LOOK INSIDE: A View From the Top by ORO Editions

A VIEW FROM THE TOP VIEWPOINT COLLECTION

PHOTOGRAPHY BY

MIKE KELLEY WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

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LO O K I N G AT P I C T U R E S I S LO O K I N G AT B U I L D I N G S

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LO O K ING AT P I C T UR ES I S LO O K ING AT B UIL D ING S E VA H A G B E R G

Photography, I contend, is just as significant an element of architectural production as the drawing of plans, the selection of finishes, the development of a program.

The photographer Julius Shulman, who worked from 1936 until his death in 2009, in many ways created a visual iconography of the landscape of Los Angeles. The first to photograph the works of the Austrian-American architect Richard Neutra, whose 1929 Lovell Health House set much of the breezy, bright, articulated tone for what could now loosely be defined as LA architecture, and a later photographer of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Eameses, Shulman offered us a taxonomy of architecture and, with that, an argument about how to look at, and photographically document, buildings. I use Shulman as an opening example because of that synecdochic relationship between his vision of Los Angeles and Los Angeles itself, for the way in which his take on architectural photography — one that emphasized a house’s site, technical aspects, and most of all the relationship between the design and the city — began, almost, to produce an architecture in and of itself. For many people, a photograph is likely to be the only version of a building they ever see. The Lovell Health House exists in my imagination and my memory because of photographs that I saw published in the Los Angeles Times in 1929; I have studied Neutra’s work, but have never seen it in person. I was examined on my knowledge of Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings in grad school, long before I ever visited Taliesin West. Does that mean I haven’t seen the buildings, because I’ve only seen the photographs? Actually, I hypothesize, it’s the opposite. Architectural photography has had its own stars — Shulman and Ezra Stoller dominated the twentieth century; Iwan Baan, Joe Fletcher, and Mike Kelley are frontrunners in the present. Their photography, I contend, is just as significant an element of architectural production as the drawing of plans, the selection of finishes, the development of a program. When Eli and Edythe Broad commissioned the New York City-based firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro to design the new Broad Museum Downtown, they must have known what a powerful opportunity

for publication the building would offer. Photos by Baan and Kelley both draw significant visual focus to the structure’s latticed exterior and the clearly articulated interiors. In other words, they make an argument. Photography is difficult to categorize. Is it a representational art? A practice of documentation? Or is it an essential creative practice, something that reorients and redefines a building, giving a structure new and different life? Powerful architectural photography can be all of those. Think of Shulman’s early photographs of Neutra’s buildings — the Singleton Residence, the Kauffman House in Palm Springs, and of course, the Lovell Health House. These photos take a point of view: about light and space, about air and openness. They have come to define much of what we consider California architecture — one inspired by sun, by ideals about health, by the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny and the gold rush, of sun seekers and wellness advocates, a rhetoric that continues to be repeated even today. Careful architectural photography comprises a series of choices that compound upon each other to produce a visual experience that both documents and argues. The photographer faces myriad choices. What kind of a day is best for this project? What time of day is best? Should we try to catch the sunlight in the morning or at the golden hour? How should the framing of the interiors relate to the exteriors? What kind of shapes are in this structure, and should they be highlighted? Or should they recede? The best architects have learned never to be on set when the photographer is there; the architect’s eye — looking for proportion, easy flow of space, the relationship between different areas — is wildly different from the photographer’s — looking for rhythms, patterns, methods for drawing a number of discrete moments in time and space together into a narrative that appears continuous.

Flipping the pages of an architecture book can become two exercises in one. On the one hand, the reader suspends disbelief. She allows herself to think that she may one day see this building that she is currently seeing. With effective photography, she is invited to place herself into the space. A kitchen becomes more than a collection of geometric shapes; in the hands of a skilled photographer, it becomes three-dimensional, alluding to life just beyond the frame, to a world just out of reach. A living room becomes a space for memories, for nostalgia, even as it’s both two-dimensional and out of time. Photography can offer narrative sequences, a moment of surprise, disorientation and dislocation becoming resolved through the next aha moment. Architectural photography can invite the reader in, just enough that she can forget that she’s looking at a book. Good photography acts, in so many ways, as a gentle scrim between the eyes and the imagination. Good photography gestures. Photographers like Shulman developed a body of work that spoke on its own terms. Kelley, with this comprehensive take on the Viewpoint Collection, is similarly building a body of work, one that aims to make arguments. What is it arguing for? For difference, for care, for the way in which these houses at once articulate themselves upon the landscape and create a strong feeling of interiority. Through Kelley’s eye, honed over years photographing large-scale commercial projects and intimate residences, we can begin to see rhythm and confluence, disjunction and resolve. By photographing these buildings through methods that are consistent, Kelley offers a coherence that feels intuitive, yet remains the product of deep and careful perception. His work calls attention to moments, details, and gestures that we might otherwise miss if we visited the actual buildings; the photography becomes a frame through which to experience the most powerfully articulated version of the structure.

