and/or to honor the photography I did.

But then look what Mrs. Miller gave up

to allow this horrible building to come in here.

I asked Mrs. Miller at that time

about the property next door.

Oh no, no one's ever gonna build there.

But look what's there now, a pile of junk.

I told Catherine to buy some charges of dynamite.

So there's the story of our lives show.

I'm serious. You have to plan ahead.

Mrs. Miller had to sell the house in the late '40s.

He sold it on to somebody else,

and they turned the garage into a kitchen.

They wiped it out.

They added a room onto the back that was,

when I bought it, used as the local crack den.

I can visualize trees going there now.

It'd be beautiful.

It won't be very long.

You'll be in the house maybe by Christmas,

but not Thanksgiving, a year from now.

No, we'll be closer than that.

Closer than that?

In three months, they'll be landscaping.

You want to bet?

A pool.

You want to bet?

I'll see in three months.

I'll bring you a bottle of scotch.

Okay.

It's a deal.

We have witnesses here.

That's right.

68 years later, we're back here, commemorating history.

In a way,

you can stop time.

Neutra was an entry point into a world of architects

that profoundly committed to the actualizations

of the ideology of the modern movement.

That ensuing year,

it read like a who's who in the architectural world,

because Neutra introduced me to Schindler,

Gregory Ain,

Harwell Harris,

Raphael Soriano,

J.R. Davidson, among others.

They were developing their own

Los Angeles based interpretations of modernism.

And Julius was creating an image for it.

He was immortalizing it.

He was sort of a filter for this architecture.

And through his images, the messages of these architects,

and this was a period of time when

architects believed that they could change the world.

They believed that life could be enhanced

through good design, it was a very optimistic period.

In the January, 1945 issue of

"Arts and Architecture Magazine",

editor and publisher, John Entenza,

announced the case study house program.

An unprecedented experiment in architecture,

the program was initiated with the intent

of creating well designed homes

for the typical post World War II family.

Built by what would become some of the most

legendary names in mid century architecture,

the majority of these homes

were immortalized by Schulman's lens.

Schulman's 1960 photographs of Pierre Koenig's

case study house number 22 are some of the most

evocative images of 20th century architecture.

His extraordinary night shot of number 22,

viewed by millions across the globe,

transformed Koenig's experiment into one of the world's

most enduring architectural icons.

One of the amazing things about that picture

at that time was, remember, this is the time when

we were building rockets to go to the moon.

And we were planning on colonizing Mars.

And the sort of popular zeitgeist

is caught perfectly in that picture.

While my assistant was setting some lights for me,

I went outside, looked at that view, just curiosity.

Oh gee, I said, looking at.

The girls were sitting there, girlfriends

of two of the architects who work with Pierre Koenig.

They didn't know they're gonna be in the picture.

They just heard the conversation.

The landscape beyond with the twinkling lights,

the transparent box mounted up on the hill,

and people sitting in a precarious corner of a glass house,

is the signature image of what one thinks about Los Angeles.

That's occupied by Carlotta and Buck Stahl.

They've lived in this house almost a lifetime.

We came over to see the lot.

All of a sudden a car comes in,

and it turns out to be the owner of the lot.

And Buck and him talked.

At the end of two hours, we shook hands. We bought a lot.

After that, the person who owned this property,

I can hear him saying, oh boy,

I got rid of that junky piece of land.

Erosion, and time, and rain

took the corners off of this lot.

So I came in, two years of weekends,

and built this up to what it is today,

with broken concrete walls embedded in the Earth.

And when we started to ask people

to talk to us about the building, everybody said no way,

because we did have it hanging over space.

And the house was all glass.

Along comes Pierre Koenig.

And he told us, no, it would be better,

safer if we did this and that.

And so it was a teamwork thing.

Of course, the man with the camera sure sold this house

to everybody in the world.

You look pretty good. Take care of yourself.

Okay. I wish I could walk like you.

You will, you will.

You have faith. I'll come back and work with you.

All right, Julius.

93 is gonna help 92. (laughing)

He's been a jewel in our life, he really has.

The photograph lives on as an absolutely pure and simple

restatement of the ideas of the case study movement,

and serves as a metaphor, really, as no other house can.

As I discovered these great prints,

I'm gonna go back and study.

