Can California keep Modernism alive? FacebookTwitterEmail Los Angeles resident Jeffrey Steenberg paid $1.35 million for a Palm Springs retreat where billionaire tycoon and filmmaker Howard Hughes once lived. Steenberg, a hairstylist-designer turned developer, intends to renovate the home, which was previously owned by writer-producer Paul W. Keyes.James Butchart / TNS Palm Springs isn’t just a great place to spend a weekend. It’s one of our last and most fervent defenders of what California really is — not what it pretends to be. That’s because Palm Springs, like the Golden State, is a modernist project, built by people who broke from old tradition and established cultures and experimented relentlessly to construct new systems that buried the past. Throughout California, modernism has produced freeways that span the state, waterworks through swamps and deserts, culture-dominating industries from Hollywood to Silicon Valley, and brand-new approaches to art, architecture, literature, philosophy, politics and religion.