CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/22/2019

Celebrate Earth Day with 'Sun Seekers: The Cure of California'

This year, we're celebrating Earth Day with a book like no other: Sun Seekers: The Cure of California, Lyra Kilston's fascinating and beautifully designed new examination of the Golden State's sunny, healthful and unorthodox mythology as related to modernist architecture, natural medicine and a certain midcentury anti-civilization appreciation for novelties like vegetarianism, eugenics, nudism and heliotherapy. Published by the sophisticated London-based Atelier Editions, this volume investigates "the myth of California as a cure itself," Kilston writes, calling the state "a giant natural sanatorium." Top spread features Pauline Schindler (wife of architect Rudolph Schindler) and Leah Lovell (progressive teacher and wife of natural health guru "Dr." Philip M. Lovell, ND, as in self-coined Doctor of Neuropathy, born Morris Saperstein) with their young students (including two sons of the photographer Edward Weston) in Leah's "School in the Garden" in the Lovell's Hollywood Health House, designed by Richard Neutra, circa 1925. Middle spread is from the chapter on the Lovell's Newport Beach House, completed in 1926. Bottom spread features a woman exercising on the terrace of German architect Richard Döcker's house in the Werkbundsiedlung, Stuttgart, circa 1926—an inspiration for the ex-pat California Modernists.