Spotlight on the Midcentury Design Duo Who Invented the Term Indoor/Outdoor Living

After 1945, the optimism of the second generation of modernist architects and designers was a great tonic to the austerity imposed by the exigencies of World War II. No place adopted midcentury modernism as quickly, or as definitively, as the United States did. And no part of the U.S. was more ready for newness, for reinvention, than California. Located at both a literal and figurative frontier, California had superb weather and an influx of non-neophobic migrants from other parts of the country (as well as refugee intellectuals from Europe, many of whom were sympathetic to modernism). California also had a healthy, diverse economy that was only strengthened by the war.