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AdrianaLima

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GLANCE

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

JIA JIA ZHU

DEPUTY EDITOR

Michael Hainey

CREATIVE DIRECTOR

MANAGING EDITOR

DIRECTOR OF EDITORIAL PROJECT

Devin Friedman

Those sumitting manuscripts, photographs, artwork, or other materials to GLANCE.

FEATURES EDITOR

FASHION

GLANCE

DIRECTOR OF EDITORIAL PROJECT

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GLANCE 3

Design

DR

INK

When I first saw this recipe I knew it had to be good, just reading through the list of ingredi-ents you can’t help but be intrigued. The Bom-

bay Sapphire infusion of apples and pears are echoed in the cider and brandy, then there is absinthe and gin-ger beer for contrasting but complimentary flavors, and on top of all that the unique addition of Fee Brother Aztec Chocolate bitters.

Ingredients: * 1.5 oz. Bombay Sapphire infused with dried pear and apples (click for recipe) * 1/2 oz. Lucid absinthe * 1 oz. local apple cider * 1/2 oz. pear brandy (Adam recom-mends: Massenez Williams Poire Brandy) * 1/2 oz. fresh lemon juice * 2 dashes Fee Brothers Aztec Chocolate bitters * Ginger beer

* cinnamon stick for garnish * lemon peel for garnish

Preparation; 1. Pour the ingredients into a cocktail shaker with ice cubes. 2. Shake well. 3. Strain into a highball glass filled with ice. 4. Garnish with a lemon peel and cinna-mon stick.

THE LAST DRINK

This is certainly not a boring cocktail. It shows off some of the trendy flavors and techniques that are hot and is a great example of the modern mixology at its finest. Adam Schuman of New York’s Fatty Crab did a great job creating here.

START

GLANCE 4

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Enjoyable moments of the day

There are other problems with alcohol, even in moderation. «Alcohol consumption is as-sociated with an increased risk of breast cancer,» says Heather Spencer Feigelson, Ph.D., a senior epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society, in Atlanta. “And while the risk of breast cancer from one glass

of alcohol is small, I›d choose dessert over a second cocktail.” But… Since being overweight also raises the risk of breast cancer, as well as of diabetes and heart disease, go easy on the dessert. Sorbet or even a fruit tart is a better choice than, say, cheesecake.

Better choice: dessert While no one is suggesting that

it›s healthy to eat a rich dessert, the research is pretty clear: Women should have no more than one drink a day.

“There›s some evidence that moderate alcohol intake lowers

the risk of heart disease, but one a day is considered the limit for women,” says JoAnn Manson, chief of preventive medicine at Boston›s Brigham and Women›s Hospital. (Some experts say that having two a couple of days a week is OK.)

START

GLANCE 5

Enjoyable moments of the day

CE

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BR

ITY

AdrianaLima

THE CELEBRITY STYLE WANTED

Lima never thought about being a model, although she had won many beauty pageants in elementary school.[4] However, she had a friend at school who wanted to enter a model-ing contest and did not want to enter alone, so Lima entered with her.

Born June 12, 1981, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil is a Brazilian model, best known as a Victoria’s Secret Angel since 2000, and as a spokesmodel for Maybelline cosmetics from 2003 to 2009.

Adriana Lima GlANCE magazine photoshot Dec, 2011.

Adriana Lima GlANCE magazine photoshot Dec, 2011 wore fancy white glamous cocktail dress.

START

GLANCE 6

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France is the most visited country in the world. It has everything that you could ever want to see on your holidays: a great city like Paris, good beaches, more monuments than any other country, lovely nature, in-credible mountain scenery; need I go on? France is also a very pleasant place to stay. It has good food, great wines and people enjoy their lives. And the best thing is, maybe apart from Paris, living in France does not have to be expensive. Paris, the city of light and its surroundings are some of the most vis-ited areas. Paris is without a doubt one of the most beau-tiful cities on the planet.

