2.14.2002 00:05
Art Scene by Bill Van Siclen

Rise and fall of the Browns' modernist experiment

It's too bad Shakespeare didn't go to architecture school. If he had, the Bard might have produced a tragicomic masterpiece based on the story of Windshield, the star-crossed summer house built by John Nicholas Brown on Fishers Island, N.Y., in the late 1930s.

As it is, we'll have to settle for Windshield: Richard Neutra's House for the John Nicholas Brown Family , a fascinating look at the planning, construction, furnishing and ultimate destruction of one of the earliest and most expensive modernist houses in America.

The show, a collaboration between Harvard University and the Rhode Island School of Design, opens tomorrow at the RISD Museum.

Brimming with a wide variety of archival material, including drawings, photographs, models, furniture and even home movies, the show tells the story of one of the most unlikely architectural partnerships of the 20th century.

On one side was John Nicholas Brown, the tall, patrician and fabulously wealthy patriarch of the famed Brown clan of Providence. On the other was Richard Neutra, a Vienna-born architect who had made a name for himself designing sleek modern-style villas for California's rich and famous.

Initially, the goal was to build a modest-size summer cottage on a rocky bluff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Brown would provide the means, and Neutra the design, for a house in the fledgling International Style -- so-called because its trademark features (boxy shapes, flat roofs and acres of plate glass) were thought to be adaptable to any locale.

In theory, it looked like a perfect marriage of old money and new architecture.

SEE A SLIDESHOW OF CURRENT EXHIBITS

Collection Museum of Art, RISD
AN EARLY SKETCH of Richard Neutra's proposed design for John Nicholas Brown's house, Windshield, as seen from the southeast. The early plans have the look of a small but stylish ocean liner.

Unfortunately, it didn't work out that way. Though Neutra was used to working with quirky clients -- movie director Josef von Sternberg, for example, insisted on lockless bathroom doors because, as he told Neutra, "there is always somebody in the bathroom threatening to commit suicide and blackmailing you, unless you can get in freely" -- Brown was picky to the point of obsession.

Not only did he and his wife, Anne S.K. Brown, visit Neutra in Los Angeles to inspect his previous work, but he insisted on vetting everything from Windshield's heat-resistant windows to its Swedish-made china. He also demanded more room for the family's servants, including separate quarters for two maids, a butler, cook, governess and chauffeur.

By the time he was done, Windshield had grown by more than 20 percent. The modest summer cottage had morphed into a modernist mansion.

Letters, notes and telegrams

To be fair, Neutra encouraged the Browns' participation in the design process -- at least initially.

Though architects often try to get to know their clients, Neutra seems to have gone farther than most. After being hired in the fall of 1936, he sent the Browns a questionnaire seeking detailed information about the family's daily habits and activities.

In typical fashion, they responded with a seven-page, single-spaced letter outlining their plans for everything from a first-floor music room ("fairly large, dry, cool and soundproof and far from the front door") to a storage locker for their record albums.

And that was just the beginning.

Over the next 18 months, Neutra and the Browns exchanged more than 150 letters, notes, telegrams and drawings. Selections from this correspondence, including copies of the Browns' responses to Neutra's questionnaire, are included in the RISD show, and they provide an unusually intimate look at Windshield's genesis.

Both Brown and Neutra, for example, were fascinated by high-tech gadgets and products.

In addition to its heat-blocking Solex windows, Windshield was outfitted with rustproof aluminum windowframes and soundproof rubber flooring. Other amenities included a radio-operated garage door opener, light dimmers and a basement projection room -- a forerunner of today's home theaters.

At the same time, the two men locked horns over Windshield's internal layout. Brown favored lots of small rooms that allowed for maximum privacy. Neutra preferred large open spaces that allowed for maximum flexibility.

In the end, Brown won, though Neutra exacted a small revenge: When the plans for Windshield were published in a prominent architectural journal, Brown's small rooms had been replaced with Neutra's open, flowing spaces.

Like a medical clinic

Not surprisingly, all the tinkering and revising took its toll on Windshield's design.

In the show's earliest sketches, the house has the look of a small but stylish ocean liner. There are echoes of Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie Style houses in the use of projecting eaves to shelter long rows of casement windows. Yet the shoe-box shapes, flat roofs and generous use floor-to-ceiling glass panels are all part of modernism's stylistic toolkit.

Later designs, however, are less successful.

As the house gets bigger and bulkier, it loses most of its sculptural rhythm. In its final form, Windshield looks less like a breezy summer getaway and more like a chic medical clinic or insurance-company headquarters.

The changes also affected the project's bottom line. Originally estimated at $40,000, Windshield wound up costing nearly $220,000 -- or about $3 million in today's dollars.

What's more, many of the high-tech products didn't work as advertised. The casement windows jammed and rattled. The soundproof rubber flooring made too much noise. The toilets in the pre-fab bathrooms flushed constantly. And even the modern furnishings were a problem, since they required constant cleaning to look their best.

Still, the worst was yet to come.

Less than two months after the Brown family moved in, Windshield was severely damaged in the ledgendary 1938 hurricane. The Browns survived -- barely -- but many of the casement windows were blown out and large sections of the roof were lifted off. (A post-hurricane analysis blamed Neutra's overhanging eaves for most of the damage.)

The house was repaired the following year and remained one of the Browns' two summer residences -- the other was in Newport -- until 1959. After an unsuccessful attempt to sell it, the Browns donated Windshield to a private club that used it as a guest house.

On New Year's Eve 1973, it burned to the ground.

A sunny spin

Both the show and its accompanying catalog do their best to put a sunny spin on Windshield's rain-streaked history.

Despite their differences, both the Browns and Neutra pronounced themselves pleased with the project. And with today's renewed interest in modern architecture, there is hope that Windshield will eventually take its place alongside Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House as an icon of 20th-century design.

But there's also a darker story lurking under Windshield's shiny glass-and-aluminum surfaces. It's a story with some of the tragedy of King Lear and some of the comedy of Love's Labours Lost , and it's a story that only an architectural Shakespeare could properly tell.

Windshield: Richard Neutra's House for the John Nicholas Brown Family runs tomorrow through April 14 at the RISD Museum, 224 Benefit St. in Providence. Hours are Tues.-Sun. 10-5. Phone: 454-6500.

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