Gregory Ain: Under Surveillance

My new piece “Gregory Ain: Under Surveillance” was published this week in the book Notes from Another Los Angeles: Gregory Ain and the Construction of a Social Landscape, edited by Anthony Fontenot, from MIT Press. (It’s “new” to the world but not to me, because I wrote this in 2015! Sometimes academic publishing takes a lot of patience.)

The article is based material from on Ain’s FBI file, which I requested in 2012. We already knew that Ain was politically-active on the left, perhaps a Communist Party member, and effectively blacklisted during the Red Scare period. But the FBI documents reveal much more. He was subject to extensive surveillance and was placed on Director J. Edgar Hoover’s Security Index, a top secret list of dangerously subversive individuals. My article analyzes this new material, including some surprising tidbits about the Eames office.

The file, 280 pages, spanning the years 1944-63.

Here’s the opening paragraph:

In case you’re not familiar, Gregory Ain (1908‒1988) was a notable Los Angeles architect. Previously I wrote the book Gregory Ain: The Modern Home as Social Commentary (Rizzoli, 2008), a comprehensive monograph covering Ain’s architecture and its political character, but the full extent of Ain’s targeting by the FBI was not known at that time.

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Edited to add: In The Nation, Kate Wolf described this article as “fascinating,” and she borrowed my line “the most dangerous architect in America” for the title. (I posed that phrase as a question.)

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See also:
Found: Gregory Ain's Museum House
Gregory Ain's Ginoza house