Paris, The City of LightSTART

GLANCE 6

GLANCE

www.GLANCE.com

Paris, The City of Light

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GLANCE 7

Diamonds

chanel watch

corn ring

rock ring

limited collection

WE ALL LOVE THEM

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8

Macroon

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punk micky

fun tool

fashion barbies

perfume

girls weapon

HeartTHE

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“In Los Angeles, by the time you’re thirty-five, you’re older than most of the buildings.”

It’s a town after all. Seen ay night by air, the city seems a large bracelet of lights and pools. It is only 500 square miles but it feels larger. Divided into 80 districts and neigh-borhoods, at first the city seems disjointed, a bewildering terrain of mountains and val-leys that ultimately touch the sea. Second in population to only New York City, Los Ange-

les could not be more different. One can still hide in the shadows and hills of a vast LA sunset. And more and more people choose to live here, ignoring the proclamation of Woody Allen in Annie Hall “that I don’t want to move to a city where the only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light.”

- Delia Ephron

GLANCE 9

By Christopher Hawthorne

Epic Architecture

GLANCE 10

Epic ArchitectureWith its exuberant, swooping facade, Frank Gehry’s newest build-

ing, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, looks anything but old-fashioned. And yet in at least one way,

it’s an architectural throwback. In an era when office parks, suburban developments, and even skyscrapers seem to zoom to completion in a matter of months, the $274 million hall, which opens Oct. 23 with three nights of inaugural performances by the L.A. Philharmonic, recalls the days when significant public buildings sometimes took decades to finish.

It wasn’t planned that way, of course. The project had its start back in 1987, with a $50 million gift from Walt Disney’s widow, Lillian. Working with a Japanese acoustician named Yasuhisa Toyota, Gehry quickly pro-duced some very promising preliminary designs. The building seemed destined to be not just Gehry’s most important in Southern California, where he’s lived for nearly 60 of his 74 years, but among the most impor-tant of his career.Advertisement

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Is the long-delayed Disney Hall, then, just a consolation prize for Los Angeles? Does one of the biggest cities in the world find itself in the odd position of playing second fiddle to a Basque regional capital with a population under 400,000? Not exactly. The building is a fantastic piece of architecture—assured and vibrant and worth waiting for. It has its own personality, instead of being anything close to a Bilbao rehash.

And surprisingly enough, it turns out that all of those postponements and budget battles have been a boon for the hall’s design. What the finished product makes most clear is that like plenty of artists, Frank Gehry tends to work better with restrictions, whether they’re physical, financial, or spatial. Without them, his work tends to sprawl not just figuratively but literally.

GLANCE 12

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Then, in the mid-

1990s, a ballooning budget, fund-raising troubles,

and other problems stalled the project. It wasn’t revived until 1997, when it received a new infusion of cash from the Disney fam-ily and others. That year saw the opening of Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which turned Gehry into a world-famous “starchitect,” doing exactly for his reputation what Disney Hall was supposed to. And in-deed the two buildings have a lot in common: Both are composed of a jumble of organic forms sheathed in gleaming, windowless met-al panels. (In Spain the material is titanium. In Los Angeles the facade was originally go-ing to be limestone, but budget cutbacks or seismic worries, depending on which story you believe, forced Gehry to go with panels of brushed stainless steel.)

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Even though it cost more than a quarter of a billion dol-lars and covers 293,000 square feet, Disney Hall is a tighter, more focused effort than many of those Gehry has produced after Bilbao, when the commissions came rolling in, his budgets sud-denly became freer, and he found himself with clients perhaps less likely to challenge his authority. The hall manages to be at once lean and wildly expressionistic. It looks like a building in which every design decision has gone through two layers of scru-tiny: one financial, the other aesthetic. Gehry had many years to tweak the project, and he’s managed to polish it without sacrific-ing any of its vitality.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic continues its reinvention of the concept of a 21st-century orchestra under the vibrant leadership of Gustavo Dudamel. Embarking on its 92nd season in 2010/11, the Philharmonic is recognized as one of the world’s outstand-ing orchestras and is received enthusiastically by audiences and critics alike. Both at home and abroad, the Philharmonic is lead-ing the way in innovative programming and redefining the musi-cal experience.

