Millard House (Pasadena, California)

The Millard House (or La Miniatura) is located at 645 Prospect Crescent in Pasadena, a suburb of Los Angeles, California, United States. It occupies part of a pentagonal tract that faces east toward Prospect Crescent and west toward Rosemont Avenue (originally Lester Avenue). The original owner, the rare-book dealer Alice Millard, initially owned only the western portion of the tract before acquiring adjacent land in the 1920s and 1930s. The modern-day tract covers about . The Millard House was built in the Prospect Park subdivision of Pasadena The surrounding area includes houses in various styles, designed by architects such as Greene and Greene, Myron Hunt, and Wallace Neff. The Louise C. Bentz House, whose original owner had sold land to Millard 1923, is immediately across Prospect Crescent to the east. is also located nearby, to the east. The Prospect Park subdivision was parceled out in 1906. Wright had reportedly selected the site after seeing it from the top of a nearby hill where Millard had originally intended to build. ==Architecture==

The Millard House or La Miniatura is one of eight buildings that Wright designed in Greater Los Angeles, alongside houses like the Storer House, the Hollyhock House, the Ennis House, and the Freeman House. The Ennis, Freeman, Millard, and Storer houses were the only four textile block houses he designed in Los Angeles. According to the writer Hugh Hart, "Wright saw his Textile Block Method approach as an utterly modern, and democratic, expression of his organic architecture ideal." After designing the four textile-block houses, Wright went on to design various concrete-block buildings across the U.S., including Usonian houses made of "Usonian Automatic" blocks. In his later life, Wright sometimes referred to La Miniatura as his first Usonian house. One of Wright's biographers, Brendan Gill, wrote that the house's design was similar to contemporary designs by Le Corbusier. As built, the house has two entrances: a vehicular entrance from Prospect Crescent and a pedestrian entrance from Rosemont Avenue. As such, Wright designed the house to cling to the lot's steep ravine, nestled among the trees. The main entrance is underneath the footbridge connecting the main house and a detached garage. A series of terraces outside the house descend into the ravine, Whereas the other houses' tiles are fixed to reinforcing bars, the Millard House's tiles are interlocked together; steel bars are still used in the joints between each block. Another difference is that Wright reinforced the blocks using conventional mortar, while in the other houses, the blocks are fastened together using steel loops. The blocks on the house are laid in an undulating pattern. Many of the blocks are square units measuring across, but there are variants that measure one-half or one-quarter that size. Some of the half-sized blocks, measuring , are used around window and door openings, and some blocks of each type are perforated. An early plan had also called for larger blocks measuring , which would have made them substantially heavier. Almost all of the blocks on the facade contain the cruciform motif; according to the historian Robert Sweeney, this served to de-emphasize the design details. Compared with Wright's other work (which tended to be more horizontally oriented), the Millard House emphasized more of its vertical design details. Double-paned glass windows are installed between concrete piers on the facade. There are also stained glass windows created by the textile artist William Morris—a friend of Millard's—and the designer Edward Burne-Jones. The house includes a concrete frame for further reinforcement. The Los Angeles County website and some sources cite the residence as having three bedrooms and three bathrooms, being arranged around a central core; Wood, plaster, and concrete are used as decorations throughout the house. Unlike Wright's other houses, in which he designed most or all of the furniture inside, Wright did not design much of La Miniatura's furniture, except for some living-room bookshelves. The house's garage and entrance are located on the eastern side of the building, facing Prospect Crescent. the perforations are infilled with small glass shards to keep water out. On the first floor, there is a kitchen and a dining room opening onto a terrace. == History ==

The Millard House was one of multiple high-profile projects that Wright completed in the 1920s, along with his other Los Angeles houses and Tokyo's Imperial Hotel. After erecting the Millard House, Wright received the commissions for the Freeman, Ennis, and Storer houses nearly simultaneously. Prior to constructing the textile-block houses, Wright had used pre-Columbian motifs in other structures such as Chicago's Midway Gardens and Richland Center, Wisconsin's German Warehouse. The Millard House was the second of two designed for the family of Alice Millard, a schoolteacher-turned-book dealer. a Prairie style structure in Highland Park, Illinois. Alice continued her husband's collection, selling some of George's investments and taking out loans to pay for merchandise. The Millard collection came to include not only books, but also artifacts such as furniture and artwork, and Millard wanted to construct at least one building to display and sell these items. At that point, fewer than 10% of Wright's clients had rehired him for another project; as Wright later wrote, "I determined she should have the best I had in my portfolio." This account was disputed; Sweeney wrote that Wright had instead brought up the idea of a new house to Millard, as he wanted to test out a new design concept that he had been thinking about. According to Sweeney, Millard had not been thinking about a new house in