Neuhaus, Hugo V., Jr. House

The Mary Wood and Hugo V. Neuhaus, Jr., House, completed in 1950, is named after its original occupants. It was the first example of the application of practices of modern architecture associated with the German-American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and the New York architect Philip Johnson to Houston and Texas at the midpoint of the twentieth century. Contextually it relates to the influence of Modern Architecture in Texas and to the statewide context of Architecture in Texas.

Secondarily, the Neuhaus House relates to Landscape Architecture in Texas because of the contributions to the development of its site by the Houston landscape architect C. C. Pat Fleming. The house is significant at a state level in the area of Architecture, as one of the most outstanding examples of Miesian domestic architecture built in Texas, and as one of the most outstanding works of the distinguished Houston modern architect, Hugo V. Neuhaus, Jr. It also meets Criterion C in the area of Landscape Architecture as an early example of the application of modernist practices of landscape design to a Texas garden.

Houston, Texas, was founded in 1836 by two brothers who had come to Mexican Texas from New York in 1832, A. C. Allen and J. K. Allen. A. C. Allen's wife, Charlotte M. Baldwin, outlived her husband and brother-in-law by many decades and it was her family, rather than her husband's, who would prosper in Houston. Mrs. Allen's niece and namesake, Charlotte Baldwin, married Frederick A. Rice, the brother and business associate of W. M. Rice, whose fortune endowed Rice University. One of Charlotte and Fred Rice's grandchildren was Kate Rice. In 1911 she married Hugo Victor Neuhaus, an engineer-turned-stockbroker from the hamlet of Hackberry, Texas, one hundred miles west of Houston. Kate Rice and Hugo Neuhaus' first son, Hugo Victor Neuhaus, Jr., was born in Houston in 1915. Between 1919 and 1923, Kate and Hugo Neuhaus built a country house in the elite Houston neighborhood of Shadyside, designed by the distinguished New York architect Harrie T. Lindeberg. Hugo Neuhaus, Jr., who would become one of the finest architects to practice in Houston, came from a background of civic and cultural leadership in which architecture played a leading role.

The house he designed and built for himself, his wife, Mary Wood, and his wife's son from her first marriage, William Stamps Farish III, in 1950 was an instant landmark because of its breathtaking modern style. It was the first building in Texas to reflect the influence of the great German-American architect, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and his disciple at the time, New York architect and museum curator Philip Johnson. Designed and built in tandem with the Miesian modern house Philip Johnson was designing in Houston for the Franco-American art collectors Dominique Schlumberger and John de Menil, the Neuhaus House was completed a few months before the Menil House. As such, it was instrumental in making Mies's steel-and-glass architecture the high style of Houston modernism in the 1950s. The Neuhaus House not only won a Medal of Honor from the American Institute of Architects, Houston Chapter, in 1951, but it was also published in two nationally-circulated design magazines, House + Home (July 1952) and House & Garden (February 1954). It was also illustrated in a feature article on Houston in Holiday magazine (1952) and included in the exhibition "Ten Years, Ten Buildings" staged by the Contemporary Arts Museum in 1959 to recognize the ten most influential works of modern architecture built in Houston in the mid-century years. It served as the model on which Neuhaus would base most of his small but distinguished body of work, carried out on a statewide basis until his retirement. Supported by its modernist landscape architecture, the Neuhaus House is significant at a statewide level for its seminal contribution to an architectural trend that would bring widespread attention to Houston and Texas in the 1950s and 1960s.

The Neuhaus Family in Texas

The first member of Houston's Neuhaus family, Ludwig Eduard Neuhaus, arrived in Galveston in 1846 and the following year founded a settlement he later named Hackberry on the Gonzales-San Felipe stagecoach route, eleven miles northeast of Hallettsville in northeastern Lavaca County. Neuhaus farmed the property between 1850 and 1852, built a two-story oak fachwerk residence and mercantile, a steam sawmill-gristmill, and later added a cotton gin and general store. By 1884 the town had an estimated population of 300, seven steam gristmills/cotton gins, two churches, a school, a saloon, a blacksmith shop, and a tin shop, but by 1900 the population was less than half that, and members of the Neuhaus family began to move to Houston. The land and remaining structures (including the 19th-century general store) are still owned by the Neuhaus family.

Hugo Victor Neuhaus, Jr.

Hugo Victor Neuhaus, Jr. was born in Houston in 1915, the son of Hugo Victor and Kate Padgett (Rice) Neuhaus. Neuhaus, Sr. was an investment banker known as "The Baron" who in 1919 commissioned architect Harrie T. Lindberg to design a house for his family at 9 Remington Lane, with John Staub as the supervising architect. When asked by John Staub later in life if his childhood house had any influence on his decision to become and architect, Neuhaus, Jr. responded that he "loved the feeling of the woodwork on a hot summer day." The famous woodwork was the result of "15 coats of pumice-rubbed lacquer that looked like glass."