This view is shared by more than one million listeners who experience live performances by the Los Angeles Philharmon-ic each year. The Philharmonic demonstrates a breadth and depth of programming unrivaled by other orchestras and cul-tural institutions, performing or presenting nearly 300 concerts throughout the year at its two iconic venues: Walt Disney Con-cert Hall and the Hollywood Bowl, a popular summer tradition since 1922. The orchestra’s involvement with Los Angeles also extends far beyond regular symphonic performances in a concert hall, embracing the schools, churches, and neighborhood centers of a vastly diverse community.

Frank Gehry a master at figuring

out ways to allow inspiration to

serve practicality, and vice versa

a large garden.

GLANCE 14

The auditorium’s convex curves Skylights in the otherworld-ly lobby

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That tension continues inside. There is a small performance and lecture space, for ex-ample, that Gehry created simply by stretching out one rounded corner of the huge lobby until it was big enough to operate as a quasi-separate room. It’s a setting for chamber music and pre-concert lectures that didn’t require any new walls or floors or even a stage. It makes some-thing remarkable out of nothing.

Other details in the lobby, from the walls lined in Douglas fir to the remarkable treelike columns (whose stocky, branching form Gehry says he stole from the Czech architect Joze Plecnik), pro-mote a dreamlike and otherworldly feel, a de-tachment from the hustle-bustle and the grime of the city. But the lobby is also open to every-body: You don’t need a ticket to walk through it, as is the case in many concert halls. This is an old-school public space in the tradition of Grand Central Terminal or Bertram Goodhue’s low-slung central branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, which is only a few blocks away from the new hall.

Like a lot of Gehry’s work, the new building re-lates remarkably well to the city, though the vi-sual fireworks of its facade and its plush interior spaces may well distract a lot of people from this fact. It occupies a full city block at the top of Bunker Hill, across the street from Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, a gilded late-modernist mis-take that used to house both the Philharmonic and the Academy Awards and today hosts nei-ther. (The Oscars are now handed out at the new David Rockwell-designed Kodak Theater, a few miles away.) The facade soars, bends, and dives in a number of directions, in typical Gehry fash-ion, but that movement is always checked by the limits of the city grid. Seen from above, the building looks like a bunch of flowers contained, barely, within a perfectly rectangular flower box. Indeed, that tension—between free-flowing imagination and the limits imposed by physics and budgets—is what defines the building as a whole.

GLANCE 16

There is still more productive tension inside the auditorium itself, which holds about 2,200 people and during daytime performances will be naturally lit by mostly hidden skylights and one tall window. The free-flowing, organic forms that Gehry loves to use are offset by the rigorous acoustic demands that any architect of a concert hall has to contend with. (In an au-ditorium of this kind, every exposed surface, from balcony railings to seat upholstery, can af-fect how the orchestra sounds.) As it turns out, Frank Gehry and concert halls are well-matched. Acousticians have realized over the last few decades that convex—or outwardly bulging—curves can be very effective, bouncing and dis-persing sound waves produced by an orchestra. (Concave curves, on the other hand, can trap sound.) And in buildings from Paris to Seattle, Gehry has produced what easily qualifies as ar-chitecture’s most varied and complete collection of convex curves. There’s no definitive word yet on whether Disney Hall’s acoustics are indeed good; the orchestra’s first performance is still a few days away. But the early word from the mu-sicians, who began rehearsing in the new audi-

torium over the summer, has been positive.All of these dualities are fitting for a concert hall. An attraction of going to the symphony is trading in your regular self for a better-dressed, more cultured one. Symphony orchestras these days are looking for ways to attract younger, hipper audiences as their core supporters grow older, while at the same time preserving the sense of refuge that will always be classical music’s main drawing card. Gehry’s design cleverly explores both sides of that divide: It is a building where the members of a democracy can go to feel re-fined, to be lifted from the everyday.

