CASA KAUFMANN DEL DESIERTO
Barbara LamprechtDejo aquí un texto que encontré hace algún tiempo en una página "oficial" (ya desaparecida) de la Casa Kaufmann del Desierto. El texto es muy interesante y por eso mismo lo publico íntegro, con la aclaración de que todos los créditos son de la autora. Espero que sea de utilidad para los lectores.
The Kaufmann Desert House
© 2008 Barbara Lamprecht
The ideas
A house by Richard Neutra proclaims its origins immediately, because it is simple, positive, complete and essential … Neutra, one of the pioneers of the new architecture, is one whom we must admire. His position is a peculiar one: he does not indulge in eccentricities in order to provoke interest; he is not of those who prefers the easy solution to the studied achievement, the abstract to the concrete, the bombastic to the quiet effect.(1)
The Kaufmann Desert House is one of 20th century’s seminal houses and designed by one of world’s most lucid architects. That could be hyperbole meant to impress, but it is also truth.
But what exactly does the phrase, “one of the 20th century’s seminal houses,” mean?
It means several things: That the architecture of this 1946 house distills many ideas that Richard Joseph Neutra absorbed, integrated with his own vitality, and expressed here. That though it is clearly by Neutra, the Kaufmann Desert House is unique even within his own body of work and one of his finest singular achievements.(2) It means that living in this house, tailored to a specific site elevates the quality of life in apparently ineffable ways that were nonetheless acutely contrived: great residential architecture is, after all, the affordance of a unique set of opportunities on behalf of a client. In this case, it was the wealthy, impatient, demanding Edgar J. Kaufmann, the department store magnate who expected nothing less than a world-class house for his winter sojourns.
The result is a calibrated canvas of opportunities far beyond even what Kaufmann could have expected. The house embodies Neutra’s guiding philosophy he called “biorealism”(3) : “that the tenants of the earth are a product of nature, from which they cannot live apart, and must not live in opposition, so that dwelling and his natural surroundings are closely interrelated, the relation being always intentional, never casual.”(4) And despite its the cool exterior and its sense of proud reserve, this is a warm house, with planes of golden “Utah buff” stone woven through the many silver-painted aluminum and steel elements, with interior colors such as rose, green, canary yellow, salmon and set against white and of course the infamous “Neutra brown” he used to make walls recede in good Gestalt psychology fashion.
The result is not so much a “house” with an indoors and outdoors. Rather, it is a setting with transitions in which Neutra honed both nature and the functional aspects of living so that eros, sensuality, the senses, are subtly and/or overtly available to the whole arc of day and night and the whole spectrum of being, whether social, en famille, or sitting quietly alone, listening to the sounds of the desert as the sun falls, the wind drops, the air cools. This kind of intelligence, coupled with the exceptionally high level of craftsmanship both in the original and restored/reconstructed house, creates a kind of livability something most of us rarely experience as visitors, let alone live with.
The significance of the house also represents Neutra’s unique approach to building just at the end of during World War II. Here in the mid 1940s, Neutra is no longer a fellow traveler in step with the white stucco-and-glass of the International Style, as he was for most of his ‘30s, although many of these typically compact houses, such as the Davis House in Bakersfield, 1937, are surprisingly cozy despite their European allegiance. Neither is the Desert House a classic post-war, one-story mid-century post-and-beam house of casual cool that Neutra and many other talented architects and developers perfected in the 1950s and ‘60s. The Kaufmann’s essential partei— that of the integration of vertical and horizontal planes, standard details pushed far beyond the norm by high-end craftsmanship and choice materials, and new details, such as metal louvers for sun control, devised from the shape of airplane fins and later used in other building types— is a watershed in Neutra’s work that still has a huge impact on other architects.
The clash of the architectsAs we know, the narrative involves a renowned client, “E. J.,” Edgar J. Kaufmann, a man who embraced cutting architecture as a tool to elevate his own fame(5) and who had of course commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design Fallingwater, the 1937 house at Bear Run, Pennsylvania, probably the world’s most famous house. But Neutra, not Wright, was the man of the hour in the 1940s.
