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.

His most famous photo is probably Case Study House #22 (below).

And also this image of The Kaufmann House by architect Richard Neutra.

However photographer Steven Klein paid homage to Shulman by recreating his Case Study House #21 with Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt in 2005.

Some other Shulman photographs.

Julius Shulman. Too cool for school.

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.

I found the most awesome book today.  Needless to say, it is on it’s way!  I am super excited to get it and look thru it over and over.   Who wouldn’t want to sit in that chair and read a book?  Bliss.

In the book Author Deborah K Dietsch beautifully illustrates the revolutionary design by such amazing architects as Albert Frey, Mies, Neutra, and more.   She has filled the book with photographs of some of the United States’ most famous mid-century houses, and has also included amazing furniture and art classics.

Back in December, I was kicking around Heath Ceramics on Beverly and my heart skipped a beat. There in the back corner was a crate full of prototypes for Heath Ceramic House Numbers—in both Neutra and Eames number fonts (below photo via heathceramics.com):

I dug and I dug until I found our house numbers, snatching up the very last numero “2.” And then I wrapped up the tiles and put them under the Christmas tree for my husband. We are Heath fanatics, and I think I’ve mentioned before that our dishes inspired much of the color palette for the rest of the house—inside and out:

When he unwrapped the numbers on Christmas Eve, we didn’t know when we would be restuccoing our house but we were both seriously excited about putting these up when we did. And finally, just last week, we finished the stucco and the new trim. But best of all, we mounted the new numbers right into the stucco. Take a look at what they replaced:

The numbers, which are a collaboration between Heath Ceramics and House Industries, will be available for sale starting June 1 at Heath Ceramics. Here’s a look at the Eames as well (via heathceramics.com):

Architects have clients and clients set the creative parameters for a project. But when an architect is his own client, all rules and artistic limitations disappear and the result is the ultimate self portrait.

Home is where the heart of an architect can fully and completely be expressed. We take a look into the hearts of six of the most renowned modern architects of our time – the homes built and inhabited by Aalto, Eames, Gehry, Neutra, Niemeyer and Lloyd Wright.

Alvar Aalto - The Finnish architect and designer Alvar Aalto built his home (above and below) in Helsinki in 1936. It is now a museum and open to the public. If you don’t recognize Aalto by his name or his buildings, you might know his furniture or glassware designs.

Charles and Ray Eames – Case Study #8 (above and below) was built in 1949 and is located in Pacific Palisades, California. In 1948, the Eames’ were commissioned to design and build an inexpensive and efficient home as part of the Case Study Housing program. Case Study #8 is considered one of the first “pre-fab” buildings and is open to public tours through the Eames Foundation.

Frank O. Gehry – Do you know the Guggenheim in Bilbao or the Disney Music Hall in Los Angeles? Yes, Gehry is that guy. In 1978, he built his Santa Monica, California home (above and below) in all its barbed wire, corrugated steel and asymmetrical glory. It caused quite a stir with the neighbors who were not accustomed to Gehry’s avant-garde sensibility.

Richard Neutra – In 1963 a fire destroyed Richard Neutra’s Silverlake, California home (image above) that he designed and built in 1932. The Austrian-born architect’s redesign, the VDL Research House II (image below), is a close interpretation of the first, with its bands of vertical glass windows and alternating horizontal planes of steel and white stucco.

Oscar Niemeyer – The Brazilian architect built his Casa Das Canoas (image above and below) in 1953 in Rio de Janeiro. Niemeyer is known for his revolutionary use of reinforced concrete and the curvaceous, sculptural quality of his buildings. His own home is no exception.

Frank Lloyd Wright – The American architect built his first home in Oak Park, Illinois (image above) in 1889, where he and his family lived while he developed his practice and the “Prairie Style” of architecture. But Lloyd Wright’s favorite residence was his masterpiece, Taliesin West (top image and image below), built in 1937 in Scottsdale, Arizona. It seems to sprout from the desert and is typical of the organic style architecture that the architect promoted in his later years.

Images: Alvar Aalto Foundation, DesignCrave, ArchDaily, Archined, Design You Trust, TheCoolist, Reference Library, Wikipedia, Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.

Ceramics celebrating the unique number fonts of two Modernist masters.

Heath Ceramics and type foundry House Industries have joined forces and created these stunning clay tiles ($45 each), in honor of the design genius and number fonts of Neutra (as in, Richard) and Eames (as in, Charles and Ray). Announce your house address with the simple, svelte Neutra numbers (image above) or the round and robust Eames font (image below).

According to Heath, “…each tile skillfully combines precision with craft in a timeless tribute to classic California aesthetic.” Classic is right, as well as stylish and made with care in Heath’s Sausalito, California factory. Available in late Spring from Heath Ceramics.

