Kaufmann Desert House

The Kaufmann Desert House was built in Palm Springs, California, in 1946 for the department store owner Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr., who had earlier commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, this time to a design by the Austrian-American architect Richard Neutra. Neutra arranged the house as a pinwheel of low steel-framed wings radiating from a central living area, each wing oriented to capture views of the surrounding desert mountains while extensive glass walls and sliding doors dissolved the boundary between interior rooms and outdoor terraces. The house became one of the defining works of what came to be called Desert Modernism, an approach to residential design that used industrial materials and open planning to adapt modernist architecture to the extreme heat and dramatic landscape of the California desert. After decades of alterations by later owners, the house underwent a careful restoration in the 1990s led by the architects Marmol Radziner that returned it closely to Neutra's original design. It remains one of the most widely published examples of mid-century American residential architecture.