“They allowed me to see absolutely everything.” As a result, much of the content in Long’s book is appearing in print for the first time. “They were incredibly generous,” Long tells me. While the designer’s biggest success, the interior of Bullock’s Wilshire, is well documented, Jock Peters is packed with newly available drawings, photographs, correspondence, and reference materials from the Peters family archives, which were in the care of Peters’ grandson, Jock de Swart, and his partner, Louise Garnett, when Long got his first glimpse of the trove in 2015. University of Texas architecture professor Christopher Long’s new book, Jock Peters, Architecture and Design: The Varieties of Modernism ( Bauer and Dean Publishers, 2021), shines a welcome spotlight on this early modernist. Still, despite a career that was regularly interrupted by bouts of the tuberculosis that would eventually claim his life, Peters proved productive during the dozen years he lived in Southern California, designing sets for Hollywood movie studios, interiors for fashionable department stores, and homes for the small number of clients who appreciated, and could afford, his architectural visions. Peters kept this promise, maybe too assiduously, although our collective ignorance of his contributions to 20th-century architecture must also be blamed on the fact that Peters died young, in 1934 at the age of 45. “I want to lead a quiet, insular life with you here,” Jock was soon assuring Herta in a letter home, “and shall try to avoid ambition and fame.” Peters’ first lodging was a room at a local YMCA, which he shared with his brother George, who had landed in the United States almost a decade earlier. When the little-known 20th-century architect and designer Jock Peters arrived in Los Angeles in 1922, his wife, Herta, and their five children remained back home in Germany. “He liked being around people up to a point, but he wasn’t the social creature Schindler was.” Schindler, who designed the architectural landmark, had already made a name for himself in the United States by writing a “manifesto” that described, perhaps for the first time in so many words, an architecture in which, “The distinction between indoors and the out-of-doors will disappear.” A stint with Frank Lloyd Wright sealed Schindler’s reputation, as did the legendary soirees at Kings Road, where it was not uncommon for modern dancers to perform in the nude while Schindler’s guests drank freely, despite the strictures of Prohibition. There, the Neutras shared the home of fellow Austrian architect Rudolph Schindler and his wife, Pauline. When the great 20th-century architect Richard Neutra arrived in Los Angeles in 1925 with his wife, Dione, and the couple’s young child, his first residence was 835 Kings Road in West Hollywood.
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