Building Imagination Initiative on Modesto’s Modernist Architecture funded by the Creative Work Fund
While immortalized in the film American Graffiti, of late Modesto’s charm has been tarnished by high rates of foreclosure, unemployment (16.7%) , and crime. Last year it placed nineteenth in Forbes Magazine’s list of the nation’s most miserable cities.
ArtPlace’s grant to the Creative Work Fund allowed us to award grants to five new place-based projects in locations where need is high and grant opportunities are limited. One such Creative Work Fund grant supports a partnership among media artists Jessica Gomula-Kruzic and Steve Arounsack with the Modesto Art Museum. The partners are making a film about one of Modesto’s distinctive but forgotten assets—its remarkable stock of mid-century modernist buildings.
Like many United States cities, Modesto enjoyed a building boom after World War II. According to architect and writer Kiel Famellos-Schmidt, “All of the major civic buildings date to the post war boom. Glass, steel, aluminum, exposed aggregate concrete, and terra cotta sun screens structure these buildings.” While its public buildings are noteworthy, it’s Modesto’s modernist homes that drew national attention. The Heckendorf Residence, designed by John Funk in 1939, set the city’s modernist movement in motion.