Way Back When: Los Altos Neutra House

I don't have enough words in my vocabulary to tell you how much I love Neutra's work. Above is a short little video that begins with and excerpt of a video titled "Neutra's VDL Research House" and ends with a short documentation about the Los Altos Neutra House.

About the Los Altos Neutra House project.

In 2005, the City of Los Altos, the Los Altos Community Foundation, and a group of citizens interested in preserving architectural history joined together to save a small Los Altos house designed in 1935 by this renowned California architect and completed in 1939.

Between 1930 and 1940 Neutra did about a dozen projects in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1935, he began designing three houses for two poets, Jacqueline Johnson and Clayton Stafford. Two small houses with identical floor plans were the residences of Stafford and his wife, and of Jacqueline Johnson. The house that was saved was Johnson's home. A third and smaller house was also built for Johnson. These residences defined a small commune in a prune orchard.

The Johnson house was moved to City-owned land and for the past three years has been carefully renovated for reuse as a community center for meetings, off-sites, and other similar activities. The completed facility has a large conference room, kitchen, bathroom, integrated landscape, and an HDTV audio/video system that on whick visitors can see videos on the history of modern architecture in Los Altos and the greater San Francisco Bay Area. This system will also serve the audio/visual needs of those using the conference room for meetings. Combining preservation and reuse has been at the essence of the Los Altos Neutra House Project.


Please excuse me while I pay some bills...