Desert Modernism Really Started in the Eastern Coachella Valley

Rudolph Schindler’s Popenoe Cabin, built in 1922 in Coachella, is the valley’s first known building featuring the clean lines that typify modernist design.
PHOTO COURTESTY ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN COLLECTION, ART, DESIGN & ARCHITECTURE MUSEUM, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBRA

Just as the eastern Coachella Valley’s agrarian landscape reaps the benefits of our desert climate with its honeyed dates and other sun-ripened crops, so too should the built landscape. At least that’s what acclaimed midcentury architect Albert Frey implied in a letter to his former boss, Le Corbusier: “The sun, the pure air, the simple forms of the desert create the perfect conditions for architecture.”

Compared to oft-referenced modernism destinations like Palm Springs and Rancho Mirage, the East Valley — for our purposes, Indio, Coachella, and La Quinta — verges on an architectural afterthought, with few midcentury gems to speak of, much less left standing. But considering the city of Coachella was the site of an erstwhile Rudolph Schindler structure that is widely regarded as the first modernist building anywhere in the valley, dare we say that our lofty design legacy germinated, so to speak, in the (artichoke) heart of our agricultural cradle?

Rudolph Schindler’s Popenoe Cabin floor plans.

“Any discussion of desert modernism has to start with that Schindler cabin from 1922,” says Frank Lopez, archivist and librarian at the Palm Springs Art Museum and Sunnylands Center & Gardens. The modest two-bedroom home was commissioned by date farmer and USDA agricultural explorer Paul Popenoe, he explains. “It’s been long demolished, but [it] exhibited modernism’s simple silhouettes and relationship to nature.”

The Popenoe Cabin’s straightforward symmetry and proportions included a wood-frame construction, multiple sleeping porches, and low-slung flat roofs, which suited the region’s paltry annual rainfall. Some architectural scholars say its design was derived from the Pueblo Revival style, inspired by the historic adobe structures of New Mexico, home to an even earlier Schindler work, the still-standing 1915 Thomas Paul Martin residence in Taos.

If the Southwestern aesthetic was the seed of desert modernism in the Coachella Valley, no one would be less surprised than Luke Leuschner, a Palm Desert native and senior at the University of California, Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design who is working on a book about Schindler’s desert works. “That’s the thing about this desert,” he says. “It’s this wild place that people generally perceive as a wasteland. It’s not easily capitalized upon but has proven to be a blank slate for fun new forms.” Stylistic freedoms made possible — mostly in Palm Springs — by a unique convergence of an unspoiled frontier, visionary architects, and an affluent clientele.

“Palm Springs modernism completely reoriented the desert and made development down valley feasible,” Leuschner says of modernism’s “trickle-east” effect.

The nautically inspired Desert Club in La Quinta was burned down for firefighting practice.
PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY JULIUS SHULMAN/ © J. PAUL GETTY TRUST, GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE, LOS ANGELES (2004.R.10)

One of his favorite East Valley gems is La Quinta’s bygone Desert Club, designed by S. Charles Lee at what is now the corner of Avenue 52 and Avenida Bermudas. This quirky example of 1930s streamline moderne exhibited unmistakable riverboat flair until it was foolishly torched in 1989 by the California Department of Forestry for firefighting practice. The nautical vision predated by 22 years Frey’s historic homage to maritime architecture, the North Shore Beach & Yacht Club at the Salton Sea.

“The Desert Club doesn’t get the credit it’s really owed. It broke from all the precedent set by older resorts like El Mirador, Hotel Del Tahquitz, and the La Quinta Hotel, which were designed in the Spanish Revival style,” Leuschner says. “Desert Club was a modern ship built on a big stretch of sand. I can’t imagine anything that would have been more eye-catching in barren 1930s La Quinta.”

“This desert [is a] wild place that ... has proven to be a blank slate for fun new forms.”

Coachella Valley Savings & Loan.
PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY JULIUS SHULMAN/ © J. PAUL GETTY TRUST, GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE, LOS ANGELES (2004.R.10)

By the time A. Quincy Jones built the Frank Capra House on the 10th hole of the La Quinta Country Club golf course in 1961, the Coachella Valley’s carefree, immaculately landscaped resort life was in, er, full swing. According to Leuschner, sprawling country club estates designed by big-name architects became all the rage after Thunderbird Country Club opened in 1951. The Hollywood director’s 4,221-square-foot home follows a popular golf-course blueprint, wherein an all-glass exposure facing the green is a friendly — and flaunting — counterpoint to fortress-like walls that make the dwelling discreet from the street.

Linda Williams, who serves as president of the La Quinta Historical Society, has tried in vain to organize tours of La Quinta’s legacy residences like the Capra House in conjunction with Modernism Week, but homeowners’ privacy concerns have always prevailed.

“We don’t have many homes by famous midcentury architects, but what we do have is worth seeing,” she says. To wit, four La Quinta Bungalows by Walter S. White from 1958 fortify the city’s modernism inventory. Built on lots adjacent to the home the architect designed in 1944 for his mother-in-law, Esther Breedlove, these middle-class domiciles remain mostly unheeded by modernism buffs. Odd considering their roofline artistry (low-pitched and polygonal, with points that resemble a ship’s prow) is imaginatively on par with White’s more recognized Wave House in Palm Desert (topped with a patented “roller-coaster roof”) and Willcockson House in Indio (whose well-preserved, and patented, hyperbolic paraboloid is an aberration of the notoriously high-maintenance genre, predating Frey’s Tramway Gas Station in Palm Springs).

The hyperbolic paraboloid of the Willcockson House in Indio predates that of the Tramway Gas Station.
PHOTO COURTESTY ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN COLLECTION, ART, DESIGN & ARCHITECTURE MUSEUM, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBRA

For drivers passing through Indio on Highway 111, White’s 1955 cathedral to modernism, designed for the Rev. Max E. Willcockson from Los Angeles, appears as a winged oddity either touching down or taking off from its meticulously chosen sand dune, an elevated perch that leverages views of the Santa Rosa Mountains and nearby groves of date palms.

Currently under restoration by new preservation-minded owners, the home has become a soaring reminder of the East Valley’s design bona fides, particularly in Indio, where heritage architecture has been historically bound to civic duties: E. Stewart Williams’ Superior Court and Law Library, for instance, was built from 1963 to 1979 in the style of New Formalism, and his 1955 Coachella Valley Savings & Loan exhibited shades of Mies van der Rohe’s 1929 Barcelona Pavilion. Having survived rumors of its razing, the Willcockson House is suddenly a beacon of desert modernism in the East Valley — arguably where it all began.