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Modernism in mud: R. M. Schindler, theTaos Pueblo and a ‘Country Home in AdobeConstruction’Albert Narath aa Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University, NewYork, 10027, USA
Available online: 26 Aug 2008
To cite this article: Albert Narath (2008): Modernism in mud: R. M. Schindler, the Taos Pueblo and a ‘CountryHome in Adobe Construction’, The Journal of Architecture, 13:4, 407-426
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Modernism in mud: R. M. Schindler,the Taos Pueblo and a ‘CountryHome in Adobe Construction’
Albert Narath Department of Art History and Archaeology,
Columbia University, New York 10027, USA
Introduction
As the king of the Scythians was drawn to
the rites of Dionysus in a Greek colony on the
Black Sea, so here the wanderers come, hoping
to tap into a power more effective than their own.
Vincent Scully, Pueblo: Mountain, Village, Dance
In a letter to Richard Neutra from the winter of 1920–
1921, Rudolf Schindler declares with no uncertainty,
‘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.’1 Schindler wrote this statement in the first
months after his move to Los Angeles and it refers
back to his experience of the vernacular architecture
of the upper Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico,
during a break in 1915 from his work in Chicago
with the office of Ottenheimer, Stern and Reichert.
By focusing on Schindler’s trip to New Mexico and
his design for a ‘Country Home in Adobe Construc-
tion’, completed after his return to Chicago, this
essay seeks to uncover the importance of pueblo
architecture for Schindler’s formulation of the
modern house. Through a comparison with
Neutra’s closely related vision of the pueblo, it will
also attempt to establish both architects’ encounters
with Taos as prime examples of the complicated and
productive interactions between modern architec-
ture and the ‘primitive’.
Modernism in mud
Only then can you stretch naked on the soil and
feel it is your real bed, sky [your] only cover.
R. M. Schindler, Notes for the Church School
Lectures
Schindler was, of course, not alone in his enthusiasm
for the pueblo. During the second half of the nine-
teenth century, the extraordinary confluence in the
United States of railway travel in the far regions of
the West, the improvement of photographic tech-
nology and the rise of the discipline of modern
‘scientific’ anthropology made the pueblo phenom-
enon a particularly modern one within architectural
discourse. Attracted to the formal elegance of
iconic views like that of the North House at Taos
and the pueblo’s precarious status as, in Aby War-
burg’s words, ‘an enclave of primitive pagan human-
ity’ in the midst of ‘a country that had made
technological culture into an admirable precision
weapon’, a long list of architects and architectural
writers have felt the irresistible pull of the pueblo.2
In the first detailed study of the pueblo to appear
in an architectural journal, the archaeologist
Cosmos Mindeleff writes in an 1897 issue of The
American Architect and Building News, ‘In an out-
of-the-way corner of the United States there is a
peculiar and distinctively American architecture,
which, while much written about, is not well
known to architects.’3 By stressing the ‘distinctively
American’ nature of the pueblo, Mindeleff enters
into the historical debate about whether American
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# 2008 The Journal of Architecture 1360-2365 DOI: 10.1080/13602360802328016
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civilisation was original and indigenous, as set forth
by Franz Kugler and J. L. Stephens in the 1840s, or
whether any portion of it was derived from the
Old World.4 For Mindeleff, the pueblo is ‘purely
aboriginal in origin, hardly less so in its develop-
ment.’5 Through the pueblo’s out-of-the-wayness,
where seemingly dimensionless terrain and climatic
harshness confer on it a feeling of the out-of-date
and, thus, authentic, the ephemeral ‘Moki’ (Hopi)
field shelter illustrated in the article takes on the
symbolic resonance of a primitive hut. Second
Mesa emerges, in turn, as an American acropolis.
For Mindeleff, just as the stone expedients
employed in ancient Greek architecture convey a
previous history of wood construction, the tectonic
clarity of pueblo architecture reveals, in itself, both
the cultural traditions of the Puebloans and an
autonomous architectural development comparable
to that of ancient Greece. In a comparison that
Schindler would draw for modern architecture, the
pueblo’s forthright masses have ‘no place in Fergus-
son’s definition of architecture as ornamented and
ornamental construction.’6 They constitute an archi-
tecture of pure legibility and mark a union between
architecture and nature that is, for Mindeleff,
‘almost incomprehensible to a people whose lives
are so largely artificial as our own.’7
In August, 1915, Schindler embarked upon a six-
week Union Pacific railway tour of the Southwest
that would give him first-hand experience of this
American antiquity. In addition to stops in
San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, San
Gabriel, San Diego and the Grand Canyon, the
journey included visits to Santa Fe and, before his
return to Chicago by the end of September, Taos.
Schindler’s time in New Mexico was originally
intended as a visit to the painter Victor Higgins,
whom he met during frequent figure-drawing ses-
sions at the Palette and Chisel Club in Chicago.8
After winning the Club’s Gold Medal for his one-
man show in May, 1913, Higgins and a fellow
Club member, Walter Ufer, were sent by Chicago’s
Mayor, Carter H. Harrison, who had himself visited
the Rio Grande Valley in 1914, to paint scenes at
the pueblos of San Juan and Taos. Higgins arrived
in Taos on Thanksgiving Day, 1914 and quickly
became an important member of the Taos Society
of Artists and an outspoken advocate for the aes-
thetic pleasures of the area’s natural and cultural
setting. In his invitation letter to Schindler written
from Taos on 30th July, 1915, Higgins suggests:
‘Taos is a very fine place — the layout of the
pueblos — and one of the most Indian in character.
The pueblo runs four and five stories high and if the
primitive appeals to you, you will be delighted.’9 The
primitiveness of Taos was tied, for Higgins, to its
apparent timelessness. He declares in a 1917
report, ‘There is in the mind of every member of
the Taos art colony the knowledge that here is the
oldest of American civilizations. The manners and
customs and style of architecture are the same
today as they were before Christ was born.’10 Trans-
ferring the Taos Society’s general mistrust of
imported subject matter and technique in painting
to architecture, Higgins concludes that the pueblo
is ‘the only naturally American architecture in the
nation today’ and that its ‘strong primitive appeal
calls out the side of art that is not derivative.’11
Schindler’s numerous informal sketches of
architecture in northern New Mexico emphasise the
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undecorated surfaces and picturesque outline gener-
ated by adobe form (Fig. 1). Similarly to Higgins’s
paintings of the streetscapes, courtyards and houses
around Taos, the sketches also convey the visual
relationships at Taos between architecture and the
surrounding high desert landscape, as well as the inti-
mate material connection between adobe buildings
and the earth. They are often generated with a
quick, almost Secessionist line recalling Schindler’s
studies of nudes from the Palette and Chisel Club
and, even more directly, depictions by Wagnerschuler
at the turn of the twentieth century of architecture
from the similarly sun-touched landscapes of the
Austrian Riviera, Sicily and the Gulf of Naples.12
Armed with a Kodak Vest Pocket camera,
Schindler also assembled an extensive body of
photographs during his 1915 trip.13 The seventy-
five images in his albums related to the Taos
Pueblo, together with pictures of Higgins’s studio,
the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, the
Ranchos de Taos church, the wide expanse of the
Rio Grande plain and Schindler himself on horse-
back (Fig. 2), constitute by far the largest section
of photographs devoted to a particular stage of
the journey. The pictures range from individual
architectural details to scenes with the pueblo as a
whole set against the upward thrust of the Sangre
de Cristo range beyond. There are also numerous
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Figure 1.
