Kaufmann House: Neutra's Desert Statement

The house a few blocks from here was designed by Richard Neutra in nineteen forty-six, and it is one of the reasons mid-century modern architecture looks the way it does in the popular imagination.

Edgar Kaufmann was a Pittsburgh department store magnate who had, a decade earlier, commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build Fallingwater in the Pennsylvania woods. For his desert retreat in Palm Springs, Kaufmann hired Neutra, an Austrian-born Los Angeles architect who had been working in California since the nineteen-twenties and who understood something specific about desert climate and desert light.

Neutra designed a structure of glass, steel, and masonry. The plan was arranged as a pinwheel, with rooms angled to catch cross-ventilation before air conditioning made that problem solvable by machine. Horizontal overhangs extended the roofline to shade the glass walls from direct summer sun while admitting winter light. The San Jacinto Mountains, visible from every primary room, were treated not as a view but as architectural material, the third wall of every room that faced them.

The photographer Julius Shulman came to the house and made photographs. Those photographs, particularly the image of the house in twilight with the mountains behind it, defined for a generation what it meant for architecture to belong to its landscape. The house appeared in magazines, in textbooks, and eventually in the cultural shorthand for what California modernism was.

It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is also a vacation rental. You can stay in the Neutra house in Palm Springs if you have the budget and the timing. Some people do.