Gehry, along with a few of his more admiring critics, likes to define himself as a combination of artist and architect. That job description sug-gests that he envies the kind of pure creation that painters and sculptors can indulge in, dis-tant from the demands of zoning boards, engi-neers, and French horn players. But in fact the Disney Concert Hall seems to make the opposite case about his talents. It’s full of evidence that Gehry is an architect in the most public-minded and collaborative senses of the word.

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GLANCE 18

“Joshua Christensen” is no stranger to fashion design.

Back in Los Angeles, Chris-tensen is currently working on two collections: one for

FIDM Debut, and one for New York Fashion Week.

Graham: When designing a garment, what sources of inspira-tion do you draw from?Joshua: My greatest source of inspiration is the culture around me, and the general feelings I get from being involved in the move-ments of the people.  I also pull inspiration from pop culture such as movies, music and other media sources. Graham: When designing a garment, what sources of inspira-tion do you draw from?Joshua: My greatest source of inspiration is the culture around me, and the general feelings I get from being involved in the move-

ments of the people.  I also pull inspiration from pop culture such as movies, music and other media sources.

G: What are your opinions on current trends?

J: I think there are so many peo-ple following so many trends that

it’s cool for people to find what they’re comfortable with.  I may not like all of the trends but it’s cool that the option is out there.

G: You were able to build a fan base from appearing on Project Runway this season, how do you intend to continue this momen-tum?

J: I’m currently working on a full mens/womens collection with one of the contestants from the show and we are planning on showing in NY fashion week in February. It’s important to just keep going.  The best question fans ask when they meet me is “Are you still designing?” I can’t help but laugh and tell them, ‘of course I am.’  Not winning the show did not crush my dreams. I’m more motivated and driven than ever before.  Between the Debut show collection and the NY collection I hope to become a successful designer creating col-lection after collection.

T h i s Wa s h i n g t o n n a t i v e m o v e d t o L o s A n g e l e s i n 2 0 0 9 a f t e r m a j o r i n g i n H u m a n i t i e s / A r t H i s -t o r y a t B Y U . C h r i s t e n s e n g r a d u a t e d F I D M i n D e c e m b e r o f 2 0 1 0 , a n d w a s p i c k e d t o p a r t i c i -p a t e i n S e a s o n 9 o f P r o j e c t R u n w a y

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J: Yes and no.  I think the best lesson I learned on the show is that fashion can go beyond the conventional.  I’m learning that it’s possible to just let go and really explore the possibilities of design.  It’s important not to waste potential in design whether it’s using a new material or us-ing new shapes or details.

G: How has the direct competition you received through Project Runway affected your work ethic?

J: I’ve always worked hard but the show has shown me that I have to work even harder. There are so many talented individuals in the world and even if I can’t be the most naturally talented designer, I can still be the hardest working; and that will take me even further.

G: How do you intend to differentiate yourself from other designers?

J: I am unique as a person and as a designer but I get what a man wants to wear.  I will de-sign clothes that work in fashion, business, and life.

G: What do you hope to accomplish with your collection for FIDM Debut?

J: I hope to show my individuality and per-

spective in design.  My Debut Menswear collec-tion is going to show exactly where I want to go in fashion.  This will be yet another step in my conquest for powerful fashion.

G: What’s the next creative step in your career?

J: Create a Fashion Empire! I look forward to working harder than ever before. So many amazing opportunities are opening up to me and I have to be prepared to take as many as possible.  We’ll see what happens after Debut and NY but I hope to continue on a personal line of clothes working on my Menswear.  I think a lot of people forget that I am almost exclusively a menswear designer.  My debut col-lection and NY half will be my menswear.

G: How has your personal design aesthetic evolved?

J: I think when I first started designing I placed limitations on my work but as I grow in design I find that I’m changing.  My aesthetic is powerful, dark and romantic. I think as I grow this becomes stronger in my work.

G: Besides fashion design, what are some other creative outlets that you’re interested in?

