It was, of course, Frank Lloyd Wright who set up the ground for modern architecture to happen in Los Angeles. Then came the Viennese, Rudolph Schindler in 1920 and Richard Neutra in 1925 at the invitation of Schindler. Both worked for Wright choosing to learn from him what they saw as essential—by focusing on spatial and formal clarity, transformability, restrained materiality, and the living environment to achieve a desirable quality of life within. Neutra and Schindler collaborated at first, and then each built a rich portfolio, mainly comprising houses and apartment blocks. Universal in principle, these abstract robust structures defined and led the development of a local building vernacular. These buildings, of which there are several hundred, are now strongly associated with the two architects’ adopted city.
Following a short introduction, in our conversation with Raymond Neutra, the youngest son of Richard Neutra, he discussed Neutra’s friendship with Schindler, the Silver Lake Colony dotted with houses and buildings by both architects, the origin and purpose of “spider legs” in his father’s houses, the iconic Kaufmann House, the architect’s desire to open up his buildings, and the mission of Neutra Institute.
Raymond Neutra was born in 1939 in his father’s seminal VDL House. Built on a tight 60 by 70-foot lot, this experimental triplex overlooks Silver Lake in the east-central area of Los Angeles. The house, Richard Neutra’s true laboratory, was built in three stages—in 1932, 1940, and finally in 1966, following the 1963 fire that destroyed much of the house. Apart from Neutra’s family, the VDL House accommodated the architect’s office and two renters—a family with a child and a lady who shared her bathroom with the drafting room. The house is a National Historic Landmark and serves as a platform for exchanging and exploring ideas in art and architecture. The residence is under the stewardship of the College of Environmental Design and the Department of Architecture at Cal Poly Pomona. It is open for tours by appointment.
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Spotlight: Richard NeutraWhile still in high school, Raymond read his father’s book, Survival Through Design, which led him to pursue a research career in medicine. He is a public health physician and epidemiologist. His brother, Dion, became an architect and partner at his father’s practice. He assumed the role of the Neutra Institute’s President after Richard Neutra died in 1970. Dion passed away in 2019, the year when Raymond became the current President of the Neutra Institute.
Vladimir Belogolovsky: Let’s start with your father’s friendship with Rudolph Schindler. They met in their student days at the Vienna University of Technology and ended up in Los Angeles, where they lived and occasionally collaborated. Then Schindler’s client, Phillip Lovell, hired Neutra to design his Health House in Los Feliz [a hillside enclave immediately east of Silver Lake], which first undermined their friendship. Then, in 1932, MoMA's Modern Architecture show included Neutra but omitted Schindler. More so, Neutra brought that show to LA, out of all places, during the 1932 Olympics. What a complicated relationship.
Raymond Neutra: It was. Schindler was five years older. He was able to come to the U.S., where he initially worked in Chicago back in 1914. They first met back at the university in 1912 when Schindler was working on his thesis, which he completed the following year. And they exchanged letters between Chicago and Vienna. My father planned to follow Schindler, but he was still a student when World War I erupted. It put his dreams on hold. In one of the letters, Schindler suggested to my father to get a job with Frank Lloyd Wright in Japan, where Wright was working at the time. Schindler’s wife, Pauline, wrote my father’s affidavit of support for his visa into the U.S.
My father first came to New York and then to Chicago, where he worked at Holabird and Roche. He met Louis Sullivan in the spring of 1924, just a week before his death, and finally met Frank Lloyd Wright at Sullivan’s funeral. He shortly worked for Wright that year. Then Schindler invited my father to Los Angeles, where he had a vacant apartment at the Schindler House, a two-unit triplex he built in 1922 on Kings Road. My parents lived there from 1925 to 1930.
Initially, my father worked as a designer and draftsman for other architects in town. Then Schindler and Neutra worked together on the competition for the League of Nations. Schindler was a night owl, and my father was a lark; he got up at four o’clock in the morning. It was hard for them to work together, especially since Schindler was busy with his own projects. But they finally did. And somehow, when the competition was submitted in 1927 it did not include Schindler’s name. This happened because my Swiss maternal grandparents thought that my father had done most of the work and took it upon themselves to omit Schindler’s name. Despite my father's frantic attempts to inform the organizers about that, it was too late. Schindler thought that it was done deliberately by my father. That was really the main reason for cooling off in their relationship. That became even more of an issue when my father was giving lectures in Europe and Schindler's friends said he did not give him sufficient credit.
Then, the Lovell Health House commission was offered to my father by Lovell in 1927 when Neutra and Schindler still lived under one roof. That put my father in a difficult position, and he tried to involve Schindler. Initially, Lovell agreed but then Schindler dropped out of the project. As it turned out Schindler was having an affair with Lovell's sister-in-law. Wright designed a house for their family, the famous texture block house, built for Samuel Freeman in Hollywood Hills in 1924. Lovell didn't like his sister-in-law and didn't want Schindler as his architect because he feared she would be giving Schindler directions and interfering with the design. So, it was only natural for Lowell to pick Neutra for his Health House. Interestingly, even after the house was finished in 1929 the two architects continued to live next door and even taught a course together at the short-lived Los Angeles Academy of Modern Art. All of that happened before I was born. But I was together with them when they happened to be in the same room at a hospital years later.