Look for Lustables daily at EcoSalon. 100% gorgeous green finds, and never sponsored.

I took a couple pix at the courthouse though, honestly, if I had the balls to be a “Johnny on the spot” photographer, the photos are of the people in the surrounding area … Awesome people walking, waiting for buses, sleeping under trees … Seriously … I need to go back and shoot the natural wildlife …

Stair rails



Stairs at Old Court House




Stairs at Old Court House



Neutra exhibit .. Not really

I think I am using my fisheye too much. I love that lens but I need to concetrate on getting a good image and not depending on the fisheye. Some pictures just scream for a fisheye though … Some.

learn about mid-century modern architecture on wikipedia [oh don't be so elitist]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Century_modern.

check out one style/one architectect. california modern and richard neutra: http://bit.ly/i5IDvj.

Neutra VDL Tours

Canon EF 85mm f/1.2L II USM AutoFocus Telephoto Lens – USA – Advanced Kit – with B W 72mm Circular Polarizer Multi Coated Filter, B + W 72mm #102 0.6 (4x) Neutra Density Multi Coated Filter for Sale

Best price Canon EF 85mm f/1.2L II USM AutoFocus Telephoto Lens – USA – Advanced Kit – with B W 72mm Circular Polarizer Multi Coated Filter, B + W 72mm #102 0.6 (4x) Neutra Density Multi Coated Filter on sale. Buy Canon EF 85mm f/1.2L II USM AutoFocus Telephoto Lens – USA – Advanced Kit – with B W 72mm Circular Polarizer Multi Coated Filter, B + W 72mm #102 0.6 (4x) Neutra Density Multi Coated Filter now with lowest price offer! Canon EF 85mm f/1.2L II USM AutoFocus Telephoto Lens – USA – Advanced Kit – with B W 72mm Circular Polarizer Multi Coated Filter, B + W 72mm #102 0.6 (4x) Neutra Density Multi Coated Filter deals! an impressive performance and large aperture optical original EF 85mm f/1.2L USM, the ring-type USM, high-speed CPU and optimized algorithms, and maintenance of this new medium telephoto lens to achieve autofocus speed approximately 1.8x faster than initially. High-speed AF and circular aperture brings attention to a dark background to create depth of field is ideal for portraits and weddings. aspheri floating optical system includes,…

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Canon EF 85mm f/1.2L II USM AutoFocus Telephoto Lens – USA – Advanced Kit – with B W 72mm Circular Polarizer Multi Coated Filter, B + W 72mm #102 0.6 (4x) Neutra Density Multi Coated Filter Features

• Medium telephoto lens – 85mm focal length, fast f/1.2 aperture
• Large diameter precision-ground aspherical element effectively corrects spherical aberration
• Floating lens elements to minimise aberration during focus, ensuring high image quality over entire image area
• Large maximum aperture for available light shooting and attractive background defocus
• 37.4″ / 95cm minimum focus distance

Indeed, it is a beautiful theme. It gives a lot wider space in the middle column, displaying more and more of your post. A sophisticated search box is already at the top-left, so that you don’t need to add search widget. And it also gives you the option of LIKE.

One of the cons, I found, is that it gives very little (thin) space to the right column, and content of your all widgets, is shrinked. And also the post title only shows the name of your post, no category, tags or comments are displayed. You need to scroll down in order to see the details.

Designer Andrew van der Westhuyzen of Collider has created album/CD covers and designs for Australia’s Ministry of Sound for years.

For music compilations, Chillout Sessions XI and XII, he combined several of my favorite things – music, architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, Swimming pools, and miniatures. The results are little worlds of escapism that when photographed and filmed up close have a tilt-shift look.

The models were shot close-up along with supers pointing at the figurines naming various artists on the albums for tv promos (shown later in this post).

Chillout Sessions XII:







video promo:

stills from a longer video promo:

Chillout Sessions XI:




The video promo:

Chillout Sessions XI photography by Sarah Nguyen and cinematography by Brycen Horne

You can see Andrew van der Westhuyzen’s previous designs for Chillout Sessions 7 here. and his design for their Ministry of Sound Annual 2006 here.

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Chillout Sessions

A homage to Frank Lloyd Wright and Neutra and the lifestyles their buildings accommodated, Chillout Sessions XII takes us to a fusion of time periods somewhere between the 50s and the 80s in the filtered light of California.

(via Collider)

Neutra

Neutra, brand of accessories created by the young Israeli designer Ilanit Neutra who joined her passions, fashion and respect for the environment, ideating a collection of hand-made bags that features a catchy design along with an unusual recycled material, the rubber of inner car tubes.

LE ECO-BORSE DI NEUTRA

Neutra

Neutra, brand di accessori creato dalla giovane designer israeliana Ilanit Neutra che ha unito le sue passioni, la moda ed il rispetto per l’ambiente, ideando una collezione di borse realizzate a mano che ha quale protagonista un accattivante design unitamente a insolito materiale riciclato, la gomma dei tubi.