J: I write quite a bit actually and have books full of ideas and creative writings.  I still love studying art, and checking out museums and exhibits.  It’s important to be as creative as pos-sible.

G: What words of encouragement would you give to prospective students, or fashion employ-ees in the industry?

J: Keep going! Never give up on the dream.  This is not an easy industry but if this is truly your passion, you will sacrifice and work until you make it.  That’s my plan.

G: You had to utilize a lot of unconventional materials during your time on Project Runway; has that affected your resourcefulness as a designer?

GLANCE 20

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20GLANCE

BY JIA JIA ZHU

Even if you’re confused by the fork in the driveway, which slopes up to the Edenic apex of Laurel Canyon, or don’t recognize architect Raphael Soriano’s mid-century design landmark, you can’t miss Julius Shulman’s place. It’s the one with the eight-foot-high banner bearing his name—an advertisement for his 2005 Getty Museum exhibition “Modernity and the Metropolis”—hanging before the door to the studio adjoining the house. As displays of ego go, it’s hard to beat. Yet the

voice calling out from behind it is friendly, even eager—“Come on in!” And drawing back the banner, one finds, not a monument, but a man: behind an appealingly messy desk, wearing blue suspenders and specs with lenses as big as Ring Dings, and offering a smile of roguish beatitude.

You’d smile, too. At 96, Shulman is the best known architectural photographer in the world, and one of the genre’s most influential figures. Between 1936, when a fateful meeting with architect Richard Neutra be-gan his career, and his semi-retirement half a century later, he used his instinctive compositional elegance and hair-trigger command of light to document more than 6,500 projects, creating images that defined many of the masterworks of 20th-century architecture. Most notably, Shulman’s focus on the residential modernism of Los Angeles, which included photographing 18 of the 26 Case Study Houses commissioned by Arts & Archi-tecture magazine between 1945 and 1967, resulted in a series of lyrical tableaux that invested the high-water moment of postwar American optimism with an arresting, oddly innocent glamour. Add to this the uncount-able volumes and journals featuring his pictures, and unending requests for reprints, and you have an artist whose talent, timing, ubiquity, and sheer staying power have buried the competition—in some cases, literally.

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Shulman’s decision to call it quits in 1986 was motivated less by age than a distaste for postmodern architecture. But, he insists, “it wasn’t quite retiring,” citing the ensuing decade and a half of lec-tures, occasional assignments, and work on books. Then, in 2000, Shulman was introduced to a German photographer named Juergen Nogai, who was in L.A. from Bremen on assignment. The men hit it off immediately, and began partnering on work motivated by the maestro’s brand-name status. “I realized that I was embarking on another chapter of my life,” Shulman says, the pleasure evident in his time-softened voice. “We’ve done many assignments”—Nogai puts the number at around 70—“and they all came out beautifully. People are always very cooperative,” he adds. “They spend days knowing I’m coming. Everything is clean and fresh. I don’t have to raise a finger.” As regards the division of labor, the 54-year-old Nogai says tactfully, “The more active is me because of the age. Julius is finding the perspectives, and I’m setting up the lights, and fine-tuning the image in the camera.” While Shulman acknowl-edges their equal partnership, and declares Nogai’s lighting abili-

ties to be unequaled, his assessment is more succinct: “I make the compositions. There’s only one Shulman.”In fact, there seem to be many. There’s Shulman the photographer, who handles three to five assignments a month (and never turns one down—“Don’t have to. Everyone’s willing to wait”), and the Shul-man between hard covers, whose latest book, the three-volume, 950-page Modernism Rediscovered, will shortly be published by Taschen. But the Shulman of whom Shulman seems most proud is the educator. In 2005, he established an eponymous institute in conjunction with the Woodbury University in nearby Burbank, to provide, according to the school, “programs that promote the appreciation and understanding of architecture and design.” Apart from a fellowship program and research center, the Julius Shulman Institute’s principal asset is its founder, who has given dozens of talks at high schools across Southern California.“The subject is the power of photography,” Shulman explains.

