R. M. Schindler: Composition and Construction.

R. M. Schindler was born the same year as Le Corbusier, 1887, and died in 1953 while Le Corbusier was building the Maisons Jaoul. The fact that his 1925 Lovell Beach House is largely regarded as one and indeed the first of the five key Modernist buildings of the 1920s (Gropius's Bauhaus, Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, Mies's Barcelona Pavilion and Neutra's Lovell Health House being the others) has not secured his reputation. His exclusion by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson from the 1932 Modern Architecture exhibition and his subsequent labelling in 1940, by Hitchcock, as an architect of 'arbitrary and brutal effects' in a manner not quite 'mature' essentially ensured his exclusion from the inner circle. But it was an exclusion that was not unexpected as this welcome and timely collection makes clear.

R. M. Schindler: Composition and Construction is the result of the exhibition and the subsequent 'Schindlerfest' held in Los Angeles in 1987/88 to mark his centenary. Just adequately edited and regrettably without an index, it is a disparate yet nevertheless cohesive collection of essays, inter spersed with selections from Schindler's own writings, and it both reflects the particular interests of the 10 contributors and promotes a common and continuing theme space.

It would seem that space was the sticking point, the quality which separated Schindler's work from his contemporaries and, because critics like Hitchcock did not understand what Schindler was doing, the generator of those 'arbitrary and brutal effects'. One would think Schindler's interest in space came with his studies under Adolf Loos in pre-war Vienna, but the recent discovery by Barbara Giella of Schindler's Program, a youthful poetic manifesto written in 1912 or 1913, produces evidence to dispute this. As Harry Francis Mallgrave argues in his discussion of the Program, Schindler appears to respond negatively to much of Loos's (and, for that matter, Otto Wagner's) teaching and, claiming that 'The only idea is space and its organisation', had already sailed for America before Loos's Concept of Raumplan (spatial plan) was fully floated. In America, his first building was the Buena Shore Club in Chicago (1916-18) which, as Giella shows, was amply infected with Wrightian and Wagnerian mannerisms. But its complex spatial language, conceived in a Loosian, three-dimensional manner proved too confusing for the contractor a frustration which was to plague Schindler in his work, resulting in him often doing his own building.

The 'Schindler Frame' was developed, as Judith Sheine explains, to help realise space architecture. By introducing a continuous wall plate at door-head height, he allowed for varying ceiling heights and continuity between spaces, as well as broad horizontal openings, clerestoreys and large overhangs. Reference Frames in Space, published in 1946, two years before Le Corbusier's Modulor, explained not so much a new theory of proportion but what he had been doing for the last 26 years. Composing each house 'as a symphony, with variations on a few themes', Schindler rejected the monocratic Golden Section favoured by Le Corbusier for commensurate ratios, preferred from Vitruvius to Palladio. Lionel March, in his analysis of Schindler's proportioning system and his study of Dr How's house in Silverlake (where March himself actually lives), shows that Schindler, as one expects from a pupil of Wagner and Loos and a native of Vienna, adheres closely to Classical models and musical ratios in his three-dimensional grid of module-sized cubes, achieving in his space architecture what Shoenberg, another Viennese then resident in Los Angeles, achieved in his music.

The machine aesthetic and the space/structure relationship of the International Style which attracted Hitchcock and Johnson to Neutra is alien to Schindler's work and, we conclude from this book, something upon which he was not willing to compromise. In his continuous battle with the International Style which, he said in 1953, 'I have fought in deed and word since it emanated from the sickbed of a frightened European culture', Schindler dug himself into a hole and, to a very great extent, regionalist obscurity. It was not deserved and this provocative and well illustrated book must go a long way towards redressing the balance. I was teaching in Los Angeles in 1987 and remember the local celebrations of Le Corbusier's centenary, although his nearest building was some 3000 miles away: Schindler's centenary, meanwhile, passed me by unnoticed.

NEIL JACKSON