Neutra and Wright had a long and uncomfortable history. After leaving Vienna, the office of Erich Mendelssohn, and his beloved mentor, the unrepentant Adolf Loos, Neutra was briefly a Wright protégé for three months in late 1924, truly a combination of oil and water. That said, Neutra was forever informed by the revolutionary qualities of Wright’s drawings in the 1910-11 Wasmuth Portfolios, published in Germany, a response which drew Neutra to his sometime Austrian colleague, Rudolf Schindler, who worked for Wright for about three years and was equally astonished by the spatial daring of Wright’s drawings. Wright and Neutra had already clashed, most famously when the former scorned Neutra’s inclusion in the famous 1932 Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition on Modernist architecture, protesting to Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock that Neutra’s work – especially the 1929 steel-framed Lovell Health House – was “cheap and thin,” a comment that only earned Wright a sharp verbal kick in response.
Wright may have publicly disparaged the Health House – true, up close the shot-on gunite (lightweight concrete) is fairly crude, the second floor layout awkward, the apparent cantilevered balconies not real cantilevers at all but suspended by steel cables. Nonetheless, Wright applied important (and never acknowledged) lessons to Fallingwater from his protégé’s spectacular hillside siting to imbue the Wright design its similar floating quality, as well as lessons gleaned from Schindler’s equally precedent-shattering concrete-and-glass 1926 Lovell Beach House.(6)
While Neutra always acknowledged his debt to Wright, over and over in his writings he also pointedly distinguished his philosophical distance from Wright’s “organic architecture.” Neutra did not believe that “architecture was brought by the stork,” as he once said. Since humans were part of nature, there was no point in distinguishing their work from real “Nature.” “Any pretense that buildings are rooted, or draw nourishment from the ground or moisture from the soil … is poetic metaphor at best and misleading at worst,” he once wrote.(7) Buildings did not need to look “organic” to be profoundly organic: the Desert House, he wrote with his typical attention to the power of language, was “inserted” into this harsh backdrop, “set on footings, whose juxtaposition of artifice and artificial climate underscored “the weather, the silver-white moonlight, and the starry sky.”
If Wright’s “sacred spot” is the hearth, where people draw in close to the fire, Neutra’s “sacred spot” is the terrace, preferably radiantly heated (as it is here), where the boundary between indoors and out is dissolved.
The year of living dangerouslyThe Kaufmann Desert House also testifies to Neutra’s ability to get the house completed during a time when labor was again becoming readily available but building materials were still scarce.(8) Kaufmann had apparently insisted on completing the house (when the average post-war house was between $5,000 and $7,000) for $35,000 and within a year.(9) The final cost was $295,000, an astronomical figure for the day, primarily due to having three shifts of workers working virtually around the clock, compounded by Kaufmann’s site visits and commands to Neutra (much of which he ignored, although Neutra did assign one of his young architects, Thaddeus Longstreth, to field E.J.’s almost daily calls(10) and still wound up with 600 or so change orders.) (11)
The house was begun and completed in 1946, a remarkable feat, this despite the hysteria that ensued when a messenger lost the full and final working drawing set enroute to be blueprinted in a rush before a deadline, a potential loss of weeks of exhausting work, only to be found in a gutter by a resourceful janitor who called the phone number on the drawing. And it also appears that nascent Palm Springs, incorporated in 1938, was beginning to raise concerns about second stories on houses, in part to retain a “village” feel and also not to compete with the mountains, although ordinances prohibiting second stories in some areas didn’t take effect until 1953, a prohibition that spurred the low slung quality of mid-century design in the desert. The legend is that Neutra convinced the City, which may have informally balked, that the famous “gloriette,” the sensual rooftop space crowning the house and saluting San Jacinto by resonating with it, was non-habitable space. This technically correct strategy, still widely employed by savvy architects, downplayed the obvious habitability afforded by the two walls, sheltering roof, sofas, a fireplace, a dumbwaiter, and even a servant bell. (And as a word, gloriette had the extra appeal of confounding pretty much any plan checker. ) (12)
Whatever happened, Neutra was right to fight for the gloriette, because while the house is essentially a distillation of space into silver or transparent horizontal planes opening to the landscape, without the gloriette and the emphatic stroke of the chimney, the Desert House would not be lauded today with phrases such as “a taut but serenely floating composition” because it would have a far more stolid presence.