A lot of people, they think, It’d be great to have our house photographed by Ju-lius Shulman,” says Nogai.

GLANCE 20

“I have thousands of slides, and Juergen and I have assembled them into almost 20 different lectures. And not just about architecture—I have pictures of cats and dogs, fashion pictures, flower photographs. I use them to do a lot of preaching to the students, to give them something to do with their lives, and keep them from dropping out of school.”It all adds up to a very full schedule, which Shulman handles largely by him-self—“My daughter comes once a week from Santa Barbara and takes care of my business affairs, and does my shopping”—and with remarkable ease for a near-centenarian. Pick-ing up the oversized calendar on which he records his appointments, Shulman walks me through a typical seven days: “Thom Mayne—we had lunch with him. Long Beach, AIA meeting. People were here for a meeting about my photography at the Getty [which houses his archive]. High school students, a lecture. Silver Lake, the Neutra house, they’re opening part of the lake frontage, I’m going to see that. USC,

a lecture. Then an assignment, the Griffith Observatory—we’ve already started that one.”Yet rather than seeming overtaxed, Shul-man fairly exudes well-being. Like many elderly people with nothing left to prove, and who remain in demand both for their talents and as figures of veneration (think of George Burns), Shulman takes things very easy: He knows what his employers

and admirers want, is happy to provide it, and accepts the resulting reaffirmation of his legend with a mix of playfully rampant immodesty and heartfelt gratitude. As the man himself puts it, “The world’s my onion.”

Given the fun Shulman’s having being Shulman, one might expect the work to suffer. But his passion for picture-making

remains undiminished. “I was surprised at how engaged Julius was,” admits the Chicago auction-house mogul Richard Wright, who hired Shulman to photo-graph Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House #21 prior to selling it last year. “He did 12 shots in two days, which is a lot. And he really nailed them.” Of this famous precision, says the writer Howard Rod-man, whose John Lautner–designed home

Shulman photographed in 2002: “There’s a story about Steve McQueen, where a producer was trying to get him to sign on to a movie. The producer said, ‘Look how much you

change from the beginning to the end.’ And McQueen said, ‘I don’t want to be the guy who learns. I want to be the guy who knows.’ And Shulman struck me as the guy who knows.”

This becomes evident as, picking up the transparencies from his two most recent as-signments, he delivers an impromptu mas-ter class. “We relate to the position of

“We did a lot of jobs like that at first. Then, suddenly, people figured out, Juliuwws is working again.”

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“I have thousands of slides, and Juergen and I have assembled them into almost 20 different lectures. And not just about architecture—I have pictures of cats and dogs, fashion pictures, flower photographs. I use them to do a lot of preaching to the students, to give them some-thing to do with their lives, and keep them from dropping out of school.”It all adds up to a very full schedule, which Shulman handles largely by himself—“My daughter comes once a week from Santa Barbara and takes care of my business affairs, and does my shopping”—and with remarkable ease for a near-centenarian. Picking up the oversized calendar on which he records his appointments, Shulman walks me through a typical seven days: “Thom Mayne—we had lunch with him. Long Beach, AIA meeting. People were here for a meeting about my photography at the Getty [which houses his archive]. High school students, a lecture. Silver Lake, the Neutra house, they’re opening part of the lake frontage, I’m going to see that. USC, a lecture. Then an assignment, the Griffith Observatory—we’ve already started that one.”Yet rather than seeming overtaxed, Shulman fairly exudes well-being. Like many elderly people with nothing left to prove, and who remain in demand both for their talents and as figures of veneration (think of George Burns), Shulman takes things very easy: He knows what his employers and admirers want, is happy to provide it, and accepts the resulting reaffirmation of his legend with a mix of play-fully rampant immodesty and heartfelt gratitude. As the man himself puts it, “The world’s my onion.”