VB: I was going to ask you about that next. That was in early 1953. Your father had a heart attack and was hospitalized at Cedars of Lebanon in East Hollywood. By pure coincidence, he was placed in the same room with Schindler, who was undergoing treatment for prostate cancer and had just a few months to live. The two men hadn’t spoken for many years before reconnecting there, right?
RN: Yes. When my father came, Schindler’s daughter-in-law asked him if he wanted to go out, and he said he would rather stay. They reminisced about Vienna and, apparently, had an excellent time together. They stayed there for a few days. I remember meeting Schindler before that. Once, I was with my parents, and we ran into him in the movies.
VB: Alex Ross in the New Yorker mentioned that the then 24-year-old Frank Gehry found out that Neutra and Schindler were in the same hospital room and went to see them. I wonder what they talked about.
RN: I was not aware of that.
VB: Neutra’s and Schindler’s buildings and houses stand next to each other near Silver Lake. What do you think about this curious colony and how they compete and complement each other?
RN: Over the years, Schindler and Neutra appealed to the same kinds of clients. And according to people’s tastes, some would go with the more standardized machine aesthetics approach of Richard Neutra, while others would go to the more complex architecture of Rudolph Schindler. Their preferences are clearly seen in the so-called Silver Lake Colony. Of course, Schindler died in 1953, and Neutra’s houses continued to be built into the mid-1960s. Between 1948 and 1961, nine Neutra-designed houses were built virtually next to each other, just a block from our VDL House. It was in the mid-40s when my father teamed up with a Danish nurseryman and friend, Holger Fog, to develop land to his design. The people who were to purchase those lots had to agree to my father’s design. That’s why they ended up all next to each other. One of the houses is the Reunion House. Originally it was intended for a family comprising three generations. My parents lived in this house for a couple of years after the 1963 fire destroyed the VDL House. Dion, my older brother, moved there in 1965 and lived there through three of his marriages.
VB: Reunion House is the one that has the so-called “spider leg” which was one of your father’s most original features. Where did it come from?
RN: My father was quite fascinated by an elbow shape. You see those shapes on the top of some of his proposed reinforced concrete apartment buildings in the mid-1920s. But they don’t start to show up until the ‘50s. The particular one, which is combined with a mitered glass corner, first appeared in the Reunion House, which was completed in 1950. That house has two spider legs—one is meant to be seen from the outside and the other from the inside of the second-floor corner bedroom. Apart from being structural, these devices serve a psychological purpose. The idea was to make the space feel much more spatial than it really is. He continued a roof beam past the edge of the roof to meet up with a freestanding vertical post. As a result, there is a perception that the room's interior space does not end at the glass but extends beyond. From the outside, this design strategy turns into a kind of De Still articulation of individual planes and elements. Although the view from the street is not as important, what matters is how it looks from the inside. This idea of extending the view and playing with abstract geometry with the help of a spider leg was later repeated in other buildings in many different ways.
VB: Your father’s buildings are quintessential examples of what is known as the mid-20th-century modern. The intentions behind this architecture include a radical relationship between indoor and outdoor, prefabrication techniques, and the psychological impact of the built environment and design on people. His Kaufmann Desert House, completed in Palm Springs in 1946 is among his best-known works. What are some of your impressions of it?
RN: I tend to emphasize his school and apartment designs more. I think his schools were even more impactful on design around the world. The Kaufmann House was part of the experimentation that he pursued in the 1940s when he started opening up his houses. Tremaine House in Montecito is also quite special. It became an application of the building systems that he developed in Puerto Rico during the war in his school buildings commissioned by Rexford Tugwell, the governor of Puerto Rico. The design of each house was driven by its client and my father enquired as much as possible about how his clients wanted to live. For example, Edgar Kaufmann specifically asked for Hercules glass doors without frames to meet at the corner. That became quite special. There are very few places where this happens in other Neutra houses where two sliding doors open and seemingly nothing holds the ceiling. He could not do it without frames as Kaufmann had asked, but he did the best he could.
VB: How did you get involved with the Neutra Institute?
RN: My father founded the institute in 1962 when I was a medical student at McGill in Montreal. The idea was to use his reputation to attract people interested in doing design research and apply it to what he called architecture of social concern. When he died, my brother, Dion, an architect who worked with my father, took over the institute. By that point, it became more about preserving our father’s legacy. Toward the end of Dion’s life, he asked me to join the board because of my own research career in environmental epidemiology. I became the institute’s president in 2019. Our mission is to preserve and explore the Neutra legacy. We promote creative research and design that benefits people and the planet. We deal with neuroscience and environmental psychology issues and practical social issues.
We own three Neutra-designed apartments used as residential and commercial spaces and as research residences for scholars. We offer our Reunion House rent-free to master’s students at USC who are doing their thesis on the architecture of social concern. They then conduct webinars, write essays about their discoveries, and lead tours. We also make our properties available for visiting scholars. And we share our experience in how to preserve historical properties. We are republishing books such as the 1954 Survival Through Design. Our website (www.neutra.org) has a gallery of photos for design aficionados, summary information about the Neutra family, as well as in-depth information for scholars and journalists. Additionally, we support a network of people who own Neutra-designed houses so that they can share preservation tips.