R. M. Schindler, Sketch
of a Taos House, 1915.
(Rudolph M. Schindler
Collection, Architecture
& Design Collection,
University Art Museum,
U.C. Santa Barbara.)
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snapshots of the pueblo’s inhabitants as well as
pictures of the entire community covering the
North House during the pueblo races on the Festival
of San Geronimo (Figs. 3, 4). Schindler’s photo-
graphic evocation of Taos has every sign of an archi-
tectural study. In addition to the characteristics of
adobe construction conveyed in his sketches, the
pictures record the dynamic interplay of the
pueblo’s masses and the bold patterns of light and
shade that arise from them (Fig. 5).
This extensive documentation provided direct
inspiration for Schindler’s own design in Autumn,
1915, for a ‘Country Home in Adobe Construction’
in Taos for Dr Thomas Paul Martin (Fig. 6). Martin
arrived in Taos in the 1890s as the county’s only
doctor and Schindler met him through Higgins.
Martin’s sister Rose was married to the painter Bert
Geer Phillips, one of the founding members of the
Taos Society of Artists. The first meeting of the
Society took place in the living room of Martin’s
house at the Taos plaza on 1st July, 1915, just
before Schindler’s arrival in New Mexico. Although
unexecuted, the Martin House project survives as a
detailed plan and a group of finely executed render-
ings with both exterior and interior views (Fig. 7).
Organised around a central court inspired by both
Wagnerschule planning and local hacienda architec-
ture, the house includes a formal front pond, dining
room, living room, billiard room, quarters for guests
and servants, porte-cochere, chicken coop, pig sty
and stables.14
The Martin House celebrates the thick, almost
sculpted earth walls of the area’s Hispanic and
Native building traditions. In a letter to Martin of
14th December, 1915 that accompanied the draw-
ings, Schindler insists: ‘The whole building is to be
carried out with the most expressive materials Taos
can furnish, to give it the deepest possible rooting
in the soil which has to bear it. . .’15 Features like
the house’s buttress-defined front porch, the exterior
entrances to the living room and billiard room, the
deep reveals of the slit windows and what David
Gebhard has described as the ‘exterior mud-like
glob of the living room fireplace’ would connect
the house, both physically and symbolically, to the
earth that gives structure to the nearby mountains
and pueblo (Fig. 8).16 In contrast to Frank Lloyd
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Modernism in mud
Albert Narath
Figure 2.
R. M. Schindler on
Horseback, 1915.
(Rudolph M. Schindler
Collection, Architecture
& Design Collection,
University Art Museum,
U.C. Santa Barbara.)
Figure 3.
R. M. Schindler,
photograph at the Taos
Pueblo, 1915. (Rudolph
M. Schindler Collection,
Architecture & Design
Collection, University
Art Museum, U.C.
Santa Barbara.)
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Wright’s depiction, in his Autobiography, of the
Indians who literally carried away his ephemeral
Ocatilla Camp in Arizona (‘Yes,’ he writes, ‘the
Navajo Indians carried it all away. . .’17), Schindler
envisions the sedentary communities and building
practices of the Pueblo Indians as a model of almost
phenomenological rootedness.
In Schindler’s presentation drawing of the front of
the house, dotted lines emphasise the sloping sur-
faces and hand-hewn irregularity of its adobe
forms, an effect which is accentuated through the
building’s softened and distorted reflection in
the front pond (Fig. 9). Like the piles of stones and
pieces of earth resting next to a Taos house that
Schindler recorded in one of his sketches, the
ripples in the water of the reflecting pool testify to
the unrelenting erosional forces of the high desert.18
Adobe mediates between the domestic scale of
the Martin House and the sublime magnitude
of the northern New Mexico landscape, a terrain
that is itself an architecture shaped by the forces
of fire and water and the unremitting sculptural
touch of wind. In his letter to Martin, Schindler
notes: ‘The house to be built in one of the vast
plains of the West, has to reach the scale of the land-
scape. . . For this reason, the house will be a low
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Figure 4.
R. M. Schindler,
photograph of San
Geronimo Day Foot
races, 1915. (Rudolph
M. Schindler Collection,
Architecture & Design
Collection, University
Art Museum, U.C.
Santa Barbara.)
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stretched mass of adobe walls, with a rather severe
expression for the outside.’19 In a context where the
physical dimension of the Rio Grande Plain takes on
the aesthetic abstractness of a geometric plane,
Schindler conceives of an architecture that is com-
mensurate with the perceptual demands of the
high desert. In another presentation drawing,
Schindler sets a side view of the house in the
midst of a landscape that, if not for a stylised
juniper bush and white-hued cloud, is utterly void
of dimension (Fig. 10). The horizontal stretch of
the house, reminiscent of Wright’s description of
the desert as linear, well-armed and abstract,
emerges with an almost geological profile. Like the
nearby pueblo, it takes on the natural tectonics of
the desert at large.
412
Modernism in mud
Albert Narath
Figure 5.
R. M. Schindler,
photograph of the Taos
Pueblo, 1915. (Rudolph
M. Schindler Collection,
Architecture & Design
Collection, Univervsity
Art Museum, U.C.
Santa Barbara.)
Figure 6.
R. M. Schindler:
photograph of Dr T.P.
Martin, Taos, 1915.
(Rudolph M. Schindler
Collection,Architecture&
Design Collection,
University Art Museum,
U.C. Santa Barbara.).
