ABSTRACT
in january 1949, the delbrücks moved into their newly completed house. Its bizarre design was Max’s—in New-Age-Speak—“statement” of his anti-conventional sentiments. An unpainted, L-shaped wooden bungalow lining the edges of a large corner lot, it was neither traditional nor modern; maybe it was premature postmodern. It clashed brutally with the ubiquitous Ibero-Californian, white-washed, two- or three-story, red-tile-roofed houses in an upper-middle-class Pasadena neighborhood near the Caltech campus. Half a century later, the bungalow had become partially hidden by trees and shrubs and no longer presented quite as grating an aspect as it did when there was no vegetation to assuage its stark facade.
