Three California Houses: The Homes of Max Palevsky

by Aaron Betsky

This glorious book showcases three architecturally important private residences, now owned by and home to the expansive art collections of Max Palevsky, director emeritus of Intel. Each house has either been restored or reworked by a well-known contemporary architect to make a magnificent showplace. The three houses together encapsulate the twentieth-century architectural history of Southern California.

Presented in detail are the Palm Spring House, by renowned mid-century modernist architect Craig Ellwood; the extravagant Malibu Spanish-style House, with interior renovations by renowned Italian architect Ettore Sottsass; and the opulent Beverly Hills House of the 1920s by George Washington Smith-with interiors that have been reworked recently by the young and already well-known avant-garde California architect Coy Howard.

160 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Aaron Betsky is an American critic on art, architecture and design. He was the director of Virginia Tech School of Architecture + Design until early 2022.
Trained as an architect and in the humanities at Yale University, he is the author of over a dozen books, including Architecture Matters, Making It Modern, Landscrapers: Building With the Land, Scanning: The Aberrant Architectures of Diller + Scofidio, Queer Space, Revelatory Landscapes, and Architecture Must Burn. Internationally known as a lecturer, curator, reviewer and commentator, he writes the blog "Beyond Buildings" for Architect Magazine. Director of the 11th Venice Architecture Biennale, he has also been president and Dean of the School of Architecture at Taliesin (originally the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture), director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (2001-2006) the Cincinnati Art Museum (2006-2014), and was founding Curator of Architecture, Design and Digital Projects at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1995-2001). As an unlicensed architect, he worked for Frank O. Gehry and Associates and Hodgetts + Fung. In 2003, he co-curated "Scanning: The Aberrant Architectures of Diller + Scofidio" at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Reviews

[Jodie]

The book of my husband's houses. They are beautiful and have taught me how it feels to live inside of a piece of art. He has a fresh eye and has nurtured genius talent. max has a love for beauty...and he has created it.