The Dr. Basia Gingold Residence

In 1940, Polish born physician Basia Gingold purchased a Spanish-style home at 514 N. Alta Drive to house relatives who were fleeing persecution in Europe. Gingold was of German-Jewish descent and had left Europe years prior; the climate was not friendly to the forward-thinking and female, Jewish doctor. Before to her move to Alta Drive, Gingold lived in the landmark apartment complex Manola Court, designed in 1926 by Rudolph Schindler, and became friendly with the Austrian architect. The two shared similar ideas about health, hygiene and philosophy and she later commissioned Schindler to design the interior of her new home. The two enjoyed the collaboration, and Gingold retained the architect for an expansion of her medical practice on Wilshire Boulevard and to design an office building on San Vincente. Little is known about why their relationship ended, but in 1946 a dispute over the medical offices culminated in a lawsuit. As a result, the medical building is not ecognized by the Schindler Archive and little historical information remains about the Gingold commissions. However badly their friendship ended, Gingold continued to hold Schindler in high esteem. When she finally moved out of her Alta Drive home in 1983, she took all of his designs with her, and they remained in her collection until her death at the age of 103.
I consider myself the first and still one of the few architects who consciously abandoned stylistic sculptural architecture in order to develop space as a medium of art... I believe that outside of Frank Lloyd Wright I am the only architect in U.S. who has attained a distinct local and personal form language.
Rudolph M. Schindler