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Importantly, Schindler’s reverie in mud stops short
of revival. He insists in the letter to Dr. Martin:
‘The building has to show that it is conceived by a
head of the twentieth century and that it has to
serve a man which is not dressed in an old Spanish
uniform.’20 Well before Schindler’s visit to New
Mexico, the striking formal interplay of the pueblo’s
masses became integral to the foundation of a kind
of modern regional pueblo style, a phenomenon
that Wright would later characterise with disparage-
ment as ‘the Yankee-Hopi house’.21 In projects like
A. C. Schweinfurth’s 1894 design for a hotel near
Montalvo, California, his grand 1895–1896
Hacienda for William Randolph and Phoebe Apper-
son Hearst, Mary Colter’s 1905 Grand Canyon
Hopi House and, directly influenced by Mindeleff’s
articles, E. B. Cristy’s 1905–1906 designs for the
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Figure 7.
R. M. Schindler, plan for
Dr T. P. Martin House,
1915. (Rudolph M.
Schindler Collection,
Architecture & Design
Collection, University
Art Museum, U.C.
Santa Barbara.)
Figure 8.
R. M. Schindler,
courtyard,
Dr T. P. Martin House,
1915. (Rudolph
M. Schindler Collection,
Architecture & Design
Collection, University
Art Museum, U.C.
Santa Barbara.)
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Boiler Plant and two dormitories at the University of
New Mexico, the aesthetic clarity of pueblo form
satisfied an urge, growing out of Arts and Crafts
values and the Mission revival, for regional sensitivity
and an ‘honest’ architectural idiom.
Cristy’s Kwataka Hall appears in the final section
of Richard Neutra’s 1927 book Wie Baut
Amerika?, finished while Neutra was living at
Schindler’s house in Los Angeles. The dormitory is
accompanied by illustrations of the Taos Pueblo
(taken by Schindler on his trip, but not credited in
the book), the Siwa Oasis in Egypt, Lloyd Wright’s
1923 Oasis Hotel in Palm Springs and, source and
end point of them all, the ‘primitive desert land-
scape’ of the West. For Neutra, this constellation
of references illustrates one side of a ubiquitous
‘Romanticism’ that coincides with the development
of modern construction in the United States. Differ-
ing, however, from the gothicised towers of Charles
Klauder’s 1926 ‘Cathedral of Learning’ in Pitts-
burgh, which arise, for Neutra, from the quotation
of recognised historical styles, interest in adobe
form-making ‘reaches back to original conditions’
and stems from a ‘bucolic reaction to the ornate-
nesses of eclecticism and of urban existence.’22
Like Schindler, Neutra was well aware of the
derivative compulsion by architects to dress up uni-
versity buildings or a steel-built home so that they
‘appear like so much piled-up adobe’.23 Rather
than Romantic reaction, Neutra’s vision of Taos,
414
Modernism in mud
Albert Narath
Figure 9.
R. M. Schindler, exterior,
Dr T. P. Martin House,
1915. (Rudolph
M. Schindler Collection,
Architecture & Design
Collection, University
Art Museum, U.C.
Santa Barbara.)
Figure 10.
R. M. Schindler, exterior
view, Dr T. P. Martin
House, 1915. (Rudolph
M. Schindler Collection,
Architecture & Design
Collection, University
Art Museum, U.C.
Santa Barbara.)
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formulated from Schindler’s accounts and his own
1925 and 1939 trips through New Mexico, ulti-
mately emphasised the Pueblo’s ‘modernness’.
Neutra’s 1930 book Amerika begins with a series
of ‘Bestimmungsstucke’ that anchor his subsequent
description of architecture in the United States.
Bracketed by Edward Weston’s photographs of a
pulquerıa and a circus tent, the section contains
pictures of the ruins of El Rito de los Frijoles at Ban-
delier, a Hopi village, the cliff-dwelling at Betatakin
in north-eastern Arizona and, on a facing page, a
view of the side-elevation of the San Jose de
Gracia Church at Las Trampas.24 The photographs
of Bandelier, Betatakin and Las Trampas were
taken by Willard D. Morgan, a critic, photographer
and early member of the Museum of Modern Art
photography department.25
In the caption to the picture of Betatakin, Neutra
writes, ‘Original [Ursprunglicher] “Cubism” in North
America, in most cases more clear than in Europe.’26
As accentuated through Morgan’s own modernist
eye, the ‘Kubenformen’ of the cliff-dwelling and
the ‘Lehmkubus’ of Las Trampas were not only con-
nected to the vernacular architecture of other primi-
tive cultures, but also to the ‘play of building masses
in Manhattan’ and the formal language of the
modern movement in Europe. Although Neutra
could still admit in 1912 that he ‘knew nothing of
the then-current Cubists, and had only a slight
inkling later of the Futurists in Milan’, his positioning
of primitive architecture as an unconscious aesthetic
‘source’ of Cubism, almost commonplace by the
publication of Amerika, is closely linked to the
complex debates concerning the transposition of
Cubism from painting into architecture that took
place in Europe before his move to the United
States in 1923.27
Even though the heavy, earth-born masses of the
pueblo, more accurately described as cubic than
Cubist, preclude any associations with the cat-
egories of transparency, dematerialisation and
simultaneity popularised by Sigfried Giedion, their
generally planar surfaces and seemingly Platonic
geometry were easily assimilated into mantras
about ‘purity’ and ‘universal form’ deployed in archi-
tectural analyses of cubist form-making during
these years. For the Dutch architect J.J.P. Oud,
perhaps the most influential interpreter of Cubism
and Futurism from within architecture during the
1910s, the ‘intellectual affinity’ between architec-
ture and Neo-Plasticism in painting made the
plane, and along with it the right angle and a ten-
dency towards three-dimensionality, the basis for
what he called a ‘new — a-historical — classi-
cism’.28 For the critic Adolf Behne, who concluded
his 1922 publication Hollandische Baukunst in der
Gegenwart with a celebration of Oud’s architecture,
this classicism was directly related to Cubism’s primi-
tiveness. In his 1919 book Die Wiederkehr der
Kunst, Behne compares the ‘fundamental’ and
‘absolute’ qualities of Cubism to non-European
architecture and to the art of children and
‘primitives’.29
In projects like Oud’s 1917–1919 staircase for the
De Vonk Holiday Hostel and his 1917 design for the
‘Strandboulevard’ at Scheveningen, cubic forms
that would soon haunt Neutra during his visit to
the Southwest are derived from a spatial conception
indebted to Berlage and Wright. While Oud’s intro-
duction to Wright signalled a possible synthesis
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with Cubism, Neutra’s first exposure to the Wasmuth
Portfolio reminded him of the ancient culture of
Native America. It was, for Neutra, ‘just like seeing
pictures of houses for people in another world’. He
imagined ‘the Pampas of Argentina, but still inhab-
ited by red Indians, with tepees as a backdrop, and
in the distance a thundering herd of bison.’30
As with Schindler before him, Neutra’s European
formation governed his encounter with Wright, his
introduction to the pueblo and his understanding
of architectural development in the United States.
