Richard Neutral

Richard Neutra (April 8, 1892 - April 16, 1970) was an Austrian architect, later naturalized American, considered one of the most important architects of the Modern Movement.

Kaufman House (1946) in Palm Springs, California.

Biography

Richard Josef Neutra was born in Vienna on April 8, 1892. He studied architecture at the Technical University of Vienna and also attended classes at the building school of Adolf Loos, one of his most respected architects. In 1912 he met Rudolf Schindler, an architect with whom he would forge a friendship, until a conflict arose between them. He participated as an artillery officer in the Austrian army, during the First World War. After the war, Neutra entered a sanatorium near Zurich to recover from malaria and tuberculosis symptoms. After his training, Neutra worked in Zurich, Switzerland, in the office of landscape gardener Gustav Ammann. In Zurich he met Dione, the daughter of the architect Alfred Niedermann, whom he would marry. He would then leave Zurich and go to Berlin, where he earned a living for a while working in a theater and as a publicity cartoonist, before joining the municipal office for public works and urban planning in Luckenwalde, a town south of Berlin, in the district from Brandenburg. There he met the architect Erich Mendelsohn, to whom he became an assistant in his Berlin studio.

In 1922 he married Dione Niedermann and in 1923 he immigrated to the United States. There he spent time in New York and in Chicago, where he worked in an architectural firm. Neutra had the opportunity to meet Louis Sullivan before his death. When he passed away, he met Frank Lloyd Wright at Sullivan's funeral, at Graceland Cemetery. Neutra admired Wright and his respect for the American architect led him to name his first child Frank Lloyd. After that first meeting, Wright would take him to his studio in Taliesin, Wisconsin, where he would work on some of his projects.

Around 1925 Neutra moved to California, to work in Schindler's studio. He settled permanently in Los Angeles, where he opened his own office in 1926. He began to design projects that incorporated innovative criteria, such as the reinforced concrete structure and metallic reinforcements in the windows. He also designed pre-fab homes that he dubbed the 'One Plus Two'. (one plus two) and worked on a future city project. In 1927 he published his book & # 34;Wie baut Amerika? & # 34; ("How Does America Build?"), which was published in Stuttgart the following year, and which drew attention in the industry. He was commissioned by the Lovell Health Home. For this work he designed a steel skeleton that required assembly in a very short time.

The Lovell House had an importance comparable to that of the steel and glass buildings of European architecture at that time, so through this house the architecture of Los Angeles became known in Europe. Originally, the Lovell house was going to be designed by Schindler, while Neutra would be in charge of the landscaping, but due to a conflict, Lovell decided to turn the project over to Neutra, which would distance the two friends for several years. The two would meet again twenty years later, in 1953, when they were assigned adjacent beds in a hospital.

Neutra was in the following years founder and professor of the Academy of Modern Arts in Los Angeles. In addition, he worked on numerous projects, experimenting on all of them with new materials and new structures. During World War II, when special construction materials were unavailable, Neutra used pine wood, bricks, and glass for some projects.

From 1949 he established a collaboration with Robert E. Alexander, which lasted ten years. Together they also designed more important buildings of a public nature, such as churches, schools, clinics and office buildings. In 1954 he wrote a new book, Survival through Design , in which he expounded his ideas on an architecture that takes into account the human factor in his designs.

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 of 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, also an architect, and during his later years gradually ceded control of his studio to him. Between 1960 and 1970, Neutra designed and built 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.

Neutra died in Germany on April 16, 1970, at the age of 78, during a speaking tour.

Architectural style

He was famous for the attention he paid 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 his surprise. His domestic architecture was a mixture of art, landscape, and practical comfort.

In a 1947 article published by The Hills, "The Changing House," Neutra emphasizes the "ready-for-anything" plan, emphasizing an open, multifunctional plan for living spaces flexible, adaptable and easily modifiable for any type of life or event.

Neutra had a keen sense of irony. In his autobiography Life and Shape, he included a playful anecdote about an anonymous film producer-client who electrified the moat around the house Neutra designed for him. This was a highly embellished account of an actual client, Josef von Sternberg, who did indeed have a house with a moat, but not electrified. Novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand, who had discussed architecture in depth in her novel The Spring, was the second owner of the Von Sternberg House in the San Fernando Valley (now demolished). A Julius Shulman photo of Neutra and Rand in the house became famous.

Neutra's early watercolors and drawings, most of the places he traveled to (particularly his trips to the Balkans in World War I) and portrait sketches, showed influence from artists such as Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, etc They are a sample of the development of Neutra's inclination towards drawing.

Legacy

Neutra's son, Dion has maintained his father's designed and built Silver Lake offices as "Richard and Dion Neutra Architecture" in Los Angeles. The Neutra Office Building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

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 (called Poly Pomona) for use by the Faculty of Environmental Design at the university. In 2011, the Neutra-designed Kronish House (1954) at 9439 Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills sold for $12.8 million.

In 2009, the exhibition "Richard Neutra, Architect: Sketches and Drawings" at the Los Angeles Central Library he offered a selection of sketches from Neutra's travels, figure drawings, and renderings of buildings. An exhibition on the architect's work in Europe between 1960 and 1979 was mounted by the MARTa in Herford, Germany.

The late 1990s revival of mid-century California architectural modernism has breathed new life into his work, such as with the homes and public structures built by architects John Lautner and Rudolf Schindler. Kaufmann's Desert House was restored by Marmol Radziner + Associates in the mid-1990s.

The Neutraface typeface, designed by Christian Schwartz for House Industries, was based on Richard Neutra's principles of architecture and design.

In 1977 he was posthumously awarded the AIA Gold Medal, and in 2015 he was honored with a Palme d'Or Star on the Walk of Stars in Palm Springs, California.

Lost Works

The 1962 Rancho Mirage, California Maslon House was demolished in 2002.

The Neutra Cyclorama building in Gettysburg was demolished by the National Park Service on March 8-9, 2013.

Representative works

Gallery

Posts

Neutra, Richard, Biological Realism. A new humanistic Renaissance in architecture, Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión, 1973 Neutra, Richard, Life and Form: Autobiography of Richard Neutra, Los Angeles: Atara Press, 2013

Bibliography

• Vela Castillo, José (1999). Richard Neutra: a place for order. Thesis (Doctoral), E.T.S. Architecture (UPM). Digital Archive UPM