The house and its settingThe Desert House is located in what Neutra dramatically called alternatively “Die Wüste,” (the “grandiose waste”) or the “Badlands of the Cordillera, badlands a term for rough geography torn up by pinnacles and gullies, inhospitable to human habitation; Cordilla, a Spanish term describing the spines of mountains bracketed by the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies; the phrase also reflects Neutra's breadth of knowledge, darting from history to geography to science but also his unchecked joy in the expansive power of language which assumed a reader as educated as he. In any case, most of us know these "bad lands" as Palm Springs, the classic Hollywood getaway, whose blue pools and green golf courses improbably wrap the base of barren San Jacinto.
The 3,800-square-foot, five-bedroom, five-bathroom house was the first Modernist villa here, a social extrovert located at the northwest edge of town, where one can slip quietly, immediately, into weekend life without dealing with downtown. Its immediate setting is a flat carpet of green studded with boulders as carefully placed as any in a Japanese garden, separated from Vista Chino Drive by a row of impenetrable hedges.
As a three-dimensional puzzle, the house integrates vertical and horizontal layers rendered in a clear, simple palette of materials: bands of silver fascia, ashlar masonry, planes of white stucco treated to a dusting of mica to make it shimmer, the occasional appearance of select vertical grain Douglas Fir, movable aluminum louvers, a blend of glass sizes that included Neutra’s usual smaller commercial steel casement windows, but also a slower rhythm of large sheets of glass that anticipated his own later post-and-beam work.
The “extreme” pinwheel plan of the Kaufmann House, in which each wing runs in a cardinal direction, develops Neutra’s “Four Courter” principle developed in the mid 1940s for the Case Study House program, where a pinwheel plan creates four courts, or areas assigned to different functions. The north wing is devoted to guest quarters, a free-standing structure separated from the main house by a protected walkway. Here, 37 feet of louvers and the long dark lily pond together connect the guest wing to the house, creating a tiny microclimate at the protected and water-cooled patio, also within easy reach of the kitchen. The east wing consists of the master bedroom suite, connected to the central living/dining area along a broad internal corridor whose north side is glass, overlooking the green lawn of the “interior” patio and whose south side is floor-to-ceiling wood cabinetry. The kitchen, service areas and staff/children’s quarters comprise the west wing, and the south, entry wing is assigned the role of pedestrian procession and transition from street to house; a long Utah buff wall on the west separates the garages from the walkway.
The pinwheel might seem an odd choice for the desert, the very opposite of the massed, energy-conserving pueblo dwelling Neutra admired and wrote about in his 1927 book, Wie Baut Amerika, or How America Builds. But the dictates of the plan speak to other more formal agendas. The pinwheel emphasizes both the extremes in social privacy here as well as a deep interlocking with the outdoors. The arms of the pinwheel throw intimates to the far ends of the plan: master and mistress, servants, children and guests, could not be farther apart. But this acknowledgment of the need for privacy is balanced by opportunities to be social: the shaded walkways, corridors and the sheltering outdoor patios link the private quarters with the hub, furthered anchored in section by the gloriette. One wonderful pencil drawing of the plan shows the northwest winds—winds every Palm Springs resident knows only too well because of the sand they invariably carry—as 45 degree diagonal lines, the four-part pinwheel opposing it. Yet the drawing also conveys the feeling that the pinwheel might start spinning at any moment, like a child’s toy.
The interior of the Kaufmann House is rife with quintessential Neutra details, such as
the elegantly tapered edges of the horizontal shelves in the built-in book shelves and cabinetry for plentiful storage (Neutra never really argued that one shouldn’t have stuff, only that it should logically accommodated) or the lowered soffit inside the living room that washes the ceiling with light. E.J. Kaufmann’s contributions include the now infamous cork-clad bathroom shower walls, floors and kitchen countertop, seen at Fallingwater; the built-in phonograph (now housing air conditioning equipment) and latex rubber cushions. And, almost unbelievably, somehow “E.J. wheedled … scores of cholla cacti out of Wright, then sent a truck to uproot them from Taliesin West [near Phoenix] and plant them around his new house, where they flourish still.”(13)
The structural system, not quite the true post-and-beam system Neutra used in future decades, combined wood and steel in a series of delicate connections that reduced the number of requisite vertical supports (which are slender in any case). This is most emphatic in the southeast living room whose glass-and-steel walls slide away, negating the corner and spatially linking the house and the pool, a gesture that recalls Wright’s steel casement corner windows that fold back at Fallingwater to elongate the diagonal vista, one of Wright’s greatest contributions to 20th century architecture. At this corner, Neutra employs two of his characteristic design motifs: the extension of a plane or line into space, and “dynamic asymmetry.” He emphasizes the horizontal by extending the line of the roof beyond the glass envelope in order to shelter the master bedroom. (This “stretched” beam, connected to a column located beyond the roof, became Neutra’s signature “spiderleg.”) Here, the silver gutter runs even father, keeping rain water well away from building fabric. But this is also an aesthetic gesture, perhaps a salute to deStijlian strategies Neutra knew well from his visit to Rotterdam, home of Dutch Functionalism, but equally likely recalling his time in Japan in 1930, where he saw a similar strategy of bamboo gutters extending beyond the building on vernacular Japanese houses. In any case, here banal gutters become a Modernist gargoyle that celebrates falling water, a very long way from Bear Run.
