R M Schindler, who died 50 years ago, was a contemporary of architectural greats like Frank Lloyd Wright - but his major contribution has been largelyforgotten, writes Emma Cullinan

The world is full of unrecognised geniuses. Maybe they lack the skills or contacts with which to promote themselves effectively. Or perhaps their work just isn't understood.

One such person was the architect Rudolph Schindler, who died 50 years ago. He was overshadowed by architects of the Modern movement who broadly followed the International Style. Even now, the name of RM Schindler is less well-known than the likes of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Richard Neutra and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Despite being European himself (he was born in Vienna in 1887) Schindler's work was also overlooked because he practised in California while, in the 1920s and 1930s, the international architectural press was more interested in architects working in Europe.

Schindler didn't plan to stay in America. He went there to work with Frank Lloyd Wright on a temporary basis, yet economic devastation after the first World War meant there was no work to go back to in Europe. Schindler hoped to return to Vienna to work with Adolf Loos, who had taught him architecture, but Loos's office had no work. Even Schindler's friend Richard Neutra was asking about leaving Europe to work in America.

In her book RM Schindler (Phaidon - £65), Los Angeles architect Judith Sheine is an enthusiastic exponent of her subject's work. While beautifully illustrating why Schindler was so brilliant and inspiring, she fights his corner against other architects rather too viciously. Wright, Neutra, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe come in for a battering. Yet the point should be that all of these architects were good and so was Schindler, but in a different way.

While Modernists were paring back their structures and having the form of their buildings guided, in certain cases, by new building components, Schindler was creating more complex structures that had humanity. While Mies coined the phrase "less is more", Sheine gleefully quotes Robert Venturi's take on this, in which he says "less is bore".

Schindler was ambitious and what he achieved leads to the question: what is success? In our world, where money, fame and size of job are often the barometers, he may be considered to have fallen short - but he does show that, whatever work you are given, you should make the most of it.

He's now gone down in history, something that won't be the legacy of many commercial architects who made piles of money during their lives. What better legacy than to inspire those that follow?

Schindler designed his houses from the inside out, a method he referred to as "space architecture". When new developments in building materials and construction meant that structures no longer needed to rely on internal load-bearing walls, Schindler declared that the modern architect "has finally discovered the medium of his art: SPACE. The 20th century is the first to abandon construction as a source for architectural form".

Now an architect could design a space and then work out how to build it.

But Schindler believed that industrialisation of building materials had led to a certain style of architecture - pared-back functional boxes. It was a mistake to let machine-made parts dictate the form of a structure. They needed to be used inventively and flexibly to create individual spaces. "Only by confining the machine to making parts which, through the very fact of their precision, may be joined freely, can we subdue its mechanical ferocity to individual human expression," said Schindler. He criticised those who stuck to rigid styles as "functionalists whose ideal of perfection is the machine".

He was a bohemian who was keen to set himself apart from others, but he paid the price for not conforming. At that time, those who were affiliated to the International Style got the publicity. This included his friend Richard Neutra who had lived in Schindler's Kings Road, Hollywood, house for many years.

Their relationship broke down when a client, who said he thought the pair were working together, gave a project to Neutra to run. Professional jealousy also put paid to Schindler's relationship with Frank Lloyd Wright.

Schindler had run Wright's office while the boss was working on the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, but when Schindler wrote that he had done this on a pamphlet, Wright was furious and said no one else had ever run his office. The pair made up, in letters to each other, when Schindler lay dying in 1953 at the age of 65.

"I am not a stylist, not a functionalist nor any other sloganist. Each of my buildings deals with a different architectural problem, the existence of which has been entirely forgotten in this period of rational mechanisation," said Schindler. "The question of whether a house is a house is more important to me than the fact that it is made of steel, glass, putty, or hot air." For him a building had to suit its occupants and its surrounds. To this end the internal spaces were paramount. The shapes of the interior rooms defined the shapes of his buildings, along with the site, climate and landscape.

Schindler's complex sections and dynamic plans distinguished him from many of his contemporary Modernists. The interiors comprised compositions of spaces instead of one single volume.

Many of his homes were L-shaped or in an asymmetrical U (such as Hollyhock house, with its glass-walled livingroom pushed out towards the Pacific Ocean) and were designed on a diagonal axis emphasised by corner windows, V-shaped ceiling joists and fireplaces in corners. In his Austrian command of English, he referred to his interiors as "excentric", meaning off centre, but it's a beautiful pun for his working style which could indeed be considered eccentric.

The entrances to his houses were often in one corner of a room, with views through the whole building via corner windows: a flow between internal rooms was important to him, as was the link between inner and outer spaces.

These dynamic plans contrasted with the regularity of the International Style.

Unlike the white and primary colours of Modernists, Schindler favoured nature's colours. He used grey and brown as the backdrop and splashes of brighter colours (rock, earth and flowers).

While he is not associated with a single style there are features that characterise Schindler's houses. They're often low, horizontal buildings (like Wright's Prairie homes), with clerestory windows, overhanging roofs, large hearths, huge openings in the walls, varying ceiling heights, plus a continuity between adjoining rooms and gardens.

In his space architecture, every detail, including the furniture, relates to the whole. He pointed out that while certain Modernist villas stood on slender pilotis, his concrete stilts were part of the building's structural frame.

Schindler's buildings were done on tight budgets as the clients attracted to his bohemian style often had more taste than money. While other architects suffered during the 1930s Depression, Schindler worked consistently if not very profitably.

He kept costs down by being inventive in the use of materials. Schindler's first houses were mainly built from concrete but his later work combined concrete and redwood timber, such as in the 1925 How house. He also used roofing materials for walls, and plywood and plaster externally.

Yet each low-cost building was special because it was the result of complex thought and hard work. Schindler rarely employed anyone else, and spent a lot of time in his car driving from site to site. He converted the rear seat so that he could carry building materials with him. In pre-mobile phone days, people complained that he was impossible to get hold of.

While Schindler put all his efforts into his work, he did find the lack of recognition difficult, and was horrified when others were credited with his designs. Schindler often felt compelled to fight for recognition. Neutra was once credited with a building that Schindler had designed, and Wright also had Schindler's ideas attributed to him.

While Wright influenced Schindler it also worked the other way around, says Judith Sheine in her book. She points to Schindler's Wolfe house, which had cantilevered balconies running past each other, just like the later Falling Water by Wright.

In a letter to Architectural Forum 1947, Schindler pointed out that in 1922 he had built a house that had "become the prototype for most of the now fashionable California houses". He had been among the first to design cellarless one-storey, low buildings, the use of glass walls with sliding doors, ample overhangs, flat roofs, clerestory windows, and solid back walls for privacy.

Nowadays the Schindler influence can be seen in buildings worldwide, including beautiful examples in Ireland such as the apartments in Ardoyne Mews, Dublin 4, by Design Strategies, with their interlocking spaces and glass windows that wrap around the top corners of each apartment; a house by Richard Murphy in Galway, with a glass corner; a house by Esmond O'Briain in Waterford with an entrance in one corner and a hearth towards the other; and the Square House in Dublin by McCullough Mulvin Architects, in an L-shape wrapped around a courtyard.

While these haven't necessarily been directly influenced by Schindler, they show that his ideas have become part of today's architectural language.