If I would have done it some years ago,

I would be a better cinematographer now.

Michael Mann, the director, as he always does,

in a full room filled up with still photographs.

And Michael told me that I'd like to do,

I want to do another wide shot.

And I would like to be able to obtain this effect,

that was in Julia's photo,

of the house that goes out into the city.

Ultimately, when he cut the movie together,

he didn't use the shot because

he felt that we didn't achieve in,

in having this quality that your photo has.

Two lights flash.

After the lights went off, I exposed five more minutes

to get the city lights at F32, to get the depth of focus.

I now understand.

I see. I didn't know that.

But I now understand.

Everything else was so sharp,

but there was some blur on the city lights.

But anyway, shooting a movie here would be a joy,

with the background of the photo you shot.

Action.

Beautiful, huh?

And cut.

Okay, now we can take a look at the whole move.

The speed is good. The speed is very good there.

It's very nice.

What we're trying to do is feel centered.

You are.

But adding the mood.

We're going to have you enter from here.

You take all the time that you need.

I want the time actually.

And the same zoom size that we have on finale here.

I was thinking of the real tight shot on him,

the reflection of him in the glass.

That's good.

Now am I gonna get a ride on the train?

You can ride this. I'll push you all around this place.

Thank you.

Shulman's photographic work for architects,

designers, and numerous publications

extended well beyond the confines of Los Angeles.

By carefully orchestrating

the timing and placement of his images, and the key design

in consumer magazines, he was able to effectively introduce

an innovative lifestyle to the American public.

As a result, Shulman became an invaluable contributor

to the burgeoning architectural movement,

not only as correspondent,

but as talent scout and respected taste maker as well.

Shulman's assignment to photograph a house

by Albert Frey in Palm Springs for "Good Housekeeping", 1947

marks a point for Shulman where he starts establishing

a career with a leading figure in the desert.

Frey is a very important figure.

He's the first disciple of Corbusier to build an America.

Frey originally lived in New York for a few years,

and then went directly to the West Coast to build a building

and fell so much in love with Palm Springs, stayed there.

He went out in the early '30s,

ended up building half of the town,

including city hall, the airport, two houses for himself.

I call Albert Frey's own house

a kind of mind shack Parthenon.

It has a corrugated roof.

It's made out of steel, which is rusted.

It's got a poured concrete floor that simply

extends in and out of the house.

But it is placed with a kind of delicate refinement,

and attention to detail

that comes out of a preplanned house.

The site is what's so fabulous about this house.

One of the joys is that you can wake up in the morning,

and you look out and you see the entire desert.

There's the Tahquitz.

Yeah, straight up. Straight up, Tahquitz.

We have this fabulous view.

It's a house designed to meet and live with the desert.

Why can't new architects, young architects,

be instilled with the spirit of the desert?

To introduce them to a building in the desert,

as one example, on a so called impossible piece of property.

You have constructed a house

which melds with, and in, the landscape.

As functional as it gets,

just essentially a steel and glass box.

There was an affinity there between Neutra and Frey.

Stewart Williams belongs to another generation.

He moves there in the, I think, 1940s.

He's one of the few, but very productive, architects

who are living in Palm Springs, who had settled there.

Hello Stewart?

It's Julia Shulman.

You had talked to Eric about the possibility of

trying to avoid this particular project that we're on,

because you felt that you aren't

photogenic enough to match my good looks.

No, we won't show you a face.

Eric and I have been talking about it,

and I explained to him that you have such an ugly face.

So we don't want to show your face.

We'll show the back of your right ear.

Hey, old friend. Hi.

We bought the crew.

Hey, I'll do it here.

Yes, you can help me do it there.

Stewart.

Good to see you.

So good to see you. Thank you.

Just a little over 90, I feel rattling here.

What is this? What started the, invasion, I'd say?

Well, the camera man.

You said you were coming with a gentleman friend.

Eric Bricker, who is the producer here.

Oh, for God's sake.

He has to have a film man, a camera man.

But don't photograph his face.

Don't photograph anything.

Don't photograph Stewart yet.

Don't photograph me, forget the yet.

Just don't photograph me.

Let's do this.

Walk around behind Stewart.

Stewart, you're gonna sit here?

