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Even before my first visit to Palm Springs, the building I most wanted to see was Richard Neutra's Edgar Kaufmann Residence. I knew the 1947 photos of the house by architectural photographer Julius Shulman which are among most famous and widely known architectural images of all time. Architectural historian John Crosse assembled an 82-page bibliography citing over 150 published articles on the house (most accompanied by Shulman photos) beginning with the house's completion through Neutra's death in 1970. But the house settled into obscurity with only 70 articles published about it after 1970 until the house was purchased and restored by Beth and Brent Harris in 1993. Since their restoration of the house (completed in 1995) there have been close to 275 articles about the Harris' efforts and those of their architects, Leo Marmol and Ron Radziner. Material choices in the Kaufmann House also reflect Neutra’s innovative approach to architecture.
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Key architectural features of the Kaufmann House include its flat, extending rooflines that provide shade and cooling in the desert heat and its expansive glass walls, which dissolve the barriers between indoors and the natural world outside. The use of sliding glass doors and moveable wall panels allows the living spaces to be entirely open to the outdoors, a revolutionary concept emphasizing the therapeutic benefits of living in close contact with nature. The Kaufmann House is celebrated for its distinctive design, which masterfully integrates the building with its desert surroundings while maintaining a functional elegance. The house is structured as a series of horizontal planes that seem to float against the rugged backdrop of the San Jacinto Mountains. The floor plan is expansive and open, typical of Neutra’s work, promoting a seamless flow between the interior and exterior spaces.
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In June Jean Prouvé’s 1951 Maison Tropicale, a prototype for prefabricated homes for French colonial officials stationed in Africa, sold at Christie’s for $4.97 million. Barry Manilow ultimately moved into the old Walter Braunschweiger Residence, a 1935 Spanish-style compound on a private hilltop in the town's Mesa neighborhood, leaving the Kaufmann desert house to sit empty for 3 ½ years. His realtor indicated that although the location and the site of the Kaufmann house were spectacular, the house itself was no longer considered valuable and the property was being sold (ultimately at $1.5 million) as a tear-down.
Richard Neutra
Manuel and Abrana Aréchiga, who were among the last holdouts in the villages, were escorted off the property; their daughter, Aurora Vargas, was carried out by force. (The phrase “cancer of socialism” was used.) At a hearing the following year, Wilkinson declined to discuss his political affiliations, hastening the demise of the city’s entire public-housing effort. If the Health House had merely received a flurry of publicity in Lovell’s column, Schindler might have felt no lasting bitterness. As Thomas Hines has argued, the real affront came in 1932, when the epoch-making “Modern Architecture” show at the Museum of Modern Art omitted Schindler while saluting Neutra as a major talent. Schindler took to calling his former friend a “go-getter type” and a “racketeer.” Neutra, for his part, felt that he had become the target of irrational resentment. Ultimately, perpetuating this stale contest of male egos conceals the myriad ways the architects influenced each other and thrived in a sympathetic bohemian culture.
Werther review – Kaufmann heads strong cast in stylishly sung and fabulously played revival - The Guardian
Werther review – Kaufmann heads strong cast in stylishly sung and fabulously played revival.
Posted: Wed, 21 Jun 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
After purchasing the house and its more than an acre of land for about $1.5 million, the Harrises removed the extra appendages and enlisted two young Los Angeles-area architects, Leo Marmol and Ron Radziner, to restore the Neutra design. When Brent and Beth Harris first saw the Kaufmann House, it was neither a pretty palace nor an obvious candidate for restoration. Strikingly photographed in 1947 by Julius Shulman, it stood vacant for several years after Kaufmann’s death in 1955. Then it went through a series of owners, including the singer Barry Manilow, and a series of renovations. Along the way, a light-disseminating patio was enclosed, one wall was broken through for the addition of a media room, the sleek roof lines were interrupted with air-conditioning units, and some bedrooms were wallpapered in delicate floral prints. In 2003 Sotheby’s sold the 1951 Farnsworth House southwest of Chicago, designed by Mies van der Rohe, at auction for $7.5 million.
