Viennese emigre architect R. M. Schindler, in Chicago since early 1914, wrote to fellow Viennese architect Richard Neutra extolling the virtues of Southwest
vernacular architecture after visiting Taos in 1915 (see Schindler photo of
Taos Pueblo below). (See also my "Edward Weston
and Mabel Dodge Luhan Remember D. H. Lawrence and Selected Carmel-Taos Connections").
Taos
Pueblo, October 1915. Photograph by R. M. Schindler. Courtesy UC Santa Barbara
Art Museum, Architecture and Design Collections, Schindler Collection.
R. M. Schindler in Taos, October 1915. Photographer likely Victor
Higgins. Courtesy UC Santa Barbara Art Museum, Architecture and Design
Collections, Schindler Collection.
Schindler fondly remembered his Taos experiences in at least two letters to his future partner Richard Neutra. A couple months after his return to Chicago he wrote, "My trip to San Francisco, but especially my stay in New Mexico among Indians and cowboys are unforgettable experiences. That part of America is a country one can be fond of." (Letter from RMS to Richard Neutra, Chicago, February 9, 1916, courtesy Dione Neutra Papers).
In a later letter to Neutra shortly after his December 1920 move to Los Angeles to supervise construction of Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House for Aline Barnsdall, Schindler wrote of his strong impressions of the vernacular architecture of New Mexico,
"When I speak of American architecture I must say at once that there is none. . .The only buildings which testify to the deep feeling for soil on which they stand are the sun-baked adobe buildings of the first immigrants and their successors — Spanish and Mexican — in the south-western part of the country." (Letter from RMS to Richard Neutra, Los Angeles, California, ca. January, 1921: quoted in E. McCoy, Vienna to Los Angeles: Two Journeys (Santa Monica, Arts & Architecture Press,1979), p.129).
Remembering these letters inspired Neutra to visit the Pueblo exhibit at New
York's Natural History Museum shortly after finally reaching the U.S. in 1923 of which he wrote in his memoirs,
"I visited the Natural History Museum and came into the room of the Pueblo Indians. These are the people who influenced the modern [Schindlerian] Californian building activity. Whole villages were built in one block on top of a mountain. These cubes, hardly without any windows, are more than one story, have terraces on the front of the setback of the upper stories. It is impossible to comprehend the complexity of this agglomeration of building cubes." (Life and Shape by Richard Neutra, Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York, 1962, pp. 170-171).
Schindler's Pueblo Ribera on the cover of Neutra's Wie
Bat Amerika?, 1927. From my collection.
Shortly after moving into Schindler's Kings Road House in 1925, Neutra included photos of Schindler's Pueblo Ribera project in La Jolla on the cover of his first book Wie Baut Amerika? (see above). (Also see much more of Neutra's book publishing evolution in my "Taliesin Class of 1924: A Case Study in Publicity and Fame".).