Ilanit Neutra

www.neutrastyle.com

Eighteen years ago, after living for ten years each in an 18th Street studio and a Mercer Street one-bedroom loft, I found myself dreaming almost every night about houses and gardens. My husband Julius and I needed a house and a backyard and a school for Alex, then ten years old. After visiting friends in the area, we zeroed in on the “Rivertowns” communities of Hastings-on-Hudson, Dobbs Ferry, and Irvington, New York, 38 minutes north of Grand Central Terminal.

We drove up almost every weekend and looked at real estate. Amazingly, there were a number of authentic Midcentury Modern houses built from 1957-60 in the style of Richard Neutra, Craig Ellwood and R.M. Schindler. Every few weeks a new one came on the market, reasonably priced. They offered the right kind of style to a California-born, UCLA-educated designer like me – open floor plans, walls of glass, beamed ceilings – but few of the amenities most buyers were looking for. No master suite with luxurious bath, no walk-in closets, no garage. But they were just right for our little family.

One Sunday we saw “the one.” It was kind of a wreck, dark and gloomy, but one of twelve houses around a two-acre pond, with a 900-square-foot deck. I could fix the dark and gloomy part, and the setting could never be matched. Alex would live on a cul-de-sac perfect for bike-riding and have a pond with a rowboat and frogs. Little-boy heaven. It was (re)designer heaven for me. The house needed everything from light fixtures to tiles. The deck would have to wait — it was just fine with the picnic tables and rickety chaise lounges left by the previous owners.

Left, a snapshot of the deck on the day we first saw the house in 1992. Right, a picture I snapped today.

Two years ago, inspired by various articles in Garden Design magazine and a picture of the Jack Shapiro (no relation) house in the book Private Landscapes, Modernist Gardens in Southern California by Pamela Burton and Marie Botnick, we embarked on a deck redesign project. The deck had already been turned into an outdoor room of sorts. But it was too hot out there to eat lunch in summer and too dark by nightfall to have dinner and relax. With the addition of electricity and a canopied pergola, there would be shade and light, two essential elements of making it a truly useful living space.

2008: The cracked decking is replaced with new pressure-treated lumber. Construction begins on the new pergola, made of wonderfully fragrant cedar posts.

The 900-square-foot deck is cantilevered above the back yard, supported by steel beams.

A local contractor and I designed the pergola so that the beams were extensions of the interior beams of the house. We worked closely with a representative of Shade Tree Canopies, which I had discovered in an ad in Garden Design, so that tracks could be installed to fit three retractable fabric canopies. Fifties-style hanging globe lights were installed as well as perimeter lighting.

The pergola is completed and stained to match the house, light fixtures installed.

I try out our new Shade Tree Canopy. The three sections can be locked into fully extended positions or adjusted to billow at different lengths. The decking was stained semi-transparent gray. 

The deck now feels like an outdoor apartment; it’s bigger than my whole 18^th Street studio, with spaces for barbecuing, eating, sunning, sitting around, plant-growing, having lots of people over for parties. Freshly squeezed lemonade, anyone?

2011: Out with the logs, in with the modern. I designed two tables that were built by C&F Steel Corp., Elmsford, NY, fitted with 3/4″ frosted acrylic tops made by Acrilex in NJ. “Supernatural” stacking chairs are by Moroso http://www.moroso.it

Huntington Beach Library, a Neutra design

You can live in the presence of great architecture and even if you don’t know who brought the structure into being or why it’s working the way it does, it will affect you.  I grew up about a half an hour’s drive from an extraordinary public library in Huntington Beach, CA, and in high school (once I had a car) I found myself going there to study.  It was a modern building in all the classic ways, designed with 2-story glass walls, skylights, indoor plantings and water features, and a transparent core of stacks, creating a wonderful atrium atmosphere.  Later I learned that the building was designed by Richard & Dion Neutra, whose innovations in modernist architecture are legendary.  Of  course, my attraction to the building, and the way I felt while I was there, made perfect sense.

Map of Forest Hills Gardens

Fast forward a few decades and I find myself living in one of the most interesting architectural communities in the United States, Forest Hills Gardens, located in the borough of Queens in New York City.  Every day I discover something new to love about this neighborhood, and even as I go about my busy days, I know the care someone took to create this structural and natural environment is affecting me.

The "Inn" now apartments at the train station

Original signage

Forest Hills Gardens was the concept of Olivia Sage, widow of industrialist Russell Sage, and head of the Russell Sage Foundation, who owned a great deal of farmland in Queens that was newly accessible to New York City via the Long Island Railroad.  Inspired by the garden city movement in England, she wanted to create a beautiful and affordable suburb that would allow the working classes to escape the squalor of the city, and enjoy the “healthful benefits of open spaces.”  These folks could live side-by-side with members of the professional and nouveau riche classes, thus broadening the  mindsets of everyone involved.  Good design, she believed, could lift society.

