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As photography became more available, magazines, publications, and printed media became the primary way people would consume architecture. Neutra’s work is notable for its ability to blur the boundary between inside and outside. In the Kaufmann House, this is done with walls that run from the interior to the exterior clad in the same stone material. This technique allows the eye to travel from the inside to the outside with minimal interruption, visually connecting the two spaces. It wasn’t until 1993, when Brent and Beth Harris, a financial executive and an architectural historian, moved in that there was an attempt to bring the Neutra house back to its original splendor piece by piece. After World War I, Neutra moved to Switzerland, where he worked with the landscape architect Gustav Ammann.
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Neutra named this elevated room a “gloriette,” a northern European Baroque term that denotes an elevated pavilion offering views of a garden or a landscape. Although Neutra enjoyed fame from the thirties onward—in 1949, he appeared on the cover of Time—clients of relatively modest means could still afford to hire him. (Several of the Neutra Colony houses were first owned by Japanese American families whose members had been in internment camps during the Second World War.) Those economics are long gone. Amid a prolonged vogue for mid-century modernism, Neutras go for extravagant prices. The Kaufmann House, a Palm Springs idyll that Neutra built for the department-store owner Edgar J. Kaufmann—who also commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater—is on the market for $16.95 million.
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Neutra wandered around the area, making sketches and interviewing the residents. This was always his point of departure, Alexander later said—“not looking at maps first but looking at the people.” In a memorandum, Neutra expressed admiration for the community that the villagers had built. It was, he wrote, “the loveliest slum in the most charming setting which the country can boast.” His use of “slum” showed that, despite his sympathetic slant, he adhered to the paternalistic mentality of mid-century urban planning. Their first address was 835 Kings Road, in West Hollywood—a communal dwelling that Schindler had built in 1922, and that he shared with his wife, the writer and educator Pauline Gibling Schindler. The core structure consists of exposed concrete walls that gently lean inward, like the sides of a tall tent. Indeed, the design was partly inspired by a camping trip to Yosemite that the Schindlers had taken in 1921.
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A dialogue between indoors and outdoors is one of the Kaufmann Desert House’s finest attributes, lending it a cinematic quality. During the extensive renovation by Marmol Radziner in the 1990s, the original concrete and silica sand floors were patched. Neutra’s International Style architecture is heightened by the San Jacinto Mountains above.
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The collaboration between the client and architect was grounded in a mutual appreciation for cutting-edge design and technological advancement, setting the stage for creating a landmark in modernist architecture. The Kaufmann House has gone through several owners after the Kaufmann’s owned the house, which led to the house to fall in disrepair and a lack of concern and preservation of the modern dwelling. However, a couple that appreciated 20th Century modern homes restored the house back to its original luster with the help of Julius Shulman. The Kaufmann House is now considered to be an architectural landmark and one of the most important houses in the 20th Century.
The house has had at least two celebrity owners, the singer Barry Manilow and the former NFL Chargers owner Gene Klein. The Kaufmann Desert House, an architectural marvel that helped define the modernist aesthetic of the resort city of Palm Springs, is up for sale at $25m. Highlights include a living room with a floor-to-ceiling fireplace, a lounge with a bar and a spacious wood deck overlooking the property. Considered one of the most important Midcentury homes ever built, it recently received a facelift thanks to an intense five-year restoration from Marmol Radziner detailed by Dwell. Today, the low-slung abode holds five bedrooms and six bathrooms across 3,162 square feet.

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They hit upon a seemingly perfect solution -- they offered the house at auction as a piece of art. A precedent had already been set with the 2003 Sotheby's auction of Mies van der Rohe's innovative Farnsworth house which sold for $7.5 million. The Harrises went with Christies who put a pre-auction estimate for the house at $15-25 Million. The Kaufmann desert house received a final bid of $15 million, but the sale was not completed due to a breach of terms by the buyer. As part of the divorce settlement, Mr. Harris now holds sole title to the property.
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The house underwent “an award-winning restoration” by Marmol Radziner in the 1990s that included the installation of air conditioning. Neutra promised to preserve the spirit of the extant villages, but there was no way to accommodate more than three thousand units without resorting to high-rises. Neutra wrote, “The tall buildings here will be spaced great distances apart and in spacious groups, separated by several valleys.” It’s doubtful whether families on the thirteenth floor would have felt nature’s embrace in any real sense.
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The house, which originally had 297 m2 in area, had been expanded to nearly 474 m2. The architects removed the areas added and restored the house based on the famous photographs Julius Shulman did of the house in 1947. The architects decided to also return to the desert garden look it had in times of Neutra.
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Prefabricated steel girders were assembled in less than forty work hours; the spraying of the concrete skin was accomplished in two days. In the end, though, the industrial might of the building may have detracted from its livability. The Lovells later complained that it had “no lilt, no happiness, no joy.” The house has experienced wear and tear in recent years, and needs a thorough restoration. The art-world potentates Iwan and Manuela Wirth are buying the property, with plans to bring back its original lustre. The Fredrick Robie House, located in the Chicago neighborhood of Hyde Park, is one of the most iconic examples of modernist architecture. Designed by renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1909, the house has been called "the most important building of the twentieth century" and "the greatest work of architecture America has produced."
In 1921, he served briefly as city architect in the German town of Luckenwalde, and later in the same year he joined the office of Erich Mendelsohn in Berlin. Neutra contributed to the firm's competition entry for a new commercial center for Haifa, Palestine (1922), and to the Zehlendorf housing project in Berlin (1923).[10] He married Dione Niedermann, the daughter of an architect, in 1922. They had three sons, Frank L (1924–2008), Dion (1926–2019), who became an architect and his father's partner, and Raymond Richard Neutra (1939–), a physician and environmental epidemiologist. The Harrises purchased the home for US$1.5 million, then sought to restore the home to its original design.
SAH Archipedia tells the story of the United States through its buildings, landscapes, and cities. This freely available resource empowers the public with authoritative knowledge that deepens their understanding and appreciation of the built environment. Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann House in Palm Springs was designed and built in 1946–1947, although some sources claim that the preparatory contact between client and architect occurred in 1945. The house exemplifies Neutra’s approach to designing a house and its surroundings as a single, continuous environment, a concept he had begun to work with in the early 1940s. Other examples are Neutra’s Nesbitt House (1942, Los Angeles) and the Tremaine House (1945–1948, Montecito). The Kaufmann House is an early example, and one of the clearest, of a post–World War II southern Californian modernism that closely integrates the building with its environment.
The lot was roughly 200 by 300 feet and, at the time, was barren with very few surrounding structures. Today a suburban neighborhood surrounds the house, and the lot is almost entirely enclosed at its perimeter by tall shrubs. Best known for his eponymous Pittsburgh department store, Kaufmann revered good design. In 1934, he and his wife Liliane commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build their weekend home along Bear Run in southwestern Pennsylvania—which would become Wright’s masterpiece Fallingwater—as well as Kaufmann’s office. The main outdoor rooms are enclosed by a vertical aluminum fins that offer flexible protection against sandstorms and intense heat.
From an aesthetic point of view, they defined a clear plan, from a purely functional, serving as a shield against the wind. The desert, or rather, this primordial wilderness area that stretches around Palm Springs, fascinated Neutra. His 1927 book “Wie Baute Amerika” ends with images of houses of the Indian peoples of New Mexico and Arizona, praising their overlapping rooms, with terraces on the roof and the ability of mud brick to withstand inclement weather. Despite the neat precision of the Desert House, it evokes the spirit of the houses of those Indian tribes, which he admired so much. This vacation home was designed to emphasize the desert landscape and its harsh climate.
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