As Mrs. Hubsch told “her” fascinating stories, I thought of other older women who still live in their Neutra homes: Susie Akai Fukuhara, who settled above Silver Lake Reservoir; Ann Brown, who watches the summer downpour circle “her” home in Rock Creek Park in Washington; Patricia Leddy in Bakersfield, who still creates a little artwork every day and fondly remembers the days when “she” was a Martha Graham dancer. Mrs. Perkins, who lived in “her” home from 1955 until “her” death in 1991, wrote, “It is impossible to express how much I love my home.” According to the house’s current owner, historian Sharon Salinger, Mrs. Perkins slept on a sofa bed next to the living room, so that when “she” awoke, “she” discovered Neutra’s original effect: floor-to-ceiling glass walls that converged in a transparent corner, creating the illusion that the house was dissolving into space. Neutra described the design of the Health House in typically sophisticated terms: “Through the continuity of the glazing and the connection to the landscape, we must turn what has been a dynamic nature for hundreds of thousands of years back into a human environment.” Photo by Julius Schulman © J. The two architects worked side by side, and sometimes together: When Schindler was building a house on the hill for James Eads Howe, known as Millionaire, Neutra oversaw the landscape design. It wasn’t until 1921, when Schindler was already working for Wright in Los Angeles, that Neutra began “his” career: after designing a forest cemetery in Luckenwald, “he” went to Berlin to work with expressionist architect Erich Mendelsohn. Some critics compare “him” to Rudolf Schindler, another great Austrian modernist in Los Angeles, who helped bring Neutr to the city before quarreling with him. The late art historian Constance Perkins, for whom Neutra built a beautiful house in Pasadena, recalls meetings in which “he” theatrically delivered an important phone call. And yet this titan of self-centeredness consumed everything around him. Neutra joined the group in 1932 and built himself the Neutra VDL House studio house on Silver Lake Reservoir. In 1916 Gill wrote, “We must build our house as simple, flat and solid as a rock, and leave the decorations to nature.” Gill seems to have been independent of the modernist philosophy promoted at the same time by the Austrian architect Adolf Loos, who proclaimed that a lack of decoration was a sign of spiritual strength. But Gill’s houses proved less confrontational than those of Loos, who scandalized Vienna but found himself sidelined in Grunwald, Calif. Can a modern aggressive house be inseparable from its surroundings? Neutra battled this question throughout “his” career, which lasted from “his” early days in Germany in the early 1920s until “his” death in 1970. The Kaufman House, an idyll in Palm Springs that Neutra built for department store owner Edgar J. Thelma Lager Hübsch is the oldest surviving owner of Neutra’s home. Neutra, who had a rigorous engineering background, made the Health House an impressive demonstration of “his” abilities. He showed up with “his” entourage without calling me and gave them a tour of the house, “he” said. Many other clients remember Neutra coming unannounced. An even bigger opportunity came in 1950, when the city commissioned Neutra and fellow architect Robert Alexander to build Elysian Park Heights, a complex of 34 homes in a neighborhood sometimes called Chavez Ravine.