A few days ago, we learned that Richard Neutra’s Lovell House had been offered for sale. Now it’s the turn of the Kaufmann Desert House to be offered on the market. While the Lovell House is one of the architect’s earliest creations, the Kaufmann Desert House is probably one of his most emblematic.
Richard Neutra, born in Vienna in 1892, initially trained as an architect in his home town with teachers such as Adolf Loos. It was not until 1923 that he emigrated to the United States. His buildings on American soil, such as the Kaufmann Desert House (1946), enabled the Austrian designer to become one of the leading American architects of his generation.
The Kaufmann Desert House was built in 1946 at the request of Edgar J. Kaufmann, who commissioned another Kaufmann House, Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous House on the Cascade. The Kauffman Desert House was originally designed as a Californian holiday home in the Mojave Desert. This architecture, immortalised and made famous by the photographs of Slim Aarons and Julius Schulman, embodies the very essence of the Californian dream. Its large windows, punctuated by a particularly marked horizontal and vertical rhythm, make it one of the emblems of American modernism in the 1950s.
