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However, it was Richard Neutra, a friend and then rival of Schindler⁴⁰, who was most notable for the intensive use of this type of glass doors, its development and dissemination. Neutra began to introduce sliding doors in the design of various buildings with prefabricated elements from the mid-1930s.⁴¹ In 1935, at Beard House in Altadena (California), an experimental house in many ways, Neutra did what is probably the first domestic application of commercial ball-bearing sliding glass-and-steel doors in the United States. These window/walls are installed in a protruding way on the outside and the sashes, despite their weight, are top-hung rather than being supported from beneath.⁴²
All his subsequent work, especially in the post-war period, focused on the elimination of the conventional boundary between interior and exterior, promoting the penetration of the outside within the space of the dwelling. It was also during this period that, with suburban development and the proliferation of single-family housing, the option arose for bigger windows and for a shared life between the interior and the exterior. Contrary to the initial postulates of the International Style – which promoted houses raised from the ground and encouraged the eminently visual role of the openings, through windows that framed the landscape and glass walls that created glass houses – the association of glass with the function of opening (generally sliding) made it possible to emphasise the fluidity of spatial movement between inside and outside.⁴³
In the case of Neutra, the architectural option of extending the flat roof beyond the glass window/wall, significantly changes the perception of glazing and the relationship between interior and exterior space. This wide overhang creates, on the one hand, an area of shade that simultaneously attenuates and extends the boundary. On the other, it reduces the reflection from the glass, increasing the exposure to the exterior while paradoxically improving the visual experience from the inside out, framing the view and reinforcing the sense of interior protection. In the words of Sylvia Lavin, “the glass becomes not transparent but invisible, leaving the house unbounded”.⁴⁴
By the second decade of the century, glazing had already assumed the role of an important architectural element to demonstrate the new possibilities of modern architecture, both through the visual reconfiguration of the window and the structural implications of that choice. Wright, in particular, saw in this solution a way to architecturally transform a box into a free plan.⁴⁵ It is though Neutra who for the very first time introduces the possibility of opening the glazed corner, transforming the window/wall from a screen into a device that promotes spatial movement and the complete dilution between interior and exterior. His most powerful and surprising use of glass walls is indubitably the corner formed by two top-hung sliders, which we find for example in the Kaufmann “Desert” House in Palm Springs (California, 1946).
Openable top-hung window walls corner at Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann House in Palm Springs (1946).
Photos by Julius Shulman, 1947. © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10).
40. Like Schindler, Neutra was a native of Vienna who emigrated to California in the 1920s. For a brief period, he was also a collaborator of Frank Lloyd Wright.
41. Among the built work, see for example the Corona Avenue Experimental Garden School (Bell, California, 1935).
42. Track and roller are concealed and waterproofed with a 18 gauge housing. These windows were also entitled to a special glass to reduce solar gain and the frames, like the entire structure of the house, were covered with a bright aluminium paint to reflect the heat. See Peter Gossel (ed.), Neutra: Complete Works, Taschen, 2010, p. 108 / Edward R. Ford, The details of modern architecture, volume 2: 1928 to 1988, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003, pp. 93-95.
43. In the case of Neutra, this focus on continuity was also reinforced by other devices, such as the interior floor heating and cooling system that extends to the outdoor terrace and pool area of Kaufmann’s “Desert” House (Palm Springs, California, 1946), who was also the owner of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater.
44. Sylvia Lavin, Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture, MIT Press, 2005, p. 59
45. “I knew enough of engineering to know that (…) a certain distance in each way from the corner is where the economic support of a boxbuilding is invariably found. You see? Now, when you put support at those points you have created a short cantileverage to the corners that lessens actual spans and sets the corner free or open for whatever distance you choose. The corners disappear altogether if you chose to let space come in there, or let it go out. Instead of post-and-beam construction, the usual box building, you now have a new sense of building construction by way of the cantilever and continuity. Both are new structural elements as they now enter into architecture… (in) this simple change of thought lies the essential of the architectural change from box to free plan and the new reality that is space instead of matter.” Frank Lloyd Wright, Writings and buildings / selected by Edgar Kaufmann and Ben Raeburn, New York: Horizon Press, 1960, p. 285
