Description:
Intuitive and pragmatic, embracing the free flow of indoor and outdoor space, the houses designed in California by R.M. Schindler are among the most celebrated examples of 20th-century domestic architecture in the United States. Yet it took decades for the Austrian émigré, who died in 1953, to convince the East Coast architecture establishment that his kind of modernism was worthy. While his sometime colleague Richard Neutra pursued the Corbusian ideal of the house as a "machine for living," Schindler designed organic forms--angled walls, variously sized windows, plans that shift off-axis--that respond to multiple aspects of the individual site. In 1921, while still employed by Frank Lloyd Wright, Schindler designed the tilt-up concrete Kings Road House for himself and his wife, Pauline. This landmark early project--fulfilling, in his words, "the basic requirements for a camper's shelter"--was designed to be shared with a contractor friend and his wife. The house became a haven for fellow bohemians, a scene entertainingly described in one chapter of this excellent and copiously illustrated study of Schindler's contribution to modernism and the architecture of Los Angeles. During the following years, the "rustic complexity" of the Lovell Beach House (1922-26) gave way to increasing international style influence, visible in the John J. Buck Residence (1934), with its flat roofs and sliding walls of glass. Schindler's late work explored increasingly personal forms of "space architecture," culminating in the delicate crow's nest design of the Ellen Janson Residence (1948-49). This book accompanies an exhibition that travels to the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. (June 28 to October 7, 2001) and then to the MAK Center in Vienna (November 13, 2001, to February 5, 2002). --Cathy Curtis
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