Richard Neutra (1892-1970)“I am an eyewitness to the ways in which people relate to themselves and to each other, and my work is a way of scooping and ladling that experience.”

Early life

Richard Joseph Neutra was born in Leopoldstadt, the 2nd district of Vienna, Austria Hungary, on April 8, 1892 into a wealthy Jewish family.

Richard attended the Technical University of Vienna and was influenced early on by the writings of William Wundt and the teachings of, Adolph Loos architect, who had visited the United States and was wildly enthusiastic about the country’s openness and opportunities for innovation.

His plans for America were set back by the interruption of World War I where he served in the Austrian Cavalry for two years.

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 moved to the United States by 1923 working first in New York and then later in Chicago.

Neutra worked briefly for Frank Lloyd Wright before accepting an invitation from Rudolf Schindler to work and live communally in Schindler's Kings Road House in California.

He subsequently developed his own practice and went on to design numerous buildings embodying the International Style.

Architectural style and Philosophy of design

• Though Modernism is sometimes criticized for imposing universal rules on different people and areas, it was Richard J. Neutra's intense client focus that won him acclaim. His personalized and flexible version of modernism created a series of private homes that were - and still are - highly sought after, making him one of the United States' most significant mid century modernists.

• Neutra became famous for the simple geometries of his designs, which were often made of steel and glass, and the prefabricated elements that made them extremely easy to build with a modernist look.

• Known for rigorously geometric yet airy structures, Neutra worked with a keen sensitivity towards blending the interior and exterior of a space such that it would “place man in relationship with nature; that’s where he developed and where he feels most at home.”

• This philosophy grew out of his feeling that “our environment is often chaotic, irritating, inhibitive and disorienting. It is not generally designed at all, but amounts to a cacophonous, visually discordant accretion of accidental events, sometimes euphemized as ‘urban development’ and ‘economic progress’.”

• As Time eloquently observed Neutra’s buildings as, "Their beauty, like that of any sea shell, is more than skin-deep—practical, not pretentious."

• Neutra coined the term biorealism, which means "the inherent and inseparable relationship between man and nature.“

RICHARD NEUTRA

Prominent Works

• Lovell Health House, CA (1929)

• VDL Research House , Los Angeles, CA(1932)

• Kaufmann House, Palm Springs, CA (1946)

• Moore House, Ojai, CA (1952)

• Gettysburg Cyclorama Centre, PA (1961)

• The Swirbul Library at Adelphi University, Long Island, NY (1963)

RICHARD NEUTRA

Lovell Health House

• Neutra design the Lovell House for Philip Lovell and his family in Los Angeles, California between 1927-1929

• The Lovell House was the turning point in Neutra’s career, putting him on the architectural radar.

• The Lovell House was designed for the active, health conscious Lovell family in the hills of Los Angeles. 

• The house has a simplified form and lacks decoration, maintains balance without strict symmetry, remains transparent and displays its structure, and takes advantage of mass-production techniques, all fundamental features of the International Style.

• The way the Lovell House manages to maintain an aesthetic of balance without being symmetrical is impressive. The cantilevering floors look similar to Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Fallingwater” which also shows nice balance.

• The house suggests a combination of Frank Lloyd Wright’s use of planes and a sleek aesthetic seen in Le Corbusier’s work.

RICHARD NEUTRA

Lovell Health House

Lower Level Plan

Intermediate Level Plan

Upper Level Plan

• The Lovell House is claimed to be the first house in the United States to use a steel structure that is typically found in skyscraper construction – Neutra learned these new techniques when he was working in New York and with Holabird & Roche in Chicago. 

• This led to a light steel frame with stucco finish perched on a concrete base, much of which was placed via pump and hose. By using standard industrial steel sash, Neutra achieved the most economical method of supporting the glass and allowing a certain amount of window washing from inside.

• The construction of a full-scale swimming pool with diving board suspended above grade—long before mass pool industry was born—must have been revolutionary in its time.

RICHARD NEUTRA

Steel Frame

Elevation

VDL Research House

• Built in 1932, the VDL Research House was conceived as an experiment in architecture, biology and human psychology.

• Neutra called it the VDL Research house, after his benefactor Dr CH Van Der Leeuw.

• Neutra gave more importance to the psychological comfort and change the perception by illusions of space and are therefore "stretched" space as much as possible.

• For example he prolonged the upper band of stucco by the volume of the room to frame the entrance below.

• A large mirror visually double the space of the narrow entrance. It also introduced a hallmark that worked only at night: the lights in the overhang, with translucent glass, its light expanded the space for housing.

• Besides the glass reflector also acted and provided an effect of intimacy. The abundance of glass provide light and views in all directions. The roof of the wooden roof, which is accessed through a ship's ladder attached to the wall east of the porch, providing a private outdoor space.

• Accessible and democratic in style, Neutra focused on technology and economy as a means to explore contemporary housing design and social interaction.

RICHARD NEUTRA

VDL Research House

• As Neutra could not afford to build the house entirely of steel, but wanted to give the effect of strips of windows like those of the skyscraper, altered the conventional construction of wooden boards (2x4) and used larger tables (4x4), rolled to house pairs of windows with steel swing.