Soon after his arrival in New York, Neutra viewed
the Southwestern dioramas at the Museum of
Natural History. Inspired by the experience, he
wrote in a letter to his wife Dione that in their con-
struction of an ‘agglomeration of building cubes’,
the Puebloans were the people ‘who influenced
the modern Californian building activity’.31 In
Amerika, the pueblo and cliff dwelling preface an
historical narrative of architecture that includes
Daniel Burnham, Louis Sullivan, J.W. Root, Wright,
Gill, Schindler and, culminating around Morgan’s
construction photographs of the Lovell Health
House, Neutra himself.
Schindler too had planned a book on American
building by 1920, based in part on material he gath-
ered while working in Chicago. Although the
project never came to fruition, no doubt owing in
part to Neutra’s more ambitious inclination in pub-
lishing Wie Baut Amerika?, Schindler’s approach to
the subject remained consistent over the course of
his career. In a 1940 letter to Janet Henrich at the
Museum of Modern Art, Schindler suggests: ‘Why
not make a study of the modern movement in this
country, starting with its local foundation apparent
in home made barns, icehouses, pueblos, etc. . .’32
While Schindler recognised the pueblo’s superficial
aesthetic affinities with European modernism, his
own vision of architecture at Taos emphasised its
connection to local conditions.33
This becomes clear in Schindler’s appreciation of
Irving Gill, whose 1909 G.W. Simmons House,
1912–1914 La Jolla Woman’s Club and, while it
was under construction, Dodge House, Schindler
saw during his trip.34 Both Schindler and Neutra
considered Gill a pioneer of American modernism
comparable in significance to Wright. Gill’s preco-
ciously unadorned houses maintained an uncanny
resonance, at least on the exterior, with the aes-
thetic formation of modern architecture in Europe,
especially in the contemporaneous work of Schindler
and Neutra’s teacher, and fellow American travel-
ler, Adolf Loos. This affinity, however vaguely
defined, was not lost on American authors. In a
1915 Sunset article, Bertha Smith describes the
1911–1913 Banning House as ‘California’s first
cubist house’. It is, at the same time, a ‘simple, beau-
tiful, useful house’ that has ‘a Made-in-America
look about it.’35 In its clear organisation, flat roof
and crisp, white, planar walls, the Banning House
signalled the vitality of an indigenous American
modernism. Gill himself articulated this vision in
the pages of The Craftsman. In a 1916 article, he
argues that architects must return to ‘the source of
all architectural strength — the straight line, the
arch, the cube and the circle — and drink from
these fountains of Art that gave life to the great
men of old.’36 These ‘great men of old’ surely
included the Puebloans, whose works Gill had
carefully studied.
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Gill’s Dodge House would become a central ingre-
dient in Schindler’s design for his own house in
King’s Road, built from 1921–1922 and located
just across the street. More, however, than a ques-
tion of formal affinity alone, connections to Gill
and the pueblo at Kings Road are revealed in the
house’s robust concrete tilt-slabs. As Reyner
Banham noted, ‘The technique was Irving Gill’s in
that part of the world, but the inspiration was the
adobe houses that Schindler had seen in New
Mexico.’37 Although Schindler’s tilt-slab technique
differs in important ways from the principles of
adobe construction employed for generations at
Taos, the materiality, massiveness and close connec-
tion to ground essential to both systems reinforced
Schindler’s interest in basic forms, contextual sensi-
tivity and, ultimately, the primitive idea of shelter.
In its intimate relationship with the ancient land-
scape of Taos, the Martin House suggested, for
Schindler, the very beginnings of architecture as
such. In his most detailed discussion of architecture
before his 1915 trip, a hand-written 1912 or
1913 manuscript entitled ‘Modern Architecture:
A Program’, Schindler begins: ‘The cave was the
original dwelling. A hollow adobe pile was the first
permanent house. To build meant to gather and
mass material. . . The technique of architect and
sculptor were similar.’38 Reminding Schindler later
of his own experience in 1911 in ‘one of the earth-
bound peasant cottages on top of a mountain pass
in Syria’, whose walls were ‘plastered over by
groping hands’, the first house emerges as an out-
growth of the archetype of the cave, its sculptural
mass derived mimetically from the earth-shaping
produced in the cave by natural forces.39
Schindler makes clear, however, that the model of
the ‘plastically shaped material mass’, dominating
architectural creation until the twentieth century,
was antithetical to the future development of
what he called ‘space architecture’. With reference
to the Syrian cottage, Schindler recollects ‘Stooping
through the doorway of the bulky, spreading house,
I looked up into the sunny sky. Here I saw the real
medium of architecture — Space.’40 The contrast
between massive adobe walls and overarching
New Mexico sky depicted in Schindler’s plans for
the Martin House suggests an analogous scene.
