Today, Kevin Roderick at LA Observed did a post about when Ayn Rand lived in the San Fernando Valley. Kevin noted that she lived in Northridge during the late 1940s in a very architecturally distinct house.
All steel, concrete and glass, with a moat encircling the house and a water-cooling system for those hot West Valley summers, the residence was built in 1935. Neutra was commissioned by the director and art collector Josef von Sternberg, at a time when the horse ranch district west of Northridge was home to a lot of Hollywood figures. “I selected a distant meadow,” von Sternberg said later, “in the midst of an empty landscape, barren and forlorn, to make a retreat for myself, my books, and my collection of modern art.” Julius Shulman photographed the home for Architectural Digest in 1947.
Rand moved in in 1943 and moved back east a few year later. The house was torn down in 1971. Kevin mentioned the house was in Northridge, so I was curious. I did some searching, and found an earlier article of Kevin’s where the address was given: 10000 Tampa Avenue.
So, I looked up the address on Google maps. It is basically at Tampa and Merridy, just north of Nobel Middle School (where our daughter went). It’s the newish gated development space. There’s some good discussion on it here. It’s only a few blocks from our house. Cool. (There are some good pictures of it here; here’s a video of the destruction of the house)
(Note: Not that I admire Rand at all, although reading the summary of the critical review of her book was interesting. I do, however, have some friends that are enamored of her, and I thought they would get a kick out of this.)