No. Well, yes. I'm gonna sit-

Is that okay with you the lighting, Eric?

As we came down a little while ago, I pointed out

all the buildings that Stewart William's design

down Palm Canyon Boulevard.

There were half a dozen of them along the canyon there.

The Palm Springs atmosphere was reflected

in everything you did in that parameter

of the Frank Sinatra House.

And that was my first house.

And that was a good house.

Well, it was a good house.

You violated all the rules or tradition.

Well, that's right.

And I made a point, always, of finding materials

that somehow was related to the surroundings of the project.

He went to the most influential client he could have had,

and built a large sprawling, modern house.

And asked why Sinatra didn't object,

since he'd originally asked for colonial,

Stewart said, he didn't know what modern was.

He just wanted a roof over his head by Christmas,

so you could entertain the family.

You have Stewart Williams, William Cody, Frey,

and a partner of Frey's, John Porter Clark,

that really by postwar star building up Palm Springs

as a postwar city, that is all about the modern aesthetic,

but a livable modern aesthetic in the desert.

One of the things that I appreciate

most about Julia Shulman is that

he was not just interested in quote, the stars.

He was interested in those other people who

might have seemed to be on the margins,

but who were very good architects.

He had this unfailing eye for seeking out new talent and

bringing it to the attention of East Coast editors.

One time he had an assignment

to photograph the work of an architect

by the name of Herb Greene in Oklahoma city.

And he had designed and built this wonderful house

that we called the Prairie chicken.

And Julius said, this is exciting.

I'm gonna run to New York with this in my bag.

I know they're gonna pick this up.

That piece of architecture was published all over the world.

And his architecture business thrived, of course.

So Julius helped to make a career

for an architect happen more than once.

I'll have Sharon sitting on the left hand chair.

The chance to work with him, see our house

through his eyes has been an incredible lesson.

For him to sort of see next generations is really inspiring.

During the design of the house,

we incorporated a lot of Julius Shulman photographs,

as a spacial construct, as well as inspiration.

A very quick way to shoot for

the qualities that we're striving for in the design.

Bend your knees a little bit.

That's good right there.

So everybody in position.

I have a great associate, Juergen Nogai.

He's from Germany,

He's a very wonderful person.

And he and I worked together on every project.

We're turning out beautiful results.

That's good.

And we have here also, more contrast.

Good. All right, let's go home.

In addition to photographing

the work of the merging architects and designers,

Shulman also documented the endeavors

of more established masters, most notably

those of the legendary Frank Lloyd Wright.

Wright revolutionized the very concept

of the built environment.

And Shulman would later translate

the architects domestic and public spaces

into vivid, and persuasive imagery.

In the area around 1950,

I was photographing a house for an architect

who used to be an apprentice with Frank Lloyd Wright.

And as a result of a conversation,

it turns out that I was able to go to the meet

Frank Lloyd Wright the next day.

He allowed me to photograph Taliesin West.

So I spent 12 days.

Then when I sent him my photographs,

he was exuberant in praising them.

He gave me other projects to photograph.

Frank Lloyd Wright designed this.

When he saw this photograph, he almost kissed me.

What lens do you use here?

Because that's a very narrow street that that's on.

It's a wide angle lens.

Were you on the other sidewalk across-

No, I was right on the curb, literally.

Wide angle lens, held straight one point perspective,

right dead center, you don't distort.

Distortion comes only when you

tilt the camera, or turn it sideways.

Did this picture help you

in future assignments with Wright?

I mean was he more amenable to your ideas and suggestions?

I should have brought the letter he wrote to me.

It was a beautiful letter.

After he saw my Taliesin pictures, he said they're.

Well, I won't talk about now, except that.

You can talk about it. What did he say?

You're among friends.

I'm not modest.

Neither am I.

You're pictures are incredible for an amateur,

and better than most professionals.

Yeah, that made me hit the floor.

Better than most professionals.

I keep that letter in my office.

That's a humbling letter.

Oh, I was very pleased, to say the least.

Frank Lloyd Wright established some ideas, early on,

that kind of wedded a new idea of architecture to its place.

He changed the nature of what we think a house is,

not what it looks like, but how it's organized,

and how you live in it.

Another architect who changed our ideas

about living spaces was John Lottner,

who came out of the Frank Lloyd Wright office.

