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R.M. Schindler

Rudolph Michael Schindler was born in Vienna, September 5, 1887, and grew up there. He attended the Imperial Technical Institute in Vienna where he was trained as an engineer, graduating in 1911. At the same time, he was enrolled in the prestigious Vienna Academy of Arts. While in Vienna, Schindler absorbed the teachings of Otto Wagner and was introduced to the theories of Josef Hoffmann and Adolf Loos. Through these men, he was exposed to the ideas of the late-nineteenth-century English Arts and Crafts movement.

In 1914, encouraged by Loos' enthusiasm for the United States and the ideas of Frank Lloyd Wright, Schindler answered an advertisement for a position in the Chicago office of Ottenheimer, Stern, and Reichert, hoping to eventually study and work with Wright. Schindler had planned to return to Austria eventually, but when he was prevented from doing so because of the first World War, he decided to remain permanently in America. By late 1917, he persuaded Wright to hire him. While living in Chicago and working for Wright there, Schindler gained first-hand knowledge of the Prairie School, the work of Gustav Stickley, the American Arts and Crafts movement, and other individual architects. There can be little doubt that the influence of Wright was profoundly felt by Schindler.

R.M. Schindler married Sophie Pauline Gibling in 1919 in Chicago. They lived in Wright's remodeled Oak Park Studio before joining him for a brief stay in Taliesin. They then moved to Los Angeles so that Schindler could supervise the construction of a group of Wright-designed structures for Aline Barnsdall. Schindler established his own independent practice in Hollywood in 1921, which he successfully maintained throughout the 1920s, the Depression years, and the war years of the 1940s, until his death on August 22, 1953.