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Moreover, the new environment was designed so that its occupants could fine-tune its features for physical comfort, most notably the radiant heating and cooling systems for the concrete surfaces of the outside terraces. Lastly, within the hostile desert surroundings the new environment was to be a safe one as exemplified by the mirrors Neutra installed in unexpected places, which allowed the inhabitants to scan their immediate surroundings. A bigger opportunity arose in 1950, when the city commissioned Neutra and his colleague Robert Alexander to create Elysian Park Heights, a thirty-four-hundred-unit public-housing complex in an area sometimes called Chavez Ravine. On the site stood three semirural villages—Palo Verde, Bishop, and La Loma—inhabited almost exclusively by Mexican Americans.
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I heard a different perspective from the architect Elizabeth Timme, who lives in the Neutra Colony and is the co-founder of a design nonprofit called LA Más. Much of her work is taken up with devising affordable-housing initiatives, and her home has given her inspiration. In a very different political climate, a reduced version of Elysian Park Heights might have become the verdant, nourishing community of which Neutra dreamed. After entering the house, to the right is the dining and main living spaces with views eastward out to the pool. Northeast of the living space is the primary suite, slightly offset from the central axis to provide privacy for the bedroom and open the view for the living space. That’s why the Desert House, built in 1946 by Austrian-born architect Richard Neutra for retail tycoon Edgar J. Kaufmann, stands out all the more.
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In 1941, Neutra joined a team working on Hacienda Village, in Watts, where one of the lead designers was the pathbreaking Black architect Paul Revere Williams. In the same period, Neutra oversaw a housing development for defense workers, Channel Heights, in San Pedro. In that almost bucolic scheme, low-rise buildings stood amid fields of wildflowers, with playgrounds, schools, and shopping all at hand. Although occupants found Channel Heights eminently livable, it lacked the kind of density that housing planners required. Santa Maria del Fiore, also known as the Duomo of Florence, is an iconic architectural landmark in the Tuscan capital.
The Kaufmann House was designed and built when American architecture was undergoing significant transformation. The mid-20th century marked the rise of the International Style, characterized by minimalism, open floor plans, and a harmonious blend of aesthetic simplicity and functionalism. Edgar J. Kaufmann, a prominent Pittsburgh department store owner, was deeply embedded in the architectural innovations of his time. Having previously commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to create the iconic Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, Kaufmann’s collaboration with Richard Neutra signified a pivot towards the burgeoning modernist movement on the West Coast. The Kaufmann House achieved iconic status through its architectural innovation and the lens of Julius Shulman, one of the most influential architectural photographers of the 20th century. Shulman’s photographs of the house, particularly the striking image taken at twilight with the interior lit and the pool reflecting the house and sky, have become defining images of modernist architecture.
These photographs do more than merely document the structure; they encapsulate Neutra’s vision of blending architecture with its environment, creating a visual narrative that communicates the essence of modernism to a global audience. Shulman’s ability to capture the elegance and tranquil beauty of the Kaufmann House helped cement its place in architectural history and inspired a generation of architects and designers to embrace the principles of modernism. From the street, the house looks beautifully layered with floating planes that rise in elevation as you move west. Wanting to capture more views at a higher elevation, Neutra designed the gloriette as an open-air perch on top of the house, covered by a roof and shading devices on two sides. Integrating outdoor living spaces and balconies was a consistent theme in Neutra’s past work.
The Kaufmanns used the house mainly as their winter residence, relocating to Palm Springs during the colder months. After 1964 two subsequent owners altered the house, increasing the square footage from approximately 3,200 square feet to just over 5,100 square feet, which compromised the original design. In 1993, the house’s current owner hired Los Angeles architectural firm Marmol and Radziner to return the house to its original state by relying on many painstakingly researched original materials and production processes. The architects also designed a pool house located to the west of the swimming pool.
The lower level of the house, the living room, follows an open plan that leads out to the patio and swimming pool. It’s outside near the pool that one begins to understand the spatial organization of the overlapping planes and the pilotis that support the cantilevering volumes. The house last went on sale in 2008, with Christie’s auctioning the house as a work of art for $25m. The house sold for $19.1m, but the sale fell through, according to Palm Springs Life. With five bedrooms and six full baths at 3,162 sq ft, the house sits on more than two acres and includes a large wood deck, tennis court and lush lawn surrounding the famous pool.
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