Eighty-six years after it was built, architect R.M. Schindler’s house on Kings Road in Los Angeles still seems radical. As perhaps the first modern house built anywhere in the U.S. or Europe, it was so revolutionary that it was hardly recognizable as a home. When Schindler sent the plans to Louis Sullivan, the architect was so mystified that he claimed he couldn’t make them out at all.

It’s a house without a living room or bedroom; it is completely integrated into its surrounding landscape; and it exposes the raw concrete and redwood from which it was constructed. Schindler spent 31 years living and working here, entertaining his artistic friends and colleagues. Yet even those who embraced the avant-garde had trouble accepting the structure as a house. Galka Scheyer, the dealer who brought the "Blue Four" (Lyonel Feininger, Alexei von Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee) to America, lived there from 1931–33, and found the living conditions so primitive that she wrote in frustration to Schindler, "I am not a bohemian!" But Schindler, who integrated his life and work as inextricably as his designs integrated indoor and outdoor spaces, found it to be an ideal setting to produce his remarkably original form of modern architecture.

Schindler’s body of work, largely residential projects, extends the design principles of the Kings Road house: complex and highly articulated interior spaces illuminated with natural light from all directions and cleverly integrated into their sites. While Schindler’s work developed through the 1930s and into the early 1950s, employing new and very economical materials in increasingly dynamic and complex spaces, his first independent work, his own house and studio, continued to inspire generations of architects. The influence of its flat roof, systematic construction system, closure to public view and L-shaped plan wrapping a private outdoor patio can be seen, for example, in the post-World War II Case Study House program, particularly in the work of Raphael Soriano, Craig Ellwood and Pierre Koenig. And his use of everyday materials in unusual combinations and complex shapes was influential in the work of contemporary architects Frank Gehry, who met Schindler at the Kings Road house; Frank Israel, whose office was at the house in the early 1980s; and Michael Rotondi, who grew up among Schindler houses in the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles. The Kings Road house seems to be at least as influential on younger architects and architecture students; it’s a vital stop on any architectural tour of Southern California.

Schindler developed the ideals that the Kings Road house demonstrates as a student in Vienna in the early 20th century. After receiving a solid technical education at the Vienna Polytechnic University from 1906–11, Schindler was accepted at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied under the most prominent architect in the city at the time, Otto Wagner, who taught him to combine theory and practice in a way that continued throughout his career. In fact, in Schindler’s 1912 manifesto, "Modern Architecture: A Program," he declared, "The architect has finally discovered the medium of his art: space," a revelation that proved to be the key to his career.

While Schindler’s education in Vienna introduced him to Wagner’s ideas about how new architecture should express modern materials and Adolf Loos’ theories about complex interior spaces and rejecting all ornamentation, his single biggest influence was Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1911, Schindler saw the famous Wasmuth portfolio, the first publication of Wright’s designs, which had come out in Germany the previous year. The illustrations of Wright’s work, houses that opened to and spread out in the American landscape, showed Schindler an architecture more revolutionary than any he had seen in Vienna; he took a job in Chicago with the intention of meeting and possibly working for Wright.

Schindler met Wright in December 1914, but Wright was not yet able to hire the young architect. It looked like the U.S. might imminently enter World War I, and Schindler expected to be deported to Austria, so he decided first to take a trip out west in 1915. He stopped in San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego, where he saw the work of architect Irving Gill, which bore a strong resemblance to that of Loos. On the advice of friends in Chicago he visited Santa Fe and Taos, N.M., where he found in the adobes and pueblos what he considered to be an authentic vernacular American architecture, free of European influences.