Pasadena; Although he had previously used square terracotta-and-concrete blocks in structures like the Midway Gardens and Imperial Hotel, these structures did not use concrete blocks as part of their superstructure, like La Miniatura did. Although Millard had initially wanted to build on a plateau, Wright subsequently convinced her to buy an alternate plot nearby, at the bottom of a ravine. According to Wright, the alternate site was cheap because it was "undesirable". Wright appointed his apprentice Rudolph Schindler as the construction supervisor, while Wright's son Lloyd was tasked with completing the working drawings for the house. Early drawings for the house indicated a system of interlocking "male" and "female" blocks; Wright's son Lloyd Wright supervised the construction. Unlike for Wright's later textile-block houses, the specifications for the blocks used in La Miniatura do not survive in full, and many details of the blocks are known only from Wright's autobiography. Whatever drawings did exist were vague, requiring the contractor to devise their own interpretation of Wright's plans. Since the molds tended to warp when they were warm, they could not be used to create blocks to precise dimensions; as such, some of the blocks vary slightly. Some of Parlee's relatives who lived nearby helped create the blocks. Wright temporarily reassigned Parlee away from La Miniatura's construction that August, asking the company to instead construct one of the guest houses outside Hollyhock House on Olive Hill in Hollywood. As a direct result, by November 1923, the construction of La Miniatura was running significantly behind the original schedule. Parlee was also hired in late 1923 to construct a theater, the Little Dipper, near the Hollyhock House. When the Little Dipper project was canceled a short time later, Wright ordered his bank not to pay Parlee any further; at the time, Parlee had already collected $8,961.50 for his construction of La Miniatura. At the beginning of 1924, Parlee quit from his job as La Miniatura's construction contractor. Despite this, Millard felt that the house's design was worth the extra cost. two books printed on vellum in 1470, as well as centuries-old Egyptian papyrus sheets. She also collected other objects such as Sheffield plate objects, Flemish tapestries, and Middle Ages bas-reliefs. Wright wrote that he had been pleased to help Millard acquire "the old books and other old things". Initially, Millard publicly exhibited some pieces from her book collection at the Biltmore Los Angeles hotel once a year. An East Indian royal, Count Robert de Clairmont, while Millard temporarily lived at the Biltmore after returning from her Europe trip that year. Another issue concerned the house's leakiness, a common flaw of Wright's designs. following this incident, Millard wrote to Wright, complaining that the floodwaters had reached up to six inches (152 mm) in the dining room. Millard's financial counselor had advised her that the house was virtually unsaleable due to its unconventional layout and its inferior construction material. Sources published after 1942 cite Wright as having designed a gallery for Millard in 1925, but Sweeney writes that there is no record of Wright having devised a design at that time. In any case, Millard asked Lloyd to design the gallery instead. Lloyd's gallery, informally known as the Doll's House, was accessed via a footbridge ran from the living-room terrace. It displayed literary artifacts from multiple eras, ranging from clay tablets and papyrus to modern-day literature. The Doll's House was initially open only on Saturdays, but it became so popular that, by March 1927, the gallery was open daily during the morning and mid-afternoon. Unfinished expansions and further changes Within two years of the studio's completion, Millard had run out of space. During the middle of that year, Millard traveled to Europe, leasing the original house to the family of her friend John S. Mitchell. Lot 12 had been sold to someone else by 1929, leaving only lot 11 (the lot closest to La Miniatura) available for development. Accordingly, Wright sent Millard some plans that March, which called for a two-story building connected to La Miniatura's garage, composed of a double-height living and dining room on its lower level and three bedrooms on the upper level. Also in 1929, Millard began charging an admission fee to La Miniatura's gallery to raise money for a memorial to the printmaker William Morris. One of Millard's friends bought lot 11 in 1929, but it remained empty for several years. Wright subsequently drew up a second sketch in January 1930, which called for a rectangular structure measuring . The structure would have a gallery room measuring high. A footbridge was to connect the second gallery building's balcony with that of La Miniatura's living room, and there would be a staircase descending from the secondary gallery's terrace to the ravine. Millard obtained a construction permit for the second gallery that August. The second gallery was originally supposed to cost $15,000, which was revised downward to $11,000 in September 1930. Millard could not afford either figure, canceling the plans at the end of that year. receiving a new-building permit for a "studio building" that April. However. she had to cancel the project again since "nobody could find any money". She acquired the rest of the ravine, as well as an adjoining parcel, but was ultimately unable to construct any expansions other than relatively small additions to the Doll's House and the garage. Lloyd oversaw the expansion of the garage, The next year, F. H. Ruppel was hired to design modifications to La Miniatura. Lloyd was hired to expand the Doll's House, a project which was completed in 1933; Millard opened