Neuhaus, Jr. was a native Houstonian and fifth-generation Texan. He attended St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire (1934), Yale (A.B. 1938), and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University (B. Arch., 1941). Upon returning to Houston in 1946 after serving in the US Army Air Force for five years, Neuhaus worked for Houston architect Kenneth Franzheim until he was licensed, and then joined the office of C. Herbert Cowell, becoming a partner in 1949. During their 14-year partnership, the firm designed many buildings in the state that obtained national, state, and local design awards. After the dissolution of that firm in 1962, Neuhaus practiced with Magruder Wingfield, Jr. until 1967 when he established his own practice known as Neuhaus Associates where he remained until his retirement in 1980.7 In addition to the house for his family, Neuhaus designed the Stude-Stevenson House (1951) and a house for Nina J. Cullinan (1953, demolished), both in River Oaks. Other houses of the 1950s outside of Houston include the Runnells- Pierce Ranch House (1956) near Bay City, and the Detering Bay House in Bay Ridge, Morgan's Point (1959, demolished). David Haid, a Canadian who had worked for Mies van der Rohe, was associated with Cowell and Neuhaus from 1960 to 1962 and during his tenure the firm's commercial structures included the Headlee District Office Building, Midland, Texas (1960), the Shell Development Company Auditorium and Research Building, South Side Place [Houston] (1961), the McAllen State Bank Building, McAllen, Texas (1961, defaced), and the Letzerich Ranch House, Friendswood, Texas (1962).

Examples of Neuhaus' later work include the First State Bank and Trust Co. Building, Mission, Texas (1964), the Hudson Ranch House near Bay City, Texas (1965), the Wood House, Palestine, Texas (1965), the Rice Hotel Laundry, Houston (1966), the Letzerich House, Houston (1966), the Aline McAshan Botanical Hall for Children at the Houston Arboretum (1969), and the Sharp House (1978, with Graham B. Luhn).

In his obituary for Cite magazine, Houston architect Anderson Todd noted that Neuhaus enjoyed a unique reputation among architects in the southwest. From diverse personalities and well-known local architects, such as John F. Staub and Howard Barnstone, it was not unusual to hear said that Hugo Neuhaus never did a bad building, a rare accolade to receive from another architect... In his role as trustee of numerous institutions and a member of their building committees, Hugo Neuhaus was the leader in many building programs in which he took the responsibility for selecting architects and coordinating their work. Neuhaus worked on two buildings of international stature. He worked with Mies van der Rohe on the design of the Master Plan of the Museum of Fine Arts, shepherding the construction of the first phase (Cullinan Hall) and continuing on the building committee during the design of the second phase (Brown Pavilion) until Mies's death in 1969, then continuing through the construction and opening of the wing in 1974, working with the office of Mies van der Rohe. The trust that he engendered in the institutions and such benefactors as Nina Cullinan, Oveta Culp Hobby, and Alice and George Brown is without parallel. During the years 1964 to 1968 Hugo Neuhaus was chairman of the building committee of the Alley Theatre, participating in the selection of the architect, Ulrich Franzen, coordination, and serving in the often difficult position of liaison between the board, Nina Vance, the architects, and the For Foundation, which matched donations from local sources. Before his death, the board of the Alley Theatre fittingly announced that the Arena Stage, the theater-in-the-round similar to the type where the Alley made its worldwide reputation, had been named the Hugo V. Neuhaus, Jr. Stage."

In 1947 Neuhaus married Mary Wood Farish, the widow of his cousin William Stamps Farish, Jr., and became the stepfather of William Stamps Farish III. Mary Wood was the daughter of General Robert Wood, chairman of Sears, Roebuck and Company. William Farish III grew up in the house on Lazy Lane and in 2001 was appointed by President George W. Bush as the Ambassador to the Court of St. James. Following his first wife's death in 1979, Neuhaus married Olive McCollum in 1985. Neuhaus' neighbor Ima Hogg originally owned the property on which the house stands. It is unclear if Neuhaus purchased the property from Miss Hogg or if she gave it to him as a wedding gift. In an article by Marguerite Johnston that appeared in the Houston Post in 1952, Neuhaus is quoted as saying, "The form of the house came from trying to close it off from Kirby Drive, which is already a thoroughfare, and to open our view as much as possible toward the ravine."

