Raphael S. Soriano Art for Sale at Auction

b. 1904 -

(b. Island of Rhodes, 6 Aug 1904-d. Pomona, CA, 1988). American architect of Sephardic Jewish descent. He came to the USA in 1924 and graduated from the University of Southern California (Barch, 1934). During his final years there (1932–5) he worked in the office of Richard Neutra. He started his own independent practice in 1936 and by 1942 his executed and unexecuted designs had been extensively published in the principal regional and national architecture magazines. His pre-World War II designs took the thin wood frame and stucco-sheathed Southern California technology of building and transformed it to the demanding visual world of high art Modernism. In his Lipetz house of 1936, 1843 Dillon Road, Los Angeles, the design is organized around a semi-circular glass façade. Other early designs of the 1930s played with the Modernist theme of horizontal banded glass and stucco walls, as can be seen in his Polito house, 1650 Queens Road, Los Angeles (1938), and in his Ross house, 2123 Valentine Drive, Los Angeles (1938). In the period after 1945 his interest turned to pavilions of post and beam steel frame in the manner of Mies van der Rohe, with infills of glass and other industrial materials. He expressed this approach in his contribution of 1950 to the Arts and Architecture Case Study House project, and in his prototype house of 1955, ‘Steel Frame House for Mass Production’ in Palo Alto, CA, designed for the builder Joseph Eichler. In 1961 he left Los Angeles and established his practice in Tiburon, near San Francisco. Soriano’s last ode to the machine and its products was a proposed tower c . 300 m high for Alcoa Aluminium (1966), to have been built in San Francisco. In this project he proposed that aluminium be used, not as a thin sheathing, but as a tubular structure. Later in his life, he moved to Pasadena, California, to become Professor of Envirnonmental Design at UC Pomona. He died there in 1988.