• The pairs of windows dictate a sharp one-meter module, a pace dimensional which became standard for many of Neutra houses in the upper deck used sheets of glass largest fixed in the same module.

• Beams of precast concrete floors and tables suspended provided fire resistance, which turned out to be a blessing from heaven thanks to them, the files in the basement survived the fire of 1962.

• Neutra convince manufacturers that donate material such as aluminium foil, using combinations of rock wool, rigid insulation and lightweight cement puzzolana. The folding doors industrial steel and glass leading to the porch outside.

RICHARD NEUTRAUpper Level Plan

Intermediate Level Plan

Lower Level Plan

Kaufmann House

• Kaufmann House was a vacation home for Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr. and his family to escape the harsh winters of the northeast.

• The design of the house is quite simplistic; at the centre of the house is the living room and the dining room that is the heart of the house and the family activity.

• The rest of the house branches out like a pinwheel in each of the cardinal directions.  From the centre of the house each wing that branches out has its own specific function; however, the most important aspects of the house are oriented east/west while the supporting features are oriented north/south.

• The north and south wings are the most public parts of the house that connect to the central living area.  The south wing consists of a covered walkway that leads from the centre of the house to the carport. 

• The house’s swimming pool is one of the most iconic and recognizable aspects of the Kaufmann House; however, it is not solely a photographic gem or simply a recreational feature.  The swimming pool creates a compositional balance of the overall design of the house. 

RICHARD NEUTRA

Kaufmann House

• The low, horizontal planes that make up the pinwheel design bring the house closer to the landscape making it appear as if it is hovering above the ground.  

• The floating effect is emphasized through a series of sliding glass doors that open up to cover walkways or patios.

• The way in which Neutra designed the Kaufmann House was such that when the sliding glass doors were opened the differentiation of interior and exterior was blurred as if it was a sinuous space.

• The flow from interior to exterior space is not simply a spatial condition rather it is an issue of materiality that creates the sinuous experience.

• The glass and steel make the house light, airy, and open, but it is the use of stone that solidifies the houses contextual relationship. 

• The light colored, dry set stone, what Neutra calls “Utah buff,” brings out the qualities of the glass and steel, but it also blends into the earthy tones of the surrounding landscape of the stone, mountains, and trees.

RICHARD NEUTRA

Plan

Moore House

• To service the twenty acres of adjacent groves, the owner asked Neutra’s firm to provide storage for at least 20,000 gallons of water for fire and irrigation reserves.

• Instead of a utilitarian storage tank, they opted to create an on-grade reflection pool.

• The result was the spectacular signature piece of this house and created the illusion of the building floating on water in the arid environs of dry Ojai highlands.

• The assignment was to provide a water reserve. The solution was an inspiration! To this day, the house, seemingly floating on a water garden, is an oasis in the hot arid climate of the desert Southwest.

RICHARD NEUTRA

Cyclorama Centre

• A major design determinant for the Gettysburg Cyclorama Centre was the housing of a grandiose cyclorama painting of the battle.

• It was some 30 feet high and over 100 feet in diameter, and had to be accessed from within and from below to avoid having to cut a door into the painting itself. Placement of this element was to become a major challenge.

• His solution was to place the painting "upstairs" out of sight—and out of mind—unless one was determined to view it.

• A continuous stream of visitors could best be accommodated by a two-way ramp, so that people could be moving up and into position for a presentation while others were moving down.

RICHARD NEUTRA

Roof during construction

Swirbul Library

• The Swirbul Library building was by far the largest that had been built on campus to that date, and no one was expecting the impact of following the local code on storm water disposal.

• The system in usage was to build what amounted to a seepage pit 8 feet in diameter and 25 feet deep to dispose of run-off for each 1200 square feet of roof area.

• One had to space these units no closer than 50 feet from each other. Buildings on campus had used three or four of these in the past. This building would have required twenty-five which threatened the feasibility of the project.

• The idea was to release the water in spurts separated by enough hours to allow the water to be absorbed at the rates estimated by the soil experts.

• He ended up building only six of these drywells instead of twenty-five. A motorized valve was inserted in the downspout line which was programmed to operate for so many minutes every six hours or so. A sensor would turn this circuit on when a float indicated the presence of water on the roof. A heating coil kept it from freezing in winter and facilitated drainage during snow and ice conditions.

RICHARD NEUTRA

Furniture Design

Boomerang Chair Camel Table

Lounge Chair Lamp

RICHARD NEUTRA

Sources

• http://www.theagencyre.com/richardneutra/• http://www.neutra.org/modern.html• http://www.archdaily.com/616668/spotlight-richard-neutra• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Neutra• http://modernistarchitecture.blogspot.in/2015/04/neutras-vdl-research-house-ii.html• https://en.wikiarquitectura.com/index.php/VDL_Research_House_I• http://www.failedarchitecture.com/richard-neutras-therapeutic-architecture/• http://www.neutra-vdl.org/site/default.asp• http://www.architecturaldigest.com/gallery/richard-neutra-slideshow/all• http://www.ncmodernist.org/neutra.htm