This has led authors to dismiss the project as either
a romantic pilgrimage back in architectural time or
the product of Schindler’s deliberate exploration
of the limits imposed on architectural expression
by the adobe model.41
Despite the Martin House’s expression of load-
bearing, mud-piled weight, Schindler’s plan for
the project grew directly out of his emerging con-
ception of modern architectural space. The finely
modulated relationship between the house’s living
room, dining room and billiard room is indebted both
to Loos, as eventually formulated in his Raumplan,
and to Wright, as illustrated in several Wasmuth Port-
folio projects and his ‘Home in a Prairie Town’ for
the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1901.42 The somewhat
incongruous interplay of elements at the Martin
House suggests a catalogue of influences that would
come to mark Schindler’s particular conception of the
modern house. In a 1968 article entitled ‘Ambiguity
in the Work of R. M. Schindler’, written on the wave
of Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction, Gebhard
describes the Martin House as a tension between
New Mexico folk-like irregularity and picturesqueness,
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Wagnerian and Wrightian symmetry, and Loosian
Raumplan, with geometric forms that are more
abstract than folk. For Gebhard, it was this schizoid
‘impurity’, detectable also in projects like the 1922–
1926 Lovell Beach House, which set Schindler
apart from his fellow pioneers and famously earned
Hitchcock and Johnson’s wrath.43
Schindler’s disparate sources are, however, all
linked to an alternative model of architectural begin-
nings. Less than a year after his return from Taos,
Schindler gave an ambitious series of twelve lectures
on architecture at the Church School of Design in
Chicago. The surviving lecture notes make multiple
references to Gottfried Semper’s idea of architec-
tural space as developed in The Four Elements of
Architecture and the first volume of Style. For
Semper, the beginning of building coincides with
the beginning of textiles. The art of the wall fitter,
originating in the weaving of mats and carpets but
later achieved through substitute materials, was
the primitive technique whose product, supported
by the scaffold of the wall, formally represents and
makes visible enclosed space. In a particularly crea-
tive reading, Schindler suggests in a note to a
section devoted to ‘Form Creation’ dealing with
polychromy in ancient Greek architecture, that
adobe is an example of such a ‘facing’, as he calls
the textile motive.44 As Schindler would have
observed during his visit to New Mexico and as
Neutra later recollects in Survival Through Design,
the earth walls of pueblos like Taos are continually
resurfaced with new coats of mud by village
women in an act of ritual maintenance.45
In addition to their other practical and symbolic
functions, the Martin House’s adobe walls signify,
for Schindler, the primitive motive of spatial enclo-
sure. Through the texture of adobe, they determine,
by extension, the creation of the room. Correspond-
ing to his statement in the Church School lectures
that ‘Space is the material of arch[itecture], room
its formed product’, Schindler insists in his letter to
Dr Martin that he does not believe ‘in the architect
who decorates elevations, but in the one who con-
ceives rooms.’46 The Martin House stages an inves-
tigation into primitive space forms, where, in a
formulation that Schindler would arrive at later, ‘a
simple weave of a few materials articulates space
into rooms.’47 Rather than the more literal connec-
tion drawn by Lionel March between Schindler’s
1918 plan for a log house and Semper’s Urhutte
(based on the anthropological model of the
‘Caraib hut’ from Trinidad that Semper saw at the
1851 Great Exhibition in London), the Martin
House shows Schindler’s growing interest not only
in specific architectural models, but also in the crea-
tive potential of the spatial motive itself.48
Schindler also links the adobe of the Martin House
to the ancient art of pottery. The walls of the Taos
Pueblo are hand-shaped, as Vincent Scully observed,
out of ‘wet clay, laid up in handfuls by the women
and patted and smoothed as in the shaping of a
pot.’49 For Semper, pots are not only the ‘oldest
and most eloquent of historical documents’, but
also the only art works that can claim to be as
ancient and as continuously integral to architecture
as weaving. In The Four Elements of Architecture,
Semper argues that the oldest ornaments were
derived either from entwining and knotting
materials or with the finger on soft clay. Ceramics
relates to the moral element of architecture, embo-
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died in the hearth. It is around the hearth that the
three other elements of architecture — enclosure,
mound and roof — are organised and around it
that the first groups assembled, the first alliances
formed and the customs of a cult developed for
the first time. Semper notes, ‘man, not as an individ-
ual but certainly as a social being, arose from the
plains as the last “mud-creation [Schlamm-schop-
fung]”.’
At the Martin House, these archaic events,
rehearsed still in calendrical rituals like the San
Geronimo festivities and the Corn Dance, take their
place around the hearth in the form of a collection.
According to Schindler’s letter, the house’s grand fire-
place, perched three steps above the living room and
measuring 24 feet in length and 8 feet in depth,
would give Dr Martin ‘ample opportunity to display
tastefully’ his ‘Indian collection’, an impressive array
of artworks and artefacts acquired over the course
of twenty-five years living in Taos.50 As with Frank
Mead and Richard Reque’s 1914 La Jolla, California
‘Hopi House’ project for Wheeler Bailey, the notion
of collecting becomes a central, even architectural,
part of the house.51 Although Schindler did not
provide images of the fireplace, one of the project’s
interior renderings depicts a large pot, inspired
perhaps by the designs of the San Idelfonso potter
Maria Martinez (one of whose works appears in
Schindler’s photograph of Dr Martin in Figure 6
above), sitting on top of a low shelf beside a built-
in seating alcove (Fig. 11). In addition, the house’s
plan includes what appears to be a three-stripe
Navajo rug, coloured bright red and black, leading
up the stepped rise from the living room towards
the hearth area (see Figure 6 above). The circular
outline of another pot sits on top of it. In addition
to their decorative roles, these objects stand, like
the Martin House hearth itself, for the ancient tech-
niques of ceramics and weaving, symbols for the
primitive origins of modern architectural space.
The objects also situate the project within a
cultural tension that constitutes the active realm
of the collector and, at a more general level,
the proximity in Taos of the ‘distance’ of Pueblo
culture. The house ensures what James Clifford
has called a ‘proper’ relationship with its primitive
objects and influences.52 As opposed to a ‘savage’
or ‘deviant’ relation’ship based, as Clifford describes,
in idolatry, erotic fixation or fetishism — fantasies of
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Figure 11.
R. M. Schindler, interior
perspective, Dr
T. P. Martin House,
1915. (Rudolph
M. Schindler Collection,
Architecture & Design
Collection, University
Art Museum, U.C.
Santa Barbara.)
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a merging with alterity — the collection is displayed,
in Schindler’s word, ‘tastefully’. It is organised and
observed according to its aesthetic structure.
Like the carpets and trinkets that filled Loos’ 1907
apartment tours and the advertisements of Das
Andere, the Martin House and its system of
objects constitute a meditation on modern capitalis-
tic culture that is grounded in the bourgeois interior.
As Banham noted about Schindler, ‘There is very
little sign that he ever felt any strong need to kick
the bourgeoisie up the crotch.’53 In the letter to
Dr Martin, Schindler envisions the house, stemming
once again from Wright, as a ‘frame for a man in
which to enjoy life through his culture. . .’54 Rather
than a frame for the re-enactment or preservation
of native tradition, however, Schindler intends the
house to provide a stage for Martin’s culture.
At the same time that he utilises native architectural
forms and artistic objects to anchor the Martin
House in its unique surroundings, Schindler incor-
porates them into a polemic that has less to do
with romantic flight than with the conditions of
modernity.
When Schindler suggests in his letter to Dr Martin
that the house ‘has to serve a man which is not
dressed in an old Spanish uniform’, he is not only cri-
tiquing the masquerading facade-architecture of
the pueblo and Spanish revivals, but also recognising
Martin’s and his own place within the complex and
historically charged cultural dynamics of Taos. This
might help to explain Schindler’s remarkable uninter-
est in the simulacra of the Taos Pueblo constructed at
the Grand Canyon exhibit at the San Francisco Pan-
Pacific Exposition and at the Painted Desert Exhibit
at the San Diego Panama-California Exposition,
both of which he undoubtedly saw directly before
his arrival in New Mexico.
