Modernism in mud: R. M. Schindler, the Taos Pueblo and a 'Country Home in Adobe Construction'

摘要

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.