Von Sternberg House

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Von Sternberg house was a single bedroom (servant bedrooms excluded) mini-mansion designed by the architect Richard Neutra. It was built in 1935 in Northridge, California in the then-rural San Fernando Valley for the movie director Josef von Sternberg. It was demolished in 1972 to make way for a housing development.

Neutra was known as a philosopher of Modernism in Architecture, and his work as a practitioner was in constant interaction with his thoughts and writings. Von Sternberg house was one of the most impressive of the incarnations of this philosophy, along with Lovell house.

In a sense Von Sternberg house was the exact opposite of the McMansions built in ever larger numbers at the beginning of the 21st century. These so-called mansions usually showed nothing but a bigger number of rooms and a bigger than average surface area to account for their inflated price. They were for all practical purposes assembled from identical elements with no distinguishing features. In contrast Von Sternberg house had a very small number of rooms and a relatively small surface area which played up its unique design features. While it did have a few vulgar features of ostentatious display, such as a separate, larger and higher garage bay for a Rolls-Royce in addition to the two other garage bays for lesser automobiles (in an era where even rich homes had only one or two garages) most of its characteristics were original and fairly discrete, showing Neutra's attention for the integration of exquisite custom details, in a flowing whole.

The exterior look of the house and of its landscaped surroundings was made of sinuous lines, yet the interiors were handily orthogonal, making furniture placement simple and easy. As in many others of his domestic designs Neutra made heavy use of well chosen industrial windows and sidings, using his advanced aesthetic sense to transform their origins and create artistic design statements which fulfilled practical functions like making privacy screens and windbreaks.

As ever, Neutra was mindful of his customer's desires even when he found them absurd. He would later regale his friends with the story (among others) of Von Sternberg asking that none of the bathroom doors have locks, in order to prevent his party guests from locking themselves up in there and threatening to commit suicide. As a movie director Sternberg was well acquainted with the all too often theatrical behavior of many Hollywood actors, while Neutra had a social life which kept him in touch with artists in other domains.

In the 1940s novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand bought the house at 10,000 Tampa Avenue in the San Fernando Valley (Chatsworth). Concerned by the thirteen acre ranch's twenty-mile distance from Hollywood, where she worked as a screen writer, Rand and her husband actor Frank O'Connor paid twenty-four thousand dollars for the house. In 1963, according to Rand biographer Barbara Branden, Ayn and Frank sold the house for one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. (Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand, p. 186)

[edit] References

• Hines, Thomas. Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture.. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
• Neutra, Richard Joseph. Life and Shape. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962.