Richard Neutra, Constance Perkins house, Pasadena, California, USA, 1955

The Perkins house is one of Neutra’s smaller designs. It was formatted specially for Constance Perkins and her budget. She was a single working woman who had chosen a career (she was professor of Art History at Occidental College) over a family. She requested no main bedroom, she preferred sleeping in her workspace. She wanted a space “as a domestic environment in which individual creativity and work, rather than family and leisure activities were the central concept”.Neutra measured the physical dimensions Constance Perkins, who was a small woman, and he scaled the house to her.

The house sits on a little hill and has a free-from pool extending into the living room. This is actually a tiny house that was constructed with inexpensive materials- wood, plaster, and glass. A spiderleg beam extended the space by projecting out into a small reflecting pool that meanders through one of the glass walls of the house.