Kaufmann House Richard Neutra Christies Architecture The New York Times

Table Of Content

• Europe's best new building
• The Art of the Rope: How This Charro Completo is Preserving Trick Roping in the United States
• Kaufmann Desert House
• The Kaufmann Desert House by Richard Neutra
• Eight chocolate-brown interiors that look good enough to eat
• Uchronia founder designs own home as "love letter to French craft"
• Spaces

Kaufmann meant no disrespect to Wright, but he sought a home more open and airy than anything in Wright's vocabulary. The flow from interior to exterior space is not simply a spatial condition rather it is an issue of materiality that creates the sinuous experience. The glass and steel make the house light, airy, and open, but it is the use of stone that solidifies the houses contextual relationship. The light colored, dry set stone, what Neutra calls “Utah buff,” brings out the qualities of the glass and steel, but it also blends into the earthy tones of the surrounding landscape of the stone, mountains, and trees.

Europe's best new building

Neutra’s sleek glass, steel and Utah stone design was considered radical at the time, paving the way for the west coast concept of “indoor outdoor” living. At the time of construction, the focus of the house was the vast desert terrain outside – in the years since, southern California’s suburban sprawl has caught up to the property. The home consists of glass walls that slide open to a number of terraces or pool, garden and desert views. A covered rooftop living room with a view of the mountains is protected on the sides by adjustable louvres. 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.

Where Was Don't Worry Darling Filmed & Can You Visit? - Country and Town House

Where Was Don't Worry Darling Filmed & Can You Visit?.

Posted: Thu, 07 Sep 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

The Art of the Rope: How This Charro Completo is Preserving Trick Roping in the United States

In 1992 Beth Harris, an architectural tourist of a sort, scaled a fence one afternoon to peek at the famous house while her husband discovered a for-sale sign in an overgrown hedge. But Dr. Harris, who worked toward her doctorate in architectural history while restoring the Kaufmann House, said she believed an auction would further the preservationist cause. Large sliding glass doors open onto patios that are lined with vertical, moveable metal fins. These slats enable the rooms to be shaded and cooled during extreme heatwaves, and closed up during sandstorms. The house in Palm Springs is predominantly oriented east-west, maximising sunrise and sunset views. The layout includes five bedrooms and five bathrooms, with a grassy backyard and pool overlooking the San Jacinto Mountains to the west.

Kaufmann Desert House

Kauffman visited Taliesin West, the summer study of Wright, located in the middle of Arizona, but was not particularly impressed. Such auctions are bringing a new level of scrutiny to a form that, little more than a decade ago, attracted so little notice that the Kaufmann House was being offered for sale as a teardown. Palm Springs is celebrating its status as a modernist mecca from 15 to 25 February 2018, when the annual Modernism Week takes place. During the extensive renovation by Marmol Radziner in the 1990s, the original concrete and silica sand floors were patched. The storied pool has been immortalized in photography by Julius Shulman and Slim Aarons. Neutra’s International Style architecture is heightened by the San Jacinto Mountains above.

A decade after Edgar Kaufmann hired Frank Lloyd Wright to design the famous Fallingwater House in Bear Run, PA, the same Kaufmann wanted to build a house on the West Coast. Seven months after their marriage, on April 15, 1955, Edgar died at the Palm Springs house at the age of 69. When Grace contested the prenup in court after his death, she argued that her stipend didn’t cover the cost of maintaining the house and that she hadn’t known the full worth of the estate when she signed the agreement. Her friend and neighbor Anita Keller May testified on her behalf, but Grace lost the case in 1961 after she had returned to Pittsburgh, where she became wheelchair-bound with multiple sclerosis. Grace died on Jan. 25, 1962, at the age of 41 of acute carbon monoxide poisoning and severe burns after a heating pad in her chair caught fire.

Eight chocolate-brown interiors that look good enough to eat

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. After seeing Wright’s Taliesin West, Kaufmann was unimpressed and gave his commission to Richard Neutra. Unlike Taliesin West, which implemented more earthy tones and materials, Neutra employed a more modernist and international style approach using glass, steel, and some stone in the design.

Home of the Week: Richard Neutra’s Famed Kaufmann Desert House in Palm Springs Hits the Market for $17 Million - Robb Report

Home of the Week: Richard Neutra’s Famed Kaufmann Desert House in Palm Springs Hits the Market for $17 Million.

Posted: Wed, 23 Jun 2021 07:00:00 GMT [source]

An extreme privacy is guaranteed both to the hosts, as the children, guests, and servants. The only coexistence between them occurs in the shaded walkways, terraces and courtyards. Blinds that flank a long dark pool connect the guest wing with the rest of the house.

Spaces

It also used cleaner, more fluid lines that harmonized with its surrounding environment. This fluid architectural style is what Richard Neutra used to create the Kaufmann House. Since the 1920s, the city, situated at the foot of Mount San Jacinto, offered refuge to the stars of Hollywood. Albert Frey, patron of Le Corbusier, had built his house here in 1940 and in 1937 completed the tiny House of Millar Neutra.

Richard Neutra's Kaufmann House epitomises desert modernism in Palm Springs

For the unforgiving desert climate, Neutra used the most up-to-date materials and technology available, but they weren’t enough to protect the house from 50 years of a subtropical Sonoran desert climate. Earlier occupants had installed a huge air conditioner on the roof that, of course, ruined the aesthetic of the gloriette. Harris found an air conditioning engineer named Mel Bilo, who found a way to navigate around the boulders beneath the house’s concrete slab and install central air in a way that makes the plenums in the ceiling circulating the air practically invisible. While Wright and Neutra shared a love of natural stone, its use in the Kaufmann house isn’t intended to integrate or marry the structure to the environment, as Wright might have done. The house last went on sale in 2008, with Christie’s auctioning the house as a work of art for $25m.

The natural stone from Utah who Neutra used in the exterior and interior creates a vivid chiaroscuro effect that is difference in the smoothness in other finishes. However, the stone is carefully chiseled, both in the original house, for which Neutra trained masons who had worked in Falling Water, who had come Kaufmann, as in the restoration carried out by the new owners by mid in the 90s and lasted five years. The pending sale is bittersweet for the current owners, who said they planned to give a portion of the proceeds to preservation groups. Asked how it felt to be close to selling the property, Dr. Harris looked back at the house, blinking away tears. In 2003 Sotheby’s sold the 1951 Farnsworth House southwest of Chicago, designed by Mies van der Rohe, at auction for $7.5 million.

This illusion is emphasized by the use of sliding glass doors that open up to the walkways and patios. The effect the glass doors give to the Kaufman House is that when they are opened, the interior and exterior become a singular flowing space. This five-bedroom, five-bathroom vacation house in Palm Springs, California, was designed to emphasize connection to the desert landscape while offering shelter from harsh climatic conditions. Large sliding glass walls open the living spaces and master bedroom to adjacent patios.