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Heinz Architectural Center opens the doors on a close designer/client relationship
A September 1939 view from the southeast of Windshield
Photo courtesy UCLA Special Collections, Young Research Library. Photographer: Harold H. Costain
The living room of Windshield
Photo courtesy UCLA Special Collections, Young Research Library. Photographer: Harold H. Costain
Kurt Shaw covers the art scene for the Tribune-Review. He can be reached via e-mail.
So wrote John Nicholas Brown to architect Richard Neutra about his desires for the house he commissioned from the Austrian-born Modernist architect that was affectionately called "Windshield" for its incorporation of large expanses of glass windows.
Completed in 1938, the house once on Fishers Island in New York's Long Island Sound has been documented in an exceptionally comprehensive exhibition on view at The Heinz Architectural Center at the Carnegie Museum of Art.
Organized by the Harvard University Art Museums in collaboration with the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design and the Harvard Design School, the exhibition contains everything from models to furnishings, including extensive drawings, photographs and pieces of correspondence between Neutra and the Brown family, who were scions of the 18th-century founders of Brown University.
So detailed is the personal involvement of architect and clients in this exhibition, that in one photograph on display John Nicholas Brown's gangly, 6-foot,-6-inch frame can be seen lying on a pile of rubble, arm shielding his weeping eyes after the house was severely damaged by a hurricane less than a month after it was completed. Although the house was rebuilt and occupied by the Browns, who summered there throughout the 1950s, it ultimately was destroyed by fire on New Year's Eve 1973.
Now long gone, this quintessentially modernist structure was Neutra's most significant residential building on the East Coast.
At the time the house was commissioned, Neutra, who came to the United States in 1923 to work with Frank Lloyd Wright, already was well-regarded for his boxy residences throughout southern California such as his "Health House," which was built for Dr. Philip Lovell in 1928 and featured in the film "L.A. Confidential."
After seeing Neutra's work on travels out West, some of which are shown in the exhibition in a Collier's advertisement and snippets of home movies contained in a 12-minute video, Brown contacted the then-Los Angeles-based architect for the commission.
Neutra sent the Browns a long questionnaire about their lifestyle and preferences to which they responded with an extensive seven-page memo. This marked the beginning of an architectural dialogue that became a pivotal event in the architect's practice.
"Neutra considered this to be a turning point in his career," says Tracy Myers, curator of architecture at the Heinz Architectural Center. "From this point on, he aimed to make the 'client interrogation,' as he called it, a standard element of his practice so that he could really understand how his clients needed to use the house rather than just what they wanted in the house."
With an extensive knowledge of art and architecture, as well as the money to match, the Browns could afford to obsess over the plans for the house.
With features such as a patio for drying clothes, children's dining rooms, servants' quarters and a large living room that doubled as a music room to which was adjoined a private practice room and storage room for instruments, the eight-bedroom and bathroom house grew to a whopping 14,500 square feet. The initial estimate of $40,000 increased to a final cost of $218,170, making it the most expensive modern house in the country upon its completion. By comparison, Wright's Fallingwater in Mill Run, which was completed a year later, was built for about $70,000.
Aside from the addition of examples of the house's furnishings and interior design plans, which featured brightly painted rooms, what makes this exhibition so enthralling is the numerous pieces of extensive correspondence between the Browns and Neutra, like that above, which was contained in a telegraph.
"It is interesting as an illustration of the way architects and clients can work together," Myers says about the correspondence. "Certainly, this was an unusually collaborative process that yielded a short-lived but extraordinary building."
On view concurrently with this exhibition is "TransModernity: Contemporary Austrian Architects," which features completed projects by three Austrian firms - henke un schreieck, Jabornegg & P lffy, and Riegler Riewe.
Along with detailed drawings, photographs and descriptions of two projects by each firm, a 32-foot, continuously looped video projection shows the interior and exterior of each building, their urban contexts and their respective designers at work.
From sophisticated inclusions such as solar panels and double-layered walls in recently completed structures to fluently integrated modern applications to existing buildings, such as a 19th-century bank in Vienna, Austria, the projects in the exhibition incorporate environmentally friendly designs that exemplify contemporary uses of applied modernist ideals.
This exhibition serves as a complimentary element to the "Windshield" exhibition, making for a well-rounded showing that brings modernism full-circle from the 1920s to the present day.
| 'Windshield: Richard Neutra's House for the John Nicholas Brown Family' |
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