The facade simultaneously invites entry but affords privacy, shielding both the house beyond as well as the sweeping views from the cliff down to the sea, views privileged to the owner. Note, too, how Neutra slows your journey to the front door, a strategy he witnessed in Japan. 

The  flawlessly sited 4,124-square-foot 1958 Connell House by Richard Neutra may be demolished in favor of a  11,933 (12,000) -square-foot house, downsized from a total 16,385 square feet proposed in December. The Neutra occupies the east end of  what is a transcendent 2.13 acre site — to the west is the rugged Pacific coastline, while the iconic Cypress Point Golf Course wraps the south and east views … it doesn’t get closer to heaven than this.

Below is a letter I’ve written to the Planning Commission, Monterey County, and urge you to consider writing one, too. The photos are by Dr. Anthony Kirk; below my  letter is the link to the December agenda item listing the many permissions  the new mansion would require.

The proposal recalls the demolition of the expansive, Frank Sinatra-chic 1962 Maslon House, with an important exception. The Maslon was also flawlessly sited (and thus doomed), the broad site jutting into a commanding view of an exclusive golf course in Rancho Mirage on two sides. It was razed for its trouble in 2002 in a ministerial (not requiring review, though it should have been evaluated for significance) and surprise move virtually overnight. I walked the chaotic ruin the next morning, and took a small section of the chimney, two bricks worth, home. The Connell House, in contrast to the lost Maslon House, does require review. That is the important exception, and our window of opportunity.

February 1, 2012

Ms. Delinda Robinson

Monterey County Planning Department

168 W. Alisal St., 2nd floor

Salinas, CA 93901

Re: Connell House

Dear Ms. Robinson,

I am writing to on behalf of the Connell House, designed by Richard J. Neutra (1892 – 1970) and completed in 1958.

Allow me to introduce myself. As the author of Richard Neutra – Complete Works, and Neutra – Selected Projects (Taschen, 2000, 2004), I am a scholar of Neutra’s works, numbering some 450 projects worldwide, and am completing a Ph.D. on his work at the University of Liverpool. Professionally, I am a qualified architectural historian according to the Secretary of the Interior Standards 36 CFR Part 61. Trained as an architect with an M.Arch. degree, both privately and as Senior Architectural Historian, ICF International, Los Angeles, I evaluate buildings for historic significance for lead agencies and developers; assist architects with interpreting the Standards; prepare National Register and Landmark nominations, among other duties typical of my profession. I am writing you in my capacity as an expert on Neutra’s works, though I apply professional standards, objectivity, and expertise in considering his projects.

Given his prolific contribution to 20^th century architecture, while undoubtedly a master architect, it is nonetheless unwise to assume anything a master architect designed is worthy of National Register consideration, as the Register guidelines for criteria remind us. Before I received word of potential demolition of the Connell House from Dr. Anthony Kirk, I had only a superficial acquaintance with the dwelling, primarily for writing the Complete Works. But the more I considered the house, the more I am convinced that Monterey County can be proud of having a highly accomplished example of Neutra’s work in its midst, an aesthetically compelling, spatially complex house perfectly wedded to its site.

Apart from Neutra’s well-known books such as Survival Through Design and Nature Near, both championing the requisite of nature in an architecture tailored to essential human needs, he also wrote a book directed at laypeople titled Mystery and Realities of the Site. Through this poetic little volume dense with images, he taught how building and landscape could be integrated to create an indelible experience on behalf of the environment as well as the occupant, delivering a compressed building footprint that nonetheless conferred a sense of expansiveness and tranquility for its inhabitants. The Art Connell House acquits Neutra’s convictions in both arenas addressed by these books. Ironically, his acute attention to site (he was renowned for helping clients to choose sites, even walking the site with his clients to evaluate it for both day as well as night conditions) now threatens these houses: because the site is so exquisite and often generous in size, the house itself becomes an impediment to development, typically a much larger dwelling.

The two-level Art Connell House exemplifies Neutra’s signature trademarks in its careful asymmetric composition of volumes and opposing opaque (stucco) and transparent (glass) planes. Roof planes of disparate sizes, adding visual interest, extend over those areas where protection from the sun is important. In its resolution of volumetric complexity, the house can be favorably compared with the 1957 Sorrells House, Shoshone, and the 1961 Villa Rang, Königstein, Germany.

Of special note is Neutra’s exploitation of the sharply sloping site. Here, the user is led down a right-angled path, slowing the procession into the house (a strategy dating back to his 1930 trip to Japan). He placed the private wing below the larger living area, largely hidden by the discrete front entry, a move similar to his design for the 1936 Kun House, Los Angeles, which is sited on a canyon. In the Art Connell House, the long elevation, containing both the upper living areas and lower bedroom levels, faces the ocean to the west. The bedroom wing steps back below the deck above, affording more privacy, protecting these areas from the western sun but also allowing use in inclement weather, another Neutra strategy in pragmatically but artfully wedding indoors and outdoors. This west elevation can be favorably compared with the 1962 Gonzales-Gorrondona House, Caracas, Venezuela, built for a government official, and the 1958 Rados House, San Pedro, designed for a wealthy ship builder. (Images of these houses are on-line or are in Complete Works.)

The bedroom room, below, is recessed below, affording shade from the western sun. Neutra often used tempered Masonite for portions of exteriors, here painted panels below bedroom windows.

Typical is the varying use of full-height and partial-height glass walls, defining primary view and secondary spaces; planes that extend into the landscape, both connecting building to site and affording privacy; a dual indoor-outdoor fireplace located at a pivotal location; the use of tempered Masonite, here painted given the ocean salt, for exterior base panels below some windows, and a virtually intact open plan interior. While his inclusion of a central courtyard, providing a gathering area sheltered from the window, is not typical, he employed a similar courtyard in the Flavin House, Los Angeles, completed the same year as the Connell House, 1958, but lacking such a dramatic site.

The architects for the 1992 addition/alteration on the south end of the house, located well away from the primary elevations, should be commended for one of the most thoughtful and compatible additions to a work by master architect I’ve ever seen. This later work exploits the footprint of a rear, little-seen service yard. The large south-facing picture window of the addition is framed by the surrounding wall, distinguishing it from Neutra’s fenestration strategies; the fascia is deeper; the roof extended less than those of other elevations; and the addition’s stucco finish is rendered in a slightly darker tone than the extant original shade elsewhere. All are moves that clearly delineate the new from the old while being compatible with the original character of the Neutra design per the Secretary of the Interior Standards for Rehabilitation No. 9. The minor and few reversible window changes, largely replacing jalousies, are quite typical alterations of the houses of many mid-century architects (jalousies were briefly popular but proved drafty and hard to maintain) and have not affected the integrity of the residence, nor has the inclusion of a later light fixture, also reversible, under an extended roof plane.

Thus, in my opinion, the Art Connell House would be considered a historical resource under CEQA. I urge your consideration in retaining this superb example of Neutra’s work. As one of the ‘first generation’ Modern architects who influenced Bay Area Modernism, Pebble Beach is fortunate in boasting an accomplished work by master architect Richard Neutra.

Sincerely,

Barbara Lamprecht, M.Arch.

author, Richard Neutra – Complete Works; Neutra – Selected Projects (Taschen 2000, 2004)

http://www.co.monterey.ca.us/planning/major/Pebble%20Beach%20Company/DMFAgenda.pdf

Wie Baut Amerika. Stuttgart: Julius Hoffman, 1927

I lectured on Richard Neutra’s own ‘crossroad’ in America, Chicago, where he arrived “one drizzly morning at the Illinois Central depot” in 1924: Chicago, where Frank Lloyd Wright, Adolf Loos, Louis Sullivan, and Jane Addams all converged in that

Pescher House, garden meadow elevation. Photo by BLamprecht

great city where the American heartland met  the steel skyscraper and fell in love … Please see http://www.wbez.org/story/barbara-lamprecht-cross-pollination-american-and-european-architecture-shown-through-work-rich

I was stunned by one part of a short Q-and-A published May 7, 2011 in the Wall Street Journal, titled “What’s So Great About Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater?” It begins,

The fabled house Frank Lloyd Wright built for the Kaufmann family over a stream in southwestern Pennsylvania turns 75 this year. Below are bits of wisdom gleaned from ‘Fallingwater,’ a new book edited by Lynda Waggoner and with beautiful photography by Christopher Little.”

The second of four question-answers posed to the authors is,

“2. Is Fallingwater a work of modernism?  No. Philip Johnson’s Glass House is a modernist building. Lever House is a modernist building. Fallingwater is modern in the sense that its form is untraditional, but not Modern in terms of belonging to a school of architecture like that propagated by Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. It is a unique example of a path championed by Wright and not taken up by the field generally: a kind of streamlined, handmade, organic architecture that at the top of its list of goals relates to, and celebrates, nature. Fallingwater was seen as beacon and highly appreciated in its time—the first MoMA show devoted to this house was in 1938, and the accolades have continued ever since—but still almost everybody went the other way.”

