Palm Springs Architour by John Weich

Driving southeast on the Interstate 10 from Los Angeles to Palm Springs is only a two-hour journey but sometimes if feels like ten. This is particularly the case on Friday afternoon when it seems like the entire city is trundling across some of California’s most unattractive terrain through the myriad and monotone communities that make up LA’s periphery. From time to time you spot a lipstick red BMW or a canary yellow Hummer zigzagging between the suburban wagons and dour drivers weathering the rush hour traffic. The frantic impatience with which these bright vehicles jump lanes indicates they are off to more rustic environs. And nine times out of ten they are. In LA thought, the faster you traverse the I-10 the sooner you reach the windmill fields, the imposing gateway to the Coachella Valley, and the quicker you can unwind in Palm Springs.

After twenty odd years of economic malaise and sinister repute, Palm Springs is fashionable again. Thanks to the thriving leisure economy of the 1990s but even more to a renewed interest in Modernist design and architecture , the city is in the midst of a tourism renaissance. Today, you’ll find mid-century motels and motor inns whose parking lots are chock-full with expensive cars whose owners are in town for a weekend of desert R&R.

Up until the 1910s, the only people roaming the Coachella Valley were the native Cahuilla tribes, Pacific Railroad workers, who in 1876 had laid the tracks between Los Angeles and Yuma, Arizona, and a handful of adventurous pioneers attracted to the area out of curiosity and health. In the 1920s, Palm Springs was still one of any number of Indian tourism towns in the southwest. But the small, dusty desert enclave at the foot of the San Jacinto mountains had more things going for it than just Indians and fair weather. First, there was a profusion of water in the form of natural springs, which ensured longevity as both a community and as a resort. Second, but no less important, was the enclave’s proximity to a rapidly expanding Los Angeles. When Ford captured the imaginations of American consumers in the early 20th century, he also assured the Coachella Valley, and specifically Palm Springs, as place in LA’s iconography as a warm-weather playground for adults.

But it was wealth and wealth alone that transformed Palm Springs into the iconic town of mid-century Modernist architecture that it is today. The wealthy industrialists and plutocrats from the Midwest and East who first entered the valley by train for their winter sojourns often brought with them architects from home to construct Spanish, Victorian and ranch-style vacation homes. This pampered coterie also brought with it an element of leisure; spending months at a time in the desert, they demanded entertainment in the form of golf and tennis. This is still very much the case today. The Coachella Valley boasts thousands of tennis courts and swimming pools, and well over a hundred golf courses whose electric-green fairways, when juxtaposed to the surrounding boulders and sagebrush, are in every sense of the word surreal.

Beginning in the late 1920s and 1930s the nascent Hollywood industry gave Palm Springs both celebrity and style. The dramatic desert landscape became a favorite weekend retreat, and an ambitious pool of architects, often straight out of the offices of French architecture and Modernist master Le Corbusier, accommodated them with luxury hotels, nightclubs, restaurants, swank shops and racquet clubs. For architects, building in the desert demanded innovative materials that could stand up to the wind and heat. Their discerning clients, never too shy to eschew a new trend, welcomed Modernist solutions.

By the late 1940s, Walt Disney, Darryl Zanuck, Liberace, Frank Sinatra and his Brat pack, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Cary Grant and other entertainment heroes could be found reclining poolside in private villas built by some of Modernism’s most accomplished practitioners, including Richard Neutra, John Lautner and Stewart Williams. The 1946 house Neutra built for magnate Kaufmann in remains one of the most endearing symbols of the Modernist movement in the world. Its magnetic pull on architecture buffs is, far from downplaying, similar to Mecca’s role for Muslims, which is why so many rejoiced when the home’s new owners commissioned a thorough and expensive renovation after several decades of neglect.

The Kaufmann house rejig is exemplary for Palm Spring’s current state of mind. In the mid-1990s vacation-goers, inspired by cinema – James Bond flick Diamonds Are Forever was filmed in John Lautner's fantastic 1968 hill-top home for Arthur Elrod – as well as mid-century architecture reportages in magazines like Wallpaper and The New Yorker, swept into town and began buying up Modernist homes, gas stations and motels. These were not just entrepreneurs anticipating a real-estate renaissance, but aficionados of iconic design as well. They almost immediately set out restoring the buildings which, though well preserved by the desert sun, were often dilapidated due to the vagaries of economic malaise in the 1970s and 1980s.

