“Mao would have understand the purpose behind the plaque,” Mr Green writes. But it gets funnier when you read the witnesses for the defense of that poor, defenseless house:
Despite its international renown, Neutra’s work has sparked intense preservation battles.
I bet. The 1935 house is nothing but a white concrete block blob with those glass bricks, all done with the true modernist's disdain for symmetry and organic flow. All Neutra’s houses on That Wiki are sharp-cornered cubes, right down to the edges where the swimming pools meet the concrete walk ways, exactly the kind of environment you want for small children:
Like so many Neutra houses, Largent is now all white, although it may well have once been unpainted cement block and redwood siding...
So it was uglier before...?
While Neutra houses are thick on the ground in the Los Angeles area, there are only five in San Francisco...
I'm getting Delta smelt vibes here: “We have thick populations of Neutra smelt in L.A., but few in San Francisco, therefore we must assume that Neutra smelt should be living in the latter.”
To make looking at Neutra in San Francisco a little easier...
Good luck.
“It speaks to an attitude in our planning and building departments that nothing is sacred,” Supervisor Aaron Peskin, an advocate for affordable housing...
What exactly is a partisan hack and single-issue lobbyist, for that must be what Mr Peskin surely is, doing advocating for the sacred? And why does that quality exist in a single-family home? Is he pushing for the castle doctrine in the Bay Area? (If so, good for him.) I also love “advocate for affordable housing.” You mean, “housing”? All homes, unless built by the government, are sold (must be) and so are affordable. It becomes more affordable to more people the older and seedier it gets, until it finally drops below the habitability of a slum and is razed and replaced. Is Mr Peskin advocating for purpose-built slums?
One Barbara Lamprecht, in a video linked on one of the two pages above, says about another Neutra house that the second-floor view used to enjoy a closer shoreline and a flooded first-floor roof which created a seamless water view from the base of the window to the far lake shore. This destruction of boundaries contrasts very harshly with her claim that Neutra was inspired by evolutionary psychology and that our artificial environments should reflect the African veldt. Apparently, those Africans in the old National Geographic pictorials were a decadent bourgeoisie, because many of them lived in walled villages.
Further amusement is provided in the sidebar, with a picture of the demolished Neutra right below an in-site link to the article, “Curbed SF's most beautiful homes of 2018,” illustrated with a classic 1885 “Italianate villa in wood,” the Gable Mansion in no-kidding Yolo County, that the website tellingly admits is the “most jaw-dropping” on that list. Richard Neutra’s lopsided “Darling House” at #8 would have been rejected for a storage shed in the Victorian Age, and somehow was not chosen to lure the reader into the article.
But even this gets better: the list-icle starts with, “how often does one get to see designs by Angela Danadjieva, Daniel Liebermann, Bernard Maybeck, Julia Morgan, and—blessed be—Ettore Sottsass on the market in the same year?” Can you spot the Wiccan? How blessed is the owner-occupant of a genuine Ettore Sottsass? You be the judge.
I always say I didn't have any choice in which architect to use. Sottsass would have killed me if I didn't have him design my house.
“Moderates get the bullet too.”