Fallingwater,  1935, is a modern modernist modernistic building born of modernity. Its floor plan; asymmetry; the use of the same materials inside and outside; the alternating unornamented rectilinearity of powerful solids punctured and balanced by equally powerful voids; a rhythm as bold, as self-confident and as apparently indifferent to blending in with “nature” as Eileen Gray’s E1027, 1929; Walter Gropius’s “Master Houses,” at Bauhaus Dessau, 1926; Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, 1931; Mies van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat, 1930; Richard Neutra’s Lovell Health House, 1929 … all unique, all speaking to an original way of thinking that fully exploits 20th century issues of freshly conceived spatial relationships; a newly kinetic interaction among outdoors, indoors, and human being;  the radical importance of the diagonal view in which movement is implicit, countering the static view of the elevation view favored in the Renaissance or in the protocols of the Ecole des Beaux Arts, an elevation and view compounded by symmetry; what else … oh, yes, for Wright in particular, a daring exploitation of 20th century technology in that outrageously presumptuous cantilever stretching out Bear Run, a cantilever so literally eccentric, apart from its visual asymmetry, that decades later it required the world’s best structural engineers to restore.

Fallingwater was as handmade as any of the early Modern experimental structures that, while earnestly seeking the hallowed label of prefabrication, were largely handmade, with lumpy (handcrafted!) white stucco that was smooth only if you were two miles away. Like finally seeing a real Mondrian, with all of its beautiful “imperfections,” much of building today still remains “handmade” even when it means the final connections that make a building sing.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wasmuth Portfolios, published in Germany in 1910, were quite modern and startled all of Europe, who continued the implications of his ribbon windows, diminished ornament, “honest” use of materials, and above all his floor plans. These highly scrutinized drawings were indeed “taken up by the field generally.”

Like many of us, I imagine, I’ve pondered what, exactly, is “modern”? Is it capitalized, if so, under what circumstances. In historic preservation, “the Modern Movement” (Style No. 70) is a style; so is the “International Style” (Style No. 72.) One can also classify a building under Style No. 80, “Other,” or Style No. 90, “Mixed.” But is Modernism a style — a set of characteristic features?” If, for example, modern = flat roof, no wonder Harwell Hamilton Harris, that gentle protege of both Wright and Neutra who often pitched his roofs, was never invited to design a house for the postwar Case Study House series. If one considers Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s essay on Wright in “Modern Architecture International Exhibition,” pp. 29 – 37, published contemporaneously with the 1932 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art unapologetically championing the International Style, one flinches at Hitchcock’s indictment, with very faint praise, of Wright’s place in Modernism, citing the “exuberance of the inappropriate ornament” in one case; and, more importantly, Wright’s isolation (“Behind Wright was only Sullivan.”) versus the hip cliques and, could one say, groupthink?, of like-informed Euros abroad. The “large areas of painted decoration on the upper surfaces [of the 1908 Coonley House] are less authentic and integral than the rambling functionalism and the native stone walls of Taleisin. Finally, “at the bottom they are classicists and he a romantic,” sticking him in the mid-nineteenth century with bosoms heaving picturesque and sublime. (One could argue that Mies was romantic, too, considering his search for the spiritual, the Platonic ideal form, the universal, in his work, a search that quickly shook off smaller minds intent on rigid adherence to a particular architectural platform. Mies didn’t get off scot-free, either: in the same book, Philip Johnson calls Mies, among other things, “a decorator in the best sense,” alluding to Mies’s “luxurious amounts of [high-end] materials,” employed with the “able assistance of his associate, Lilly Reich.”) But what might it mean to have “only” Sullivan behind one? Through his own connections and especially Dankmar Adler, his partner, Sullivan was connected to the German (!) intelligentsia, architects and engineers, who were slowly infusing the design of skyscrapers with imagination and precision. Sullivan trained at MIT and the Ecole, but nonetheless thought his way through all that influence to give us a deeply poetical understanding of the relationship between form and function. As a preservation specialist, at my work, I label buildings as Modern in style, and know it is important to do so because in that context the nomenclature serves as an anchor that can be elaborated. Privately, I struggled, especially when I began to read Walter Benjamin’s stringent, even anguished, writings on modernity. It struck me that Modernism was not a look or a set of feature but the questions an architect raised and how he/she resolved them. What is the architect critiquing, what value does that question have in light of a particular time, place, and set of circumstances? What alternatives does the architect propose? Each Modernist, I realized, had their own critique, their own relationship to cities, to politics, to nature — landscape, geography, light, air, sun, color  – and to the role of technology and the promise, if any, of prefabrication. Unless Wright had something to critique, his architecture would not be known today. It would be accomplished, but not original. Not Modern.

I recently had a great talk with a friend, and we were agonizing and laughing over when to capitalize “modern” in addition to defining it. Like the early Modernists themselves, it depends on the context and the individual using the term. And later, on-line, while looking for something else (of course), I came across a great quote by Eric Owen Moss, F.A.I.A., the well-known architect, director of Sci-Arc, the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles, holder of two M.Arch. degrees, who said what I had said, but better:

Remember the appendix to Hitchcock and Johnson’s International Style? Philip told us how we could all be modern architects. And NYMOMA was his enforcer. Just follow the rules. And that codification didn’t begin the modern era. That book and his exhibit ended modern architecture as speculation, and began modernism as style. Study. Learn. Replicate.

I was stunned by one part of a short Q-and-A published May 7, 2011 in the Wall Street Journal, titled “What’s So Great About Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater?” It begins,

The fabled house Frank Lloyd Wright built for the Kaufmann family over a stream in southwestern Pennsylvania turns 75 this year. Below are bits of wisdom gleaned from ‘Fallingwater,’ a new book edited by Lynda Waggoner and with beautiful photography by Christopher Little.”

The second of four question-answers posed to the authors is,

Is Fallingwater a work of modernism?  ”No. Philip Johnson’s Glass House is a modernist building. Lever House is a modernist building. Fallingwater is modern in the sense that its form is untraditional, but not Modern in terms of belonging to a school of architecture like that propagated by Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. It is a unique example of a path championed by Wright and not taken up by the field generally: a kind of streamlined, handmade, organic architecture that at the top of its list of goals relates to, and celebrates, nature. Fallingwater was seen as beacon and highly appreciated in its time—the first M)MA show devoted to this house was in 1938, and the accolades have continued ever since—but still almost everybody went the other way.”

Fallingwater, 1935, is a modern modernist modernistic building born of modernity. Its floor plan; asymmetry; the use of the same materials inside and outside; the alternating unornamented rectilinearity of powerful solids punctured and balanced by equally powerful voids; a rhythm as bold, as self-confident and as apparently indifferent to blending in with “nature” as Eileen Gray’s E1027, 1929; Walter Gropius’s “Master Houses,” at Bauhaus Dessau, 1926; Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, 1931; Mies van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat, 1930; Richard Neutra’s Lovell Health House, 1929 … all (and all unique, by the way) speak to an original way of thinking that fully exploits 20th century issues of newly defined spatial relationships; a newly kinetic interaction between outdoors and indoors for the inhabitants;  relationship to a newly kineticized space; the radical, radical importance of the diagonal view, in which movement is implicit, countering the static view of the elevation view favored in the Renaissance or in the protocols of the École des Beaux Arts, an elevation and view compounded by symmetry; what else … oh, yes, a daring exploitation of 20th century technology in that outrageously presumptuous cantilever stretching out Bear Run, a cantilever so literally eccentric, apart from its asymmetry, that decades later it required the world’s best structural engineers to align.

Fallingwater was as handmade as any of the early Modern experimental structures that, while earnestly seeking the hallowed label of prefabrication, were largely handmade, with lumpy (handcrafted!) white stucco that was smooth only if you were two miles away. Like finally seeing a real Mondrian, with all of its beautiful “imperfections,” much of building today still remains “handmade” even when it means the final connections that make a building sing.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wasmuth Portfolios, published in Germany in 1910, were quite modern and startled all of Europe, who continued the implications of his ribbon windows, diminished ornament, “honest” use of materials, and above all his floor plans. These highly scrutinized drawings were indeed “taken up by the field generally.”