In addition to his architectural practice, Neuhaus served on the boards of trustees of many Houston cultural institutions. As such, he was associated with the design and construction of two of the most significant works of modern architecture built in Houston in the 1950s and 1960s. Neuhaus was one of several architects and art collectors asked to recommend an architect for an addition to the Museum of Fine Arts to be paid for with a contribution made by a client and family friend, Nina Cullinan. In 1954 Neuhaus and other committee members recommended Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Mies' only art museum building in the U.S. and his only building in Texas is the two-phase addition he made to the Museum of Fine Arts, Cullinan Hall (1958) and the Brown Pavilion (1974). In the mid-1960s, Neuhaus chaired an architect-selection committee for the Alley Theater, which led the Alley to commission the New York architect Ulrich Franzen to design its award-winning performance hall in downtown Houston (1969). The direct connection to Mies van der Rohe was especially important because it supported the emergence of a Miesian "school" of modern architects in Houston in the 1950s and 1960s. Frank D. Welch in his book Philip Johnson and Texas (2000) noted this trend and its origin in the patronage of Dominique and John de Menil: "One can only speculate in hindsight on how Houston's postwar architectural landscape might have developed without the Menil patronage of Johnson." Neuhaus was the first Houston architect to be shaped by this patronage and his house was the first work of architecture to reflect its impact on Houston and Texas, predating the completion of the Menil House.

River Oaks

The River Oaks neighborhood is adjacent to Buffalo Bayou and Memorial Park in west central Houston and was developed in the 1920s by Michael Hogg and attorney Hugh Potter. Kansas City architects Hare and Hare drew up the master plan for the area, which included homesites, a campus for River Oaks Elementary School, two shopping centers, and esplanades. The master plan, which provided rigid building codes, also called for underground utility lines and no alleys. Deed restrictions and centralized community control assured exclusivity: a panel of architects and citizens approved house designs, with a minimum price of $7,000. African-American blacks, Jews, and other minorities were excluded from the neighborhood. The first home in the area was built for William and Sue Clayton (NRHP 1984). River Oaks operated independently for three years but was soon annexed by the city of Houston.

General trends in building practice and style development

Neuhaus studied at Harvard just after the arrival of Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer and was a fellow student of Philip Johnson, director of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art who returned to Harvard, his alma mater, in 1940 to study architecture. In 1947, Johnson organized a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art on Mies's work, both his seminal modern buildings in Germany of the 1920s and early 1930s and those he built after immigrating to the U.S. in 1937 and settling in Chicago. When Johnson was commissioned to design a house in Houston for Dominique (Schlumberger) and John de Menil, art patrons and founders of the Menil Collection, in 1948, Neuhaus was recruited as Johnson's local associate architect. As a result of this collaboration, Neuhaus came under the influence of Mies van der Rohe.

Houston architectural historian Ben Koush observed that "The design of the Neuhaus house draws heavily on Mies' 1935 project for the first version of the [unbuilt] Ulrich Lange House, one of a series of similar brick courtyard house projects designed between 1931 and 1938 that appeared in Johnson's monograph. The visual language of the solid brick slab interrupted by glass voids and the heavy cornice was similar as was the quirky bull's eye window to the left of the entrance. The plan of Mies' project had three main brick volumes containing services and sleeping areas linked by glass-walled volumes containing living areas as did Neuhaus'. Although Neuhaus had a considerably more elaborate program, the Miesian spatial quality of the main living areas was not adversely affected."

Landscape

Cauthen Cook ("C. C.") Pat Fleming, often called the "dean of Texas landscape architects," practiced in Houston and the south from the 1920s through the 1990s, and is regarded as one of Texas' leaders in the field. One of seven children, Fleming was born in Beaumont on February 13, 1909, to Joseph Vandever and Keziah Fleming. He studied architecture at the University of Texas in Austin until two separate chemistry and welding accidents burned his eyes and forced him to abandon his studies. Under the guidance of retired UT architecture professor Dr. Tandy, Fleming visited Europe, where he decided to practice landscape architecture.

He received no formal training as a landscape architect but gained experience as an employee of Mrs. C. B. Whitehead, an Austin landscape contractor who executed the planting for the University of Texas called for by the master plan by Hare and Hare of Kansas City. He served as a landscape architect in the design of Palmetto State Park near Gonzales, Texas (1934-1935), and as the supervising landscape architect for the San Jacinto Monument and Battlegrounds (1935-36), where he worked with Albert Sheppard, a fellow UT alum who became his business partner from 1937 to 1942. Alfred Finn, the architect of the monument, recommended Fleming's work to influential Houstonians. Shepard and Fleming received numerous commissions in the wealthy Houston neighborhoods of River Oaks, Shadyside, and Broad Acres, often working with prominent Houston architect John Staub. Their most notable commission was the Diana garden for Ima Hogg's residence, "Bayou Bend." (NRHP 1979). In 1938, Fleming became assistant director of the Houston Housing Authority.

