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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

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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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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.

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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,

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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

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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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