As one of Wright's most promising proteges,

Lautner united his passion for both architecture

and engineering, creating visually thrilling spaces

that remain revolutionary even today.

I refer to him as the missing link between

the classic modernism, the work of Neutra,

or case study house architects,

and the more sort of expressive

and organic work that people now associate with Los Angeles.

He thought that every single house should be

developed out of the site constraints,

and out of what the budget allowed,

and what the client wanted and needed.

John was a brilliant engineer.

You have a house perched on the side of the hill.

And there's no excavation here.

It's just like a birdhouse would be.

And look at the view you get from here.

And he had the concept of getting a contracting company

to acquire the land around here,

and build a series of these pods.

He couldn't get a contractor

to build and finance this kind of project.

It's a tragedy.

Nice meeting you.

How long ago did you take the picture?

I photographed this house originally

when it was new in 1961.

And in 1968, it was made a major

story about for "Life Magazine".

So you're the famous Julius Shulman?

68 years of photography about the cover.

She's been instrumental in making my book so beautiful.

She's a book designer. I can't wait to see it.

Well, wait till you see-

When's it gonna be published?

Ask Angelida.

Well, I don't know.

Okay, when's it gonna be published?

When it's at its best, then we start printing.

We look so long on this book,

it's like you can't do it better.

Angelika happens to be a very creative woman.

And she built this wall not wall.

Not myself.

Well, and then.

The stones are too high.

There's a stairway up here, up to the hill above.

Someday there'll be a trail from here to my house,

which is half a mile straight,

otherwise you'd take Mulholland.

You go over the hill, and we were gonna hike

to our house from here someday.

And look at the nice light coming through here,

the last rays of sunlight.

Isn't that beautiful?

Julius made beautiful pictures of Lautner's buildings.

And Lautner, I would say, is another example of that

branch of modernism, a legacy of expressionism.

Eric Mendelson,

late Frank Lloyd Wright.

After all John Lautner went to Taliesin in the late '30s,

and was imbued with all of that.

Frank Lloyd Wright called John Lautner

the world's second greatest architect.

He felt very strong about the talent of this student.

And John was such an amazing builder.

The photograph of John Lautner,

this is the age he was when he designed our house.

And in fact, if you look behind him in the photograph,

there's a design for a restaurant that incorporates

a lot of the same features as the entryway of our house.

What we refer to as the lobby,

for lack of a better description, because

it's not a real practical room.

It's just a spectacular room, I think.

Oh, it's a real practical room.

We've had string quartet concerts in here.

We've had fundraisers for Rudolph Schindler at Mocha.

We had Julie Shulman birthday party in here.

No no, it's great as a restaurant and nightclub.

But I mean, as far as something in a house.

It lent itself to be something that

is a little bit in the world of fantasy.

Many Lautner homes are now used in films,

for some reason, the site of evil person.

So this is the east side of the house.

And on the West Side,

if you walk past the pool is the Hollywood sign.

That's just, it's really cool.

I grew up with that, in cold Minnesota, wondering wow.

Hollywood, that's really a place.

But how insane to look right through our house to see.

You can literally look

from west to east in this direction.

The movement of the sun and the moon,

we see them so clearly.

Here is a view of Los Angeles, if you can see it.

This is progress in the eyes of many people, pure smog.

We cannot permit ecology to be destroyed,

because that is the life blood,

the lifeline of our whole world.

I was invited to a dialogue with

the PR man for Irvine Corporation.

Your very concerned about eagles and birds,

and I'm very concerned about people.

They just began to cut down trees,

and destroy the orchards and build

little communities of tract houses.

We're not allowed to build houses.

We're not allowed to build businesses,

and do things for fear that were going to hurt some

ecology or environment, a word that you,

you or no other environmentalist

has ever been able to define for me.

I don't know what the environment is,

if it doesn't include me.

In my photography, doing architectural work essentially-

Julius becomes much more

aware of the environment, and concerned about it.

He was really adamantly disgusted

with what was happening to his Los Angeles.

We started a program called

Project Environment USA, to show how architects could

relate to good environment in their design work.

And for 10 years, these photographs

were published and exhibited throughout the United States.

By the 1960s, Shulman had become

one of the world's foremost architectural photographers.

