Hollyhock House

Hollyhock House stands in East Hollywood, Los Angeles, designed by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright for the oil heiress and arts patron Aline Barnsdall and completed in 1921 as the centerpiece of a planned arts complex on a hilltop site she called Olive Hill. The house takes its name from a stylized, abstracted hollyhock flower motif, drawn from Barnsdall's favorite flower, that Wright repeated throughout the building's ornamental concrete detailing, columns and art glass. Its design blends elements Wright associated with pre-Columbian Mesoamerican architecture, particularly in its massing and battered walls, with the horizontal planes and interlocking geometric volumes of his earlier Prairie style houses, making it a transitional work between those two phases of his career. Barnsdall donated the house and surrounding grounds to the City of Los Angeles in 1927, and it has since operated as a public museum within Barnsdall Art Park. It was included in 2019 among the eight Frank Lloyd Wright buildings inscribed together as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.