As usual in any Neutra dwelling, the boundary between indoors and out is extinguished, but here this is accomplished in very refined ways. The stonework threads throughout the project, unifying it: running along the garage wall, penetrating the house, jumping to the fireplace; finally it connects the far-flung utility room to the master bedroom area along a long wall. The same ultrasmooth concrete is used inside and out, primarily in public areas. This concrete is itself a unique feature in that the deep top layer of the concrete bed is a mix of white Portland cement combined with fine silica sand, and then, like terrazzo, ground down; the interior is highly polished to subtly mark the difference between indoors and out. Radiant heating extends to the pool area, and Neutra even placed it in the low seating wall linking the house and the pool, a wry, socially magnanimous gesture to hedonism that ensures the party continues for shivering wet bathers or formally dressed partygoers on a winter’s night. (In summer, Neutra envisioned ice-cold water running through the system to “protect the delicate hindquarters,” but the requisite massive chiller, which would have been hideously expensive to run, was never installed. )(14)
True enough, while this is in many ways a formal house, there is nothing more liberating than padding about in bare feet on these cool ultrasmooth floors, indoors or out. The strategy extends the “livability” of space, an idea so dear to Neutra, who insisted that architecture should address everyday function as well as “the honeymoon moments in life.”
In addition to the juxtaposition of horizontal and vertical planes, Neutra imposed a second type of contrast through his spare but complete palette of materials: the blonde Utah buff stone with its rough texture creates a “thrilling dialectic” (another Neutra turn of phrase) against the smoothness of the glass, steel, plaster and stucco. However, the treatment of the dry-set(15) stonework is equally artifice, precisely rendered both originally—when Neutra trained the masons himself—and in the multi-million-dollar restoration Brent Harris and Dr. Beth Harris, an architectural historian, undertook after they purchased the house in 1992. (All the formulas and methods treatments for the materials used have been gathered and organized so that future owners know appropriate procedures for treating the house.) The house is now in the process of being listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
Restore/reconstruct/renovateThe restoration/updating/reconstruction by Marmol Radziner + Associates, a noted Los Angeles architecture design-build firm, was lauded by many critics and decried by some as being “more perfect than the original,” as the renowned Julius Shulman, principal photographer of the house, proclaimed. In addition to the research, the work included locating the original metal fabricating company on the East Coast responsible for the metal work and then buying the crimping equipment to replicate the original fascia, as well as opening up the long-closed quarry vein to mine matching damaged or removed stone.
Both in 1946 and half a century later, each stone was chiseled to fit its own asymmetric (but “dynamic” and therefore balanced) place by craftsmen working under arduous conditions, beneath a punishing sun and in temperatures that can easily reach 120 degrees F, as construction superintendent Eric Lamers attests. In 1998-99, the architects designed and built a contemporary multi-functional fitness/pool/entertainment pavilion, replacing an existing non-Neutra-designed structure. The goal of both client and architect was that the new pavilion take a back seat to the iconic masterpiece, eschewing features such as silver fascia, ashlar masonry, and aluminum louvers. And while the new pool pavilion, located at the northeast corner of the pool, does feature a sense of openness to the outdoors, a flat roof, large sliding glass doors and radiantly heated concrete floors, all cues from the older house, its exterior cladding, however, is deliberately an unexciting sand-colored stucco plaster and mesh screens that reduce solar gain.