The Grand Canyon exhibit was sponsored by the
Santa Fe Railway and the Fred Harvey Company as
part of their promotion campaign for tourism in the
Southwest. It included a scale model of the Grand
Canyon viewed from Pullman railroad cars carrying
visitors along the ‘rim’. As visitors were taken past
the Canyon and a pueblo village filled with Acoma
potters, Navajo silversmiths, a ‘weaver’s grotto’ and
dance performances, women dressed in Navajo
costume provided narration. The Painted Desert
Exhibit, conceived by the same sponsors, was even
larger and more ambitious. It included ceremonial
kivas, hornos (beehive-shaped outdoor ovens),
Navajo Hogans, Apache tipis, a balloon-frame and
plaster-constructed cliff-dwelling and copies of the
Acoma and Taos pueblos designed by the Fred
Harvey Company architect Mary Colter. Starting
with Maria Martinez and her extended family, more
than one hundred Apache, Hopi, Navajo and
Pueblo Indians were hired to construct and inhabit
the Pueblo, sell artwork and perform dances for the
visiting public.
As the exhibit’s brochure suggests, this hetero-
geneous array of people and structures was meant
to represent conditions in the provinces of New
Mexico and Arizona from before the arrival of
Spaniards in the sixteenth century and continuing
to the present day. The Taos Pueblo in particular
was celebrated as ‘one of the best preserved
examples of antiquity so far as architecture is con-
cerned.’55 Unlike the Santa Fe architects Rapp,
Rapp and Hendrickson’s New Mexico State Building,
which in its direct reference to the church at the
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Acoma Pueblo recreated the constructions of Pueblo
Indians under the direction of Franciscan mission-
aries, the San Diego version of the Taos Pueblo
evoked an architecture untainted by foreign influ-
ence. For Nusbaum, the Painted Desert was, there-
fore, not ‘an Exposition pueblo, but just such a
pueblo as Indians build themselves, only a little
better and more typical.’56
Despite Schindler’s fascination with the purity,
rootedness and apparent historical constancy of
adobe architecture, his vision of the Taos Pueblo’s
cultural context was one of hybridity rather than
the fantasy of a singular timeless essence or type.
Starting with Juan de Onate’s efforts to colonise
the upper Rio Grande at the end of the sixteenth
century and punctuated by conflicts like the
Pueblo Revolts of 1680 and 1696, and Don Diego
de Vargas’s military reconquest of New Mexico in
1693, Taos played a central role in the historically
close and often uneasy relationship in the area
between Puebloans and the Spanish. In more
recent years, waves of outside influence at Taos
included French traders, Plains Indians and, even-
tually, Anglo settlers and artists. Despite the
Pueblo’s remarkable ability to retain a large degree
of cultural autonomy in the face of these external
pressures, an accomplishment celebrated and some-
times exaggerated by travellers to the area, Taos
was, by Martin’s arrival, a hybrid space where the
territory between one culture and another and
between modernity and pre-modern tradition was
continually negotiated.
This was nowhere more clearly displayed than at
the Pueblo’s San Geronimo Day festival. The
dances and races that contributed to the festival
were far from pure cultural artefacts rooted in the
deep past. San Geronimo Day started as an
Autumn trading festival where neighbouring tribes
gathered, but the occasion was quickly institutiona-
lised by the Spanish as a celebration of the Taos
Pueblo’s patron saint. Following an evening mass,
the performance of a sun dance and a procession
under the image of Saint Jerome, the festival
included morning foot races in which one side of
the Pueblo competed against the other and an after-
noon of clowns and pole climbing in the centre of
the Pueblo grounds. In an 1898 issue of Harper’s
magazine, the painter and Taos Society co-founder
Ernest Blumenschein labelled the event ‘a strange
mixture of barbarism and Christianity.’
By the turn of the twentieth century, San Geronimo
Day had become a popular tourist spectacle with
thousands of onlookers crowding the streets and
rooftops of the Pueblo in order to watch the native
dances and, with similar wonder, each other. This
phenomenon led one author to describe the festival
in 1903 as ‘a good place to witness the passing of
the old and the coming of the new.’57 In a particularly
symptomatic scene, Martin himself arrived in the
middle of the 1900 San Geronimo Day celebrations
seated on top of his car. His vehicle glided in and
out of the crowd and halted directly in front of the
Pueblo’s North House. As reported in the Santa Fe
New Mexican, ‘It was the automobile’s first appear-
ance at a San Geronimo feast, and the splendid
little machine was the wonder and admiration of
the moment. . . Almost immediately scores of kodak
fiends were on the alert to catch a snap shot at the
auto, the crowd and the big mud houses of the
Indians.’58
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Schindler was sure to include Martin’s famous car,
alongside a horse-drawn carriage, in his plan for the
Martin House garage (see Figure 6 above). He was,
after all, just such a kodak fiend. In a series of photo-
graphs in his album, Schindler depicts scenes of the
San Geronimo Day foot races with throngs of specta-
tors, clothed mostly in dresses and suits, lining the
terraces and rooftops of the North House in order
to witness the action (see Figure 4 above). Departing
from Schindler’s architectural studies of Taos, the
subject matter and particular framing of these
images are far from unique. They have the unmistak-
able look of a picture postcard. Schindler approached
the pueblo and its people with a gaze that was tour-
istic just as much as it was, narrowly speaking, archi-
tectural. This is confirmed in his portraits of individual
members of the Taos Pueblo. On the back of one
photograph, Schindler writes, ‘fremde Indianer’
(see Figure 3 above). With its connotations of, at
once, ‘strange’, ‘foreign’ and ‘exotic’, Schindler’s
label not only expresses a romanticised notion of
the remoteness of the Puebloans, but also indicates
his perception of the space between his culture and
theirs.
The hybrid character of the Martin House, also
reflecting Martin’s own position within the complex
cultural dynamics of Taos, provided Schindler with a
framework within which the continual negotiation
at the pueblo between familiar dichotomies, like
outsider and insider, self and other, and modernity
and tradition, could be extended to a more general
meditation on the position of modern architecture
within the contrasting dimensions, in the tradition
of Ferdinand Tonnies, of Civilization and Kultur.