Like many of us, I imagine, I’ve pondered what, exactly, is “modern”? Is it capitalized, if so, under what circumstances? In historic preservation, “the Modern Movement” (Style No. 70) is a style; so is the “International Style” (Style No. 72.) One can also classify a building under Style No. 80, “Other,” or Style No. 90, “Mixed.” But is Modernism a style — a set of characteristic features?” If, for example, modern = flat roof, no wonder Harwell Hamilton Harris, that gentle protégé of both Wright and Neutra who often pitched his roofs, was never invited to design a house for the postwar Case Study House series. If one considers Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s essay on Wright in “Modern Architecture International Exhibition,” pp. 29 – 37, published contemporaneously with the 1932 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art unapologetically championing the International Style, one flinches at Hitchcock’s indictment, with very faint praise, of Wright’s place in Modernism, citing the “exuberance of the inappropriate ornament” in one case; and, more importantly, Wright’s isolation (“Behind Wright was only Sullivan.”) versus the hip cliques and, could one say, groupthink?, of like-informed Euros abroad. The “large areas of painted decoration on the upper surfaces [of the 1908 Coonley House] are less authentic and integral than the rambling functionalism and the native stone walls of Taliesin. Finally, “at the bottom they are classicists and he a romantic,” sticking him firmly in the nineteenth century with bosoms heaving picturesque and sublime.[1] But what might it mean to have “only” Sullivan behind one? Through his own connections and especially Dankmar Adler, his partner, Sullivan was connected to the German (!) intelligentsia, architects and engineers, who were slowly infusing the design of skyscrapers with imagination and precision. Sullivan trained at MIT and the École, but nonetheless thought his way through all that influence to give us a deeply poetical understanding of the relationship between form and function. As a preservation specialist, at my work, I label buildings as Modern in style, and know it is important to do so because in that context the nomenclature serves as an anchor that can be elaborated. Privately, I struggled, especially when I began to read Walter Benjamin’s stringent, even anguished, writings on modernity. It struck me that Modernism was not a look or a set of feature but the questions an architect raised and how he/she resolved them. What is the architect critiquing, what value does that question have in light of a particular time, place, and set of circumstances? What alternatives does the architect propose? Each Modernist, I realized, had their own critique, their own relationship to cities, to politics, to nature — landscape, geography, light, air, sun, color  – and to the role of technology and the promise, if any, of prefabrication. Unless Wright had something to critique, his architecture would not be known today. It would be accomplished, but not original. Not Modern.

I recently had a great talk with a friend, and we were agonizing and laughing over when to capitalize “modern” in addition to defining it. Like the questions the early Modernists raised for themselves, it depends on the context and the individual using the term. And later, on-line, while looking for something else (of course), I came across a great quote by Eric Owen Moss, F.A.I.A., the well-known architect and director of Sci-Arc, the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles, holder of two M.Arch. degrees, who said what I had said, but better:

Remember the appendix to Hitchcock and Johnson’s International Style? Philip told us how we could all be modern architects. And NYMOMA was his enforcer. Just follow the rules. And that codification didn’t begin the modern era. That book and his exhibit ended modern architecture as speculation, and began modernism as style. Study. Learn. Replicate. [2]

Early rendering. Richard J.Neutra, Kronish House, 1953, pastel on paper. Courtesy Palm Springs Art Museum.

©barbaralamprecht2011

The Beverly Hills City Council meeting Tuesday, Aug. 2 turned from regular into extraordinary. The meeting began at 7:17, and the room was packed for one agenda item: the proposed ministerial demolition of the Richard Neutra’s Kronish House. After normal city business including city pensions and trees that blocked expensive view corridors, Linda Dishman, the executive director of the Los Angeles Conservancy, stepped up to the podium. She was the first of perhaps 30 speakers, some from far away but many passionate and outspoken Beverly Hills residents, all articulating variations on a theme of preserving not only this house, but also establishing a preservation ordinance for one of the few Southland cities without one.  The owner’s representatives spoke too, equipped with visuals that were a painfully obvious attempt to make the house look its worst, images with holes from asbestos! termite damage! mold!, images that were mildly amusing and somewhat irritating to any preservationist or restoration architect who had likely restored far worse. And to add insult to injury, the images were — apparently — of a guest house that Neutra had not designed. The evening twisted again when the owners previous to SODA, owners who vacated the house in April, announced that they had lawsuits pending with SODA, a statement so stunning to everyone there that Council members asked the former owner present to repeat his claim (which to my knowledge has not been substantiated.) One councilman turned to the city lawyer and asked whether a demolition permit could even be authorized if the title wasn’t clear. In any case, you could see the heads turning as people gasped to others around them … what the ….?  To the astonishment of many, expecting confrontation rather than cordial deliberation, the City fully endorsed the proposal for creating an ordinance, hopefully one that changes a “ministerial” action, i.e., an action that occurs as a matter of city law and not requiring a review, to a “discretionary” action, i.e., an action requiring review. Altogether, it was an exhilarating night that didn’t end until 12:30 am.

All this is a prelude to the below, which compares this big-boned, upscale house to others Neutra designed at roughly the same size and cost, no matter their age or location, and then compares this large 1955 residence to the very small, low-budget Perkins House, built in the same year. My goal is to discuss two different kinds of “range” Neutra demonstrated in creating big or small houses, always predicted on a specific response to a client and budget with a specific site, (which is why his houses especially far poorly in attempts to relocate them, with perhaps one exception.) What follows is still true, and was uploaded on July 21 — it’s been a very fast-paced two weeks:

Just as a prisoner is prepared for execution step by step, first numbed before the lethal injection, preliminary permits (to check and cap gas/sewer lines) have been pulled for the possible demolition of what is probably the largest and one of the most imposing houses designed by Richard Neutra in North America.

Not that preserving the work of a master is predicated on size.

Early rendering. Richard J.Neutra, Kronish House, 1953, pastel on paper. Courtesy Palm Springs Art Museum.

Completed in 1955, the 6,891-square-foot, pinwheel plan Kronish House is almost 1,100 square feet smaller than the Alfred de Schulthess House, completed a year later in 1956 – but the de Schulthess, beautifully landscaped by the great landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, is in Havana, Cuba … and in fine condition.

The De Schulthess House, Richard Neutra with Raul Alverez, Havana, Cuba, 1956. Photo courtesy of Roy Dowell and Lari Pittman.

Then there is the José Joaquín Gonzalez-Gorrondona House, 1962, designed for Venezuela’s Minister of Communications, another large-scale villa with libraries (plural), conference room, dormitories, lecture and music rooms … but that is in Caracas. Like its Latin American neighbor to the north, the South American house is also in fine condition. The Gunther Pescher Villa, 1968, in Wuppertal, Germany, is in exquisite condition, as is the Prof. Martin and Christina Rang Villa, 1961, in Königstein im Taunus.

In the U.S., the Kronish House is 900 square feet larger than the très chic Rice House, designed for Ambassador Walter and Mrs. Inger Rice and completed in 1964. There Neutra integrated the elongated structure into a precipitous site, carved into the side of a man-made island overlooking the rocky banks of the broad James River in Richmond, Virginia.

Ambassador Walter and Inger Rice House, Richmond, Virginia, 1964, Richard and Dion Neutra. Now owned by the Science Museum of Virginia. Photo by Barbara Lamprecht

In contrast to the prospective fate of the Kronish, the client, Mrs. Rice, bequeathed the house to a benevolent guardian, the Science Museum of Virginia. The Museum and a new group of Friends are restoring the property, using it for a range of programs, all with Inger’s active, supporting presence. The lines of the house are sleek and cool, typically Neutra, right?, but what is also “typical Neutra” is the full complement of nature-near elements and explicit responses for a specific client: the dance floor for the Ambassador, a floor plan that alertly responds to the social niceties and requisites of diplomacy, and a very mod bomb shelter … it was the ’60s, didn’t we all have a mod bomb shelter? Even the walkway to the basement shelter is angled so that a straight bullet shot or grenade toss was impossible.

But where the Rice House is a long two-story rectangle stretched along an outcrop of rocks and trees, the Kronish House is a pinwheel plan on steroids. A kindred spirit to the Kaufmann Desert House in Palm Springs, 1947, the arms of the Kronish House are even bigger and longer.  The interstitial spaces are filled with pools and plantings, akin to Roman villas with interior atria and impluvia, with an elaborate spatial sequence of outdoor and indoor rooms and ever-changing views of landscape and plantings.

The Kronish House, Richard Neutra, Beverly Hills, 1955. Entry. View east. Photo courtesy of Neutra Architecture.

In 1955, the same year the roughly  7,000-square-foot Kronish House was built, Neutra designed 14 built projects and one very small perfect one. The Constance Perkins House, a deStijlian composition of descending lines and planes on a hilly site in Pasadena, is a mere 1,310 square feet. It was designed as a response to a challenge from a feisty, not-so-well-endowed professor of art and art history, Dr. Perkins, who walked up to Neutra after a lecture he gave on how he could build a great house on a tight budget, and asked him to do just that. The result is a tiny house with a big heart, now one of the star contributors to the Poppy Peak Historic District, listed in 2010 in the National Register of Historic Places. It is Pasadena’s newest district and one of the few in the nation devoted to residential Modernism.

