Richard Neutra.
California Living

Chapter 1

Chapter II

Childhood in Vienna ca. 1900

Richard Neutra has a sheltered childhood in Vienna’s second district, Leopoldstadt. Among his earliest memories are his parent’s somber apartment furnished with cumbersome, old-fashioned furniture near the Augarten park. Decades later, in his memoir, he cites it as his personal starting point for a strict renewal of living along the lines of modernism: maximum opening to the outside, sparse, functional furnishings, liberation from the decorative excess of the Gründerzeit. His two much older brothers, Wilhelm and Siegfried, study medicine and mechanical engineering, and are key role models; while his sister Josefine, six years his junior, influences him with her artistic ambitions. He admires the special technical proficiency and precision of his father who worked his way up from apprentice to owner of a foundry. As a youngster, Richard feels especially comfortable in his father’s workshop. Perhaps this was the start of the immense technical interest that would distinguish Neutra as an architect.
 

Defining encounters

In the years around 1900, the dispute over the sense and possibility of a strict renewal of architecture is more passionate in Vienna than in any other city. Otto Wagner declares “modern life” as the starting point for design; the forms of the past should no longer shape the base for architecture, but instead: purpose, construction, and material. As professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, he passes on this doctrine to the next generation. The young Richard Neutra follows the debates around Wagner’s project for the Stadtmuseum on Karlsplatz as well as the scandal surrounding Adolf Loos’s building on Michaelerplatz. Parallel to his studies at the technical university, today’s TU Wien, Neutra attends Loos’s private Bauschule (building school), which influences him greatly and awakens his interest in the U.S. He discovers the oeuvres of Frank Lloyd Wright and Henry Sullivan. The relationship to his brother-in-law, the art historian Arpad Weixlgärtner, stirs Neutra’s great interest in cultural history, which will define his thinking about architecture.
 

War and collapse

In the summer of 1914, just a few weeks after the shots in Sarajevo, reserve lieutenant Richard Neutra is called to Trebinje in the far south of Bosnia Herzegovina. Shortly thereafter, the war breaks out. His most important task is to observe the movements of enemy ships along the coast.  Since he is not directly involved in fighting, despite a daily life of deprivation, he has a great deal of time on his hands to think of the world and the future that lies ahead for him in the U.S. As Neutra would later report, it is the Monarchy’s multilingual army that makes him a cosmopolite. He becomes acquainted with the population’s misery, and also comes down with a severe bout of malaria. He experiences the collapse of the monarchy in a sanatorium in what is now Slovakia. With his last remaining cash, he sets off for Switzerland to regain his health in a convalescent home near Zurich. Here is where he meets his future wife, Dione Niedermann. In light of the difficult financial situation, a journey to the U.S. is still far in the future.

California Calls You

Neutra’s direct connection to America from 1914 on is Rudolph Schindler, a student of Otto Wagner, who had traveled to the U.S. shortly before the outbreak of war. The letters between Schindler and Neutra testify to Neutra’s curiosity and Schindler’s homesickness. After the collapse, Neutra reports on the catastrophic situation in Vienna and pleads urgently for information about American architecture. He beseechs Schindler, who was working for Frank Lloyd Wright at the time, not to return to Europe, and asks for details on immigration into the U.S. In 1920, Schindler asks Neutra to send copies of Otto Wagner’s publications, and also sends him the manuscript of Henry Sullivan’s “Kindergarten chats,” to search for a publisher in Berlin, where Neutra has meanwhile begun working with Erich Mendelsohn. Neutra does not have enough money for the crossing. In 1921, Schindler manages to convince Wright to invite Neutra to work on his projects for Japan, but two years would pass until Neutra boards a ship in Hamburg headed to New York in 1923.
 

How does America build?

Publications can decisively shape architect’s careers — hat applies to the distribution of photos of their buildings, as well as widely circulated books. In the late 1920s, Richard Neutra was well known in his hometown and in the German-speaking world not only as the creator of the Lovell Health House, but as the author of important books about U.S. architecture. Interest in the subject was keen: until this time, there was little knowledge in Europe about U.S. building techniques and practices. During his first years on the new continent, Neutra and his wife Dione co-edited the highly successful book, Wie baut Amerika? (How does America build?), and then published a second book about America in the prestigious “Neues Bauen in der Welt” series by the Schroll-Verlag in Vienna in 1930. With these two books, Neutra was recognized not only as the leading expert for American architecture, he was also soon considered the most important representative of “Neues Bauen” (New Building) in the U.S., even though he had built relatively little until then.