The length of Fleming's practice spanned decades, and his style followed national trends, beginning with Beaux-Arts Classicism, followed by subsequent trends of the Country Place Era, Colonial Revival, Southern Gardens, and Modernism. Modernism as a landscape design style included the rejection and reaction against the traditional styles. New technologies and attitudes were also inherent in the exploration of newness. While modernist architects sought to incorporate the beauty of the machine aesthetic and explore the possibilities of new and overlapping volumes and spaces, the modern landscape architect sought similar goals. Modern landscape design, according to the article Axioms for a Modern Landscape Architecture by architecture critic Marc Treib, adheres to six axioms: the denial of historical styles, the use and definition of space as opposed to the patterning of space, the use of landscapes by people and not merely for visual delight, the destruction of the axis, the use of plants as sculpture and the integration of the house and garden.

The landscape of the Neuhaus residence is a good example of Fleming's modernist vocabulary. He designed the gardens in 1950, the same year as the house. Paige Phillips notes that the "entry court is more traditional with symmetrical organization of two cross-axes. The plantings of the entry court have been changed from the original and there is now an English-style flower garden. The rear patio is distinctively modern in its design and is "divided into several subspaces for sunbathing, dining, dancing, and lounging."

tatewide Significance

The Neuhaus House is significant at a statewide level as the first example of the Miesian version of modern architecture to be built in Texas. It is additionally significant for having demonstrated the applicability of Mies's practices to Houston and Texas in such a compelling way. The house is significant because, the Menil House, advanced Miesian modernism as the high style of mid-century modern architecture in Houston. The dramatic transparency of the Neuhaus House, its scintillating indoor-outdoor connections, its internal spatial openness, it's sophisticated interior planning, and its use of courtyards to extend living space to the out-of-doors are modernist attributes that it persuasively promoted. That Neuhaus built his house on Lazy Lane, the most elite street in the most elite neighborhood in Houston, seemed to identify Miesian architecture as the elite style of modern architecture in Houston, in comparison to such competing modern tendencies as the organic architecture of MacKie & Kamrath, associated with Frank Lloyd Wright, and the flamboyant Contemporary style associated with the Houston neighborhood of Riverside Terrace. By virtue of its boldness and refinement, the Neuhaus House was featured in national design publications to make the point that, as House & Garden headlined its article: "Texas Has Taste."

The Neuhaus House derives additional significance from the landscape installation by C. C. Pat Fleming, Houston's foremost landscape architect from the late 1930s until the 1960s. Fleming designed the gardens in 1950, the year the house was built. The landscape design of the patio continued the practice of zoning space by function and literally seemed to pull the inside outside. The paving pattern of the "dancing" and "dining" portions of the terrazzo terrace extends the four-foot-square grid of the dining room to the out-of-doors. The use of serpentine lines to differentiate the paved sections of the patio from the grass-surfaced "lounging" section and a planting bed indicates the influence that the California modernist landscape architects Thomas Church and Garrett Eckbo (both of whom would work in Houston in the 1950s) exerted on Fleming. The broad, curved, brick-rimmed, grass-surfaced steps that lead from the patio down to the backyard and ravine affect a transition from the orthogonal geometry of the house to the naturalistically landscaped lawns and ravine. The landscape design of the Neuhaus House advanced the modernist precept of living in the landscape, which was supported by the house's extensive use of glass walls. The house derives significance from the consistency with which Neuhaus and Fleming integrated the interior and the exterior through their clever interpenetration of spaces and Fleming's use of different types of plantings nearer the house that contrasted with those already on the site.

Summary

The Hugo V. Neuhaus, Jr. House was Texas' first and remains one of Houston's best examples of Miesian modern architecture. The private rooms of the pavilion-type house are zoned in separate wings to surround public spaces that feature dramatic glass walls overlooking the plunge pool and patio gardens. Set back from Kirby Drive and Lazy Lane, the house makes the most of its wooded surroundings and affords privacy by opening up the center of the house to the views. The Neuhaus House is significant at a state level because it was the first example (and one of the finest) of an architectural trend especially associated with the mid-twentieth century to be built in Texas. The personal connections of its owner-architect to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson contribute to its significance, as does its role in promoting this architectural trend in Houston and Texas. The landscape architecture of the Neuhaus House additionally contributes to its significance because it supports the application of modernist ideals of domestic life to this site. The Neuhaus House and Gardens retain a high degree of architectural integrity and are nominated in the area of architecture with significance at a state level.

After Neuhaus,' death in 1987, his estate sold the house in 1992 "at a rock bottom price and without preservation restrictions." The house was in danger of being demolished in the early 1990s by owners who never lived in the house. The second owners to live in the house, Dr. and Mrs. Jacques A. Ghadialli, purchased it in 1995 to preserve it. The current owners, former US Secretary of Commerce Robert Mosbacher and his wife Michele purchased the house in 2002. It is hoped that listing the house on the National Register will raise awareness of the importance of preserving modern landmarks in Houston. The house and gardens are currently listed as a City of Houston Landmark and the application for a Recorded Texas Historical Landmark (RTHL) listing is in process.