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The Kaufmanns used the house mainly as their winter residence, relocating to Palm Springs during the colder months. After 1964 two subsequent owners altered the house, increasing the square footage from approximately 3,200 square feet to just over 5,100 square feet, which compromised the original design. In 1993, the house’s current owner hired Los Angeles architectural firm Marmol and Radziner to return the house to its original state by relying on many painstakingly researched original materials and production processes. The Kaufmann House achieved iconic status through its architectural innovation and the lens of Julius Shulman, one of the most influential architectural photographers of the 20th century. Shulman’s photographs of the house, particularly the striking image taken at twilight with the interior lit and the pool reflecting the house and sky, have become defining images of modernist architecture.
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To the west, a kitchen, service spaces, and staff quarters are reached by a covered breezeway. In the northern wing, another open walkway passes along an exterior patio, leading to two guest rooms. From the street, the house looks beautifully layered with floating planes that rise in elevation as you move west. Wanting to capture more views at a higher elevation, Neutra designed the gloriette as an open-air perch on top of the house, covered by a roof and shading devices on two sides.
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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. The result is a striking, sculptural layout resembling a pinwheel with various wings radiating from the central living and dining room. Throughout, there is a strong connection between the indoors and outdoors, reinforced through large swaths of glazing and shade-inducing vertical aluminum louvers that are also one of the home’s highlights. Richard Neutra, a Vienna-born architect, brought a unique blend of European modernism and Californian innovation to his projects.
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While Beth Harris may have moved to Los Angeles, many feel her heart has stayed behind in Palm Springs. Her former husband Brent also continues to actively support preservation activities in Palm Springs and is currently restoring a Welton Becket-designed home in the historic Tennis Club neighborhood. In 1996, the house was designated a historic site by the Palm Springs Historic Site Preservation Board.
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The way in which Neutra designed the Kaufmann House was such that when the sliding glass doors were opened the differentiation of interior and exterior was blurred as if it was a sinuous space. The Harrises purchased the home for US$1.5 million, then sought to restore the home to its original design. Neutra had died in 1970, and as the original plans were not available, the couple brought to Los Angeles architects Leo Marmol and Ron Radziner to restore the house.
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To continue their efforts of preservation, they decided to put the house for auction at Christie's auction for high profile, contemporary, art. They believed that only serious buyers interested in continuing the preservation of this historical site would purchase the house at an auction. The house sold at auction for 19.1 million dollars by an anonymous buyer but later fell out of escrow. Unfortunately, only glimpses of it can be seen from the street including its famous ‘gloriette’ roof deck. In the north wing another corridor opens along an outside patio that leads to two other rooms.
Following the end of World War II, he was commissioned for the Kaufmann house, and it later became a beloved piece of the renowned International Style architecture he was known for. The variety of spaces, ranging from enclosed to semi-enclosed to open, transcends any traditional distinction between indoors and outdoors in favor of a continuous, human-made environment. Moreover, the new environment was designed so that its occupants could fine-tune its features for physical comfort, most notably the radiant heating and cooling systems for the concrete surfaces of the outside terraces. Lastly, within the hostile desert surroundings the new environment was to be a safe one as exemplified by the mirrors Neutra installed in unexpected places, which allowed the inhabitants to scan their immediate surroundings. Neutra used as basic materials stone, glass and steel, and tended not to depart from the range of colors than the desert offered, so that the house does not desentonase of their natural environment.
Kaufmann House, Palm Springs Architecture Revisited, Palm Springs California - Palm Springs Life
Kaufmann House, Palm Springs Architecture Revisited, Palm Springs California.
Posted: Wed, 29 Apr 2009 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Completed in 1946, the Kaufmann Desert House was an instant sensation, and soon the five-bedroom, five-bathroom vacation house became an important catalyst that kick started the post war surge of Modernist architecture in and around Palm Springs. Inside the home, the main floor layout is centered around a living and dining room with its floor-to-ceiling windows and brick-fronted fireplace. The master suite, additional bedrooms and service wing are along adjoining corridors or covered walkways. After Kaufmann's death in 1955, the property cycled through a number of high-profile owners, including Barry Manilow and former San Diego Chargers owner Eugene Klein.
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Following Edgar Kaufmann's death in 1955, his desert house sold to Francis C. Park, who in turn sold it in 1962 to art dealer Joseph Linsk and his wife Nelda. Ft. of interior space by converting a patio into a media room; a wall was removed so the newly enclosed space could open into the original living room; additional air conditioning was placed on the roof that cluttered the roof planes. The south wing connects to the public realm and includes a carport and two long covered walkways. These walkways are separated by a massive stone wall and led to public and service entries, respectively. The east wing of the house is connected to the living space by a north-facing internal gallery and houses a master bedroom suite.
The war moratoriums were slowly lifted as World War II ended, but relatively strict building regulations remained enforced. However, Neutra was able to find his way around the restrictions by breaking ground on the foundation a few days before the official enforcement. The project resulted in a total cost of nearly $300,000, surpassing the current single-family residence average of $40,000. 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.
Much was made of Neutra's skirting of local ordinances that prohibited second stories, but similar upper-level sleeping porches were commonplace in the desert. They were often included in early Spanish-style homes that, in pre-air conditioning days, had sleeping porches (or gloriettes) that caught the evening breeze and allowed locals to sleep outdoors during the hottest summer months. The origins of the house are familiar to architecture fans because of the pedigree of its owner, Edgar Kaufmann, the Pittsburg department store magnate. Kaufmann meant no disrespect to Wright, but he sought a home more open and airy than anything in Wright's vocabulary.
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. For Neutra, however, the house also symbolized a universal type of dwelling for difficult-to-settle environments. The south wing comprises two covered walkways separated by a massive stone wall, while another open path leads north past a patio to a pair of guest bedrooms.
When the Harrises decided to end their marriage, they faced a dilemma regarding the disposition of the house. Both were clear that the house required a special buyer who would fully appreciate its cultural significance and provide the kind of maintenance such a property requires. 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.
Major outdoor rooms are enclosed by a row of movable vertical fins that offer flexible protection against sandstorms and intense heat. Located at 470 West Vista Chino in Palm Springs, California, this masterpiece of architecture was designed to connect residents and visitors to the beautiful surrounding desert, letting the outside in and vice versa. The two-story, five-bedroom, five-bathroom, home was built in a pinwheel design with low horizontal planes that bring the house closer to the desert landscape, giving the illusion that it is floating amongst the mountains. This illusion is emphasized by the use of sliding glass doors that open up to the walkways and patios. The effect the glass doors give to the Kaufman House is that when they are opened, the interior and exterior become a singular flowing space. The Desert House stands in the northern part of Palm Springs, where the lower slopes of Mount Jacinto meet the plain of the Coachella Valley.
The house’s swimming pool is one of the most iconic and recognizable aspects of the Kaufmann House; however, it is not solely a photographic gem or simply a recreational feature. The swimming pool creates a compositional balance of the overall design of the house. The house alone is unbalanced and heavy as the wings are not equally proportioned, but with the addition and placement of the swimming pool there is a cohesive balance and harmony throughout the design.
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