OpenStreetMap (new tab)

Google Map (new tab)

Google Streetview (new tab)

Overview

The architect Charles W. Moore, then headquartered in New Haven, CT, designed this idiosynchratic dwelling for the urban planner Leland Burns, who taught at both UCLA and Cambridge University.

Building History

Leland S. Burns (1933-2021) taught urban planning at both Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK, and at UCLA. According to the Charles Moore Foundation website, "In 1973, Lee Burns reached out to Charles Moore’s studio in New Haven, Connecticut and asked if he would be willing to design his house in Los Angeles. Moore organized the house across the top of the site’s slope, with the steepest part kept open for a garden. Seen from across Santa Monica Canyon, the Burns House aspires to be a compact village, whose flat facades and shed roofs are suggestive of an Italian hill town." (See Charles Moore Foundation.org, "Burns House," accessed 05/17/2023.)

Charles W. Moore (1925-1993) taught at Yale University while the Burns House was being planned and built. Moore and Burns became friends during the process of collaboration. The Japanese-American architect, Shinji Isozaki, laid out the landscaping and did some design work on the interior, principally the bathrooms. Moore asked a Yale graduate student in architecture, Tina Beebe (born c. 1948), to lay out the color palette for the Burns House. (See Charles Moore Foundation.org, "Burns House," accessed 05/17/2023.) Beebe became well-known as an architectural colorist during her career.

Building Notes

The 1981 book, Color in Townscape, said of the colors of the Burns House: "The colors of Tuscany--ochre, orange, rose-pink, mixed on location--reverse architectonic precedence. The projections are painted in receding hues, the indentations in warm tones." (See Martina Düttmann, Friedrich Schmuck, Johannes Uhl, Color in Townscape, [San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1981], pp. 168-169.)

PCAD id: 12386