Kaufmann-who also commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater-is on the market for $16.95 million. The Kaufmann House, a Palm Springs idyll that Neutra built for the department-store owner Edgar J. Amid a prolonged vogue for mid-century modernism, Neutras go for extravagant prices. (Several of the Neutra Colony houses were first owned by Japanese American families whose members had been in internment camps during the Second World War.) Those economics are long gone. The architecture within calls as little attention to itself as possible, so that your eyes are drawn to the reservoir shimmering through the foliage.Īlthough Neutra enjoyed fame from the thirties onward-in 1949, he appeared on the cover of Time-clients of relatively modest means could still afford to hire him. Reticent, almost inconspicuous, they gaze out at joggers and dog walkers with a guarded serenity. Huddled under lofty pines and eucalyptus trees, these dwellings embody the architect’s seductive later manner: low, wide façades plate-glass windows under overhanging roofs darker, woodsier trim. Between 19, he built nine more houses a block to the south, in an area now called the Neutra Colony. Neutra joined the throng in 1932, building himself a studio-residence, the Neutra VDL House, by the Silver Lake Reservoir. In the early twentieth century, the neighborhood was settled by avant-garde artists, radical activists, and bohemians. But if you venture a few miles to the southeast, into Silver Lake, you can see Neutra in a stealthier, suppler mode. The Health House, majestically at odds with its environment, doesn’t quite hit the mark. Neutra wrote of the design in characteristically convoluted fashion: “Through continuity of fenestration, linkage with the landscape, we should draw again on what the vitally dynamic natural scene had been for a hundred thousand years, and make it once more a human habitat.”Ĭan an aggressively modern house become indivisible from its surroundings? Neutra contemplated that challenge throughout his career, which extended from novice efforts in Germany, in the early nineteen-twenties, until his death, in 1970. Inside, you have the sense of hovering in space as you look down the thick-grown hillside toward a hazy horizon and a possible sea. It is a monumental yet unreal creation-a silver-white vessel that seems to have docked at the top of a canyon. The main structural elements are a skeleton of light steel, a thin skin of sprayed-on concrete, and ribbons of casement windows, which run across the south-facing side. It occupies a steep slope at the edge of Griffith Park, plunging three stories from street level. The Lovell Health House, as the behemoth on Dundee Drive came to be known, remains a dumbfounding sight. Three years later, Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock, the codifiers of the International Style, hailed Neutra’s work as “stylistically the most advanced house built in America since the War.” Thousands of people took the tour striking photographs were published. will conduct the audience from room to room.” Neutra’s middle initial was actually J., but this recent Austrian immigrant, thirty-seven years old and underemployed, had little reason to complain: he was being launched as a pioneer of American modernist architecture. Neutra, architect who designed and supervised the construction . . . On a page crowded with ads promoting quack cures for “ chronic constipation” and “ sagging flabby chins,” Lovell announced three days of open houses, adding that “Mr. Lovell, the imperiously eccentric health columnist for the Los Angeles Times, invited readers to tour his ultramodern new home, at 4616 Dundee Drive, in the hills of Los Feliz.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |