Moonlight in the Bathroom

By Wolf Von Eckardt

However modest in scale, Richard Neutra 's houses soared

When Architect Richard Neutra was designing a house for Alan and Janet Glenn in Stamford, Conn., he took them out late one evening to the site. "And this is where your bathroom will be," he said. "When the moon is out, it will shine through the skylight, so you won't have to switch on the light and disturb each other."

Neutra, the Vienna-born American architect who died twelve years ago at the age of 78, insisted on involving his clients in planning their houses. He would ask husband and wife to give him separate lists of their special wishes and problems.

"It's the architect's job to keep the divorce rate down," he would say. Neutra did not always succeed at that. But as shown in a stunning exhibition that opened last week at New York City's Museum of Modern Art, "The Architecture of Richard Neutra: From International Style to California Modern," he did succeed in creating designs that combine delightful livability with uncompromising modernity. Neutra, in fact, was one of the foremost leaders of the 20th century architectural revolution.

The model, drawings and photographs at MOMA of Neutra's famous Lovell House, built between 1927 and 1929 in the arid Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles, still quicken the viewer's heartbeat. There had been nothing like it before, nor was there to be anything like it during that decade, not even in avant-garde Europe, where Mies van der Robe's pristinely trend-setting steel-and-glass Tugendhat House in Brno, Czechoslovakia, was completed a year later.

Owner Philip Lovell was a health columnist, an exponent of water cures, open-air sleeping and vegetarianism. Neutra, more enthusiastically than scientifically, designed for him what he called a Health House. It consists of a steel frame, somewhat like a huge bird cage, daringly jutting out of a steep slope. Without sacrificing its airy appearance, the frame is enclosed in a dynamic pattern formed by window bands, metal panels sprayed with a coating of stucco and cantilevered balconies. The entrance to the house is at the top of the hill on the level of the living rooms and sleeping porches, which soar out over the valley. From there the house sort of tumbles past the library, guest rooms and such, down to the swimming pool. With its openness, silver-gray metal trim, geometric furniture and automobile headlights used as wall lights, the house was a triumph of new design and engineering.

The Lovell House was the authoritative overture, as it were, to a dramatic series of residences. All exploited the theme of light-filled space and pleasing simplicity with, as Neutra put it, "soul-refreshing" variations. His style and convictions were strong enough to adapt themselves to the residents, the climates and particularly the landscapes of his projects. The Nesbitt House in Los Angeles (1942), for instance, has a decidedly rustic ambience. The vigorous textures of rough brick and redwood board and batten predominate. The hard, angular lines of the Kaufmann House in Palm Springs (1946) deliberately contrast with nature. The spindly steel columns, fragile-looking window walls and beams that poke freely into the air are a reinterpretation of classic Japanese architecture.

The MOMA exhibition, the first architecture show in the museum's new west wing, conveys Neutra's human appeal as well as his architectural brilliance. Created by Arthur Drexler, MOMA's director of the department of architecture and design, with Historian Thomas Mines, the exhibit is engagingly mounted in a Neutra-esque sequence of spaces, which vary in size to suit the displays and in the hues of their gray walls to suit their mood.

Neutra's intellectual origins were the same as those of his more famous fellow revolutionaries, Walter Gropius, Mies and LeCorbusier. As a student in Vienna, he deplored the degeneracy of dwelling in an ornamented past and longed for the exaltation of a pure and machine-made future. His hero was Adolf Loos, the architect who declared ornament a crime. But, like the other modern pioneers, Neutra was most deeply impressed by the early work of Frank Lloyd Wright, which was published in Europe in 1910.

When Neutra first met Wright in 1924, shortly after Neutra had come to the U.S. to work, "it was just like suddenly seeing the unicorn or some other fairy tale figure one has been searching for behind the rainbow," as Neutra recalled later. The unicorn offered Neutra a job at his Taliesin, Wis. workstead. The association did much to shape Neutra's style, although, as Drexler says in the exhibition catalogue, Neutra was both praised and blamed for cleaning up Wright's complications. While Mies and the others translated Wrightian picturesque into the language of abstract painting, Neutra advanced along the simple lines of Japanese architecture, which Wright also admired.

Neutra's importance to the modern movement may not yet be fully recognized. For one thing, he was never one of the boys. He emigrated more than a decade ahead of such refugees from Nazism as Gropius and Mies. He settled in California, which is a long way from Yale, Harvard, New York City and Chicago, where architectural history, if not always made, is almost always written. Perhaps to compensate, Neutra strove so stridently for more than his share of recognition that irritated critics may have given him less than he deserved.

The MOMA exhibition should turn a fresh light on Neutra's achievements. It may even do more: in the current identity crisis of our art and architecture, Neutra's buildings prove that the point, in the end, is not modern or postmodern. It is good architecture or bad . -- By Wolf Von Eckardt

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