Perkins House, Poppy Peak, Pasadena, Richard Neutra, 1955. Project architect: John Blanton. Photo by Raymond Neutra.

As I write this, the house is empty and dark. Its design strategies, its affordances, lie unknown and unexploited. They cannot support the life of an inhabitant or a family as intended. Use it or lose it, your trainer will say. In a Neutra dwelling, those strategies are rendered with precision in section, plan, and elevation to allow someone to accomplish their life however they life: with cool type A clarity, with elegance, with children with jam and dirt all over … Were the Kronish to be demolished, along with “character-defining features,” those strategies, all that thought and architectural genius, are lost to history.

How can buildings like the 1962 Maslon House, Rancho Mirage, demolished overnight in 2004 (I was there the next day and at least I got two mortared bricks from the chimney, Berlin wall-esque) or the Kronish House, be eradicated without thought? How can a work by Richard Neutra, or any master architect, be demolished as a “ministerial” gesture? Have you looked up “ministerial”? Essentially, it means without judgment. Under orders. Without thought. It is the antithesis of “discretionary.”

What witness to the art of living do we lose as a society if a Neutra, or an Ain, or a Schindler, etc., etc., is demolished under orders and without thought? We tore down the storied Josef Von Sternberg villa in the early ’70s. We cannot forget Irving Gill’s masterpiece across from R.M.’s Kings Road House, 1916 – 1970.

The proposed demolition of any work anywhere by a master architect is automatically discretionary. Period.

The Taylor House, Richard Neutra, 1964, Glendale. View looking south. Photo by Larry Schaffer.

©barbaralamprecht2011 The text below is based on a talk I gave on Saturday June 11, 2011, for the Society of Architectural Historians, Southern California Chapter, at Richard Neutra’s Maurice and Marceil Taylor House, 1964, in Glendale, California. It was a beautiful day. The full-height glass walls on the north were thrown open so the 40-odd people could arrange themselves as they wanted, some standing a little removed on the sheltered terrace or under the oak tree off the living room, some draped on sofas and chairs, perched on the wide hearth of the floating brick fireplace, or sat on the floor. [1]

Breaking the box, thinking outside of the box, being boxed in: all are phrases that speak to the inflexibility of “the box.” In Modernist architecture, however, the right-angled box — at least dissembled and unskinned — was intended to be liberating, not confining. Some of Southern California’s finest “boxes” are a stone’s throw from where we’re sitting: in the Pasadena/Glendale area alone, there is the 1976 Art Center College of Design, by Craig Ellwood and Jim Tyler; Ellwood’s Don and Salley Kubly House, 1964; a host of excellent post-war projects by “USC School” architects such as Buff, Straub and Hensman, Whitney Smith, Wayne Williams, Thornton Ladd; and houses by Richard Neutra and his protégés Gregory Ain and Harwell Hamilton Harris. What distinguishes a Modernist box from the rest of boxes in architectural history is that the Modernist box is bigger than its actual footprint, as a Mies van der Rohe (1886 – 1969) anecdote illuminates: As the chief organizer of the 1927 experimental Weissenhof Siedlung housing complex in Stuttgart, Mies laid out the overall scheme, which included houses designed by great names such as Peter Behrens, Walter Gropius, Mies, Le Corbusier, Hans Poelzig, Max and Bruno Taut, Johannes Oud. Mies made a model of the hillside site plan: rows of little white flat-topped boxes, some bigger, some smaller, depending on whether they were single-family, multi-unit, or apartment blocks. Some were free-standing, some were detached, all staggered so that no box lined up with another above it or below it, and all were oriented parallel to the slope of the hill. The deliberately staggered configuration of volumes of different sizes, heights, and distances from one another collectively defined the little boxes as unified urban fabric, which a rigid alignment would not have achieved.

Postcard, Weissenhof Siedlung Stuttgart, posted by Rafael Carzola

When a colleague on the organizing committee, a devout Modernist, challenged Mies’s apparently arbitrary scheme as not having enough Sachlichkeit,[2] Mies acidly retorted, “You seem to understand a plan only in the old sense, as so many separate building parcels. The model was meant to convey a general idea, not actual sizes. I believe it is necessary to strike … a new course. I believe that the new dwelling must have an effect beyond its four walls [my italics].”[3]That is, these boxes engaged the outdoors – the landscape, the sky – and other surrounding buildings — in new ways, and do so in ways that required elastic consideration of how much space there should be around a building. In effect, through the intentionally fluid location of his buildings on the site, Mies was asserting his individual will, acting against Sachlichkeit’s more formulaic and comforting retreat into the “functional.” Obviously buildings throughout history, such as free-standing Greek temples dramatically sited in a larger complex against a backdrop of rugged hills or contemporary structures ala Zaha Hadid, have always had a visual “effect beyond its four walls.” But these are not houses, let alone houses for the working or middle classes. Even Renaissance palazzos, villas for the rich with facades of masonry walls and “punched-in” windows, faced streets or squares with principal elevations. But the presence of glass, and a lot of it, complicates that effect. Glass dictated a far more calibrated relationship with their environment, but equally if not more importantly, the inhabitant also now has a much more complex relationship with whatever lay beyond the building footprint, which is what I’m exploring in this essay. The Modernists accomplished this larger Miesian effect in two ways: first, through transparency, by using ganged glass casement windows or with full-height glass walls, or both. Full-height windows elicit different psychological and physiological responses than casement windows, whose sills are about waist height; they also differ from highly placed clerestory height windows. Floor-to-ceiling glass assumes the full impact of a landscape or a view. The engagement with the outdoors is unmitigated, without shirking, no matter whether that provokes dread at full exposure or delight in expansiveness. And without a shield or window covering, this happens day and night.

Dana-Thomas House, Springfield, Illinois, Frank Lloyd Wright, 1904. Source: U.S. Library of Congress.

The second thing Modernists did was to dissemble the box into volumes and then into discrete lines or planes. Initially, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867 – 1959) started to break the box by stretching it in one dimension, almost making it seem ready to rip in tension. Soon he broke the box in terms of volumes that thrust out into the landscape, typically connected by narrow necks and bridges, beginning in the late 19^th century with his houses in Springfield, Illinois, such as the Susan Lawrence Dana House, begun 1899, completed 1904. Certainly the Bauhaus in Dessau and the beautiful “Master” houses for faculty Lionel Feiniger, Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky/Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, all designed by Walter Gropius in 1926, together are the collective celebrity of the idea of the white 20^th century box dissembled into discreet volumes of glass and concrete. The “free plan” anchored Le Corbusier’s Five Points of Architecture, which he developed in the early 1920s. And surely one of the world’s most beautiful boxes is that of architect formidable Eileen Gray, whose E1027, Roquebrune near Monaco, with Jean Badovici, 1930, is bravely but brilliantly sited on the side of a precipice. And then there is Michael Hopkin’s exquisitely small-boned steel box of a house in Hampstead Heath, London, 1976:

Hopkins House, Hopkins Architects, Hampstead, 1976. Photo by Steve Cadman and used with permission, Flixkr

This idea of a connected group of volumes has retained its currency for architects for decades, such as the houses of the Case Study House architect and educator, the high-spirited Ralph Rapson.[4] He seemed unendingly curious about how to take apart a volume and put it back together, evident in his postwar and mid-century houses (I just returned from a trip to the Midwest, and stumbled on the famous University Grove, a group of 103 stellar Modern houses built for University of Minnesota faculty and staff on a leafy plot of land, including nine houses by Rapson and many more by the brilliant Close Associates, Winston Close and Elizabeth Scheu.[5])

Livermore House, view east. B. Lamprecht

Livermore House, Ralph Rapson, 1968, University Grove, MN. View northeast. B Lamprecht

We can see that dissembled series of volumes at the Community Facilities Planners Complex in South Pasadena, Smith and Williams, 1958. Instead of designing one monolithic structure housing offices, the architects created four intimate interlocking one- and two-story buildings interwoven with outdoor landscaped “rooms” by landscape Architects (Garrett) Eckbo, Dean, Austin and Williams:

Community Facilities Planners Complex, Smith and Williams, 1958. Photo by Barbara Lamprecht

Or we can see the idea of the dissembled volume, with far more opportunities to reach into the landscape and to avail the building of sunlight and air in the recently restored Zonnestraal Sanatorium [for tuberculosis], Jan Duiker, 1931, in Hilversum, Holland. I saw it in 2009 when the utterly abandoned buildings of glass and concrete were being restored, but Raymond Neutra, RJN’s son, photographed it quite recently in its newly restored glory:

Zonnestraal Sanatorium, Jan Duiker, 1931, Hilversum, the Netherlands. Photo by Raymond Neutra.

