Richard Neutra, Kaufmann House, Palm Springs, Calif., 1946
In the realm of domestic architecture, Southern Californian tastes were often ahead of the more tradition-bound Eastern seaboard. The warm climate made it possible for a handful of advanced architects to design homes that were truly open to the elements — a longtime dream of European Modernists. The same Edgar Kaufmann who commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build Fallingwater asked the Austrian emigré Richard Neutra to make him the light-filled glass-and-steel winter home captured in the above voluptuous picture by the great architectural photographer Julius Shulman.

At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

• California's Changing Landscape