Late modernism is prolific in Los Angeles. Where European modernism’s émigrés (and refugees) including Neutra and Schindler came and made indoor/outdoor the epitome of simple southern California living, the following generation of L.A. architects took free reign of SoCal’s modernist recipe – white orthogonal geometries, much steel with glass, and clean detailing.

But these new buildings (circa 1945 to 1965) weren’t humble like Schindler’s Kings Road residence or even Charles Eames’ gallery-esque case home; in fact many weren’t residences at all. Most second-generation L.A. modernism consisted of institutional architecture – banks, courts, museums and schools. This modernism was big, cool (in some cases even cold), and ignored by critics and academia. In those years preceding Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, this placid modernism flourished in L.A.