On the other side of the ocean, especially in Germany, Austria and Holland, Wright’s 1911 watershed Wasmuth Portfolio of drawings, preceded by the March 1908 issue of Architectural Record, which published Wright drawings and photographs, was enormously influential in breaking the box, certainly for Rudolf M. Schindler (1887 – 1953), and Neutra. The other major influence was the de Stijl art movement founded in 1917 in Amsterdam. De Stijl, which comes from stile, or post, was based on sources including the ideas of Dutch mathematician M. H. J. Schoenmaekers (1875 – 1944); the architectural writings, drawings, and projects of Wright and Hendrik Berlage (1856 – 1934); and the religious philosophy of Theosophy. De Stijl held a similar understanding of “space” as did the Theosophists – that is, the “underlying and absolute All,” and the primary substance of Modern architecture. This was a view held by Schindler, who famously wrote “the most important building material of the 20^thcentury is space itself”).

Rhythms of a Russian Dance, Theo van Doesburg, 1918. Source: Freebase.

This primacy of space leads to the third component of Modernist boxes, which is the concept of the flowing, uninterrupted space, especially demonstrated by the paintings of Bauhaus masters Klee, Kandinsky, Theo van Doesburg, and Piet Mondrian. Van Doesburg and Mondrian’s abstractions of nature, music, and city life were rendered in color, shapes, and straight lines of different lengths that did not intersect, which underscored the idea of a space free to move, especially diagonally, and to be everywhere simultaneously, a posture assumed by Modern architecture. Two decades before Wright, the great 19^th century architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White introduced flowing space in the firm’s “radical spatial reconception of the domestic interior, in their huge, sweeping Shingle Style houses typically sited on the shores of the American East Coast,” as critic Martin Filler has pointed out. This reconception, based on centuries-old Japanese vernacular architecture,  was a “breathtaking expansiveness quite the opposite of typically compartmentalized Victorian residences, in which every room was a veritable room unto itself.”[6] (It should be added that the Victorians and turn-of-the-century arbiters of design mediated space very precisely to regulate social relationships, especially gender, status, and age. The McKim, Mead, and White work was therefore more radical in disorienting these often rigid spatial relationships.) The new, voluptuous sense of space in their work was in turn organized and disciplined by light wooden grilles above the openings.[7] And almost a half century before McKim, Mead and White, Catherine Beecher Stowe’s floor plan for the new American House, published in her Treatise on Domestic Economy, 1841, is riveting in opening up the ground floor to be altogether more flexible and functional, somewhat in the spirit of the Rietveld-Schröder House in Utrecht, Gerrit Rietveld, 1924, with its sliding and movable parts. However, this new, exhilarating sense of spaciousness in this early McKim, Mead and White work could not be completed, i.e. could not be realized, without the second, critical addition of “broad expanses of multipaned windows, often on two sides of the room, which in many cases gave onto the firm’s signature enveloping verandas” [just as the glass walls of the Taylor House opens to the terrace, as do thousands of walls in pedigreed and in millions of lesser status houses]. The fourth factor in facilitating the dissemblage of the box is the denial of a static frontal elevation; the denial of single-point perspective and the vanishing point and the rise of the diagonal. In a pinwheel plan, as seen in Mies’s Brick Country Villa, 1924, or Neutra’s Kaufmann Desert House, 1946, space immediately moves. It is no longer shepherded along in straight lines, halted or rigidly constrained. No longer static, space can move beyond hierarchy, diagonally or back and forth.

Brick Country Villa, Mies van der Rohe, 1924

Another way to consider the emergence of the diagonal is the right angle, where two straight perpendicular lines converge. The hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is implied. With glass walls that meet at right angles (e.g., at the corners of walls) that diagonal “hypotenuse” view is realized. One can see this in the sweeping glass corners of Neutra’s early employer, architect Erich Mendelsohn, in his commercial work, especially the Berliner Tageblatt building (1923), which Neutra worked on. One can easily also see at least the desire for a diagonal view in the windows aligned with corners in Arts and Crafts architecture of the early 20^thcentury. Obviously, we can see that idea of the implicit diagonal and free space in plan here in the Taylor House. But the free space is controlled. For example, the longitudinal axis on the east, private side of the house, is glassed at both ends as a strong linear anchor.

Taylor House, longitudinal axis. View south. Photo by barbara lamprecht

This ordered, traditional strategy provides a sweeping view through the entire length of the house and out of it, a very “Julius” moment.[8] Dancing against that axis are dynamic diagonal views and paths. In the language of environmental psychology, Neutra proffers “affordances,” or opportunities, to move axially or diagonally within this space, movement that in turn extends to the landscape and to the “natural” ornament of plantings, leaves, rough bark, clouds, which both animate the space and orient our visual and neural systems to scale and place. That, ultimately, is the point: physical and emotional well-being. If a building goes beyond its footprint in the precise way that Neutra designed, it allows the inhabitant, at a very primal level, to feel more secure, more connected to place, and assured of what is happening in the area beyond the walls. That ancient assurance, of the ability to apprise our environment, allows us to defend ourselves if necessary, but also provides us the affordance, the opportunity, to concentrate on other things that require more intellectual work, more neural activity.                            Taylor House. Floor Plan w/ longitudinal and diagonal axes. Image barbara lamprecht

In this very rectilinear box, you can see specific trajectories for diagonal movement in the path from the carport south to the living area, a private path, and then to the outdoors; or from the front door west to the living area and then to the outdoors. In Neutra’s Ward House, 1939, the relationship between the fireplace, glass wall, and outdoor space speaks directly to the blurring of the boundary between indoors and outdoors. Neutra doesn’t locate the fireplace in the standard “hearth” location, centered on a wall, where the descendants of hairy humans gather round, well protected from nature. No, he does something that would be labeled crazy anywhere a real winter exists. Neutra’s gesture proclaims not only a benevolent climate — this is Southern California, could be East Africa, this fireplace announces — but also embraces the outdoors and the natural landscape as an equal partner in the act of dwelling, even at night. The brickwork is even painted white, just as the exterior stucco is, drawing the outdoors into the living room. Many other Neutra houses follow this pattern — including the Taylor House, in which the fireplace floats parallel to and a meter or so away from east window wall and the threatened Kronish House, 1955, in Beverly Hills:

The Ward House, Richard Neutra, Los Angeles, 1939. Photo by Julius Shulman. Print location: University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Special Collections. Julius Shulman images now owned by Getty Research Institute. Low-res scan source: Richard Neutra - Complete Works by Barbara Lamprecht.

The Kronish House, Richard Neutra, Beverly Hills, 1955. Fireplace. View west. Photo by Julius Shulman and used courtesy of Dion Neutra.

For Neutra, the Taylor House is no less organic for its precise right-angles. That is, “organic” in the sense of the complex functional feedback and interaction of parts characteristic of living “organisms.” The building of inorganic materials was nonetheless holistic. The relationship between naturalscape and builtscape created a “thrilling dialectic,” in Neutra’s words. Most of us inhabit boxes, or decorated sheds, as architect/authors/urban planners Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown and Steven Izenour would say, some sheds and boxes more opaque than others.[9] If we think about inhabiting a box, they can be closed, in which case from inside we would have no sense of anything beyond the walls, unless we are inhabit a house with the aforementioned atrium. In the 19^th century, not only did large plate glass not exist, but Nature was still too volatile to be trusted all the time, although theorist/architects such as Andrew Jackson Downing extolled the virtues of country living in his cottage designs. In lieu of woodland living, by and large out of reach for an increasingly industrialized society, the Victorians dragged the outdoors in, taming it with dried, dead bits of nature stuck in vases or covering their walls with patterns of the outdoors. Nature was other, and was only invited indoors when it behaved properly.[10] (Simultaneously, restorative garden cemeteries and public parks, newly available to the working and middle classes, became popular as appropriate venues for outdoor activities, a reaction to the Industrial Revolution that fouled nature and blackened the lungs of city dwellers and factory workers.) Nature was not the only thing a closed box could control. Privacy was another, especially if the world beyond the walls was increasingly incoherent. As the famous Viennese architect, iconoclast, and critic Adolf Loos declared, “The building should be dumb outside …” His early 20th century houses — his white boxes — are closed not because nature is the problem but because people are. His exterior walls embodied hostility and mistrust to a different “other,” e.g., the hypocrisies of the Hapsburg Empire and the Viennese public. Ironically, the Industrial Revolution also led to the perfection of manufacturing large-span plate glass. No longer a luxury, huge openings could frame views and permit abundant exposure to light, sun and nature. Like sanitoria, such access to the outdoors confounded dark dank spaces, bacteria, and killer airborne disease. Not long after my lecture I read a recent New York Review of Books article that startled me both in timing and in content. It noted that “organisms have skin, but their total environments do not. It is by no means clear how to delineate the effective environment of an organism.”[11] The author, geneticist Richard Lewontin, even included an old children’s song:

