The architecture critic Paul Goldberger called the photograph “one of those singular images that sums up an entire city at a moment in time.” Less obviously glamorous but equally inviting is the 1946 photo of Gordon Drake’s tiny, ingeniously designed home. Here two young ladies converse in a glass-enclosed living room that juts out toward the sprawling city grid of tiny lights. Even more resonant is Shulman’s 1960 photograph of Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House No. Kaufmann reclining by the pool and the bright house sharply delineated against the misty desert hills, has come to represent Palm Springs, mid-century modernism, and Neutra himself. His 1947 twilight shot of Neutra’s Kaufmann House, in Palm Springs, with Mrs. The architects built the buildings, but Shulman created the evocative images through which we know them. Through his work with Neutra, Shulman met other California modernists, including Rudolf Schindler, Raphael Soriano, Charles and Ray Eames, Albert Frey, John Lautner, and Gregory Ain.
For the next thirty-four years, until Neutra’s death in 1970, the two collaborated. When Neutra saw the snapshots, he recognized the young man’s special talent: an ability to capture the aesthetic and emotional intention of designs. Just for fun, Shulman, then an aimless student who’d been auditing courses at Berkeley and UCLA for seven years, shot photos of the unusual house, using his pocket camera and a tripod. One of Neutra’s apprentices was boarding with Shulman’s sister, and he took young Julius along on a visit to the nearly complete Kun House. That person was the photographer Julius Shulman, who met Neutra in 1936. To turn those buildings into icons, however, someone had to transform steel and stone into reproducible images, emotionally resonant and frozen in time.
The iconographer for free#
To the mission architecture of the old travel posters, Neutra and other California modernists added new symbols of the good life, or at least their raw materials: the walls of glass, inviting patios, flat roofs, and sliding doors appropriate for free spirits in a kind climate. Instead of a visual lecture on Machine Age precision or the evils of ornamentation, the modern architecture-above all, its home design-became the setting for a new kind of life or, as we’ve come to call it, lifestyle: comfortable and convivial, a place where outdoors and indoors, leisure and ambition, nature and artifice, mind and body can happily coexist. In the golden sunlight and quirk-tolerant culture of southern California, modernism’s glass walls and white boxes lost their sternness. “I found what I had hoped for,” he wrote, “a people who were more ‘mentally footloose’ than those elsewhere, who did not mind deviating opinions … where one can do almost anything that comes to mind and is good fun.”
In February 1925, Richard Neutra and his family settled in Los Angeles.
“I wish I could get out of Europe,” he wrote in his diary, “and get to an idyllic tropical island where one does not have to fear the winter, where one does not have to slave but finds time to think, or even more important, can have a free spirit.” A travel poster in Zurich obsessed him: California Calls You, it read. In the fall of 1919, a young Austrian architect dreamed of escape-escape from the frigid European winter, from the “psychological collapse” of a demoralized culture, from the “empty cheerless drafting” that consumed his workdays.