By John A. Loomis

“What kind of architecture is it?” asks author Paul Turner in “Mrs. Hoover’s Pueblo Walls: The Primitive and the Modern in the Lou Henry Hoover House” (Stanford University Press, 2004). In answering this question not only are the origins of a unique and little-known house uncovered, but new insights are provided into the origins of 20th century modernism.

The Lou Henry Hoover House (1919-20) sits on San Juan Hill behind the Stanford University campus. It was home to the family of Herbert Hoover for more than 20 years and now serves as the residence of Stanford’s president. Its three-story asymmetrical composition follows the curving hillside in a series of interlocking cubes. The flat-roofed white exterior, casually arranged across the site, offers many opportunities for outdoor living. The unadorned exterior is contrasted by an interior which is more conventional. The architecture of the house has long been an object of curiosity, if not some mystery. An official plaque placed in 1978 labeled it “International Style.” However, the house’s weighty white cubist forms came long before Johnson and Hitchcock’s invention, and little resemble the machine aesthetic the duo promoted in 1933.

The modernist, though non-International Style, sensibilities of the exterior of the Hoover House lie not with the architect of record, Arthur Bridgman Clark, but with his client Lou Henry Hoover, wife of Herbert Hoover, who acted as the real designer of the house. Lou was a progressive and modern woman who challenged conventional gender roles. Like her husband, she had studied mining engineering at Stanford, and she collaborated with him professionally. Her fundamental values were shaped by the Quaker ethic of simplicity that led her to value functionalism. She believed in a healthy lifestyle full of vigorous exercise and outdoor living. She harbored an interest in non-European cultures, especially their vernacular architecture, of which she collected photographs from travels around the world. Indeed, she was blessed with a strong innate visual and formal acuity. However, her interest in vernacular architecture was not a superficial attraction to the exotic. She was drawn more to the nature of form. That is not to say that she did not have her picturesque moments. She did, but they were always subordinate to a greater whole.

The values that Lou brought to the design of her house were part of a set of cultural interests that were in the air in the early 20th century and that contributed significantly to the rise of modernism. Turner identifies these as “an attraction to pure, undecorated geometric forms; an adherence to functionalism …, a passion for healthy living and outdoor activity; and a fascination with the ‘primitive’ forms of non-European cultures.” The “primitive and the modern” formed a dialectic through which these interests interacted and in the Hoover house achieved a remarkably modern synthesis.

It is interesting to look at the synthesis others achieved. Irving Gill, Southern California’s proto-modernist, was interested in the West’s native adobe forms. His geometric volumes, such as in the Dodge House (1916), bear comparison to the Hoover house but are crisper in form, more like that of Adolf Loos. The austere Loos was capable of picturesque moments such as in his villa project for the Venice Lido (1923) where a roof trellis recalls the American Southwest. And it is interesting to note that Loos’ stark white cubist exteriors often contrasted with his cozy wood-paneled interiors, a contrast not unlike the Hoover house. R.M. Schindler was interested in Native American architecture, and he traveled to Taos where he filled sketchbooks with images of native form. He also believed in the healthy value of outdoor living and expressed this in his own Kings Road House (1921-22). The young Le Corbusier nurtured an interest in the vernacular architecture of North Africa and the Middle East. Moreover, he celebrated outdoor exercise and living in his Villa Savoye (1929-31), and though it bears no formal similarity to the Hoover house, it was inspired by similar cultural interests. Abstraction plays an important role here. Abstraction is one of the fundamental revolutionary processes that manifested itself in both modern art and architecture in the early 20th century. Abstraction provided the designer the path from the primitive to the modern. Lou also took that path.

In the vast Hoover family archives researched by Turner, there is no evidence that Lou was aware of the work of any of the early modern architects. It is also interesting to note that her house predates many of the early icons of modern architecture. She had arrived at modernism on her own and left a work that remains as a lens through which to view the very origins of modern architecture.

John A. Loomis, AIA, is affiliated with the civil and environmental engineering department of Stanford University as a visiting associate professor.