… or not, if you’re a house with a lot of glass. Glass makes opaque skin a transparent membrane. A close friend of the owner of the Taylor House, the late sculptor/artist Gordon Matta Clark, would take a saw to create large holes in opaque boxes to expose us, if jaggedly, to the inner workings, the secrets opacity hides.) We don’t need a blowtorch or Sawzall with glass. It is a multivalent phenomenon. Looking into a glass house makes one a voyeur. To be inside such a house looking out has no such predatory connotation but rather is a wholesome exercise. Glass is the means or extending one’s self beyond the building envelope into nature, just as the building itself is having “an effect beyond its four walls.” In Modernism’s hands, glass afforded both access to nature and privacy, as the Taylor House demonstrates with its opaque street facade and its utter openness to nature for its inhabitants. The house is indeed a free-standing rectangular box of 1,350 square feet, but as a work of architecture it demonstrates how the act of perception can be altered to create feelings of expansion, or what the environmental psychologists Neutra followed so closely would call “prospect,” meaning looking out above your surroundings from a commanding position … afforded by glass walls. In contrast, the kitchen and the bedroom/dressing area, with their walls of warm mahogany, create the counterweight to prospect in the quality called “refuge,” or shelter, or what Gaston Bachelard called the cave. Both prospect and refuge are necessary to us.  Neutra delivered a small space that feels expansive, not cramped, because it has an effect beyond its four walls. As he often said, his goal with small houses was to “stretch space” through another set of tools, Gestalt aesthetics, where dark and light paint were enlisted on behalf of his goal of prospect and refuge. But why a box? Why not curves, aren’t they more organic? Rectilinearity is as old as the Roman axis of cardo maximus and decumanus maxima, the north-south and east-west axis, respectively. Legend has it that Roman seers had to first examine the entrails of beasts in areas where a Roman city or military outpost was contemplated. This may sound superstitious but in fact is quite pragmatic. Bright, fat entrails meant food and water were nearby, portending a prosperous economy. And practically, standardized patterns for stone, wood, and metal are easier to use in design and in construction, and last longer than sun-dried bricks or mud. Neutra’s architecture is to a degree standardized. It acknowledged and acquiesced to Western building traditions, but his appreciation for the straight line and right angle (which in fact was sometimes tempered by a radiused curve, seen in some early interiors) goes deeper than that. He was always searching for reasons for why things should be a certain way; his architecture always reveals itself as a profoundly intuitive art that was grounded in science. The apparently quite banal Los Angeles County Hall of Records, designed by Neutra and his erstwhile partner Robert Alexander and completed in 1961, comes to mind. A T-shaped building anchoring the north end of the city’s civic plaza, the south-facing stem of the T is a massive closed box devoted to the storage of paper records, today a consummate symbol of an outdated paradigm. But for the rest of the T, occupied by hundreds of civil servants, planners, clerks, and policy makers, among other consultants Neutra hired a “kinetic ophthalmologist” to assist the design team in understanding how tracking the sunlight and changes in daylight over the day could ultimately be correlated to worker productivity and well-being. (If I hadn’t read the phrase and the consultant’s name, I wouldn’t have believed there was such a profession, but Neutra managed to find one – or upgrade a regular opthamologist — to sway politicians.) Calibrated exposure to the outdoors was necessary for the building to act organically and to promote human health, emotional and/or physical. “Rectangularity, the intersection of the plumb and the level, is a biological fact,” Neutra said. “We have a wonderfully acute sense for it in the vestibulum of our inner ear where resides our precious sense of equilibrium. The plumb shows us precisely the direction of the pull of gravity and its relation to the water level of the horizon with which it, and the vertical, intersect in a crisp sharp emotionally satisfying right angle. Piet Mondrian was no false saint. A sense for it [rectilinearity] has truly been grown into us by creation.” Thus, Neutra makes no apologies for the straight line, which he often extended into the natural landscape along with his famous “spider legs” to connect landscape to building. Mies didn’t apologize either, and one recalls that he appropriated the thinking of the great 19th century German architect, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who considered architecture as an abstraction of nature. In the Taylor House, the floor-to-ceiling wood storage cabinets and closets are largely massed in the core of the building, allowing, even in comparison to many of his houses, many expanses of floor to ceiling glass. And I don’t think in any other house will you feel as liberated without abandoning the feeling of shelter if you want or need it. There are very few doors to regulate privacy, a sensual editing decision, at first glance, for this older couple whose children were grown and gone. But privacy is nonetheless there, rendered spatially rather than through the use of doors. The house also faces, primarily, east-west, usually an architectural no-no. But that brings us to the trees, and to the artistic way that Neutra sited this building: I can’t imagine a more richly textured dialectic, between the angles and curves and kinks of the oak trees, that is, the squirrels’ thoroughfare, and the rhythm of the square silver-painted posts and transparent glass? Think about it: in the VDL Research House II, Neutra objected to his son Dion’s inclusion of the open-tread diagonal staircase from the upper floor to the rooftop penthouse. Here in the Taylor House, the diagonals are present but in their natural form, as part of the tree, not part of the house. The only place that is curved is near the front door, where nature slips under the glass as a small, curved pond (once water, now Japanese river stones) that compresses a Roberto Burle Marx garden into a slight and economical gesture ….

The description of the Taylor House from Richard Neutra – Complete Works (Taschen 2000):

The narrow rectangle lies on an equally narrow strip of a site sits on “a really unapproachable piece of land at the end of a dead-end street” Neutra wrote.  Surrounded by oaks, the small house is spacious, highly organized, easy-going. No attitude. What looks to be a judicious use of lines and planes unfolds into a complex integration of events that knit the house together seamlessly and created the context for dwelling. The Taylors’ children were grown. This was the couple’s pied-a-terre. In the little house, all the standard Neutra moves are here but compressed, as though the neatly rendered small stroke works just as well as the grand gesture. In plan, the private path starts from the carport to the northwest, leads to the kitchen and opens out to either an outdoor terrace on the northeast, to the dining/sitting area, or through an opening to the “book” end of the living room.  It continues flowing diagonally past this central space with its east floor-to-ceiling glass wall. The transition to the master suite begins with the fireplace. Here the path forks, either to the smaller bedroom and bath on the southwest or the master bedroom at the southeast corner.  In classic Neutra language, the over-scaled fireplace is pulled away from the window wall and placed perpendicular to it. By cantilevering it and enlarging the hearth, Neutra conferred its sense of weightlessness; he added texture by using both Roman and common red brick around a plaster firebox. Beyond the fireplace, the core of bathrooms, floor-to-ceiling cabinetry and the dressing area creates privacy for the master suite. There are few doors in the house, supplanted by other full-height mahogany built-in cabinetry throughout the entire house. Other small gestures occur at the front door (Neutra typically separated public and private access, which usually connected to the kitchen) where a simple dark burlap panel compresses space and prolongs the delay in seeing the entire living room’s wall of glass and, typically, a squirrel or two sliding and darting along the big oak branches beyond.  The dwelling stands above fairly dense suburbia, and yet once inside, privacy and a stunning up-close panorama of the oaks as well as the San Fernando Valley confer instant serenity. The master bath adds a special feature, making it feel like a rustic Japanese bath. Here one glass wall faces a sunken bathtub. One could easily rub noses with a coyote or deer drifting who inhabit the low Los Angeles mountains all around.

Glass is the membrane separating nature alert but at ease beyond the glass, observing nature alert but at ease inside the glass. View east. Photo by John Solomon.

In other words, preservation morphed into a four-headed monster: a planning tool, a design review tool, a development tool and a tool to preserve genuinely valuable old neighborhoods and buildings. Today decisions about managing urban development are frequently framed as decisions about what and what not to preserve, with little sense of how those decisions affect the surrounding neighborhood.

Worse, these decisions are mostly left to the whims of overly empowered preservation boards, staffed by amateurs casting their nets too widely and indiscriminately. And too many buildings are preserved not because of their historic value or aesthetic significance, but because of political or economic deal-making.

