At Home with Modernism
Across the country, Modernist houses are entering the architectural canon and becoming more accessible to the
public
By Mike Singer
For the more than 30,000 visitors who descended on Palm
Springs last month for Modernism Week, dozens of events
offered multiple ways to experience the homes of
architects. From films such as Coast Modern and Ray Kappe:
California Modern Master, and twice-daily double-decker
bus tours, to lectures on architects’ lives and even a new
Modern house tour mobile app, visitors to this resort city
celebrated architecture in many modes. Most of these
architectural experiences, however, were over when the
week was done. But one experience—the Modernist house
museum—continues beyond the week-long celebration,
offering continual access to Modernist design all year long.
During a day-long symposium at the end of Modernism
Week entitled “The Public and the Modern House,” the focus
was on the growing role of Modernist house museums and
keeping the visions of their architects alive for future
generations. Sponsored by the Palm Springs Museum of Art,
the symposium brought together Modernist house curators
from around the world, a gathering that would be unlikely
even 20 years ago, before Modern architecture had
established a wide foothold in the canonical dialogue of
architecture.
Today, a new web-based Iconic House Network provides
information on dozens of modernist houses worldwide with
hopes to capture best practices and engage both house
museum curators and the public at large in the rising cultural
phenomena of modernist house museums. Indeed, the
The Schindler House. Photo by Gerald Zugman,
image courtesy of the MAK Center.
The Neutra House in Los Angeles. Image
courtesy of David Hartwell.
number of modern house museums has increased
dramatically ever since Edgar J. Kaufmann, jr., bequeathed
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, to the Western
Pennsylvania Conservancy in 1963, making it the first
Modernist house to enter the public domain. Today,
Fallingwater is visited by 160,000 people annually.
“You now have access to capture living memory, either from
the house creators, or those who were close to them,
allowing you to think about the process involved in modern
living,” says Susan MacDonald, the head of field projects at
the Getty Conservation Institute, which is working with the
Eames Foundation to make the Los Angles house of Ray and
Charles Eames, built in 1949, appear as it looked at the time
of Ray’s death in 1988.
As with the Eames and other houses now available for public
tours, residences designed by architects as their own
personal homes provide a unique viewpoint into their
respective design philosophies. These houses are often
laboratories for formal and aesthetic experiments that work
their way into the mainstream. Here’s a look at what three
Modernist house museums are doing to keep the visions of
the architects, who designed and lived in these homes, alive
for the public and posterity.
Rudolph and Pauline Schindler House
Designed as a live-work space for two couples with a shared
kitchen and an apartment for guests, the 2,500 square foot
Schindler House in Los Angeles was visited by leading
intellects and social activists of the day, including Richard
Neutra, who was a five-year live-in guest during the 1920s
when he first came to California to work with Schindler.
Schindler himself moved to Los Angeles in 1919 to oversee
design of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House in East
Hollywood.
The house pinwheels outward, with wings that form
protected and partially enclosed garden spaces accessible
through sliding wood doors that help to bathe the interior in
sunlight. Its mix of heavy concrete, wood frames, and light
Philip Johnson’s Glass House. Photo by Eirik
Johnson, courtesy of the Glass House.
The Eames House. Photo by Eames Demetrios,
courtesy of the Eames office.
make the Schindler House a precursor to the more materially
stringent Modernism to come, and recalls Schindler’s early
tenure with Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago. Decades after it
was built in 1922, the house became the model for Arts and
Architecture Magazine’s post-WWII Case Study Houses
series, according to James Steele’s Schindler (Taschen).
Symposium keynote speaker Kimberli Meyer, director of the
MAK Center (which manages the Schindler House) says
programming is key in preserving Modernist houses. “It is
not only important to preserve these Schindler Modernist
buildings, but it is important to enliven the space in ways
that reflect how life was when the Schindlers were there,”
she says.
Today, the MAK Center is using the idea of a modernist
house museum to engage a group of artists, architects, and
writers in exploring systems designed to activate a person's
experience of a particular locale. The current exhibition, Plan
your visit, questions the nature of tourism in curated and
controlled environments.
Richard Neutra House
In the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, AIA Gold
Medalist Richard Neutra’s design influence is on display at
his VDL Research House. (VDL are the initials of Dutch
industrialist Cornelius Van der Leeuw, who provided Neutra
with a gift to build his family home). VDL Research House I,
built in the International style in 1932 with ribbon windows
and a concrete façade, served as both Neutra’s house and
studio—and a place of experimentation.
A 1963 fire destroyed the original Neutra house, leading to
the construction of VDL Research House II in 1966 on the
same footprint. It’s a work of late Modernism, with extensive
use of mirrors, glass, and shiny surfaces that allow visitors to
experience reflections of trees, flowers, and changing
weather patterns. The original first-floor office and drafting
rooms were opened up to become the Richard J. Neutra
Institute seminar room and his wife Dione’s music recital
room.
In 1990, Dione Neutra died, and the house was bequeathed
to Cal Poly Pomona, with the agreement that one of its
faculty members would live in the house and manage it. “It’s
an interesting arrangement,” says Sarah Lorenzen, chair of
the Architecture Department at Cal Poly Ponoma, and
current resident director of the VDL Research House. “In the
last five years, we’ve been trying to reinvigorate the house
with a series of events. We have concerts there, and art
collaborations with galleries in Los Angeles. We hold student
juries and student presentations there. Students also work
as architectural tour guides for the house every Saturday.
They not only talk about the house, but [about] their
experience studying architecture and their connection to the
house as a laboratory for architecture.”
The Phillip Johnson Glass House
Architectural trendsetter Philip Johnson, FAIA, may be noted
for Postmodernist leanings with his 1984 Chippendaletopped AT&T building, but in the 1950s, a tiny pavilion of a
house outside of New York came to define Modernist
architecture’s ethos of orthogonal material honesty and
lightness: the Glass House in New Canaan, Conn.
In 2007, the Glass House was the first Modernist house
property in the country to become a National Trust Historic
Site; it now receives 12,000 visitors a year..
Henry Urbach, director of the Glass House, is keeping the
legacy of Phillip Johnson, an AIA Gold Medalist, alive on his
47-acre estate. First conceived of as a weekend retreat in
1949 that Johnson shared with his partner David Whitney,
the estate grew to include 14 buildings, including exhibition
and gallery space. “My hope is to reanimate the Glass House
as a curatorial laboratory to complement Johnson’s and
Whitney’s work,” Urbach says. “Exhibitions and other
programs will allow the public to experience the site in new
ways so that the Glass House continues to exist as a site of
cultural production, a place of innovation and discovery.”
In addition to art exhibits such as a recent Frank Stella show,
the public can interact with the Glass House in digital,
multimedia forums. Glass House Conversations, an online
public discussion space, continues the historic role of the
Glass House as a gathering place for conversations on
architecture, art, and design. The book Modern Views
reflects on the idea of aglass house through architect
dialogues with another National Trust modernist house
museum, Mies Van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House.
Recent Related:
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Architecture as Economic Development in a Modernist Mecca
Mid-Century Modernist Sunnylands Estate Opens to the Public
Paul Revere Williams: The AIA’s First African-American Member was an Architect to the Stars
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