her house to the public on several occasions, including a 1929 showcase of medical literature, a 1933 exhibition of objects by T. J. Cobden-Sanderson, a 1934 showcase of ancient manuscripts and early books, and various exhibitions celebrating Morris. Millard sought to resell lot 11 in 1934 and asked Wright to devise additional plans for that site. A couple had expressed interest in lot 11, but they decided to buy another lot after Wright took his time responding; he eventually sent Millard five plans, none of which were ever built. Millard continued to live at La Miniatura, hiring a contractor to repair the roof in 1937; she died there in 1938. Her collection was acquired by several friends who gave it to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. After moving in, Daniels submitted plans to Pasadena's government in 1940 for $1,500 worth of alterations to the house. and Daniels repaired the roof the next year. According to Daniels's granddaughter Nicole, he furnished the space with Mediterranean furniture and painted over the redwood. Daniels sometimes gave tours of the house as well. Daniels received a preservation award from the Pasadena Beautiful Foundation in 1969, commemorating his family's preservation of the Millard House. The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976; the National Park Service's report stated that the house was significant not only because of Wright's design, but also because of Millard's involvement in the Southern California cultural scene. In the 1990s, Nicole Daniels inherited La Miniatura from her grandfather. Nicole had placed the house for sale the previous year with an asking price of $3.45 million. Zander decided to buy La Miniatura and later purchased another house in the neighborhood. In the 2000s, Zander began renovating La Miniatura, hiring Marmol Radziner + Associates to oversee the renovation. Annie Kelly was also rehired to help renovate the house after Zander expressed admiration for the color scheme of Kelly's house. La Miniatura remained in relatively good condition during that decade, in contrast to the Ennis and Freeman houses, which were operated by public entities and were in various stages of disrepair. Sources disagree on whether he had spent $2.5 million, or $4 million to renovate the house. The house was opened to limited public viewing in 2008 for the first time in 16 years; Zander had been confident that the house would be sold quickly, or $5.95 million by late 2009. That year, Doe told The Wall Street Journal that the house's roof still leaked. but they were described in the Financial Times as a couple from China. The house remained a private residence, though the writer Audrey Wachs of ''The Architect's Newspaper'' noted in 2018 that the owners were willing to consider inviting would-be visitors who left them a bottle of wine. ==Impact==

Reception The initial critical response to La Miniatura and the other textile block structures was mixed. Charles Lockwood of the Los Angeles Times wrote that the homes were greeted with "howls of laughter", as Beaux Arts-trained architects were "appalled" to see a common building material used for the facades and interior walls of expensive homes. Another critic, Arthur Miller of the Los Angeles Times, called it "a completely modern house in which fine old things can quite naturally be themselves". Wright himself took great pride in his design of La Miniatura, saying that "I would rather have built this little house than St. Peter's in Rome", In 1980, The New York Times noted that La Miniatura was known around the world and ranked it among the few buildings in Los Angeles that had become 20th-century architectural icons. The architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock described the house's perforated concrete blocks as "sparkling penetrations", The biographer Meryle Secrest wrote that all of Wright's textile-block houses were "monumental, aloof and irresistibly Mayan in feeling", and she said that La Miniatura in particular appeared imposing even though it was small. Sweeney wrote in his 1994 book Wright in Hollywood that the house "is the most perfect of the block houses built on the West Coast", because, unlike the other three block houses, it had retained Wright's original design without many modifications. Christopher Hawthorne of the Los Angeles Times agreed that the house was Wright's best design in Los Angeles because of its location next to a ravine, as well as its restrained design. Another Los Angeles Times reporter wrote in 2011 that La Miniatura "remains a piece of architectural genius, frozen in time", despite not being particularly well-known, while the Pasadena Star-News called it one of Wright's "masterpieces" in 2008. Media and influence La Miniatura's design directly influenced the set design for a 1989 episode of the soap opera One Life to Live, whose art director Barry Robison had been inspired by the house because "it was American architecture". The house was depicted in "Blood Oath", a 1994 episode of the TV series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, as well as in a music video for a rap song by Sean Combs, where it was depicted as the residence of a New World Order leader. It was also used as a filming location for the second season of HBO's science fiction series Westworld during 2018, when the building was on sale. Although the Westworld production team had wanted to shoot the series' third season at the house, the house's new owners would not allow any filming inside, so a set resembling the house's interior was built instead. One writer for The Salt Lake Tribune wrote in 2007 that the house's Mesoamerican architectural details may have helped inspire some architectural details in the LDS Conference Center in Salt Lake City. ==See also==