Museum may add to collection: old houses

LOS ANGELES -— Shortly after moving here last year to take over as director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Michael Govan started looking at houses — not as a place for him to live but as potential museum pieces.

His idea —- one that has rarely, if ever, been tried on a large scale by a major museum —- is to collect significant pieces of midcentury residential architecture, including houses by Rudolf M. Schindler, Richard Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright and his son Lloyd Wright, and to treat them as both museum objects and as residences for curators.