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(Photograph by Gerald Moorhead ) -
(The University of Texas at Brownsville)
The first modernist house in Texas was built for Pan American Airways pilot and executive George Kraigher, who directed the Latin American branch of the company headquartered in Brownsville. Located on a six-acre tract in what was at the time the city outskirts, the house sits today on prime commercial land. Small in scale, it belies its twenty-four-hundred-square-foot living area lit by continuous ribbons of casement windows protected by deep horizontal eaves that interlock with a series of vertical planes. While a second-floor terrace encircles one half of the second story, there is no such exterior feature engaging the outdoors at the ground level. This first design by Neutra in the United States outside of California, and one he visited in 1951, was rehabilitated by the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College in 2007.