Much has been made of the photographer’s eye. Do they see differently than the rest of us? Or are they simply able to understand how a frame, a flattened rectangle, can act as a portal through which we can understand a structure? As the architectural historian James S. Ackerman has written, the earliest architectural photographers, working in the nineteenth century, were tasked mostly with documentation, practice which leads, Ackerman argues, to the necessity of differentiating photography created as document and photography created as art. Early photographers, Ackerman contends, were delighted to practice this new technology on buildings and landscapes simply because they were subjects that — unlike people — did not move. The long exposures the earliest cameras required were well-suited to immovable objects like buildings. Still, even with the advent of photography, drawings and paintings were for years considered the best and most effective ways to describe buildings — the way they could loom ominously over a city street (think of Hugh Ferris’ iconic renderings, produced in the early 1920s and immortalized by the Dutch architect/theorist Rem Koolhaas in Delirious New York). In the mid-nineteenth century, Ackerman says that tourism was instrumental in an increasing demand for architectural photographs, another nod to the ways in which photography allows us, in a sense, to go somewhere and see a place we might never physically visit. The trajectory of architectural photography then mirrors, in so many ways, the trajectory of how buildings can come to be photographed now. What may have started as a desire, in this case, to document a singular body of work — the Viewpoint Collection — has become, through Kelley’s eye, lens, and post-production choices, a way of both communicating an argument and allowing us to visit these houses that many of us will most likely never see in person. The photographs also demonstrate that these projects are quintessentially Californian. Their emphasis on open plans,

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airy modernism, the relationship between inside and outside, a textural warmth in many of the interiors, grainy wood, light colors, and intensive attention to landscaping are also quintessentially Los Angeles; they are inspired and inspiring, they are aspirational, they are expensive, they are done by some of the best architects working today. There is a productive tension in these projects, in the ways they’re represented, between what the architect Tom Kundig refers to as prospect and refuge, between the visitor’s ability to look out over the city and landscape, and to feel secluded and enclosed. There will always be an imaginary line between seeing a work of architecture in person and seeing it only in photographs. What I hope this brief foray into thinking about architectural photography has done is to frame the experience of reading and looking at the following images, locating them both historically and conceptually within a long lineage of an ever-evolving process. This book offers a moment in time and space, in many ways a document of a particular way of looking at architecture. In fifty years, these houses will seem different to us, will feel different, will be contextualized differently, in ways we, of course, can’t yet imagine, and we will read these images similar to the way we now read Shulman’s photographs of Neutra’s projects. Because they reflect not only the photographer’s eye, of course, but also all the cultural, historical, and aesthetic forces working on the photographer, the architects, the developer. And that’s why architectural photography can be such a powerful element of architectural production; it exists as immediate art, and as a future historical document, one that across history has outlasted the objects it interprets. It mirrors and represents our current abilities and concerns and also delineates a moment in time — one, in this case, in which a number of architects were given extraordinary resources and opportunities with which to explore, and communicate. These images are more than representations of each of these projects. They are the project.

C A PT UR ING W H AT ’S T HE R E MIKE KELLEY

Mike, I have been following your photography for a while and admire your work. I am currently running a custom home building firm in Los Angeles — we have about a dozen high-end homes under construction or existing, ranging from $25-$80M in finished price. I would like to discuss with you the possibility of photographing the homes for our portfolio and possible residential listing purposes. Haven’t been that thrilled with the photographer options presented to me.

I wish I could say that there was more to it, some magical pixie dust I sprinkled, something I showed Fred that convinced him I was the guy. Nope. In hindsight, I was pretty sure that the only purpose of the call was that he just wanted to check that I was capable of holding a conversation and wasn’t a Very High-Maintenance Artist before he let me into these homes. Quite possibly one of the most serendipitous starts to a working relationship in my life.

If there is interest, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Back over email, we agreed on a date to photograph the first home, which would be the Bird Streets house. I asked for a day and a half. I got it. No problem. Anything you need, Mike! The house is ready to go.

