Banking on Beauty: Rolling Hills Estates-Rancho Palos Verdes By Adam Arenson
Sheets Studio, Home Savings Rolling Hills, leaping dolphins sculpture and horses mosaic, 1974, Photo by Adam Arenson, 2012.
The Millard Sheets Studio created dozens of spectacular designs for Home Savings and Loan—and the collection of buildings in the South Bay demonstrate the range of these commissions. (The full story of the Sheets commissions is in my award-winning book, Banking on Beauty: Millard Sheets and Midcentury Commercial Architecture in California.
I want to start with the Rolling Hills Estates-Rancho Palos Verdes location, which is my absolute favorite of all the Home Savings and Loan designs.
Opened on May 8, 1974, this branch holds some new Sheets Studio flourishes. Twenty-one horses gallop across a black granite background on the main façade, in a grand billboard-size image; the stained-glass window inside depicts horses in a corral, with a large collection of dogs, cats, and goats joining in on the fun. But a small mosaic wall in the front parking lot added a new design element: unremarkable by itself, the wall became the pedestal for four of John Edward Svenson’s bronze porpoises, leaping and diving over mosaic waves. The the Ceramic Tile Institute honored the work with a design award for Millard Sheets and the studio.
In all, the art is in three forms: the mosaic, credited to Millard Sheets on the wall and Studio assistants Nancy Colbath, Denis O’Connor, and Sue Hertel in the files; John Edward Svenson‘s leaping dolphins, forged in Oslo; and the stained glass, inside, a collaboration between Hertel and John Wallis Stained Glass.
Sue Hertel and John Wallis and Associates, stained glass for Rolling Hills, 1974. Photo by Adam Arenson, 2012.
The result, I think, is one of the most beautiful branches, just down the hill from the stunning views of ocean and shore that crown Rancho Palos Verdes. The size and complexity of the work leads to a large file in the archives, but the effect is simple–an improvement on existing Home Savings forms. I was particularly struck by the stained glass, as I think I had never seen it, whereas the leaping dolphins make the front of the branch quite iconic.
The innovations in the forms–new background material; combining sculpture imaginatively with the mosaic wall of sea foam; and the use of a more naturalistic color palette with a traditional set of children and domestic animals–suggests subtle adjustments to traditional Sheets Studio-Home Savings artwork, the kind of tinkering made possible by artists secure in what was expected of their work but trying not to be bored.
The surprise of the stained glass is another reminder how, like so much excellent architecture, even the repetition of form and style can hold surprises in a new context.
More recently, the Sheets Studio granite supplier, Carnevale & Lohr, played a key role in the preservation and restoration of Home Savings mosaic art at this site.
For my award-winning books — Banking on Beauty: Millard Sheets and Midcentury Commercial Architecture in California (Texas, 2018), The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War (Harvard, 2011/paperback Missouri, 2015) — and my co-edited volumes Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States (California, 2015) and Frontier Cities: Encounters at the Crossroads of Empire (Penn, 2013), as well as current projects, see: http://adamarenson.com and http://manhattan.edu/faculty/adamarenson