Townhouse on the Green

A row of oak trees lines a park

So, she hired the best.  Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., whose father had conceived New York City’s Central Park, the original famous and enduring bucolic escape from city life, was brought on to lay out a comprehensive scheme, and Grosvenor Atterbury, an architect and urban planner with a shared passion for improving the lives of the working poor, was hired to lead the architectural aspect.  Together they created a community that looks like a medieval village, feels comfortable and soothing, and features unbelievably dramatic foliage.  The 1909 plan includes residential streets that fan out from the train station, and there are apartments, co-ops, row houses, free-standing houses, schools, churches, parks, and, of course, a tennis club.  The broad-scale planning – the vistas one experiences and the way one moves through the community — combined with the attention to detail incorporated into the buildings, parks and public spaces, work together to create the magic.

Entrance to The Inn Apartments

Gate to private garden

Lantern detail on home

A large, Tudor-style home

Grosvenor Atterbury designed in a variety of styles, but the arts-and-crafts genre (as seen in the Gardens) best expressed his progressive ideas about quality buildings and quality living for all.  Arts-and-crafts had its roots in the ideas of revolutionary art critic and social thinker, John Ruskin (1819-1900), whose keen assessment of the various architectural periods found in Venice, Italy, lead him to believe that the gothic style was the most pure and valuable.  It wasn’t about the pristine expressions of the Renaissance, it was about the qualities of a building made by a working man with the tools and materials available to him, and the

imperfect and expressive results his perspective and skills created.  These ideas lead to the broad design spectrum of the arts-and-crafts architectural and decorative arts movement, which includes the British style used for Forest Hills Gardens; the exotic, eastern-inspired aesthetic style; the simple, heavy mission style popular in California; and others.   All of it harkens back the hand-hewn, rustic endeavors so favored by Ruskin.

Parking smartly hidden away

Archway to apartment building

Economically, Forest Hills Gardens was supposed to be a business, not a charity project.  To make the apartments and houses affordable, Atterbury used inexpensive, new materials.  He also pre-fabricated for delivery sections of many of the repetitive buildings, enabling more efficient and less costly construction.  You might be thinking, “this doesn’t look so modest and affordable.”  In truth, the first people to purchase homes in the Gardens were professionals, as it appealed to their sensibilities and residential needs.  As the popularity of the Gardens amplified, the rules for altering properties tightened, and the trees grew ever taller, the value has only increased, so, it’s never been much of a working class resource.

Custom-designed signage and lamp posts

Atterbury and Olmsted’s original designs, at least, remain very much intact, and the photos you see here were taken just this week.  I hope you enjoy these snapshots of Forest Hills Gardens and that they may inspire you to make a visit.

Have you been here?  Seen the train station on your way to the Hamptons?  Visited other Atterbury buildings or Olmsted gardens?  Leave me a comment.

A bi-level home

Two free-standing houses with shared parking space

Beautiful wood detailing

Olivia Park, named after Mrs. Olivia Sage

architect’s lineage, part 1

I am certainly no scholar, so please take this as a more distanced view than any rigorous academic pursuit would reveal.

Although not strictly associated with Penn, there is a kind of Philadelphia School of architecture that moves from Furness through George Howe and Louis Kahn to Robert Venturi.  This is one of the most important confluences of the two major education traditions of the Ecole des Beaux Arts and the European modernist polytechnical schools.  In the end, despite the ostentatiously high-tech and even futuristic forms,  the structural expression seen in the work of Foster and Piano and Rogers owes as much or more to the more plastic and sculptural training of the Ecole as filtered down through Howe and Kahn rather than the materialistic and technical influences of the polytech schools.

On another note, a look at the New York Five – Eisenman, Graves, Meier, Hejduk and Gwarthmey – shows the influence of Gropius and Breuer at Harvard  (Meier did not attend Harvard but worked for Breuer) more than anything else.  Their Modern revisionism came more from outside of the paths of Mies and LeCorbusier than their forms might suggest.

And a final note on this kind of lineage is the fascinating case of California Modernism.  Rudolf Schindler, educated by both Loos and Wright, blends the tradition of European Modernism with the Chicago School via Wright.  Schindler and Neutra, both working, and at a time living together, generated an amazing body of work, reconciling the abstractions of Modernism with the California climate and landscape.  Their legacy, in the Case Study Houses and through Harwell Hamilton Harris in the gathering of the Texas Rangers, echoes through every school of architecture in the States for the next 50 years.  And in the photos of Julius Shulman, their work influences every architect in their generation and next.