Richard Joseph Neutra was an Austrian American architect. His impact can be seen above all in southern California. His many private houses and villas from Los Angeles to Palm Springs are designed on a grand scale and yet at the same time are impressively integrated in their natural and built environment. Richard Neutra came to be considered among the most important modernist architects.
Background
Neutra was born in Leopoldstadt, the 2nd district of Vienna, Austria Hungary, on April 8, 1892 into a wealthy Jewish family. His Jewish-Hungarian father Samuel Neutra (1844–1920) was a proprietor of a metal foundry, and his mother, Elizabeth "Betty" Glaser Neutra (1851–1905) was a member of the IKG Wien. Richard had two brothers who also emigrated to the United States, and a sister Pepi Weixlgärtner who was an artist who emigrated to Sweden where her work can be seen at The Museum of Modern Art.
Education
Neutra attended the Sophiengymnasium in Vienna until 1910. He studied under Adolf Loos at the Vienna University of Technology. He was a student of Max Fabiani and Karl Mayreder. In 1912 he undertook a study trip to Italy and Balkans with Ernst Ludwig Freud (son of Sigmund Freud).
He served as a lieutenant in the artillery in the Balkans until the end of the war. He took a leave in 1917 to return to the Technische Hochschule to take his final examinations.
After World War I Neutra went 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 centre for Haifa, Palestine (1922), and to the Zehlendorf housing project in Berlin (1923).
Neutra moved to the United States by 1923 and became a naturalized citizen in 1929. Neutra worked briefly for Frank Lloyd Wright before accepting an invitation from his close friend and university companion Rudolf Schindler to work and live communally in Schindler's Kings Road House in California. Neutra’s first work in Los Angeles was in landscape architecture, where he provided the design for the garden of Schindler’s beach house (1922-1925), designed for Philip Lovell, Newport Beach, and for a pergola and wading pool for Wright and Schindler’s complex for Aline Barnsdall on Olive Hill (1925), Hollywood. Schindler and Neutra collaborated on an entry for the League of Nations Competition of 1926–7; in the same year they formed a firm with the planner Carol Aronovici (1881–1957) called the Architectural Group for Industry and Commerce (AGIC). He subsequently developed his own practice and went on to design numerous buildings embodying the International Style, twelve of which are designated as Historic Cultural Monuments (HCM), including the Lovell Health House and the Richard and Dion Neutra VDL Research House. In California, he became celebrated for rigorously geometric but airy structures that symbolized a West Coast variation on the mid-century modern residence.
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.
In 1932, Neutra was included in the seminal MoMA exhibition on modern architecture, curated by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock. 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. In 1965 Neutra formed a partnership with his son Dion Neutra. 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.
Richard Joseph Neutra died in Wuppertal, Germany, on April 16, 1970, at the age of 78.
Achievements
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.
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.
In 2011, the Neutra-designed Kronish House (1954) on 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 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.
The typeface family Neutraface, designed by Christian Schwartz for House Industries, was based on Richard Neutra's architecture and design principles.
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.
Member California Board Examiners, Architect and consultant for hospitals, schools, Government of Puerto Rico. Member advisory board for schoolhouse planning unites states department of Education American International Congress for Modern Architecture. Member of advisory board Los Angeles International Design Center. Member Joint American International Assurance-American Medical Association Committee on Environmental Health. Member architectural review and advisory panel United States Navy. Benjamin Franklin fellow Royal Society Arts, London. (Fellow) The American Institute of Architects (residential honor award 1954), Sociedad Central de Arquitectos Argentina (honorary). Member Academia de Belle Arti de Venzia, Academia Lucca, Association Mexican Architects. Association of Cuban and of Bolivian architects, Royal Institute British Architects, Society of German Architects (honorary president 1969). Member of French Academy of Architecture, National Academy of Design, National Institute Arts and Letters, Association Argentinian (honorary), Association Peruvian Architects (honorary).
Connections
He married Dione Niedermann, the daughter of an architect, in 1922. They had three sons, Frank L (1924–2008), Dion (1926–) an architect and his father's partner, and Raymond Richard (1939–) a physician and environmental epidemiologist.
Rudolph Schindler was an Austrian-born American architect whose most important works were built in or near Los Angeles during the early to mid-twentieth century.