Sought after by publications around the globe.

Shulman traveled continuously throughout the US,

Europe, Asia, and South America, defining imagery for both

the eras great architectural masters and its young pioneers.

When I went to Mexico,

I did a tremendous amount of work there for architects

like Abraham Zabludovsky, and Ricardo Legorreta.

Tell me, your daughter was taking photographs.

Yes. Thanks to you, yes.

She's still doing it, thanks for your advice and everything.

Well, why not? It's a good business.

Let the architects do all the heavy work,

and here we come in and take pictures, like this.

They just did a book

on us, an editor of Mexico.

I brought you a copy.

You've been busy.

Yes, yeah we have.

We have to attempt great things. That's a mistake.

History makes it great.

Why don't we say, we have to attempt to understand

the history of our lives, the history of our times?

Its better.

My honest opinion.

Yes.

It's the only one you can give in all your life.

As I traveled around South America,

I found great architecture in Atlantida, Uruguay.

I found great architecture in Argentina.

However,

the most enticing and most dramatic

of all the work I photographed there existed in Brasillia.

He went there under the sponsorship of

a Mexican architect by the name of Abraham Zabludovsky.

And the family, you'd think Julius was a brother

or something, the way they treated him.

And all the kids, Uncle Julius, practically.

And he knew all about them.

And Alinka Zabludovsky was a very gracious lady,

and made me feel very welcome.

You realize, Alinka, what a privilege it is to be here,

to see what, this is wonderful.

Abraham was very skilled at getting good photography.

Look at this photograph.

Absolutely fantastic.

Chose the right time of day,

when you get light inside and outside.

Tells you the whole story of the building.

You realize, when you stop here in one moment,

and just let the eye walk around here.

Look what was achieved in a lifetime,

and the contrast between each building.

The man was a good architect, a good human being.

Salute.

Modernism started to decline in the late 1960s,

as a new style, postmodernism, emerged in its place.

With an emphasis on wit, ornament, and historical reference,

it was a shift that would ultimately

drive Shulman into retirement.

Julius had a wonderful archive.

So he decided, look Carlos, I'm gonna give you,

which he did, $10,000 cash.

I'm gonna give you $60,000 worth of camera equipment.

I'm gonna write you a letter of recommendation

to all my existing clients.

Go out, carry on, do your best.

I'm gonna, quote, retire, close my doors.

I felt that many architects

turned to strange designs.

It wasn't architecture to him. He hated it.

He hated all of these postmodern architects.

He thought they were fools.

Julius is often outspoken and judgmental.

I don't always agree with his judgment,

but I appreciate his candor.

One judgment that I do agree with him on is his

opposition to much postmodernist architecture.

It reminds me of Reyner Banham's definitive line,

postmodernism is to architecture

as female impersonation is to femininity.

As modernism slowly fell out of fashion,

many masterworks were neglected, even destroyed.

Shulman however, remained a faithful steward

to the modernist ideal.

Ultimately his vast photographic archive would become

an indispensable resource, as public tastes turned

enthusiastically back toward modernism.

We weren't looking to buy a house in Palm Springs.

We were looking to see this house.

The house had been on the market for four years,

and it needed a lot of work.

The real estate agent, as she was showing us the property,

kept reinforcing the idea that you could buy this

for land value and build whatever you want.

So I asked her,

do you really think that somebody would,

would take this house down?

And she said, well, they could.

It was really at that moment that

I knew we had to get this house.

I sought out Julius, and he was immediately excited.

He probably had 25 pictures that he could show me that day.

But he had about 80 pictures that he had never printed

that he printed for us.

And without those pictures,

we couldn't have restored the house.

It had four owners, and 2,500 square feet added onto it,

which puffed out of every side, except the Shulman view.

We decided to remove all of the additions.

And that meant wherever they came in contact with the house,

that's where our restoration problem was gonna be.

There was a cutout in the stone here,

because there was a doorway that opened out

into a closet that had been added.

So when I first came out here,

there was a sense of excitement and anticipation.

But walking around the site,

there was also a sense of sadness,

because much of the character that I remembered so vividly

from school and books had been tarnished.

There was also excitement,

because you could see the original house in there.

Up to the foyer, let's go.

Architects of this generation

were pushing the limits of their technologies.