Projects for Vienna

While developing his career in California, Neutra maintains steady contact to Austria. Initially, the length of his stay in America is undecided; a return is still an option. But the working conditions in Austria and Germany are not inviting. The economic recovery after the collapse is again destroyed by the world economic crisis beginning in 1929. In Red Vienna, private residential building comes to a complete standstill, the city fathers enforce an architecture with conventional building techniques and traditional forms, which is the opposite of what Neutra hopes to achieve. Before his arrival in California, he participates in the competition for a new synagogue in Hietzing. However, his strictly cubist “functionalist” project has no chance. In 1930 he is invited by Josef Frank to participate in the international Werkbundsiedlung. The small house would remain the only building by Neutra in his former homeland.
 

Family in danger

While Richard Neutra enjoys great prestige as a busy architect in California in the 1930s, his family’s situation in Austria after the Anschluss in 1938 becomes extremely perilous due to their Jewish heritage. His brothers Wilhelm and Siegfried, both over sixty years old, are able to flee to exile in the U.S. His sister Josefine, on the contrary, remains behind in Vienna: she is married to the art historian Arpad Weixlgärtner and is thereby largely protected from persecution through his status as an “Aryan,” which places her in a “privileged mixed marriage.”  Nonetheless, her status is extremely precarious and dependent on the despotism of the Nazi regime. Weixlgärtner attempts to obtain citizenship for his wife through testimonials from prominent Nazi humanities scholars. The couple is forced to leave their official residence and is accommodated in an “Aryanized” villa in Hietzing. After the liberation in 1945, a fire destroys their home, and all of their possessions are thereby lost. The Weixlgärtners subsequently move to Sweden.

Architect of books

Magazines and books are key in the global dissemination of Neutra’s ideas: his built structures are located mainly in the far distant westernmost area of the U.S., and only very few who know of his private homes have actually seen them in person—thus rendering photographic documentation, representation, and distribution that much more important. Willy Boesiger, who published the complete works of Le Corbusier, also publishes Neutra’s oeuvre from 1951. Neutra’s theoretical ideas (Survival through Design, 1954) as well as his memoir (Life and Shape, 1962) are promptly translated into German. The three volumes published by the Alexander Koch publishing house, Mensch und Wohnen 1956, Welt und Wohnung 1961, and Naturnahes Bauen 1970, are meant to illustrate the “biorealism” concept; however, they are used mainly as a mere collection of role models for the fashionable “Neutra style” that unfurls in the 1960s, which is sharply criticized by the young avant-garde. Neutra’s final book, Bauen und die Sinneswelt, about his own house in Los Angeles, is published posthumously in 1977 in East Germany, once again displaying his global influence beyond ideological borders.
 

Attempt at a return

Although Neutra is given several commissions in Germany and Switzerland in the 1960s, the relationship to his hometown proves difficult. Granted, it is not necessary to first “discover” him, as it is for the architects driven out in 1938. On the contrary, people are proud of the world-famous Austrian. An exhibition is devoted to him at the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) already in 1949, he is granted the Prize of the City of Vienna in 1958, and he is meant to build a culture village in Kierling in 1962; there is also talk of him designing the Austrian broadcasting’s regional studio in Salzburg.

Dione and Richard Neutra spend most of their time in Vienna between 1967 and 1969. He anticipates contracts, wants to coordinate the Forschungsgesellschaft für Wohnen, Bauen und Planen, and establish an international architect congress. In the end, the film Die Ideen des Richard Neutra is made, commissioned by the federal government. Neutra presents a rival for established architects, the younger architects see him as representative of the establishment. The Neutras retreat from this unfriendly atmosphere and return to Los Angeles, resigned, in 1969. 

Chapter III

1892
Richard Neutra, the son of Elisabeth and Samuel Neutra, is born into a Jewish Viennese family on April 8th. Samuel Neutra owned a foundry in Vienna’s 2nd district, Leopoldstadt.