Given the fun Shulman’s having being Shulman, one might expect the work to suffer. But his passion for picture-making remains undi-minished. “I was surprised at how engaged Julius was,” admits the Chicago auction-house mogul Richard Wright, who hired Shulman to photograph Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House #21 prior to selling it last year. “He did 12 shots in two days, which is a lot. And he re-ally nailed them.” Of this famous precision, says the writer Howard Rodman, whose John Lautner–designed home Shulman photo-graphed in 2002: “There’s a story about Steve McQueen, where a producer was trying to get him to sign on to a movie. The producer said, ‘Look how much you change from the beginning to the end.’ And McQueen said, ‘I don’t want to be the guy who learns. I want to be the guy who knows.’ And Shulman struck me as the guy who knows.”

This becomes evident as, picking up the transparencies from his two most recent assignments, he delivers an impromptu master class. “We relate to the position of the sun every minute of the day,” Shulman be-gins, holding an exterior of a 1910 Craftsman-style house in Oakland, by Bernard Maybeck, to the lamp atop his desk. “So when the sun moves around, we’re ready for our picture. I have to be as specific as a sports photographer—even a little faster,” he says, nodding at the im-age, in which light spills through a latticework overhang and patterns a façade. “This is early afternoon, when the sun is just hitting the west side of the building. If I’m not ready for that moment, I lose the day.” He does not, however, need to observe the light prior to photograph-ing: “I was a Boy Scout—I know where the sun is every month of the year. And I never use a meter.”

Shulman is equally proud of his own lighting abilities. “I’ll show you something fascinating,” he says, holding up two exteriors of a new modernist home, designed for a family named Abidi, by architect James Tyler. In the first, the inside of the house is dark, resulting in a handsome, somewhat lifeless image. In the second, it’s been lit in a way that seems a natural balance of indoor and outdoor illumination,

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.ner. Then there are times I’ll select two or three people—the owner of a house, or the children—and put them to work. Some-times it’s called for.”

“Are you pleased with these photographs?” I ask as he sets them aside. “I’m pleased with all my work,” he says cheerfully.“I tell people in my lectures, ‘If I were modest, I wouldn’t talk about how great I am.’” Yet when I ask how he devel-oped his eye, Shulman’s expression turns philosophical. “Sometimes Juer-gen walks ahead of me, and he’ll look for a composition. And invariably, he doesn’t see what I see. Architects don’t see what I see. It’s God-given,” he says, using the Yiddish word for an act of kindness—“a mitzvah.”As a plaque beside the entrance indicates, the 3,000-square-foot, three-bedroom structure, which Shul-man commissioned in 1948 and moved into two years later, was landmarked by L.A.’s Cultural Heritage Commission as the only steel-frame Soriano house that remains as built. Today, such Case Study–era residences are as fetishized (and expensive) as Fabergé

eggs. But when Shulman opens the door onto a wide, cork-lined hallway leading to rooms that, after six decades, remain refresh-ing in their clarity of function and communication, use of simple, natural materials, and openness to the out-of-doors, I’m reminded that the movement’s motivation was egalitarian, not elitist: to produce well-designed, affordable homes for young, middle-class families.

“Most people whose houses I photographed didn’t use their slid-ing doors,” Shulman says, crossing the living room toward his own glass sliders. “Because flies and lizards would come in; there were strong winds. So I told Soriano I wanted a transition—a screened-in enclosure in front of the living room, kitchen, and bedroom to make an indoor/outdoor room.” Shulman opens the door leading to an exterior dining area. A bird trills loudly. “That’s a wren,” he says, and steps out. “My wife and I had most of our meals out here,” he recalls. “Beautiful.”

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We continue past the house to Shulman’s beloved garden—he calls it “the jungle”—a riot of vegetation that overwhelms much of the site, and frames an almost completely green canyon view. “I planted hundreds of trees and shrubs—back there you can see my redwoods,” he says, gesturing at the slope rising at the property’s rear. “Seedlings, as big as my thumb. They’re 85 feet tall now.” He pauses to consider an ominously large paw print in the path. “It’s too big for a dog. A bobcat wouldn’t be that big, either. It’s a mystery,” Shulman decides, pushing the Mercedes past a ficus as big as a baobab.

