An Architectural Atlantis

What is the value of creation, when there is no permanent symbol of that creation? This is the central question of Windshield: Richard Neutra’s House for the John Brown Family, the current exhibition at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum. The house, named Windshield after the large amounts of glass used in its construction, has achieved more fame for its ill-fate than its revolutionary design. Completed in 1938, the house stood as a beacon of modern design for a mere week before it was significantly damaged by a hurricane. The house was rebuilt by 1939, but was consumed by a fire on New Year’s Eve in 1973, never to be rebuilt. As such, Windshield represents the Atlantis of modern domestic architecture: a fabulous creation that only exists in the imagination.

During the 1930s, many American architects were heavily influenced by European designs, especially those of the Bauhaus movement. Domestic architecture reflected this influence, and the flat, linear houses of Frank Lloyd Wright, notably Fallingwater in Mill Run, Pa., and Walter Gropius’ residence in Lincoln, Mass. are perhaps the best examples of this style. Both houses were built contemporaneously with Windshield, and the three houses use much of the same structural vocabulary, due in part to the fact that Neutra, an Austrian emigré, worked under Wright during the 1920s.

Neutra’s designs, however, were less formal and more pragmatic than those of many of his contemporaries, concentrating more on materials and methods than form. This exactly suited the temperament of a young philanthropist, John Nicholas Brown, who was looking to build a summer home on Fishers Island, R.I., for his family. Brown was a Harvard-educated man with a life-long passion for modern art and architecture. Interested in medieval art during the early 1920s, he collaborated with the architect Ralph Adams Cram to design the interior of the Gothic Chapel at St. George’s School in Newport, R.I. Brown’s interest soon shifted to modern art, and he was a member of the junior advisory committee during the founding of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The Windshield project is unique because it represents one of the strongest architect-client collaborations of the modern period. Brown and Neutra exchanged over 150 letters, telegrams and memos during the duration of the project, and the Browns were often intimately involved in the smallest of decisions, from the color of a bathroom to the overhang of a roof. “My purposes in building this home in the modern style,” Brown wrote to Neutra in the fall of 1936, “are threefold: first I wish the home to be comfortable and convenient to live in; secondly, I hope it will be a distinguished monument in the history of architecture; thirdly, I look forward to these ends being attained as economically as possible and particularly in a way that will assure the minimum of cost for up-keep and running expenses.”

The exhibit documents the intimate relationship between the Browns and Neutra through the use of obvious sources—telegrams and re-worked floor-plans—but also through the use of more subtle instances of collaboration, such as a scrawled “See notes here!” in red pencil on plans, Neutra’s reminders to himself to consult the Browns’ suggestions. Windshield utilizes a variety of Neutra’s drawings to convey the evolutionary process of the project, but simultaneously treats each work as a drawing in its own right. Small colored-pencil sketches of elevations and detailed graphite renderings of interior spaces hang near a large axonmetric view of the dining terraces roof and a huge floor-plan. Close inspection of these plans reveals a myriad of details: built in closets for Anne Brown’s hats, a soda-fountain in the children’s playroom and a sound-proof music room. In addition, the home had its own meteorological equipment and state-of-the-art Dymaxion bathrooms—fancy one-piece copper bathrooms.

Two models help viewers grasp the volume and depth of the house’s spaces, while various black and white photographs offer contemporary documentation of the house. These photographs were taken by a range of photographers, from Adelard Legare, the Fisher’s Island Army Photographer, to Harold H. Costain, a photographer for Town and Country. The contrast between the stark, geometrical lines of the house and its surrounding organic landscape made for stunning photographs, a fact that the prominent architectural photographer G.E. Kidden Smith immediately noticed. At the end of the exhibit, a compilation of Brown home videos is shown to display the Browns’ encounter with modern architecture. The video has no sound, however, and fails to hold the viewer’s interest—which is too bad, as the video documents important influences in the Browns’ taste, such as the pueblo-style houses of Tuscon. An architecture student with some time on his hands could do worse than put together an audio component for the film.

The gallery also shows furniture from Alvar Aalto, a furniture designer from whom the Browns comissioned 85 pieces to place in Windshield. Working from the tradition of the Swedish Modern school, Aalto’s designs look almost commonplace today—a testament to his lasting influence on the world of furniture design. His simple wooden chair is upholstered in a wild zebra print, a fabric the Browns selected from Elsa Gullberg, a Swedish textile artist who was also a member of the modern school. The bright blue floor that the furniture is placed upon is also symbolic—of the blue rubber floors of Windshield.

“The blue rubber is a great care,” Brown wrote to Neutra in September of 1938. “It seems almost impossible to keep it looking really well...I wish that at Harvard I had taken a course in how to finish floors as I feel woefully ignorant of the technology of this important art.” Anne Brown had a great eye for color, and in addition to blue floors, she installed red tiles, glass and formica in her bathroom, red blinds, white walls and blue floors in the den and she used rose-colored lightbulbs in the stairway. Unfortunately, the exhibition is so concerned with maintaining the minimalist aesthetic of the exterior of the house—only blond wood and titantium frames are used against grey walls in the exhibition—that the small blue floor is the only hint of the fun that the Browns had with their minimalism.

But despite the meticulous planning, Windshield soon became an ironic symbol for the primacy of function over form in architecture. A week after the Browns moved into their new home, the wind of a hurricane tore off the roof of the house and popped out many of the houses windows and frames. Debris littered the grounds of the house, and it took a year to rebuild, although none of the traditional homes on Fisher’s Island suffered any damage. Not surprisingly, Neutra soon published an essay called “Regionalism,” touting the value of considering environment when building.

Unfortunately, this exhibit fails to fully address the issues of artistic permanence that the ill-fated Windshield project necessarily occasions. It is notoriously hard to mount an exhibition about architecture; the finished project usually cannot be exhibited, leaving only secondary sources—photographs, drawings or models—to convey an artistic sentiment. While the Windshield exhibition does a commendable job in giving a sense of the house through these sources, it never engages with the larger issues of creation and permanence that the exhibition itself raises.