Palm Springs’s administrators; however, do not quite seem to know what to do with all of this mid-century architecture. Admittedly, the majority of tourists that come to Palm Springs are ageing golfers who are more interested in shacking up in the air-conditioned environs of a faux Spanish condominium than in a no-tell motel done up in period-style furniture and a 1950s minimalist guise. The Coachella Valley ranks among America’s fastest growing region, and it is often easier and more profitable to tear these centrally located structures and reclaim the land rather than renovate them. In recent years, the City Council has mindlessly demolished William Cody’s Springs restaurant, and just a few months ago destroyed a still-functional Albert Frey shopping center to make room for new development.

The city has, however, spared another Albert Frey structure, the arching Tramway gas station, the first Modernist monument that greets visitors when driving into town. The city plans to turn it into a tourist center. Grassroots organization ModCom (Modern Committee), comprising many of the people responsible for the rejuvenated architecture awareness in Palm Springs, remains skeptical. ‘They still have to make the ‘necessary’ changes to accommodate the center,’ says Andrew Danish, a regular visitor and co-author of one of the few books dedicated to Palm Springs’s Modernist tick, Palm Springs Weekend. ‘In light of what they’ve already destroyed, our skepticism is more than justified.’

Fortunately for the city, there is plenty more where that came from. It is hardly possible to drive down Palm Springs two main drags, Palm Canyon Drive and Indian Canyon Drive, without being awed by the sheer number of Modernist banks, shopping centers, mobile home parks (the truest symbol of modernity), gas stations and churches. This is particularly the case at the crossroads of Palm and Indian Canyon Drives where three banks stand, all built in the late 1950s or early 1960s. Not only are these institutions – two built by Steward Williams and one, currently a Bank of America, by Victor Gruen and Rudy Baumfeld – civic monuments of their own right, but also testaments to the wealth on which Palm Springs was erected.

Easier to miss are City Hall, built in 1952, and the International Airport terminal building, erected in 1960. Despite their general acclaim, both are situated far enough beyond the main drags and golf courses to elude the eye of the average tourist. And only those with a detailed map and a keen eye will venture into the suburb estates and chic neighborhoods at the base of St. Jacinto Mountain where iconic villas and test case homes are scattered at random. Similarly, to gain access to sleek, streamlined homes of mid-century stars like Jack Benny, Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra you’ve got to have connections; they are often visible on their hilltop perches from the road but even more often secured behind gated communities and private golf resorts with guard posts at the entrance.

For many, the only mid-century architecture they need to see is in their motels. In the last three years diminutive motels like Miracle Manor and Hope Springs, both located in a suburban tract in Desert Hot Springs, have reconstructed the minimalist luxury and seclusion of 1950s motels with the addition of twenty-first century spa treatments. Miracle Manor, credited as the trend’s pioneer, guarantees its guests R&R with rooms minus telephones and televisions and a rejuvenation recipe that combines a natural spring pools, deep rubdowns and desert breezes.

The popularity of these motels among LA’s better half ensured that motels offshoots were quick to follow. In Palm Springs, there is the Orbit Inn, which offers a 1950s experience right down to the silverware, and the larger Estrella, with its 1970s-themed poolside bungalows. Even large mid-century motor inns have joined the fray. Last May, the owners of Caliente Tropics Resort on East Palm Canyon invested US$2.2 million to recreate the upscale Polynesian-style atmosphere of the 1960s, complete with Tiki sculptures and Polynesian music. It may look like a typical motor inn from the exterior, but the rooms aren’t necessarily cheap and the parking lot is filled with the BMWs and Hummers that passed you on the I-10 on your way out from LA.

If ‘for sale’ signs are any indication, then more motels are on the way. When driving about the city I stopped off at William Cody’s 1947 Del Marcos (now San Marino) hotel and met the LA investor who had purchased it a few minutes before. He said he had plans to return the hotel to its former glory, starting with giving it back its original name. Some of the city’s other storied hotels, like Cody’s 1955 L’Horizon and Lloyd Wright’s (eldest son of Frank) 1925 Oasis Hotel, are either up for sale or rumored to be.

When Palm Springs tail-pinned in the 1970s and 1980s, the rest of the Coachella Valley continued to build, with new oases like Indian Wells, Rancho Mirage and Indio popping up above the tamarisk trees and jimsonweed. Modernism may reign in Palm Springs, but for every iconic hotel and bank there are twenty postmodern ones to compete. Just to give you an idea of how popular Palm Springs has become; the Starbucks on Palm Canyon Drive is said to be the second largest grossing in the United States.

Now that Palm Springs is fashionable again, it is impossible for architecture buffs with modest bank accounts to swagger into town and leave with the mortgage to a Sinatra home . The next best thing is to earmark a few days and rent a car and marvel these structures as the sculptures they truly are.