Richard Neutra’s Architectural Vanishing Act

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Can an aggressively modern house become indivisible from its surroundings? The architect Richard Neutra contemplated that challenge throughout his career.

of the Kaufmann House—a dream vision of postwar leisure, with Liliane Kaufmann lounging by the pool as the Palm Springs sun sets behind desert mountains. In this same period, John Entenza, the editor of the magazine, launched the Case Study program, featuring designs for model progressive homes. The mid-century-modern heyday had begun.

Neutra wrote of the design for the Health House in characteristically convoluted fashion: “Through continuity of fenestration, linkage with the landscape, we should draw again on what the vitally dynamic natural scene had been for a hundred thousand years, and make it once more a human habitat.

The L.A. City Council began holding hearings on Elysian Park Heights. Neutra spoke on April 26, 1951, conceding that the existing villages were “really very lovely” but arguing that “a much greater density is needed to give urban amenities to these people or anybody who wants to live there.” Such technocratic language must have sounded feeble next to the angry pleas of the residents and the political red meat served up by their lawyers.

Neutra did not abandon his city-shaping aspirations in later years, but his work tended to lose focus whenever it moved to a larger scale. He and Alexander collaborated on the Los Angeles County Hall of Records, a dour structure on Temple Street. The Orange County Courthouse, in Santa Ana, cuts a crisper profile, not least because of the Neutra lettering on its tower.

Ryan Soniat is a preservationist in the purist camp—the sort who tries to persuade clients to install a vintage nineteen-fifties oven. One day, I followed him as he checked on two active projects: Schindler’s McAlmon House, in Silver Lake, and Neutra’s Linn House, off Mulholland Drive. At the McAlmon, he and the occupants, Larry Schaffer and Magdalena Sikorska, were scraping away layers of paint, trying to excavate the original color scheme.

 

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