In presenting the significant influence of Richard Neutra over Harwell Hamilton Harris and the way 
Harris’ legacy affected Gordon Drake’s work, a modern genealogy spanning three generations of 
California architects –from the mid-20s to late 40s– is established on this thesis to discuss how 
these authors understood and expressed their special links with the physical environment and the 
creative landscape of Southern California. The analysis of the buildings and projects in which these 
architects worked together as disciples and masters and, above all, the identification of their 
circles of influence, can describe some of the formative events that best explain the channels 
through which the most original modern traditions in the region were generated and transmitted. 
 
Harwell Hamilton Harris and Gordon Drake are two genuine California architects. Despite the 
quality of their work, it remains quite unknown to the European architectural culture. This 
situation is representative of how the history of modern architecture has approached California 
only through a few incomplete reports whose main sources should be furthermore 
examined. This is the case of Esther McCoy, the first architectural historian of the California 
modern period whose writings are often quoted without considering her frequent personal 
involvement in the very facts that she describes.
 
Harris reached Neutra’s office in 1928. Richard Neutra was by then living at Pauline and Rudolph 
Schindler’s home in Kings Road, where he was completing the executive project of the Lovell 
House, the building to which Neutra devoted the most important promotional effort in his career 
and the work that confirmed his international celebrity. Just over a decade later, Gordon Drake 
joined Harris’ office where he worked in fact on the Weston Havens House project. This house 
assured the recognition to his mentor. The Weston Havens House was completed some weeks 
before the US entry into World War II. The cover of March 1940 issue of California Arts & 
Architecture portraying full-page the inspired cross-section of this house meant a turning point in 
Harris’ career and equally decisive for John Entenza. For the architect it entailed the end of his 
relationship with the magazine. Regarding the editor, it was his first cover and the beginning of a 
thriving publishing career oriented to make prestige. Meanwhile, Drake won with his first work, 
his own home in Los Angeles (1946), the first contest of Progressive Architecture magazine. The 
photographs that Julius Shulman took of Drake’s house catapulted him to fame. The architect 
was a young promise whose meteoric career was suddenly interrupted by an accident that cost 
him his life before turning 35 years old.
 
The Media interest aroused by the work of these architects brings the opportunity to explore the 
mechanisms of fame and the editorial policies of the time, as well as the publicity strategies of 
these authors and even the importance that some protagonists of these stories conceded to the 
elaboration of their own biography. This thesis insists on the important of the construction of the 
affections and relationships that made possible those architectures. In this sense the militant 
commitment of Pauline Schindler was vital. Throughout her life, she mobilized a network of 
architects, artists, photographers, writers, political activists, intellectuals and progressive clients 
without whose friction the history of California modern architecture would have probably 
been quite another matter.