Schindler’s interest in the pueblo, intensified through
Taos’s close proximity to, and even inseparability
from, the consumerism, mass culture and industrial
production of an almost ubiquitous Amerikanismus,
emerges as a response, in the midst of America, to
the forces of production that govern the unchecked
development of technological society and the build-
ings that issue from it. Reflecting his letter to
Dr Martin, Schindler argues, ‘Mere instruments of pro-
duction can never serve as a frame of life.’59
Whereas, for Schindler, the product of the engin-
eer is ‘entirely civilisatory’, the architect is ‘both the
child and creator of a culture’. The architect’s
source ‘is the life character of a group nationally,
racially, or locally defined, a source emitting a
subtle unconscious influence to which he is forced
to submit.’60 Taos was, for Schindler, just such a
source. By submitting, however ‘tastefully’, to the
pull of the pueblo, conceived in part as the fantasy
of a first, and thus metaphysically privileged, Ameri-
can ‘modern’ architecture, Schindler began to lay the
groundwork for a vision of architecture that would
set him apart from many of his fellow pioneers. In
its investigation of space forms and the architect’s
relationship to the cultural and economic forces of
modernity, The Martin House played a central role
in Schindler’s personal and architectural develop-
ment. After all, as Schindler noted after his return
from Taos, ‘Christ and Buddha did not go to see the
Grand Canyon to find himself [sic] — he went into
the desert.’61
Acknowledgements
This essay would not have been possible without the
help of Kurt Helfrich at the R. M. Schindler archive
and the pioneering work on Schindler in New
422
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Mexico by David Gebhard. Special thanks also to
Michelangelo Sabatino for his efforts in bringing
these papers together.
Notes and references1. Letter from Schindler to Richard Neutra, Los Angeles,
California, December, 1920 or January, 1921: quoted
in E. McCoy, Vienna to Los Angeles: Two Journeys
(Santa Monica, ArtsþArchitecture Press, 1979), p. 129.
2. A. M. Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo
Indians of North America (Ithaca and London, Cornell
University Press, 1995), p. 2. See also ‘A Lecture on
the Serpent Ritual’, Journal of the Warburg Institute,
2 (1938–1939), pp. 277–292.
3. C. Mindeleff, ‘Pueblo Architecture – I’, The American
Architect andBuildingNews, 56 (17th April, 1897), p. 19.
4. See F. Kugler, Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte (Stuttgart,
Ebner & Seubert, 1842) and J. L. Stephens, Incidents of
Travel in Central America (New York, Harper & Brothers,
1841).
5. C. Mindeleff, ‘Pueblo Architecture – I’, op. cit., p. 19.
6. Ibid., p. 19. Schindler addressed Fergusson’s theory
of architectural decoration in his 1916 Church School
Lectures.
7. Ibid., p. 19.
8. Schindler’s time with Higgins is documented in photo-
graphs of the painter’s studio and of models from the
Taos Pueblo posing for a painting.
9. Letter from Victor Higgins to Schindler, Taos, New
Mexico, 30th July, 1915: R. M. Schindler Archive, Archi-
tecture and Design Collection, University Art Museum,
University of California, Santa Barbara.
10. J. Keely, ‘Real American Art — At Last!’, Chicago
Sunday Herald (25th April, 1917): quoted in
D. A. Porter, Victor Higgins: An American Master
(Salt Lake City, Gibbs Smith, 1991), p. 49.
11. J. Keely, ibid., p. 49.
12. Schindler would have learned about the indigenous
domestic architecture of southern Italy and the
Austrian Riviera during his student years in Vienna
under Otto Wagner from 1910–1913. Starting with
Joseph Maria Olbrich in 1894 and including Josef
Hoffmann from 1895–1896, Emil Hoppe from
1901–1902 and Wunibald Deininger from 1902–
1903, a succession of Wagnerschuler forwent
customary atelier arrangements in Rome during their
prize tenures in order to explore, like Karl Friedrich
Schinkel and a host of others before them, the
formal sincerity and idiomatic simplicity of Mediterra-
nean buildings.
13. Schindler’s photograph albums are held at the
R. M. Schindler Archive. For a detailed discussion of
Schindler’s photography, see E. Lutz, ‘R. M. Schindler
and the Photography of the American Scene,
1914–1918’, Visual Resources, 21 (December, 2005),
pp. 305–328 and The Architect’s Eye: R. M. Schindler
and his Photography, doctoral dissertation, University
of California, Santa Barbara, 2004.
14. Schindler exhibited a floor plan and renderings of the
house’s front porch and interior court at the thirteenth
annual architecture exhibit for the Chicago Architec-
tural Club, held at the Art Institute of Chicago from
5–29th April, 1917. In addition to its listing in the exhi-
bition catalogue, the Martin House was illustrated with
a view of the court in a section of the April, 1917 issue
of Western Architect devoted to the exhibition.
15. Letter from Schindler to Dr T. P. Martin, Chicago, Illi-
nois, 14th December, 1915: R. M. Schindler Archive,
Architecture and Design Collection, University Art
Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara.
16. D. Gebhard, ‘R. M. Schindler in New Mexico, 1915’,
New Mexico Architecture (January–February, 1965),
p. 18.
17. F. L. Wright, An Autobiography (New York, Duell,
Sloan and Pearce, 1943), p. 311.
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18. This play of elements is, after all, one of the things that
drew Schindler to New Mexico. After his return to
Chicago, Schindler recalled the effect of a ‘wall muti-
lated by the rain’ and concluded, ‘That is why people
go and see the old towns of Europe and the pueblos
and mission churches of the West.’ R. M. Schindler,
Church School Lecture, XII, 2: R. M. Schindler Archive.
19. Letter from Schindler to Dr T. P. Martin, op. cit.
20. Ibid.
21. F. L. Wright, An Autobiography, op. cit., p. 309.
22. R. J. Neutra, Wie Baut Amerika? (Stuttgart, J. Hoffman,
1927), p. 77. The affinity between pueblo architecture
and native building traditions from similarly arid
regions of the world highlights, for Neutra, the univers-
ality of adobe form-making. See also C. Mindeleff,
‘Native Architecture in Africa and New Mexico’, Scienti-
fic American, 79:20 (12th November, 1898), p. 313.
23. R. Neutra, Survival Through Design (New York, Oxford
University Press, 1954), p. 65.
24. Below the picture of Las Trampas, Neutra includes illus-
trations of two neo-classical houses built around 1800
— one in Monterey, California and the other for an
American consul in the Mexican province of Upper
California. Alongside the architecture of the pueblo,
the simplicity and regularity of these houses are
undoubtedly connected, for Neutra, to the unified
artistic culture, grounded in burgerlich classicism and
the Biedermeier, represented by the phrase ‘um
1800’ and celebrated by modern architects like
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
25. Together with his wife Barbara, famous for her photo-
graphs of the Martha Graham Company and other
innovators in modern dance, Morgan attended
Neutra’s lecture course at the Academy of Modern
Art in 1929 and conducted extensive photographic
studies of California projects by Gill, Wright, and
Neutra. He worked collaboratively with Neutra on
the illustrations for Amerika.
26. R. J. Neutra, Amerika, die stilbildung des neuen bauens
in den Vereinigten Staaten (Vienna, A. Schroll, 1930).
27. Quoted in T. S. Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search
for Modern Architecture (Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 1982), pp. 14–15.