They were trying to achieve things that in many ways,

their technologies weren't capable of achieving.

But the modernist confidence was to do it anyway.

And with that came an elegance.

But with that came a challenge.

And these houses are desperate for care and restoration.

There weren't any working drawings

of this house that we had access to.

We had sketches and little,

very small interior elevations of various rooms.

But it was Shulman's photographs

that really kind of guided us.

He captured the sensibilities of the house,

the aesthetic of the house, what the house felt like.

And to me, that's the genius of those photographs.

Every architect practicing today has to somehow resolve

the mythology that Julius Shulman captured for us.

How they do it as their own business,

and their own ability and magic

to create new worlds out of it.

But really all of them have to, in some way, make peace

with the modernism that Julius Shulman presented to us.

It's a simple but true statement that Julius Shulman is

the most important architectural photographer in history.

When we met around 1990, he had never really shown his

photography in a fine art context.

When I said I wanted to

show his work in a gallery, he thought

the beautiful pictures that I took on my vacation,

that's what you want, I said no.

It was just such a natural thing

that has worked should be available as fine art photography.

It's just a matter of context, and perception.

Since then, we've shown his work in Milan,

and London, and Paris, and Cologne, and Berlin,

and Munich, and New York, Toronto.

It's been an extremely successful relationship.

The genealogy of architecture photography

in the United States really starts with

a man named F.S. Lincoln.

After that, it kind of balloons out to three,

which is Julia Shulman, Ezra Stoller,

and the studio of Hedrich Blessing in Chicago.

Their photographs were a bit darker,

and they deal with ambient light.

Shulman's deals more with the natural landscape.

And Stoller's is the tonality of the sky.

Stoller's photos are very different than Shulman,

in that sense of Stoller's are more

elevational like in their visual construction.

Julius' photos are mostly one point perspectives.

And to show a really good modern interior,

you really need to do a one point perspective,

because the modern will unfold in a beautiful way.

The rooftops and floor lines recede into

this single point, and they jut out at you

at this very dynamic 45 degree angle.

And so the images are either

shooting towards you, or pulling you in.

Often, the houses in real life

are not nearly as beautiful as Julius's pictures.

He was a master at shifting the planes around to,

in a way, distill the essence of the building

into one particular shot, or to even enhance

the strong lines of an already powerful building,

and raise it to a different level.

Somehow he's able to put so much of himself

into the vantage point,

that you feel his presence in the room,

even if he's not in the frame.

We had been talking about

where Julius's archive should end up for many years.

And there had been discussions

and proposals from various museums.

But I, and Julius, and his daughter,

I think, had always been most interested in

it ending up at the Getty.

Here, suddenly they're gonna strip all the negatives,

and contact prints, and enlargements.

The whole story of my life will not be transposed into

Mr. Getty's. hall.

So there's all these, and all these over here,

and all those over there.

There's a bunch of other out in the shed out there.

And they all need to be plastic wrapped.

This is exhibit material you can take.

These are all my original prints.

They go back, far back. You can see the date on that.

That's 54 years ago.

But it's a sad experience.

I don't know how you're gonna plan to store these.

I'm not just gonna move away from this whole project.

I aim to come to Getty quite frequently.

Oh, we need your help for it.

And I hope you'll ask me because,

let me have a key to the gate.

Because I plan to come there.

Julius had a specific organization of his archive.

We as an archival institution, do not want to change that.

Because it really shows Julius's thinking.

And the working with the archive

is just as much of importance to understand Julius's work

as looking at the photos themselves.

The place is gonna be barren without my archives.

But there's so many other things still piled up here.

I am gonna miss some of these.

And look at the work I'm doing here now.

And I can still have my coffee and scones,

and have a good life,

thanks to my daughter, Judy.

This is a man who lives in his present, in the present.

And in his presence too. (chuckles)

But he lives in the present.

And it was the same thing when Olga died.

He's always looking forward.

Somebody's coming up here tomorrow.

Here's an order to these people.

Ah! It's empty.

Many of those pictures are not to go yet.

Right.

'Cause I want to start them.

Judy doesn't know how I feel about those.

Many of those pictures are salon pictures,

personal pictures, and they're not ready to be shipped yet.

I'll be all right.

And I've got these wonderful things here.

