Austrian-American architect (1892–1970)
Richard Neutra |
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 Neutra with a photo of the Beard House, 1935 |
| Born | Richard Joseph Neutra
(1892-04-08)April 8, 1892
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| Died | April 16, 1970(1970-04-16) (aged 78)
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| Occupation | Architect |
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| Spouse |
Dione Niedermann
( m. 1922–1970) |
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| Children | 3, including Dion Neutra (1926-2019) |
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| Awards | Wilhelm Exner Medal (1959)
AIA Gold Medal (1977) |
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Richard Joseph Neutra ( NOI-tra;[1] April 8, 1892 – April 16, 1970) was an Austrian-American architect. Living and building for most of his career in Southern California, he came to be considered a prominent and important modernist architect.[2][3] His most notable works include the Kaufmann Desert House, in Palm Springs, California.
Biography
Neutra was born in Leopoldstadt, the second district of Vienna, Austria Hungary, on April 8, 1892, into a wealthy Jewish family. His Jewish-Hungarian father Samuel Neutra (1844–1920),[4][5] was a proprietor of a metal foundry, and his mother, Elizabeth "Betty" Glaser[6] Neutra (1851–1905) was a member of the IKG Wien. Richard had two brothers, who also emigrated to the United States, and a sister, Josephine Theresia "Pepi" Weixlgärtner, an artist who married the Austrian art historian Arpad Weixlgärtner and who later emigrated to Sweden. Her work can be seen at the Modern Art Museum in Stockholm.[7]
Neutra attended the Sophiengymnasium in Vienna until 1910. He studied under Max Fabiani and Karl Mayreder at the Vienna University of Technology (1910–18) and also attended the private architecture school of Adolf Loos. In 1912, he undertook a study trip to Italy and the Balkans with Ernst Ludwig Freud (son of Sigmund Freud).[citation needed]
In June 1914, Neutra's studies were interrupted when he was ordered to Trebinje, where he served as an lieutenant in the artillery until the end of World War I. Dione Neutra recalled her husband Richard's hatred of the retribution against the Serbs in an interview conducted in 1978 after his death: "He talked about the people he met [i.e. in Trebinje] … how his commander was a sadist, who was able to play out his sadistic tendencies…. He was just a small town clerk in Vienna, but then he became his commander."[8]
Neutra took a leave in 1917 to return to the Technische Hochschule to take his final examinations.[9]
After World War I, Neutra moved to Switzerland, where he worked with the landscape architect Gustav Ammann. In 1921, he served briefly as city architect in the German town of Luckenwalde, and later in the same year he joined the office of Erich Mendelsohn in Berlin. Neutra contributed to the firm's competition entry for a new commercial center for Haifa, Palestine (1922), and to the Zehlendorf housing project in Berlin (1923).[10] He married Dione Niedermann, the daughter of an architect, in 1922. They had three sons, Frank L (1924–2008), Dion (1926–2019), who became an architect and his father's partner, and Raymond Richard Neutra (1939–), a physician and environmental epidemiologist.
Richard Neutra moved to the United States by 1923 and became a naturalized citizen in 1929. He worked briefly for Frank Lloyd Wright before accepting an invitation from Rudolf Schindler, a close friend from his university days, to work and live communally in Schindler's Kings Road House in California. Neutra's first works in California were both in the realm of landscape architecture: namely, the grounds of the Lovell Beach House (1922–25), in Newport Beach, which Schindler had designed for Philip Lovell; and a pergola and wading pool for the complex that Wright and Schindler had designed for Aline Barnsdall on Olive Hill (1925), in Hollywood. Schindler and Neutra would go on to collaborate on an entry for the League of Nations Competition (1926–27); in the same year, they formed a firm with the planner Carol Aronovici (1881–1957), called the Architectural Group for Industry and Commerce (AGIC). Neuatra subsequently developed his own practice and went on to design numerous buildings embodying the International Style, 12 of which are designated as Historic Cultural Monuments (HCM), including the Lovell Health House (HCM #123; 1929), for the same client as the Lovell Beach House, and the Richard and Dion Neutra VDL Research House (HCM #640; 1966).[10] In California, he became celebrated for rigorously geometric but airy structures that epitomized a West Coast version of mid-century modern residential design. His clients included Edgar J. Kaufmann, (who had commissioned Wright to design Fallingwater, in Pennsylvania), Galka Scheyer, and Walter Conrad Arensberg. In the early 1930s, Neutra's Los Angeles practice trained several young architects who went on to independent success, including Gregory Ain, Harwell Hamilton Harris, and Raphael Soriano. In 1932, he tried to move to the Soviet Union, to help design workers' housing that could be easily constructed, as a means of helping with the housing shortage.[11]