The pavilion’s existence creates a new path, a new destination, and a new way of experiencing the primary house without compromising its integrity. The owners also restored and updated the tennis courts and bought adjacent land so that the setting of this seminal house remain uncompromised and “retain its integrity,” to coin preservation parlance. Other additions include buying additional land to maintain the sightlines of the larger setting, i.e., the gesture of a free-standing house on a carpet of land and green; xeriscaping and succulent plantings; a tennis court east of the pool house; the planting of an orchard with pomegranate and citrus trees integrated with meandering walkways and places for meditation.
One change, designed to be reversible, was made on behalf of family: to get to the children’s bedrooms in the west wing (formerly staff bedrooms), one had to exit the kitchen and walk outside. While this might have been appropriate for adult staff, the current owners did not want to be physically separated from their children. A interior hallway was seamlessly inserted on the south and can be deconstructed as desired.
CodaEven if it is “more perfect than ever,” in ensuring the Kaufmann Desert House for the future, this lesson in lucid architecture will continue to bear witness to ideas about how we can live:
To our eyes, Neutra’s architecture looks severe, minimal, uncompromising. We are used to more “narrative” in architecture, to images which soothe or entertain in facile ways. Extravagance in architecture serves only to arouse passing interest, vulgar curiosity, and worthless attention; it is not a sound base to form a style which is itself being formed by gradual variations, by the merging of inventions of widespread origins, rhythmically and without haste, thus curbing all extremes and excesses.
Neutra is disciplined, coherent and logical, his attitude springs from organized thought, based on the certainty of his mission.” (16)
© 2008 Barbara Lamprecht
(1) Todmann & Cia, Itda, Editores. 1951 Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo, Brasil. Introduction.
(2) Achievement can be gauged in many ways. For Neutra, achievement was also measured in longer arcs of time, not solely in singular works: conferring grace in living in small spaces; revolutionary approaches to school design that became ubiquitous, in his belief that all humans are the same but different, universal and specific; in embodying the optimism of Modernism, and above all, in his joyful response to both the opportunities and imperatives of nature.
(3) Bios, from the Greek, life; realism, because architecture had to be rooted in how people really behave, not how they should or ideally behave. The real machine in the garden was not the building, but the human being.
(4) Ibid.
(5) Franklin Toker. 2003. Fallingwater Rising. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Preface, A Fallingwater Timeline.
(6) Ibid., p. 176-178.
(7) Lamprecht, Richard Neutra - Complete Works. (Kologne, Los Angeles: Taschen, 2000). p. 52. Quote is from unpublished, undated manuscript, “Architecture and the Landscape,” UCLA Special Collections, The Richard Joseph Neutra Papers, Manuscript Collection 1179.
(8) Much research remains to be done on the year of construction. There are recountings of a law that forbade the cost of a postwar house in Palm Springs to exceed $40,000, a prohibitions that apparently took effect in the spring of 1946, but the City of Palm Springs had no such ordinance; architects who were also war veterans and now living in Palm Springs and Los Angeles cannot recall such an ordinance. If one did exist, it may have been on a federal level, perhaps prompted by a national concern to make sure that sheltering returning veterans and growing families enjoyed higher priority than expensive houses.
(9) Interview with John Blanton, one of Neutra’s leading design architects, recalling office/studio talk. Interview 17 Oct 2008.
(10 Raymond Neutra recollections, recounted 11 Oct., 2008; also, Thomas S. Hines. 1982. Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 200.
(11) Toker, op. cit., p. 333.
(12) According to The New Shorted Oxford English Dictionary, the word “gloriette” means “a highly decorated chamber in a castle or other building,” a meaning antithetical to the diaphanous, severe space Neutra creates here. The “room” Neutra designed here is closer to “glory” in one meaning, “The splender of bliss and heaven” or “an effluence of light... a splended ornament.”
(13) Toker, op. cit., p. 332.
(14) Sources: Raymond Neutra, Leo Marmol, Eric Lamers.
(15) “Dry set” means mortared from behind, giving stonework a crisp, sophisticaed look almost impossible to achieve with revealed mortar; dry set rock can be seen in walls centuries old all over American fields and forest.
(16) Op. cit., Todmann & Cia, Itda., editores.