While Koolhaus/OMA’s exhibition indicated that preservation encourages a lack of authenticity in favor of a sanitized (mostly white) past, Goldhagen takes aim at preservationists as narrow-minded amateurs with no sense of how local actions are affecting a wider community. Briefly, my experience when acting as a historic preservation specialist and a professional architectural historian, is quite the opposite. First, we are professionals who must be qualified to assess and analyze cultural resources in a variety of ways: why is a landscape, building, or site worth preserving? Is it because of the designer, because someone famous did something significant here, or because this place represents some broad cultural purpose? Is this the only place like it, or are there hundreds like it? Once we answer that, which can be an amazing adventure in research, our job is to distill that understanding in language that is rational, progresses logically and if need be, to stand up in court. Second, the range of preservation is changing, deliberately and methodically reaching out to minorities and wider definitions of what is valuable to a community: Maravilla Handball Court in East L.A.; China Alley in Ventura, John and Alice Coltrane’s house on Long Island may be as important to preserve as a thoroughbred example of the International Style. Third, the boards I deal with are populated with both ‘amateurs’ — if you mean local members of a community who care enough about their surroundings to show up for long, unpaid meetings– and architects, some of whom are I would vouchsafe are just as sensitive, creative, irreverent and dynamic as the Koolhauses of the world. Preservation boards need ‘amateurs’ because what we as environmental consultants do needs to be transparent to a community and population, and because amateurs force professionals to communicate in language that is forthright and not elitist: like a democracy, it’s all about checks and balances. Fourth, the regulations of preservation are far more flexible and collaborative than most unversed in these regulations may be aware. Fifth, the concept of ‘authenticity’ is one we in the profession think about and agonize over all the time.

Take mid-century Modern. I for one am bemused when Formica, that emblem of postwar optimism that spoke to the “good” in plastics and the chutzpah of creating radical architecture with humble, inexpensive materials, is removed as oh-so-tacky, disappearing into the blender of homogenized contemporary good taste: Off-white engineered quartz and high-end woods replace the Formica and paint-grade wood, and that’s just the beginning of the sanitizing blade in some of the houses whose interiors are gutted. I love Duravit fixtures and Fleetwood or Metal Window Corps. windows as well as the next person, but does everything have to look like a Dwell feature? Why not acknowledge the staying power of Formica (I can’t believe I’m arguing for plastic meant to look like walnut, that moment in The Graduate) or build a new house and riddle it with as much good taste as much as you like? As one veteran of World War II, USC-trained Lyman Ennis, buddy of Connie Buff, Cal Straub, Don Hensman, told me not long before he died, “We had just won a war. How difficult could it be to build a house?” That kind of optimism, embodied by the $10-per-square-foot post-and-beam pre-Title 24 and seismic requirements that would weigh down the breathtakingly slender but elastic wood framing … that peculiar optimism is long gone, replaced by irony, and maybe the paralyzing self-conscious anxiety of getting it right.. perhaps that is why we both worship mid-century and clean it up, make it pretty, making it cool.  There are seven terms that speak to a property’s integrity, or authenticity: location, design, workmanship, association, feeling, setting and materials. Feeling, especially, is subjective and has to be thoughtfully, carefully, thought through because though touchy-feely at first glance, it is also a technical term. What kind of feeling does a property convey? Does it feel authentic, or does it feel wrong, somehow, too perfect, all its authenticity banished? Does that example of postwar architecture convey that feeling of optimism … through, for example, preserving that Formica?

And if something does need to change to meet 21st century needs, again, my experience is that regulations do have oxygen, and the process of deciding what can be jettisoned or altered can be collaborative and thoughtful, eliciting great philosophical discussions and imaginative moves. If you visit the ultra-famous Eames House, apart from how remarkable it is, what also strikes me, unexpectedly, is the sense of humility and simplicity that percolates through a construct that feels an awful lot like joy. And what contributes to that feeling of humility leads us back to analyzing materials, workmanship, and design, and how they work in concert to convey that feeling.

I see the problem not with amateur status of boards ill-equipped to judge. Rather, I see the problem far earlier in the process. A client hires an architect to do X, who does so, and along the way each invests the other with the emerging deliverable, a project, which increasingly gets hard-lined, reified, and paid for. This is then presented as a fait accompli to a board. While the architects are working and the developers are running around dealing with entitlements and investors, someone remembers that the area where the new project will be located has to be evaluated to see whether any cultural resources might be affected, e.g. demolished or impacted in some deleterious way. Because all this is happening in parallel but with no collaboration, by the time it reaches a review board, either a planning board or a citizens’ review board, everyone involved with the project has a significant amount of expertise, time and money invested in a piece of knowledge or a vision.  Lines get drawn, and everyone runs around being shocked, shocked, that A didn’t know that the context had to be addressed, and B can’t embrace a truly great project, etc., etc. Everyone runs around with bandaids, heels dig in, more time and money is spent, and finally, when the project gets built, it is watered down because the changes are superficial and last minute, no one’s happy, and still the public is shocked, shocked, that X-1 or -2 got built, how could “they (and by this point everyone is up for blame: architects, preservationists, historians, developers, planners) get away with this?”

What is missing is a brief discussion at the beginning of the project, in which a short report indicates there may be some historic resources in the area. If the resource is a building, is there a way to exploit existing proportions, materials, rhythms, datum lines, landscape or plantings, other subtle relationships that might inform an addition or renovation? … tasks that architects often impose on themselves even with a blank canvas, as any student who had to use the lessons of D’Arcy Thompson’s “On Growth and Form,” Edmund Husserl’s lessons in seeing familiar things in new ways, or Ernst Haeckel’s revelations on natural forms. (Thompson was a favorite assignment in the late 19th century at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, affiliated with the École, where renowned Classicists such as Richard Hunt and Charles McKim trained as well as brilliant iconoclasts Louis Sullivan and Henry Hobson Richardson; Thompson is au courant today in schools like the Southern California Institute of Architecture, aka Sci-Arc, and Woodbury University in Burbank, both influential institutions in architectural education.)

In my opinion, preservation preserves diversity. It doesn’t necessarily eliminate change or growth and rarely can stop demolition if that is what a community finally determines it wants, issuing a “Statement of Overriding Concerns” after the transparent process of evaluation and comment. Preservation is also a question of scale: a community left to developers is a promise of slick, branded, ultimately flaccid homogeneity, diminishing our sense of a rich, colorful, diverse history with a thinner historical fabric in which the remaining players have, unfairly, more symbolic work to do, and maybe more than they were ever intended to bear. Or it means leaving the Formica-that-will-not-die in place.

One of Neutra's Zehlendorf houses, 1923. Photo by bml.

The quartet of small houses Richard Neutra designed in 1922 are located on Onkel Tom Strasse in Zehlendorf, a quiet, leafy, well-to-do Berlin suburb. Known as the Adolf Sommerfeld Residences, they were named after the rather eccentric developer who built them. (Sommerfeld proposed, and Neutra drew, a giant revolving turntable with three partitions, containing, for example, a piano in one section; a dining room table with places already set in a second; and a sitting area in the third. The massive mechanism, smack in the middle of the really-not-so-big living room, was a decidedly novel way to address one of early Modernism’s eternal quests: making space work harder for everyman. The more predictable approach to reconfiguring space would be sliding walls or curtains, seen in any number of German and Dutch experiments such as the Rietveld-Schröder House, Utrecht, 1924. On Onkel Tom Strasse, one turntable actually got built; alas, it is no more but the mechanism below the floor may be.)

Another Zehlendorf house, Neutra, 1923. Photo by bml.

Neutra designed these compact dwellings while his employer, Erich Mendelsohn, was working in Palestine. The four exemplify how Neutra could animate a potentially stolid, solid, white cube: a type pretty much the antithesis of his later command in completely eliminating a “box” in favour of exquisitely proportioned planes of glass, metal, stone, or stucco, all sliding past each other or into the landscape in a complex balance of asymmetry. The Zehlendorf boxes have deep punctures of solid and void befitting these sturdy houses. But even here you can see some of the gestures that would become much more emphatic in Neutra’s later work, such as elongating planes or extending a plane to wrap around a corner to create a balcony, something similar, if more tentative, than the jutting momentum of the Lovell Health House pool.

No, it’s what’s inside these houses that took my breath away and off my white-walled perch. Rooms are defined by hues so rich one feels saturated in color even after one leaves and steps back into the sunlight, like a musical chord that keeps resonating. And in contrast to his later deployment of a single plane of a color or material that continues from the inside to the outside, passing through glass to extinguish the boundary between exterior and interior, here in Zehlendorf the colors define space as discreet containers, as filled volumes, not as planes.

The foyer, leading to the blue living room. Photo by bml.

Upstairs in one of the Zehlendorf houses.

The ground floor bathroom. Photo by bml.

The living room. Photo by bml.