I certainly didn’t want to hesitate to contact Fred, who wrote me the most understated email in architectural photography history. But, you know, you can’t reply immediately, else you look like an overeager online dater. Give it a day. Have a little chill. Of course, I knew everything about Fred’s custom home building firm — Viewpoint Collection — they were only the most spectacular homes in Los Angeles, designed by some of the best architects in the state and built by masters of their trade. I’d seen the news stories, knew the firms involved, saw the renderings floating around, had worked for some of the suppliers involved, etc. Fine. I’ll call him back tomorrow. I’m a “busy” photographer after all, sitting around waiting for it to get dark so my brain can finally turn on and I can work into the witching hours. Most of my non-shooting days are occupied by answering emails and getting swallowed whole by Los Angeles traffic, anyway. The perfectly timed call was maybe five minutes, tops. Three, more likely. “Hi Fred! Got your email. Wanted to follow up.” “Love your work, Mike.” “Yep, that fits in our budget.” “Ok, see you then.”

I think Fred spent fifteen minutes with me on our first photography day. Totally relaxed. Honestly, completely refreshing compared to a “normal” photography day (if anything can ever be called that in this profession), where clients (or their representatives, or their agents, or their publicists, or their woefully unprepared marketing interns) are there to orchestrate every tiny detail down to the second hand on the clock in the background. When architects have been hands-on for years, it can be borderline impossible for them to let go and hand off the photography to someone who is only seeing the project for one day. But that is what’s so great about architectural photography — a relinquishing of control. It is only on projects where a significant amount of trust is placed with a photographer to see a project with clear eyes, unbiased, untethered from the hours of toil on details and colors and finishes that a photographer can create images that do justice to the work done over the course of years. It was the complete trust and free access that Fred and by extension, everyone at Viewpoint who I worked with, that allowed me to get the best photographs of some of the most incredible homes ever built.

I often tell my stressed-out clients that there is no such thing as a perfect project. I’ve seen hundreds of incredible homes, maybe even thousands at this point. Every project has shortcomings, every project has access restrictions, every project has a thing to work around: the construction site next door, the contractor frantically (or slowly) trying to lay down the last floorboard and patch the drywall, homeowners that don’t want you there, aggressive tenants and business owners who don’t understand why the architect needs pictures (they’ve already been paid, after all!), the oft-unfounded, “I’m famous and I don’t want people casing my house” celebrities, every job a curveball of what it’ll be. With these homes, we had none of that. Come at 5:00 a.m. Come at noon. Come at 9:00 p.m. Take 3 days. Do whatever it takes. Not to say that it was easy, though. A constant source of brain-wrinkling anxiety for me while photographing these projects was dealing with the fact that it was hard to take a bad picture. Easy to walk in, put the camera almost anywhere, and find a ‘good enough’ photograph. But to actually be able to find the great compositions that will turn the remarkable into the unforgettable, and then to get them at the right time of day was something very difficult to do. I was overwhelmed with what I can only describe as a smorgasbord of possibilities in every house. An inordinate amount of time was spent distilling, refining, trying to pull the absolute best out of each home, rather than just walking in and pointing the camera in a general direction with a wideangle lens. Sure, you could fly through and deliver 150 images and show everything — but in the process, you’d show almost nothing. The results of my brain wrinkling, I hope you’ll agree, were spectacular. In the end, these ended up being a few of the most demanding shoots in my career — on both a physical scale and an interpersonal scale. While I have carte blanche access, how do you keep multiple clients happy? Oftentimes, client needs were at odds. I’ve got an architect who demands rigorous perfection, and real estate agents who need photos yesterday.

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After all, this is a fifty-million-dollar asset we’re talking about — and we gotta get it sold. The pressure was definitely on to deliver. Many of the shoot days were sunrise to sunset on multiple days in a row — in summer — during LA heatwaves with the house open to the elements. Overheated cameras failing at the most inopportune times, worn out shoe soles, placing cameras on the edge of cliff-hugging infinity pools, running on pure coffee by day two. Unfortunately, I’m not one who can just take a few pictures; they have to be the best they possibly can be, which means getting there for the moment and then forcing myself (and my crew) to stay until late. Twelve-hour days were the norm. I’ve always got to push as far as I can, try to go the extra mile, and squeeze the most juice out of these projects as I could. To go beg the neighbors to put the camera on their lawn, because that was the best shot. To sneak in to the construction site next door after-hours, because that was the only way to see the entire home. To balance the tripod on a car outside. Quickly — make it happen! And that’s why the trust that was instilled in me for these projects was so incredible. I truly don’t believe I would have pushed as hard as I did if there was a client breathing down my neck the entire time, telling me where to put the camera and how to take the picture. The freedom afforded gave me the energy to tackle these projects to the absolute best of my ability and leave no angle uncovered or time of day unexplored. As far as architectural photography goes, it was an absolute honor to spend so much of my working time amongst these homes with nothing to do but make the absolute best photographs possible. Despite all of that, I’m still torn. I had the incredible privilege of photographing these houses — it was my job to do justice to the countless man-and-woman-hours that were poured into making them come to life. The pressure was immense, and I truly hope

that I did the best job I could have done in order to commemorate the tireless work of everyone involved — from designers to accountants, masons to drywallers. Their lives are inextricably linked with these projects, and the photographs are all the world will ever see of these homes once they are sold. What an immense honor it has been to hold the camera that documents them.

