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The cultures of central Europe, Japan, the Midwest and Hollywood collide in this small, low-slung house that was once the nexus of a very swinging scene of radical politics, innovative architecture, avant-garde music and voracious sexual appetites.
The architect of the West Hollywood house, built in 1921-22, was the Viennese émigré Rudolph Schindler (1887-1953), who had come to the US in explore of his idol Frank Lloyd Wright, with whom he found work.
His design for a home for himself, his wife Pauline and another couple, engineer Clyde Chace and his wife Marian, was an experiment in communal living. The house had very little privacy — there were no real bedrooms but, rather, outdoor terraces or sleeping porches and studies that Schindler termed “retreats”, also partially alfresco.
Fast-growing trees and shrubs were deployed to create outdoor rooms that were as much a part of the architecture as the interiors, which featured sliding canvas doors that made the space fluid and reconfigurable (they could also be entirely removed). There was no heating and the plumbing was basic.
Schindler, who wore silk shirts open at the neck, dark wavy hair flowing down to his collar and a fashionably Hollywood moustache, was a European intellectual seduced by an American dream. He had studied in Vienna under Otto Wagner and made the transition from Secession to Modernism via a Japanese-inflected artsy-craftsiness.
But there is nothing twee or nostalgic here. The floor slab is bare concrete, the timber and metal finishes are unadorned, the screens are naturally coloured. Only the folded copper sheet over the fireplace and the built-in wooden furniture supply visual relief.
Yet the feel is oddly warm, rich and rewarding, a moment of creative and cultural friction as bourgeois Austria rubs against Frank Lloyd Wright’s attempts to create an American architecture. It is wholly imbued with a desire for the California lifestyle; an outdoor fireplace, alfresco sleeping, inviting the warm, flower-scented air inside.
It was Pauline who made the house a social centre, with salons, dances, parties and flings. The lifestyle was stimulating, highly charged and more than a little chaotic. The Schindlers’ marriage was open, though mostly in one direction. Pauline’s lovers included the composer John Cage; Rudolph’s many partners were a source of contention and the couple divorced in 1940.
After the Chaces left, the Schindlers were joined by a fellow Viennese émigré, the brilliant Modernist architect Richard Neutra. The two had known each other back home and Neutra leapt at the chance of an entry into the California lifestyle. He was quite strait-laced, however, and struggled with Schindler’s exploits and the extreme bohemianism.
They lived and worked together for more than a decade (their drafting tables were set up next to each other), but Neutra eventually left, disillusioned. The two met some years later by a strange coincidence in the hospital where Neutra was being treated for a heart attack and Schindler for prostate cancer. It was reportedly a happy period when the old architects joked and laughed in Austrian-accented German. Both died shortly after.
The Schindler House was reunited with Vienna when it was taken on by a branch of that city’s MAK architecture museum, which opens it to the public. It is a magical place, full of the shadows of old Europe but opening on to the sun-warmed lawns of Hollywood.
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