Well Julius, Judy's not coming back till Sunday.

Sunday, what's Sunday?

Sunday's the fifth,

when you're coming for brunch at the house.

But Julius I have a meeting at two,

so I can't stay around this afternoon.

All right. That's how you feel about.

I'd love to be here, you know I would.

I know.

That's it.

Bye bye.

A major reason for the revival of

modernism in the late 1990s is the republication

of Julius's photography by Taschen.

People look in Taschen's books.

They say, I want to leave here.

And they want to,

they want to become part of a Julius Shulman photograph.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate it. Thank you.

It's a beautiful one.

That's a collector's item.

Yeah, now it is.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

I like your work.

Enjoy it.

Julius has a portfolio that encapsulates

the generation of architecture that many people

would never get to see in the flesh.

Benedikt Taschen mythologized

the man who mythologized the buildings.

Can't even tell you

how many of your photographs I have.

Everything was fine.

Wonderful.

I never sold so many books.

It's astounding when you think about the

number people who've been here tonight.

The whole firm was here, I guess.

It's amazing, don't you think?

Where are we going now?

I don't know. He's on his way.

So then we have to come up

with a title for the book as well.

You have seen all these big books here with

Arocki, and Leni Riefenstahl, and so.

Yours is, of course, a little bit bigger.

Of course.

How can we else do this?

And then what we should do is,

I brought you a couple of proofs here.

And let's just think about

the color corrections, and what we can do.

Hey, the old church. This is perfect.

I think so too, yeah.

And this is your first wife?

Emma, yeah. Emma.

Wow.

You know, it was in this show in Madrid, as a big print.

And people love it there.

It's really wonderful.

So I think color wise, it's all fine here.

And that frame, that right, I think that's fine too.

Don't you think so?

Absolutely.

Okay, so this is here in Palm Springs, isn't it?

That's the Birges House,

and Alfred Frey was the architect, perfect.

So in that case it's done.

That's Montreal, Canada.

Oh that's cool.

This is the secret is to

have the same values of light here as here.

This is sun light. That's God. This is Julius.

God and Julius. That's cool.

I think that's a great combination.

Julius, you know for the book, when we do it,

I think in the next couple of days,

I hope you will receive the signature pages,

so that you can sign them all, the 2,500.

And then we later on bind it in the final book.

Good. No problem, that'll be all right.

Good, so we don't have to make

too many corrections here, just a very few.

Julius, if you would like to say hello,

we have a sales meeting here.

See, the like you.

The architecture of Southern California,

modernism is associated with the idea of lifestyle.

Modernism less as something that is a societal utopia,

and more as something that is a personal utopia.

And Julius's work has had

a huge influence in that perception.

Is there a broom or a brush? The carpet.

The footprints, get rid of the ones here.

There, right there, hold it.

Move this chair over there.

This table, the same way.

He sort of really set the standard

for the depiction of everyday life in a modern home.

The other chair,

slide that back a little bit towards the window.

Good.

And you drop this down here, you got more floor. Perfect.

All right, let's do it.

Schulman's pictures have this base of a romance to them.

His work represents a certain ideal that happened years ago.

And yet it helped

create the essence and ethos of this city.

My house.

Where, where, where?

Here.

He got me my first client.

And then when I got out of school,

he got me my second client,

his brother-in-law, or ex brother-in-law.

Yeah, Jerry Shrome.

That's the living room.

These two things are guests.

And one thing that Julius also did,

even though he didn't, he wasn't successful,

he tried to get "Arts and Architecture"

to be interested in my work.

They didn't like my work, so.

But that wasn't his fault. He tried. I remember.

I'm glad to see this, it's shaping out.

Yeah, it's this principle,

that the pieces interlock and they can.

So I found a drawing by Leonardo, the same.

No. Yeah.

So then I said, but I found the drawing after I did this.

So he copied me, I said.

We were very influenced by Harwell Harris,

Frank Lloyd Wright, Japan.

So I came out of that, it wasn't.

I didn't just invent a language.

Your presentation of the initial Disney Center design

left a lot of people aghast.

My God, they would say.

And I say I was one of those too.

Your vocabulary was foreign to us.

But you explain here that there is a misinterpretation

of your design for the Disney Center.

