House Hunt.(The Talk of the Town)

Richard Neutra, the architect, is not the sort of figure you think of as having much to do with artists like Damien Hirst and Jean-Michel Basquiat. But there he was last Tuesday night, at Christie's, as Lot 42, right before Hirst's "I'm in Love for the First Time" and Basquiat's "Untitled (Car Crash)." Not Neutra himself, who has been dead since 1970. It was the house he designed, in Palm Springs, in 1946, for Edgar Kaufmann, the Pittsburgh department-store owner who, a decade earlier, had commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build Fallingwater.

In the past few years, a handful of notable pieces of modern architecture have been put up for auction. The most famous was Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House, which Sotheby's sold, for seven and a half million dollars, in 2003. But these were treated as works of design, and auctioned off along with Eames chairs and Tiffany lamps. Christie's decided that the Kaufmann House, a serene, almost ethereal composition of glass walls and solid planes, was valuable enough to offer in its spring sale of postwar and contemporary art. Andrea Fiuczynski, the president of Christie's Los Angeles, and her colleague Joshua Holdeman knew that since Philip Johnson's Glass House and the Farnsworth House are both museums now, the Kaufmann House was one of the few modern American masterpieces that a private owner could still acquire. They valued it at between fifteen and twenty-five million dollars, which could buy you a more than decent four-bedroom in a good building on Fifth Avenue. The price for the Kaufmann House, Holdeman said, reflected "the public awareness of its having reached the status of being a cultural object."

There was barely standing room at Christie's on Tuesday evening. The crowd included a few people who aren't usually seen at auctions, such as Carolyn Brody, the former chairman of the National Building Museum, and Thomas Hines, Neutra's biographer. Beth Edwards Harris, an architectural historian from Los Angeles, was also there. She and her husband, Brent, bought the house from Barry Manilow in ...