The following is from ARCHITECTURAL RECORD,May 1940: "The principle vertical construction members are 4-by-4 posts, continuous for the two stories. These are notched to receive continuous lintels, providing a strong, earthquake-resistant rigid frame. The uprights also serve as finished door and window jambs, thus eliminating much detail. The cost of the group came to approximately $3,500 for each of the units.

"All rooms of each unit are directly accessible from the entrance and stair hall. The living room, kitchen-dinette, and both bedrooms in each apartment have windows on three sides. Yet this entails no loss of privacy, as those [window] facing the entrance or street fronts are clerestories. Between the living room and the dinette is a sliding glass door, 6 ft. wide, which permits closing off the cooking space from the living room, a glass door leads out to the private patio."

There is nothing clever or intricate in Ain's designs. Any carpenter could build them. They were constructed extraordinarily well, due to Ain's sense of obligation to his client and the choice of contractors who shared his goals.

Ain predated the merchant builders in reducing the number of elements in a structure. In the framing he carried four-by-four posts to the height of the building to form an uninterrupted girdle; he limited the sizes of wall openings to the four-foot intervals between the studs. This reduction brings a rhythm and an order that rules the building.

Though Gregory Ain gained an international reputation in the late 1940s and early 1950s, his has always remained an essentially Californian architecture. Ain was born in Pittsburgh in 1908. His family moved to Los Angeles in 1911. He entered UCLA in 1924. After 2 years of mathematics and physics he decided to shift to architecture at the University of Southern California. In the late 1920s Ain began working with Richard Neutra on the Rush City Air Terminal project. Neutra's rationalism appealed to the young Ain as well as his crusade for the objectivity of the Modern; for its use and symbolism of the machine; for its use of architecture as a social tool; for its portrait of the architect as an active social critic. In 1929 and 1930 Ain designed his own, unrealized, projects including several multiple dwellings, a single family residence, and a community building and retail store. Among these was Ain's first full commitment to modular design, a concern which was to dominate his work after he left Neutra in 1935.

The Dunsmuir Flats are akin to the mathematical games Ain learned as a child. His list of requirements extended beyond his hopes--"Just to see," he said. And, what he saw affected the future direction of his work and gave him a secure place in architecture. The only aid he had from the site was its gradual upslope and the five degrees the sides varied from a pure rectangle. He made use of both by angling the building to the street and staggering the units back. The entrance corner of each unit hits exactly the four-foot setback line on the north. Each unit has its private entrance, lighted by a high continuous strip of glass on the north.

The plans of the individual units come close to being faultless. A central entry connects the spaces on both levels. Each living and dining room opens onto a small terrace and garden, and on the second floor both bedrooms face south and have their own balconies. The only major deficiencies in the plan are the interior location of the kitchen, which lacks any windows of its own, and the provision for a single door rather than sliding glass doors between the dining and living areas and the terrace.

The Dunsmuir Flats were designed for a narrow, gently sloping lot. The repetitive nature of the four two-story housing units, with their flat roofs and narrow horizontal bands of windows to the north, gives them the classic reading of the Modern or International Style. What is not apparent from the often photographed exterior is the delicate detailing, the scale of the interior spaces, and the full impact of how the interior spaces flow to the outdoors.

There is a change of mood from the north face to the south. The north side is smooth, the glass flush with the plaster, the only decoration is the continuous dark line of glass against white, the staggered blocks unified by the continuous glass, the glass disappearing behind the canopy over the low entrance, then reappearing.

The mood on the south side is open--the wide sliding glass doors, the generous-sized sash and fixed panels, the wood trellises over the second floor porches. The rise of the natural grade places one garden above the next.

The entrance hall gives access to the living room, the stair to the second floor, and a door to the service area, which leads to a lavatory and the kitchen.

One goal Ain set for himself was to provide light from three sides for all rooms, accomplished in the kitchen by a clerestory above the entrance canopy. The dining space extending out from the kitchen has windows on the garden side and a panel of glass above the overhang.

With the acclaim received from the Dunsmuir Flats, it is surprising that Ain did not receive any further commissions for multiple dwellings. He did, however, plan several groupings of houses; two adjoining houses in 1939 and three adjoining houses in late 1940.

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Click on this MAY 1940 issue of Architectural Record to download a copy of our original article on Dunsmuir Flats.

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