But that is what’s so great about architectural photography — a relinquishing of control. It is only on projects where a significant amount of trust is placed with a photographer to see a project with clear eyes, unbiased, untethered from the hours of toil on details and colors and finishes that a photographer can create images that do justice to the work done over the course of years. 13

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BIRD STREETS

Of all the bedrooms I’ve ever photographed, this is one of my favorites. For some of these shots, we could go down a rabbit hole. We’re at a junction here. We could go this way, that way, this way, that way. Every photo has all these moving pieces — it’s like an orchestra. MK

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This project presented the opportunity to design the street and cul-de-sac as well. Rather than just have a street down the center, which could have been a boring easement driveway, a landscaped, tree-lined piazza was created. It was an opportunity to design a little village. ROCHA NUEZ

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HIDDEN HILLS EAST 25210 JIM BRIDGER ROAD

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The stair floats in the space. It’s a self-supporting, very thin steel structure. They shipped it here and dropped it in place. It was amazing to watch. BULLI

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A F T E R WOR D FREDERICK CHIN

As Eva Hagberg writes in her introduction, photography is often the only means by which people can experience a work of architecture. They learn to understand a building through its images. We knew how important photography would be as we developed the Viewpoint Collection brand, and its role in forming perceptions about what we were creating. This book showcases both the architecture that comprises the Viewpoint Collection and Mike Kelley’s photography. In my mind, the two are inextricably linked. The photographs not only capture the sense of space in each house and the collective quality and tactility of the materials used — they also capture the sites and the incredible views that are unique to each home. The sites were the starting point for our decision to create the Viewpoint brand and differentiate ourselves from others who work in the luxury home market. They are all in prestigious areas of Los Angeles — Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Holmby Hills, Hidden Hills, and Hollywood Hills — and have stunning views that span from Downtown Los Angeles, to Palos Verdes, the Pacific Ocean and the San Gabriel Mountains. These locations and views inspired the name Viewpoint Collection and the title of our book, A View From the Top.

The specific site conditions of each property required the architects to design structures that capitalized on the view while accommodating floorplans and exterior designs that optimized livability, functionality, privacy, and uniqueness. Every design decision was made to support the breathtaking views, to create a sense of separation and elevation, and to provide a spectacular environment for viewing the most exciting city in the world. We approached potential buyers as discerning clientele — as if they were considering a work of art that appealed to their individuality, not as if they were purchasing a home that looks like so many others. Creating memorable homes was a massive challenge that required collaboration from everyone involved: architects; contractors; subcontractors; project managers; finance, legal and marketing teams; and real estate brokers. Our commitment to using high-quality materials and finishes reinforces the identity of the Viewpoint Collection brand and set us apart from other luxury homebuilders. We faced many challenges, including the human resource and supply chain challenges of building luxury homes during COVID, as well as appeasing adjacent property owners during lengthy construction phases. Timelines for approvals in differing localities had to be accounted for

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while we adapted to changing real estate market conditions. Through it all, we stayed true to our mission of delivering memorable, bespoke homes. For me, the most challenging aspect was aligning everyone’s focus on the same goal, despite the adversity. We are proud of what we have all worked so hard to build. Our success is a testament to the dedication and collaboration of the entire team — our commitment to quality allowed us to create a distinguished portfolio of luxury properties that are highly regarded and well-received by the market. I am particularly grateful to Mike, who has contributed enormously to our success. I knew it would have been impossible to convey the message of the Viewpoint brand with typical real estate marketing photos, and instead wanted images that reflected our mission. Mike met the challenge with distinctive photography that accentuates the efforts of all involved. Thank you. Thank you also to Tyrone McKillen of Plus Development, Desiree Carson of Viewpoint Collection, and Tad Kimball and Brad Collins of Group C for their invaluable contributions. Without their help this book would not exist.

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The photographs not only capture the sense of space in each house and the collective quality and tactility of the materials used — they also capture the sites and the incredible views that are unique to each home.

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