His use of color here reminds me of Le Corbusier’s Color Keys or, especially, Bruno Taut’s Berlin housing, beginning with his “Paint Box Estates” aka Falkenberg Housing, 1912.[1] Taut’s later manifesto of 1919 defends color without apologies, and just as capable as white in combating “the dirty grey” of houses:

“We do not want to build any more joyless houses, or see them built… Colour is not expensive like moulded decorations and sculptures, but colour means a joyful existence. As it can be provided with limited resources, we should, in the present time of need, particularly urge its use on all buildings that must now be constructed. We categorically denounce the absence of colour even if the house is in the midst of nature. There are not only the lush landscapes of spring and summer, but also the snow-covered scenes of winter, which cry out for colour. Let blue, red, yellow, green, black and white radiate in crisp, bright shades to replace the dirty grey of houses.”[2] 

As Peter Davey has pointed out, “Taut believed that color was also necessary because ‘it was a social duty of the architect to offer the inhabitants of social housing schemes an identification with their relatively modest living environment through the use of colour.’ Thus, he was calling for color for two reasons: one, for its ability to precipitate an emotion, in this case joy, and the second because color was a superb way in a chaotic, war-torn environment to weld emotional connections to the environment.”

Neutra would go on to dedicate his life to calibrating the psychological and physical, the emotional and the perceptual, in his architecture. He discussed color in Survival through Design in the chapter, “Light and Color Experience in Static Interiors”:

“The strong vivid colors in nature, like those of an impressive evening sky, would become hard to bear if viewed indefinitely; here the factor of fatigue appears operative. Undoubtedly, steady uniformity needs to be offset – just as seasonal change is an important element in our enjoyment of nature … The brightest reds and yellows in nature are not commonly found over extensive areas, or, if they are, they do not appear for prolonged periods of time.”

He then went on to discuss “bright xanthophyll,” that colors autumn foliage; the role of “red hemoglobin” in “hunting, war slaughter, and bloody murder,” and the “great exception,” chlorophyll: “Through countless millions of years animal and human retinas have been conditioned to tolerate immense expanses of green. Eyes have grown to relax in full view of them. A similar prevalence of bright yellow or red would indeed be unbearable.”

As far as I know, Neutra never again used color so dramatically or to define volumes as he did in Zehlendorf, but rather more in the spirt of what he advocated in Survival. More typically, he employed white and a deep, cold brown, a color so typically seen in his later work that I call the paint “Neutra brown,” when he wanted spaces to project (white) or recede (brown), a basic technique of Gestalt aesthetics. There is a fine story Dr. Stuart Bailey told me once about consulting Neutra on his Pacific Palisades home, Case Study House #20, 1946. The young Dr. Bailey was a dentist, who, one assumes, appreciated good light to see detail. He asked Neutra if the closet interiors could be painted white, to see things better, rather than dark. Seems a reasonable request. “Mr. Bailey, “ Neutra said sternly, “The closets must recede. If you paint them white, I will remove my name from the project.” The closets stayed dark. (Neutra also threatened to commit “public suicide” if trees were removed from a school property. The trees housed birds, which pooped on faculty cars. Neutra won that one, too.)

But the color that far and away most recalls Neutra is silver, no matter the decade, seen especially on wood trim such as window sills, posts, or on steel windows. Paint protected either material, of course, but silver, of all the colors, “dematerialized” these elements and dispersed light.[3] If glass technology couldn’t yet deliver the large spans of glass so prevalent in early and mid-century post-and-beam architecture, then the requisite framing members of smaller expanses of glass could best be visually suppressed by using silver; such suppression would aid the human eye to connect to the landscape beyond with as little impediment as possible. Light and space, whether considered mystically or scientifically, were vital concepts in the religious philosophy Theosophy and to Dutch Functionalist architects such as Leendert Cornelius van der Vlugt, principal architect of the famous Van Nelle Factory, 1929, and of the equally famous house he designed as principal in Brinkman and Van der Vlugt for Cornelius van der Leeuw, a rich industrialist, Theosophist, and rigorous Modernist who commissioned the light-filled factory, which, beyond mysticism, pragmatically encouraged worker safety and productivity.

Van Nelle Factory, Rotterdam, 1929. Leendert Van der Vlugt and Johannes Brinkman for Cornelius van der Leeuw. Photo by bml.

His Rotterdam house, with its exterior white walls and silver trim (with plenty of color inside), faces the lake at Kraslinge Plas, just as the Neutra family home, the white-and-silver VDL Research House I, 1932, and II, 1966, designed by Dion and Richard Neutra, face the Silverlake Reservoir in Los Angeles. Neutra named his own house after Van der Leeuw because he loaned the architect $3,000 to build his own house.[4]

Neutra often left colors for a wall or two up to the choice of his clients. In the Olan and Aida Hafley House in Long Beach, the clients chose a salmon and persimmon for the two walls of the master bedroom … but on the north wall, below the full-width band of casement and fixed windows, was Neutra brown while the ceiling was white. The unchanging, stable brown (also used in the closets, to make them recede) and the white play Renaissance to the colors’ Baroque.

South salmon (left) and west, persimmon, Olan and Aida Hafley House, 1953. Photo by b.lamprecht

The original color, Olan and Aida Hafley House, Long Beach, 1953. Photo by barbara lamprecht

In the Taylor House, Glendale, 1964, the walls of the bathroom were beautiful gradations of darker blue offsetting lighter yellow green, a precise color scheme that project architect John Blanton created after much trial and error, based on the client’s general wish for blue and green in the two bathrooms. While the colors in the bathroom are original, the current owner replaced the tile in each, with equally beautiful results. In the master bathroom, one can slide the glass wall away and commune directly with the groundcover’s dark, glossy greens and the rough bark of the oak trees just outside of the sunken shower/tub … talk about sensual.

The Maurice and Marceil Taylor House, master bath. Photo by bml.

Taylor House, master bath. Photo by bml.

In another home, and I honestly forget which one, Neutra was led to a then-unpainted bedroom wall by the little daughter of his clients.  It was to be her room. “What color would you like?” he asked, looking down at her and her turquoise snow jacket (the ones many little girls wore in the ‘50s and ‘60s, usually with hoods trimmed with fake white fur.) “Would you like the wall that color?” She was delighted.

In the Pescher Villa, Wuppertal, Germany, 1968, the bright yellow tile in a bathroom lifts one’s spirits on an overcast day. Outside, the entrance to the house would be soberly commanding without the red-painted steel work but it wouldn’t be lively. Here the color’s task is to knit the white and “Neutra brown” stucco planes, glass, and grauwache sandstone walls into a crisp, harmonious composition.

The Guenther Pescher Villa bathroom. Wuppertal, Germany, 1968. Photo by bml.

Pescher Villa bathroom. Photo by bml.

Pescher Villa bathroom. Photo by bml.

Mr. Guenther Pescher with his favorite statue. Photo by bml.

Mr. Pescher at home. Photo by bml.

In an undated, one-page, typed paper titled A Colorless Building Or Sculpture Is An Abstraction Which Was Not Known To Early Man And Particularly Not The Greeks, Neutra wrote this on color:

Color was – as in nature – a part of form, formal solution, and formal proportion. Color was no afterthought or afterchoice. It was – as it is in the reality of physiological and psychosomatic experiencing – “part and parcel.” I saw in Agrigentum[5] a temple with the triglyph and metope-frieze lacking, and it looked in better proportion to the columns, than with the frieze that had been spared on the other front of the ruin. Suddenly it dawned on me that I had – on the other side – been looking at a colorless remnant. No more were the red triglyphs between the blue “holes” of the metope against which the reliefs had been eliminated. All proportions had changed!”

Of course, it was actually the great German architect and theorist, Gottfried Semper, who drew attention to the Greeks’ use of color in temples. Pigment and paint could become a “bodiless coating” that permitted a dematerialized architecture of pure form, Semper’s highest ideal, as scholar Harry Mallgrave has pointed in his biography, Gottfried Semper: Architect of the 19th Century.

Color, whether in architecture or nature is a powerful tool to alter perception and mood, as any hospital designer, artist, graphic designer, etc. etc. can attest. It is an endless topic. When Neutra wrote about color and eye fatigue over half a century ago, it was a different world than our modern urban paradigm today, in which visual jinglejangle is unrelenting. Perhaps such stimuli will become our own chlorophyll, given some thousands of years.

In 2010, I had the privilege of writing the successful nomination for listing the Mello House, 1957, in the National Register of Historic Places.

I was then asked by the owner to apply for the Mills Act, as the family trust wished to sell the home with permanent safeguards. Under a Mills Act contract, the house was assured its continuity and restorative measures, and the new owners were assured of significant savings in property taxes. The house was designed by Calvin Straub just as Buff, Straub and Hensman was establishing itself as one of the most influential postwar American firms and known for its post-and-beam dwellings beautifully integrated into their settings.

We were successful, and now this powerful incentive for buyers is in place. The house recently sold for approximately 1.6 million, a low price.

1960 photograph, courtesy of the Mello Family Trust; 2010, by barbara lamprecht