BIography

Born in Vienna, Austria, Richard Joseph Neutra (1892-1970) graduated summa cum laude from the Technical Institute (University), Vienna. He also attended the informal school founded in 1912 by the radical writer and architect Adolf Loos before serving with the Austro-Hungarian Empire forces in World War I. Like his early friend and colleague Rudolf M. Schindler, Neutra was deeply influenced by the 1910-1911 European publication of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wasmuth Portfolios,

a watershed manifesto in twentieth-century architectural history. The publication illuminated Wright’s radical conception of the “breaking of the [conventional] box” through more open plans and an emphasis on the extended low horizontal line. Both younger architects absorbed and reinterpreted Wright’s strategies, whose uninterrupted diagonal sightlines into nature were afforded by long banks of windows and corner windows. Such configurations became common in the work of many of the European Modernists and later in the architecture of the “Second

Generation” Modernist architects of Southern California. 

Loos, another primary influence, advocated a return to the qualities of humility, anonymity, and what he termed “lastingness,” or durability, in building. Rejecting historicism, Loos argued for a sober, forthright architecture that rejected stylish innovations. These views anchored Neutra’s belief that great architecture did not have to be a series of novel designs hut could evolve detail by detail. In addition, because he established predictable methods, construction costs decreased and allowed the architect to focus on site and user needs.

Despite, his broad education, because of the economy and lack of opportunities at the end of World War I, Neutra’s first job was assisting the Swiss landscape architect, botanist, and gardener Gustav Ammann. Ammann, now considered an important figure in modern European landscape theory, promoted the role of nature and landscape as a necessary component in any architectural setting. Neutra’s early income in Germany relied on small garden and landscape work. In these early designs, he specified plant types, budgets, and maintenance schedules. Beginning in the 1930s, Neutra typically used more general instructions on the height of plant or tree, scale of foliage, and plant placement. Later in his career, Neutra worked with important landscape architects such as Garrett Eckbo and Roberto Burle Marx, in which their designs, incorporating curves and other geometries, offset Neutra’s orthogonal forms.

Neutra immigrated to America in 1923. He was hired as a draftsman by the large Chicago firm, Holabird and Roche, where he mastered steel skyscraper framing and later met another hero, architect, and critic Louis Sullivan. Beginning in the fall of 1924, Neutra worked for Wright in his atelier Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin, before moving in early 1925 to Los Angeles, where his fellow Austrian, Schindler, was based. The city became Neutra’s permanent home. He worked for Wright before teaming up with Schindler, who, with Neutra, was responsible for introducing European Modernism to the West Coast. Apart from his European and American influences, Neutra’s round-the-world tour in 1930 included Japan. The visit was partially facilitated by the Japanese architects he met at Taliesin. Neutra’s stay there was a turning point, as he later wrote in the foreword to a book on Japanese gardens. The well-proportioned use of asymmetry and the consistent use of a standard palette of materials for a wide range of users that he witnessed there confirmed his belief in his own approach. Additionally, the fundamental integration of gardens, texture, landscape, views, and architecture that he admired in Japan strengthened his conviction that nature or nature’s qualities were indispensable in architecture. (29) 

Neutra’s renown in residential architecture rests on his command of proportion and his skillful synthesis of overlapping lines and planes of stucco, steel, and glass that extend into the surrounding landscape. The Lovell Health House, Los Angeles, 1929, established his international fame. Set high in the Hollywood Hills, the house was a superb expression of the International Style and the first entirely steel frame residence constructed in the United States. When he could find no general contractor willing to take on such a radical project, harnessing his early experience in Chicago, Neutra himself took on the challenging project, proving his expertise in innovative methods in construction. Seven years later in the catalogue to the landmark 1932 “Modern Architecture” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Neutra was hailed as “the leading modern architect of the West Coast.” (30) Although chiefly associated with Southern California, he began working in the San Francisco Bay Area as early as 1935, building a clapboard house on Twin Peaks. Two years later he designed the boxy redwood-clad Darling house on Woodland Avenue in San Francisco, which adapted the minimalist architectural aesthetic of 1920s and 1930s Europe to regional conditions, placing it within the woodsy anti-urban Bay Area Tradition.

Neutra went on to design approximately 400 projects, including tract developments, National Park Service visitor centers, churches, colleges, schools, public buildings, defense housing, and villas in Germany, Italy, and Switzerland. Although some have been demolished, especially those on exceptional sites, a number of properties are now designated historic resources in the United States as well as protected internationally, including the early 1960s Bewobau Housing

Development in Germany, and the former U.S. Embassy, Karachi, Pakistan, 1960, designed with his partner in large civic ventures, Robert E. Alexander, and declared a historic monument. Although primarily known for his houses, Neutra’s achievements range from innovative construction techniques to his radical reconceptualization of American schools with strategies that became permanent hallmarks in educational settings here and abroad. Winner of numerous honorary doctorates and prizes, he earned the American Institute of Architects’ Gold Medal posthumously in 1977.

Neutra grounded his architecture on his immersion in readings in emerging nineteenth- and new twentieth-century disciplines, including evolutionary biology, medicine, Gestalt aesthetics, and other sciences. Collectively, his readings and personal acquaintance with many of the authors of the works he read convinced Neutra that an alert contact with nature, or the qualities of nature, were critical to any successful human setting. His knowledge of the body’s physical, sensory, and cognitive systems underscored his emphasis on creating environments—the building and its immediate and larger setting— that engaged the senses, Neutra set forth his theory in his 1954 book, Survival Through Design.

Additionally, Neutra used his knowledge of Gestalt aesthetics, refined during his winter teaching tenure at the Bauhaus in 1930, to “stretch space.” Devices such as extended balconies, mirrors, and transparent glass, facilitated such “stretching,” altering the perception of space to create a feeling of expansiveness. Neutra put these tools to use in the designs of small houses and

multi-family designs. 

29 See Barbara Lamprecht, “Neutra in Japan, 1930, to his European Audiences and Southern California Work,” Southern California Quarterly 92 (Fall 2010): 215–42; and Richard Neutra, Foreword, Japanese Gardens for Today, by David H. Engel, and (Rutland, Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle, 1959), xii, xiii. 

30 Alfred H. Barr, Foreword to Modern Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1932), quoted in Hines, Richard Neutra, 125.