In 1932, Neutra was included in the seminal MoMA exhibition on modern architecture, curated by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock. From 1943 to 1944, Neutra served as a visiting professor of design at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont. In 1949 Neutra formed a partnership with Robert E. Alexander that lasted until 1958, which finally gave him the opportunity to design larger commercial and institutional buildings. In 1955, the United States Department of State commissioned Neutra to design a new embassy in Karachi. Neutra's appointment was part of an ambitious program of architectural commissions to renowned architects, which included embassies by Walter Gropius in Athens, Edward Durrell Stone in New Delhi, Marcel Breuer in The Hague, Josep Lluis Sert in Baghdad, and Eero Saarinen in London. In 1965, Neutra formed a partnership with his son Dion Neutra.[10] Between 1960 and 1970, Neutra created eight villas in Europe, four in Switzerland, three in Germany, and one in France. Prominent clients in this period included Gerd Bucerius, publisher of Die Zeit, as well as figures from commerce and science. His work was also part of the architecture event in the art competition at the 1932 Summer Olympics.[12]
Richard Joseph Neutra died on April 16, 1970, at the age of 78.[13]
Architectural style
He was known for the attention he gave to defining the real needs of his clients, regardless of the size of the project, in contrast to other architects eager to impose their artistic vision on a client. Neutra sometimes used detailed questionnaires to discover his client's needs, much to their surprise. His domestic architecture was a blend of art, landscape, and practical comfort.[citation needed]
In a 1947 article for the Los Angeles Times, "The Changing House," Neutra emphasizes the "ready-for-anything" plan – stressing an open, multifunctional plan for living spaces that are flexible, adaptable and easily modified for any type of life or event.[14]
Neutra had a sharp sense of irony. In his autobiography, Life and Shape, he included a playful anecdote about an anonymous movie producer-client who electrified the moat around the house that Neutra designed for him and had his Persian butler fish out the bodies in the morning and dispose of them in a specially designed incinerator. This was a much-embellished account of an actual client, Josef von Sternberg, who indeed had a moated house but not an electrified one.[citation needed]
The novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand was the second owner of the Von Sternberg House in the San Fernando Valley (now destroyed). A photo of Neutra and Rand at the home was taken by Julius Shulman.[citation needed]
Neutra's early watercolors and drawings, most of them of places he traveled (particularly his trips to the Balkans in WWI) and portrait sketches, showed influence from artists such as Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele etc. Neutra's sister Josefine, who could draw, is cited as developing Neutra's inclination towards drawing.[citation needed]
Legacy
Neutra's son Dion has kept the Silver Lake offices designed and built by his father open as "Richard and Dion Neutra Architecture" in Los Angeles. The Neutra Office Building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.[14]
In 1980, Neutra's widow donated the Van der Leeuw House (VDL Research House), then valued at $207,500, to California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona) to be used by the university's College of Environmental Design faculty and students.[15][16] In 2011, the Neutra-designed Kronish House (1954) at 9439 Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills sold for $12.8 million.[17]
In 2009, the exhibition "Richard Neutra, Architect: Sketches and Drawings" at the Los Angeles Central Library featured a selection of Neutra's travel sketches, figure drawings and building renderings. An exhibition on the architect's work in Europe between 1960 and 1979 was mounted by the MARTa Herford, Germany.[citation needed]
The Kaufmann Desert House was restored by Marmol Radziner + Associates in the mid-1990s.[18]
The typeface family Neutraface, designed by Christian Schwartz for House Industries, was based on Richard Neutra's architecture and design principles.[citation needed]
In 1977, he was posthumously awarded the AIA Gold Medal, and in 2015, he was honored with a Golden Palm Star on the Walk of Stars in Palm Springs, California.[19]
Lost works
Neutra's 14,000 sqf "Windshield" house built on Fishers Island, NY for John Nicholas Brown II burned down on New Year's Eve 1973 and was not rebuilt.[20]
The 1935 Von Sternberg House in Northridge, California was demolished in 1972.[21]
Neutra's 1960 Fine Arts Building at California State University, Northridge was demolished in 1997, three years after suffering severe damage in the 1994 Northridge earthquake.[22][23]
The 1962 Maslon House in Rancho Mirage, California, was demolished in 2002.[24]
Neutra's Cyclorama Building at Gettysburg was demolished by the National Park Service in March 2013.[25]
The Slavin House (1956) in Santa Barbara, California was destroyed in a fire in 2001.[26]
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