1902–1910
attends the Sophiengymnasium, a secondary school on Zirkusgasse in Vienna’s 2nd district.

1911
after one-year of military service, Richard Neutra begins his architecture studies at the Technical University in Vienna. After an interruption due to the war, he graduates in 1918.

1912
Neutra meets Rudolph Schindler, a student of Otto Wagner and travels with Sigmund Freud’s son Ernst to Dalmatia. In the autumn, he enters Adolf Loos’s private “Bauschule” (building school).

1914
in the library, Neutra discovers the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, which has a long-lasting influence on him and increases his desire to become familiar with the U.S.

1914–1918
during the war years, Neutra serves as an artillery lieutenant in the Balkans where he contracts malaria and tuberculosis. He realizes his first building, a tea house, in Trebinje (Bosnia-Herzegovina).

1919
during his convalescence in Switzerland, he meets his future wife Dione Niedermann. He works with the garden architect Gustav Ammann in Zurich and at the office Wernli & Staeger in Wädenswil, and participates in courses by Karl Moser at the Eidgenössischen Technischen Hochschule (ETH) Zurich.

1920
brief return to Vienna, works in a Quaker aid organization, then moves to Berlin.

1920–1923
works at the office Pinner & Neumann in Berlin, later with Heinrich Staumer. For a short time, Neutra is the city architect for Luckenwalde near Berlin, and subsequently, an assistant to Erich Mendelsohn.

1922
marries Dione Niedermann.

1923
Neutra travels alone to the U.S. and works briefly for C. W. Short and Maurice Courland in New York.

1924
birth of his son Frank Lloyd. Neutra works as a technical drawer in the office of Holabird & Roche in Chicago and meets Louis Henry Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. He moves with his wife to Wright’s studio house Taliesin (Wisconsin) and becomes his employee.

1925
the Neutras move to Los Angeles and live in the house of Rudolph Schindler. Intense occupation with the utopian urban design “Rush City Reformed.”

1926
birth of his son Dion. Schindler and Neutra collaborate in the competition for the League of Nations palace in Geneva.

1927
publication of the book Wie baut Amerika? (How America Builds).

1927–1929
building of the Lovell Health House in Los Angeles. Neutra achieved his breakthrough with this spectacular building, which was celebrated as the first mature example of the “International Style” in the U.S. In the following four decades, he would realize hundreds of projects for residential homes, housing estates, and public buildings in the U.S. and Europe.

1930
Neutra travels via Japan, China, the Indian Ocean, and the Suez Canal to Europa. Traditional Japanese architecture would leave a great impression on him. Meetings with Alvar Aalto, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier.

1930
publication of the book Amerika. Die Stilbildung des Neuen Bauens in den Vereinigten Staaten.

1932
participation in the exhibition organized by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock “Modern Architecture” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Building of the VDL Research House as his home and office. Opening of Vienna’s Werkbundsiedlung, which includes also a model house by Richard Neutra.

1939
birth of his son Raymond.

1943/44
Neutra works as head planner and architectural adviser for the government of Puerto Rico.

1944/45
president of CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne).

1947
with the Kaufmann Desert House in Palm Springs Neutra realizes one of the most well-known single-family homes of the twentieth century. In the post-war years, his frequently published buildings become models for modern living throughout the world. 

1948
a lecture journey brings Neutra back to Europe again for the first time in eighteen years. 

1949
a Neutra exhibition takes place at Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts

1949–1953
office partnership with Robert Alexander.

1954
publication of Neutra’s most important theoretical treatise, Survival Through Design.

1955
the Neutra archive is established at the University of California, Los Angeles.

1962
publication of his autobiography Life and Shape.

1963
a fire destroys his home and studio in Silver Lake. During reconstruction, Neutra works closely with his son Dion, who is likewise an architect.

1966–1969
Richard and Dion Neutra form an office partnership. Richard and Dionne spend most of their time in Vienna in order to give their son greater freedom. Nonetheless, the plan to re-settle in Richard’ former home is unsuccesful. They return to Los Angeles.

1970
despite ill health, Neutra embarks on a series of lectures throughout Europe. On April 16th, one week after his seventy-eighth birthday, he dies of a heart attack while visiting the Kemper house in Wuppertal, which he designed.