The mystery I find myself pondering, as we walk beside the ter-raced hillside, is the one he cited himself: the source of his tal-ent. In 1936, Shulman was an ama-teur photographer—gifted, but without professional ambition—when he was invited by an architect friend to visit Richard Neutra’s Kun House. Shulman, who’d never seen a modern residence, took a handful of snap-shots with the Kodak vest-pocket camera his sister had given him, and sent copies to his friend as a thank-you. When Neutra saw the images, he requested a meeting, bought the photos, and asked the 26-year-old if he’d like more work. Shulman accepted and—virtually on a whim—his career took off.

When I ask Shulman what Neutra saw in his images, he answers with a seemingly unrelated story. “I was born in Brooklyn in 1910,” says this child of Russian-Jewish immigrants. “When I was three, my father went to the town of Central Village in Con-necticut, and was shown this farmhouse—primitive, but [on] a big piece of land. After we moved in, he planted corn and pota-toes, my mother milked the cows, and we had a farm life.

“And for seven years, I was imbued with the pleasure of living close to nature. In 1920, when we came here to Los Angeles, I joined the Boy Scouts, and enjoyed the outdoor-living aspect, hiking and camping. My father opened a clothing store in Boyle Heights, and my four brothers and sisters and my mother worked in the store. They were businesspeople.” He flashes a slightly cocky smile. “I was with the Boy Scouts.”We arrive at a sitting area, with a small pool of water, a fireplace, and a large sculp-ture (purchased from one of his daughter’s high school friends) made from Volkswagen body parts. Shulman lowers himself onto a bench and absorbs the abundant natural pleasures. “When I bought this land, my brother said, ‘Why don’t you subdivide? You’ll make money.’” He looks amused. “Two acres at the top of Laurel Canyon, and the studio could be converted into a guest

house—it could be sold for millions.”

He resumes his story. “At the end of February 1936, I’d been at UCLA, and then Berkeley, for seven years. Never graduated, never majored. Just audited classes. I was driving home from Berkeley”—Shulman hesitates dramatically—“and I knew I could do anything. I was even thinking of getting a job in the parks department raking leaves, just so I could be outside. And within two weeks, I met Neutra, by chance. March 5, 1936—that day, I became a photographer. Why not?”

Hearing this remarkable tale, I understand that Shulman has answered my question about his talent with an explanation of his nature. What Neutra perceived in the young amateur was an outdoorsman’s independent spirit and an enthusiasm for life’s possi-bilities, qualities that, as fate would have it, merged pre-cisely with the boundless optimism of the American Century—an optimism, Shulman instinctively recognized, that was em-bodied in the modern houses that became, as Street-Porter says, “a muse to him.”“[Shulman] always says proudly that Soriano hated his furni-ture,” says Wim de Wit, the Getty Research Institute curator who oversees Shulman’s collection. “He says, ‘I don’t care; when I sit in a chair I want to be comfortable.’ He does not think of him-self as an artist. ‘I was doing a business,’ he says. But when you look at that overgrown garden, you know—there is some other streak in him.” That streak—the free soul within the unpreten-tious, practical product of the immigrant experience—produced what Nogai calls “a seldom personality”: a Jewish farm boy who grew up to create internationally recognized American cul-tural artifacts—icons that continue to influ-ence our fantasies and self-perceptions.I ask Shulman if he’s surprised at how well his life has turned out. “I tell students, ‘Don’t take life too seriously—don’t plan nothing nohow,’” he replies. “But I have always observed and respected my destiny. That’s the only way I can describe it. It was meant to be.”“And it was a destiny that suited you?”At this, everything rises at once—his eyebrows, his outstretched arms, and his peaceful, satisfied smile. “Well,” says Shulman, “here I am.”

I suggest a tour of the house, and Shulman moves carefully to a rolling walker he calls “the Mer-cedes” and heads out of the studio and up the front steps.

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