Richard Neutra

In 1936, Nicholas and Anne Brown commissioned Richard Joseph Neutra to build their family a summer home on Fisher Island. The house was completed two years later, and became known as the "Windshield House" for its large expanse of glass. An admirer of Frank Lloyd Wright's work, Neutra gave a large role to the surrounding landscape and vegetation in his building design. In this drawing of the music room, the wall-length window allow free view of the house's surrounding and downplays the division between inside and outside, interior and landscape.

Richard Neutra's design for Windshield House---a summer home on New York's Fishers Island---exemplifies the International Style of modernist architecture. Associated with the German Bauhaus school, whose founder Walter Gropius called him a "lonely pioneer" of modernism in America, Neutra subscribed to the purist belief that a modernist building must be functional and unornamented. Here he adheres to the style's technical precision, expression of structure, lightening of mass, and incorporation of brand-new products, such as aluminum windows, linoleum, and Buckminster Fuller's one-piece Dymaxion bathroom. Weeks after Neutra's house for the John Nicholas Brown family was completed in 1938, it was severely damaged by a hurricane. Rebuilt and occupied by the Brown family until 1959, it was destroyed by fire in 1973.