This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Aline Barnsdall met Frank Lloyd Wright by early 1915, several years before she gave him the commission most people now remember her for. She bought the thirty-five acre Olive Hill site in the middle of Los Angeles on June 3, 1919, for three hundred thousand dollars, and began construction of Hollyhock House on April 28, 1920, with an ambition well beyond a private residence: she envisioned the whole estate as an arts and live-theater complex, a public-facing cultural project rather than simply a home. The main house and its guesthouses were finished in 1921, but the project had by then run far past her original seventy-five thousand dollar budget, with estimates for the house alone landing somewhere between one hundred twenty-five and two hundred thousand dollars. Barnsdall, unwilling to keep absorbing the overruns and unhappy with elements of the design, fired Wright over the cost and design disputes by October 1920, before construction had even fully wrapped. What makes the story more than a simple falling-out is what survived it: correspondence between the two shows a continued, genuinely warm relationship well after the professional break, with Wright at one point writing that Barnsdall would drop suggestions the way a warplane drops bombs, and then sail away into the blue, an image equal parts affectionate and exasperated. The remark captures something real about working with a client who had the money to fund an ambitious vision and the temperament to keep revising it, a combination Wright clearly found maddening and, in his own way, admired. Barnsdall eventually donated Olive Hill and Hollyhock House to the city of Los Angeles, and the estate now operates as a public park and museum, the arts-and-theater complex she originally imagined never fully realized but the house itself preserved as one of Wright's first major Los Angeles commissions, built for a patron whose politics and personal choices were, in their own moment, at least as unconventional as the architecture she paid for.