Irving Gill (1870-1936)
The work of Irving Gill would continue to influence their disciples Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra. From their professional beginnings until the end of their lives, both of the younger men were conscious of their debts to Irving Gill.
He argued " we must build our house simple, plain and substantial as a boulder, then leave the ornamentation of it to Nature, who will tone it with lichens, chisel it with stroms, make it gracious and friendly with vines and flower shadows as she does the stone in the meadow."
Dodge House (1914-1916)
- Schindler was an admirer of Irving Gill. The schindler was pleased to build their own house so near the great Dodge house located within a few blocks of each other.
- Schindle borrowed aspects of Gill's tilt-slab construction technique, in which concrete slabs were poured to harden in molds on the round, then tilted upright and linked with narrow, glazed interstices to from the structure's outside walls.
Frank Lloyd Wright
-Schindler managed Wright’s office during his several long absences in Japan and Californina: Typical of Schindler’s designs in Wright’s absence was an unbuilt project for the Shampay house (1919)- its ownership has been discussed for the last few years. -
He referred to the Los Angeles work as his California Romanza – “being frankly on holiday.” More “expressionistic” than his early, rational Prairie style, yet more controlled than the jagged flamboyance of his later years, Wright’s work of the middle period drew heavily from the forms of pre-Columbian Mexico and the American Southwest.
Schindler’s impression to Wright:
While most architecture was, and would continue to be, about space as well as structure, Schindler and Wright were among the earliest to articulate the difference verbally with an emphasis on the former… It was chiefly in Wright’s Prairie period, Schindler believed, that this was most obvious, whereas in such later work as the Imperial Hotel and the Barnsdall house he would “become sculptural.” In Japan and California, Schindler observed ambivalently, Wright
sought “to weave his buildings into the character of the locality through sculptural forms.”
Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (1915-1919)
With his epochal Imperial Hotel, Wright’s California designs of the early 1920s comprise the essence of his undervalued “middle period,” a body of work temporally situated between the acclaimed architecture of his Prairie years (ca. 1893-1914) and that of his celebrated late decades (ca. 1932 – 1959).
Neutra
-From the time of their births in late-nineteenth-century Vienna through the launching of their careers in America, the lives and the work of Schindler and Neutra would remain intertwined. Yet from the beginning there were also significant differences…
- In early February 1925, when the Neutras joined the Schindler's at Kings Road, a new era began for the two young architects and for California modernist architecture. However similar their Viennese origins, temperamental differences and historical contingencies of timing and circumstance had caused their journeys to take different forms.
- The strongest confirmation of Neutra's growing international reputation and of Schindler's correspondingly ambiguous standing was Neutra's inclusion in, and Schindler's exclusion from, the 1932 "Modern Architecture" exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art.
Lovell Health house - Neutra had a same client to Schindler, Philip and Leah Lovell.
- Neutra designed "Lovell Health house" which is larger than Schindler's "Lovel Beach house."
-turning point in Neutra's career.
-Museum director Alfred Barr's principles :
"The new architect thinks in terms of volume as apposed to mass and solidity."
"Beauty in the new style depends upon technically perfect use of materials whether metal, wood, glass or concrete; upon the fineness of proportions in units such as doors and windows and in the relationships between these and the whole design."
>Neutra's Lovell Health epitomized these principles while Schindler's Lovell Beach House embodied them only partially.
Lovell Beach House (1926) Lovell Health House (1928)
Otto Wagner (1841- 1918)
The Viennese architects most crucial to the work and the world view of Schindler and Neutra were Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos, both of whom were teachers of Schindler. Neutra, five years younger, was not able to study with Wagner vefore his retirement from the Imperial Academy of Art, but he learned from his example as a modernist pathbreaker. Like Schindler, Neutra thrived in Loos’s informal, less institutional, “Bauschule” salon…
Wagner’s professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts included the establishment of his own design studio and the teaching of master classes, the so-called Wagnerschule, to which only a few students were admitted each year and produced the most creative designers of the first half of the twentieth-century including R.M. Schindler.
Postal Saving Bank (1905)
Aside from the modular, steel-framed Stadtbahn stations of the 1890s, the building of Wagner’s that most interested Schindler and Neutra was his Postal Savings Bank, the first modern building to be granted a place of honor on the architecturally historicist Ringstrasse. Near the front entrance, flanked by offices on three sides, stands the double-height, steel and glass banking room- the most significant and spectacular feature of the building. The sophisticate furniture and fixtures, all designed by Wagner, combine Machine Age metaphor with functional suitability. The building epitomized the Germanic concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the layered and integrated total work of art, a concept that would influence Schindler and Nuetra, as it had earlier inspired their American mentor, Frank Lloyd Wright.
Adolf Loos
-Since Wagner and most of his students still sanctioned systems of organically integrated architectural ornament, it remained for another Viennese architect, Adolf Loos, to provide the crucial counterpoint in his polemical assertion that ornament was a "crime."
-Two of these, Schindler and Neutra, would learn from Loos in revealingly different ways – Schindler primarily from the Raumplan complexity of his architectural interiors, Neutra primarily from the stark simplicity of his surfaces.
Interior of Villa Muller
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