Lovell House

The Lovell House, also known as the Lovell Health House, stands on a steep hillside site above Griffith Park in Los Angeles, designed by the Austrian-American architect Richard Neutra for the physician and health advocate Philip Lovell and completed in 1929. It is widely credited as the first residential building in the United States constructed with a welded steel skeleton frame, a construction technique borrowed from industrial and commercial building that allowed Neutra to open the house's walls almost entirely to glass and cantilever its terraces dramatically out over the hillside. Lovell had already commissioned an earlier experimental house from the architect Rudolph Schindler, and his patronage of both Neutra and Schindler placed him at the center of the earliest circle of European-trained modernist architects working in Southern California. The Lovell House was included in the landmark 1932 Museum of Modern Art exhibition that introduced the term International Style to American audiences, and it remains one of the most historically significant houses of that movement built anywhere in the United States.