Richard Neutra

Richard Neutra was an architect.  An Austrian-American architect, assonance alliteration.  He was born in the second district of Vienna, Austria Hungary on April 8, 1892.  His parents were wealthy.  Papa Samuel Neutra owned a metal foundry.  Business was good.  Metal was melted and liquid metal was poured and new metal was cast and formed in a mold and solidified and cooled.

Richard had two brothers and a sister.  His mother was  Elizabeth “Betty” Glaser Neutra.  His sister was an artist.  She made sculptures and enamelwork and paintings.  She married the Austrian art historian Arpad Weixlgärtner and moved to Sweden.  Some of her work is visible at The Museum of Modern Art.

Neutra studied at the Vienna University of Technology.  The architects Karl Mayreder and Max Fabiani were his mentors.  Young Richie also attended Adolf Loos’s private architecture school.  Loos was a controversial modernist and critic of the Art Nouveau movement.  He studied abroad in the Balkans and Italy with Ernst Ludwig Freud.  Ernst was the son of Sigmund Freud, future architect and an all-around good lad.

Early Career

The World War disturbed the school work.  Lieutenant Neutra served in Trebinje in the artillery division.  The fighting raged.  He took a leave and his final exams in 1917.  The fighting stopped.  He went to Switzerland and was employed by the landscape architect Gustav Ammann.  He was a city architect in Luckenwalde, Germany in 1921.  He moved to Berlin and joined Erich Mendelsohn’s firm before 1922.

He married Dione Niedermann before 1923.  She was the daughter of an architect.  They had three sons.  The couple moved to the United States in 1923 and became naturalized citizens in 1929.  The patriarch worked for Frank Lloyd Wright for some time.  His first project in Los Angeles was the landscape architecture for a friend’s beach house.  The site was in Newport Beach and lasted from 1922 – 1925.  Various projects followed. 

Richard Neutra formed his own practice.  Twelve of his designs were constructed and designated as Historic Cultural Monuments.  The Lovell Health House was finished in 1929 with the aesthetics of the International Style.  It was featured in the films L.A. Confidential (1997) and Beginners (2010), starring Ewan McGregor.  His signature buildings captivated California.  The breathable and technical geometric structures made him famous.  In the 1930’s he trained a generation of architects that included Harwell Hamilton Harris, Raphael Soriano and Gregory Ain.

Twilight

The MoMA featured his work in an exhibition of modern architecture.  The showcase was curated by the historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock and architect Philip Johnson.  Neutra worked as a professor in Vermont in the early 1940’s before forming a partnership with Robert E. Alexander.  The foray allowed him to work on institutional and large commercial buildings.  The United States Department of State commissioned him to design a foreign embassy.  He worked with his son Dion in 1965.  A new partnership was formed.

Eight villas were completed in Europe during the 1960’s.  One was in France.  Three were erected in Germany.  The rest in Switzerland.  Richard Neutra died on April 16, 1970.  He was seventy-eight years old.  His attention to detail throughout his career was unmatched.  The size of the building did not matter.  The client came first.  His domestic masterpieces were a perfect balance of nature, art and practical luxury.

Some of his art is lost.  The fourteen thousand square foot Windshield house in New York burned down on New Year’s Eve in 1973.  The Von Sternberg House in Northridge, California was knocked down in 1972.  It was finished in 1935.  The Fine Arts Building at California State University was demolished in 1997 after the fallout of an earthquake years prior.  A fire claimed The Slavin House in Santa Barbara in 2001.  The flames were hot against the wood.  Beams splintered in pressure and made noise.  A year later the Maslon House in Rancho Mirage was deconstructed.  The former building was built in 1962.

Grass and other structures sit on the locations of the lost art.  Other organisms roam below.  In the mud or dirt or sand and dirt and mud and sand, time passes and cultures are formed.  They are unnamed and waiting or nothing at all is happening.  Richard Neutra was awarded the AIA Gold Medal posthumously in 1977 and the Golden Palm Star in Palm Springs in 2015 on the Walk of Stars. 

“A building can be designed to satisfy by the month with the regularity of the provider. Or it can give satisfaction in a very different way, by the moment, the fraction of a second, with the thrill of a lover.”

– Richard Neutra