On Saturday, November 2nd we had our first workshop. We took a field trip to El Alisal, the former home of poet, journalist and activist Charles Lummis, built in 1910.  Although many Good Exposure students have lived less than a mile away their entire lives, this was many their first time visiting the home.

From the Society of Southern California website:

“Built between 1898 and 1910 the Lummis Home was built by Charles Fletcher Lummis which he said he built “to last a thousand years.” Its architecture, Lummis had written, “is part of my life and my brains and my love and my hands.”

The Lummis Home stands on the west bank of the Arroyo Seco, the usually-dry riverbed that begins in the San Gabriel Mountains and extends south to join the Los Angeles river on the water’s path to the Pacific Ocean.

Booster, Native American rights activist, writer, City Librarian, translator, and ethnographer, Charles Lummis was a man of many talents. An eclectic man in many respects, the home represents Lummis’ love of the American Southwest and wood-hewn household furnishings. In many respects the Lummis Home represents the beginning of the Arts & Crafts aesthetic that was to soon take the architectural world by storm–only to peak with Greene and Greene homes such as the Gamble House. A warm, intimate connecting with the outdoors is brought into the interior of the house with concrete floors, wood furniture, railroad pole supporting beams for the ceiling and delicate decorative carved woods.”