28. J. J. P. Oud, ‘Over Cubisme, futurisme, moderne bouw-
kunst, enz.’, Bouwkundig Weekblad, 37:20 (1916),
pp. 156–157: translated in, E. Taverne, C. Wagenaar,
M. de Vletter, eds, Poetic Functionalist: J.J.P. Oud,
1890–1963: The Complete Works (Rotterdam, NAi
Publishers, 2001), pp. 169–170.
29. A. Behne, Die Wiederkehr der Kunst (Leipzig, K. Wolff,
1919). See D. Mertins, ‘Anything but Literal: Sigfried
Giedion and the Reception of Cubism in Germany’,
in, E. Blau and N. J. Troy, eds, Architecture and
Cubism, op. cit., pp. 219–251.
30. J.J.P. Oud, ‘Der Einfluss von Frank Lloyd Wright auf die
Architektur Europas’, in Hollandische Architektur
(Mainz, Florian Kupferberg, 1976); R. Neutra, Life
and Shape (New York, Appleton-Century Crofts,
1962), p. 173.
31. Letter from Neutra to Dione Neutra, New York,
November, 1923: quoted in, D. Neutra, ed., Richard
Neutra, Promise and Fulfillment, 1919–1932: Selec-
tions from the Letters and Diaries of Richard and
Dione Neutra (Carbondale and Edwardsville, Southern
Illinois University Press, 1986), p. 101.
32. Letter from Schindler to Janet Henrich at the Museum
of Modern Art, 6th April, 1940: quoted in J. Sheine,
R. M. Schindler (London and New York, Phaidon
Press, 2001), p. 257.
33. For Schindler, ‘In the main work which is generally
called “modernistic” is an architectural backwash of
the several movements of modern art in Europe,
such as futurism, cubism, etc. . . They limit themselves,
like a painting or a piece of music, to an expression of
the present with all its interesting short-comings.’:
R. M. Schindler, ‘Space Architecture’, op. cit., p. 50.
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34. Schindler also saw Gill’s Administration Building,
covered by Goodhue with Rococo ornamentation,
during his visit to the San Diego Exposition.
35. B. Smith, ‘California’s First Cubist House’, Sunset
(August, 1915), p. 368.
36. I. Gill, ‘The Home of the Future: The New Architecture
of the West: Small Homes for a Great Country’, in,
B. Sanders, ed., The Craftsman: An Anthology (Santa
Barbara and Salt Lake City, Peregrine Smith, 1978),
p. 309.
37. R. Banham, ‘Rudolph Schindler: Pioneering without
Tears’,ArchitecturalDesign, 37 (December,1967), p.579.
38. R. M. Schindler, Modern Architecture: A Program,
republished in A. Sarnitz, R. M. Schindler, Architect,
1887–1953, op. cit., p. 42: Schindler also discusses
adobe and ancient architecture in his notes for the
1916 Church School Lectures.
39. R. M. Schindler, ‘Space Architecture’, Dune Forum
(February, 1934), op. cit.
40. Ibid., p. 44.
41. See L. March, ‘Log House, Urhutte and Temple’, in,
L. March and J. Sheine, eds, RM Schindler: Compo-
sition and Construction (London, Academy Editions,
1993) and J. Sheine, R. M. Schindler, op. cit.
42. Indeed, upon receiving the Portfolio shortly after its
publication in 1910 from a librarian in Vienna,
Schindler even declared Wright ‘the first architect’.
Schindler helped to introduce Wright to pueblo archi-
tecture after starting work in his office in 1918. For
the importance of Native American traditions for
Wright, see N. Levine, The Architecture of Frank
Lloyd Wright (Princeton, Princeton University Press,
1996), pp. 185–189.
43. D. Gebhard, ‘Ambiguity in the Work of
R. M. Schindler’, Lotus, 5 (1968), pp. 106–121.
44. Schindler’s note reads, ‘All classic arch¼decoratif -
facings (struct. Material disappears - dematierialized)
facing applied (influence of use of textiles?) adobe,
etc. (see Semper).’: R. M. Schindler, Church School
Lecture, op. cit., X, 1. Schindler also refers to Semper
in a discussion of facings in X, 2.
45. R. Neutra, Survival Through Design, op. cit., pp. 67–68.
46. Letter from Schindler to Dr T. P. Martin, op. cit.
47. Emphasis added: R. M. Schindler, ‘Furniture and the
Modern House: A Theory of Interior Design’, Architect
and Engineer, 123 and 124 (December, 1935 and
March, 1936), pp. 22–25 and 24–28.
48. See L. March, ‘Log House, Urhutte and Temple’, op.
cit., pp. 102–113.
49. V. Scully, Pueblo: Mountain, Village, Dance (Chicago
and London, The University of Chicago Press, 1989),
p. 48.
50. The complete sentence reads, ‘The center part of the
room lays on a lower level than the entry, (third
sketch), and the fireplace (3 steps), an impressive
feature which will also give you ample opportunity to
display tastefully your Indian collection.’: letter from
Schindler to Dr T. P. Martin, op. cit. The fireplace
dimensions are taken from L. March, ‘Log House,
Urhutte and Temple’, op. cit.
51. Mead and Reque’s design was commissioned by
Wheeler Bailey for a pueblo-style guest house to
display his extensive collection of Hopi art and
Navajo rugs.
52. J. Clifford, ‘On Collecting Art and Culture’, in The
PredicamentofCulture: Twentieth-CenturyEthnography,
Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass. and London,
Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 219.
53. R. Banham, ‘Rudolph Schindler: Pioneering without
Tears’, op. cit., p.579.
54. Letter from Schindler to Dr T. P. Martin, op. cit.
55. Painted Desert Exhibit, San Diego Exposition, brochure
(1915; Avery Library, Columbia University).
56. Quoted in M. F. Bokovoy, The San Diego World’s Fairs
and Southwestern Memory, 1880–1940, op. cit.,
p. 120.
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57. J. A. LeRoy, ‘The Indian Festival at Taos’, Outing, an
Illustrated Monthly Magazine of Recreation, 43:3
(December, 1903), p. 283.
58. ‘The Feast of San Geronimo. Thousands of People
Thronged Taos to Witness the Unique Celebration a
Week Ago’, Santa Fe New Mexican, 37:196 (6th
October, 1900), p. 1.
59. R. M.Schindler, ‘Space Architecture’, op. cit.
60. R. M. Schindler, ‘Furniture and the Modern House: A
Theory of Interior Design’, op. cit., pp. 22–25
and pp. 24–28: republished in A. Sarnitz,
R. M. Schindler, Architect, 1887–1953, op. cit., p. 53.
61. R. M. Schindler, Notes for Church School Lectures,
II, 3.
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