More than three decades after his death, Richard Neutra remains among the most celebrated of the founders of modern architecture who managed to capture the spirit of modernism in a powerful and memorable way, and several of his works have become icons of twentieth-century architecture.
Born and reared in Vienna around the turn of the century, Neutra very early on demonstrated the facility for exquisite draftsmanship that would mark his later drawings. In 1911, he enrolled in the architecture department of the Vienna Technical University. His professors at the Technical University included Rudolf Salinger, Karl Mayreder, and Max Fabiani. In addition, Neutra was drawn to the teachings and ideas of Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos, and he regularly attended Loos’s private lectures and tours of Vienna’s architecture.
The outbreak of World War I interrupted his education, and Neutra, who served for a time as an artillery officer in the Balkans, was unable to complete his training until 1918. He subsequently worked briefly for Erich Mendelsohn and others in Berlin before immigrating, in 1923, to the United States. He settled first in Chicago, finding employment with the venerable firm of Holabird and Roche, but, ever restless, he soon accepted a position with one of his early heroes, Frank Lloyd Wright, at Taliesin. By 1925, Neutra was in Los Angeles, where he established a partnership with his Viennese friend and former classmate, Rudolph Schindler.
Neutra’s early designs, such as his visionary project for “Rush City Reformed” (1923-30), show the imprint not only of the ideas of Wright, Wagner, and Loos but also of the flowing lines and curvilinear forms of Mendelsohn and Antonio Sant'Elia and the other Italian futurists. By 1927, he had begun to develop a more elemental design language based on simple post and lintel constructions of steel or wood, wrapped with thin wall planes, ribbon windows, and flat overhanging roofs. This new style reached its apotheosis in his design for the Lovell Health House in Los Angeles (1927-29), now widely regarded as one of the signal contributions to the Modern movement.
In the Lovell House, the lyrical qualities of Neutra’s spare frame structures derived as much from their honest and direct use of modern materials—metal, concrete, and glass—as from their undisguised, almost classical composition. Enthralled with these new industrial building products, Neutra explored the possibilities of prefabrication and tectonic austerity, transforming his faith in technological modernity into a distinctive design vocabulary.
In contrast to many of his contemporaries, Neutra demonstrated a particularly strong interest in meeting the needs and wishes of those for whom he built. He sometimes observed his clients for days, or even weeks, in an effort to discern which type of layout would best suit their lifestyles and habits. Throughout his career, he was also attentive to the siting and landscaping of his buildings—a sensitivity he had learned from Frank Lloyd Wright. Neutra's designs, however, although strongly rooted in their contexts, retain a more abstract quality: They appear less part of the natural landscape than artificial objects in the landscape, an approach later adopted by many of the younger Californian architects.
During the 1930s and 1940s, Neutra’s architecture became compact and controlled while retaining the elemental vocabulary of the Lovell House. The repetition of his distinguishing mannerisms, such as his use of parapets, spandrels, or spider legs, evokes an impression of strong uniformity in his designs despite manifest differences in their planning and composition. This uniformity was further reinforced by Neutra’s preoccupation with the single-family house, which constituted the mainstay of his practice for much of his career. Indeed, he preferred these houses to the commissions for large-scale buildings he began to receive after World War II. Many of his later works, produced in collaboration with Robert Alexander, lack the complexity and visual potency of his best designs, betraying an inability to transfer his concepts to large scale.
Among Neutra’s important mature designs, however, was the house he designed in Palm Springs, California, for Edward Kaufmann (1947), which has become one of the most widely reproduced buildings in the history of modernism. It is notable not only for its splendid realization of the principles of openness and transparency that were so central for Neutra but also for the introduction of natural materials—stone rubble and wood—that became emblematic of his late domestic designs and of the California Modern in general.
Neutra’s role as begetter of modernism extended beyond his work as an architect. He was also a tireless advocate for his own work and the cause of the new architecture. Over the course of his career, he wrote numerous articles and several books that brought his work and ideas about modernism to worldwide attention.
Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.2 (G-O). Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005. |
