An architect is certainly not a couturier, yet you may argue that Albert C. Ledner's modus operandi was more similar to that of a Haute Couture creator. A high fashion designer works directly with and on the body of a client, measuring, going through fittings and doing adjustments; in the same way, Ledner was often inspired by the passions of his clients when he designed their houses and tried to develop tailor-made modernist visions for them.
One of his best examples remains the house he created in 1961 for Pat and Adrian Sunkel, a couple of avid smokers. As they spoke about design, the amber ashtrays scattered around their house struck Ledner and the architect suggested they could have incorporated such objects into their new house. So it happened that 1,200 amber glass ashtrays eventually became the only decorative element in an otherwise black and white home.
Ledner's attention for his clients and his obsession for details are perfectly captured in the documentary "Designing Life: The Modernist Architecture of Albert C. Ledner" directed by Ledner's daughter Catherine and her cousin Roy Beeson. The film is on this afternoon at the Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF) closing today at the historic Los Angeles Theatre Center (514 S. Spring Street; you can check out the full programme for the festival here).
The documentary briefly looks at Ledner's early years through archival images: after taking his degree in 1948 Ledner went to Taliesin hoping to work under Frank Lloyd Wright (as a young pilot in the Army Air Corp he flew over Wright's Taliesin during a training mission and eventually decided to explore it in person).
He remained there for three months and then moved back to New Orleans where he started his own practice in 1949 and mainly designed houses for private clients. Moved by a strong sense of curiosity, an inquisitive nature and a will to experiment, Ledner would often start creating a house from an interior design element such as the fireplace and then develop the structure around it.
He distinguished himself from other architects since, rather than just designing a house on paper, he would have a hands-on approach and was keen on developing new structure ideas and solutions for his buildings.
The documentary introduces some of his first structures including the Goldate House and the Kleinschmidt House (both from the early '50s). The former, characterised by one of Ledner's interior gardens, helped him becoming established in New Orleans after if was photographed for House Beautiful.
The "ashtray" house wasn't the only one that incorporated rather unusual features: for the Leonard House (1972) he created scones using Cointreau bottles, though one of his most extraordinary buildings remains the 1964 Galatoire House. Ledner integrated in this structure items and objects collected by his client: the iconic glass walls were indeed made employing the arched windows his client had salvaged from the Good Shepherd Convent in New Orleans. Ledner turned them upside-down and created with them a striking facade.
The architect was also fascinated by shapes and geometries as proved by the Ledner House (1955): his home called to mind the amazing structures of the World's Fair pavilions as it consisted in two circular wings characterised by a 12-point star of a roof. Spaces were harmoniously designed with no screens and divisions so that one room seemed to seamlessly flow into the other.
Though in his life Ledner mainly focused on private houses, he also designed in the '60s buildings in New York City, as part of a long-running project he did with the National Maritime Union, a seaman's organization that at the time wanted to reinvent itself and provide a new and more modern appearance to an old-fashioned profession.
Ledner designed for the NMU in New York three structures that looked like ships sailing through a concrete world. The NMU headquarters on Seventh Avenue featured a wave-evoking scalloped motif on its facade, while the two buildings on Ninth Avenue and West 17th Street featured porthole-style windows (one of the structures also sloped back 20 feet from the base, recreating the movement of a wave rising) and were transformed in more recent years into the Maritime and Dream Downtown hotels.
"Designing Life" features interviews with the late Ledner (he died last November), with family members and historians, but the best parts remain the on-site tours of his buildings, as the camera seems to be able to freely fly into the structures, genuinely proving to the audience that Ledner's houses were living and breathing organisms with connected rooms that linked the inside and the outside (Ledner often added interior gardens and it wasn't rare to find a pond inside some of his buildings).
Understudied and underappreciated, Ledner is worth rediscovering as he created his own personal style turning around Wright's principles. The buildings he left behind remain his legacy, but, as "Designing Life" highlights, there is a human legacy to study as well in the relation Ledner had with his clients that helped him creating new visions and adding to his architecture an exuberant personal touch and a joyousness missing in many modernist houses.
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