And you gave me a note about my redemption.

I formalized it by saying

that this was their redemption of Julius, with love.

Well, you redeemed yourself, and I in turn-

Got redeemed.

Right here.

So we see where this wall meets that wall,

those angles here.

So let's get rid of.

In doing so we get more ceiling. Ceiling is very important.

That's not bad, that's almost,

almost that's the exposure.

A little bit more.

I'm showing the beginning and end of the walls.

So it's as simple.

It's an architectural story.

This is perfect exposure.

I think so, yeah. We can do it in that way.

The bottom of the stage here,

when that's enlarged into a reproduction,

that's gonna show the story,

how this is related to that wall.

See it comes around here, back around here.

So we have a perimeter.

That gets everything.

Did it? Yeah. The point.

How about the bottom?

Everything. We can crop there.

But we do not need now, because I don't want to go.

Can you see the top, here? We get everything.

That's fine. Let me look at that.

Oh, wait a minute.

How about putting on 75, and doing a horizontal one?

All right, there's your rising front.

We have big notations in this too.

Let me check the poll light, shall we?

See, we are getting dark in the corner.

I like that. I want that.

It's a part view.

No, we always do that in our pictures.

We darken the corners always. So there really.

I never do that.

I do, and that's why people like my photography.

Okay.

I darken it purposely.

I control what I call the vision acoustics.

Folk lore is one thing, but working is another thing.

Especially that right now,

the kind of architecture that you have documented,

that's so much in favor again.

And then you can see all these people come here to hear you.

Well, you've heard the term mazal tov,

when someone gets buried, I mean married.

So, apparently I've been graced with mazal, good luck, fate.

This photo is about architecture,

but you also been very interested in the city,

specific ideas, I think, about the city.

Is that correct?

We have no control, no planning, no urban planning.

How would you like to live

somewheres in that pile of junk?

Can we control the real estate market? No.

But we can guide it, intelligently.

You are a rock star.

A who?

A rock star.

You're famous, like Elvis Presley all of a sudden.

Oh my God. What's the deal?

I'm better than he is.

I'll say.

Let's go cut the cake here.

♪ Happy birthday dear Julius ♪

♪ Happy birthday to me ♪

The first toast is to my father,

a man whose curiosity and optimism

has propelled him through a magnificent life.

I would also like to have us all remember

the modernist architects who made my father's work possible.

Good night, Julius. Good night.

Good night. Good night, good night.

Thank you.

And this is the original concrete structure?

I have always admired Julius from the standpoint of his,

somebody who's together as he is,

and at his age and still is vital.

He's being asked so often

to be out there and talk about where he's come from,

and where he's, what he believes in today.

The camera is the least important element in photography.

That's why in my seminars,

I will not permit the camera to be introduced

until we look at what we're judging.

We've started a new organization,

called Julia Shulman Institute at Woodbury.

And we're starting a new program

for high school students, lecturing on photography.

Now in this composition, we're seeing

all the way into this dark part of the building here.

President Nelson, it is my honor to present

Julius Shulman, the undisputed master

of architectural photography

for the honorary degree, Doctorate of Architecture.

Thank you all so much.

I can't begin

to say what this means.

But I'm beginning a new life every day.

Let me fill you in on something very simple.

Life is good.

Life can be beautiful.

What more can I ask?

Thank you very much.

Beautiful, beautiful. Thank you.

Do you see yourself as a romanticist?

Oh yes. I have fun.

I learned something, Julius, from talking with you.

I have a gate, and I've got a box from the shepherd.

I think that's when the greatest

architecture pictures I've ever seen.

Yeah, that's wonderful, a great picture.

So this points out about photography,

success, romanticism.

If you're worried about the job you're gonna do,

you can't be bothered with a barking dog.

Come on, let's get him in the house. Let's go shooting, Joe.

But if you're relaxed, and enjoy what's around you,

you speak to those dogs.

Julius, you enjoy your work, don't you?

Oh, what else is there?

The newly created Julius Shulman Institute

at Woodbury University, and the recent acquisition

of his archive by the Getty, has secured Shulman's place

as one of modernism's most eloquent ambassadors.

Both his personal and photographic legacy

continue to endure, perpetuating the philosophy,

simple beauty, and pioneering spirit of modern architecture.