The story of Richard Neutra's life is, in many ways, the story of modern architecture since Neutra experienced in his own lifetime the buoyant struggles of the movement's early years and the heady successes of its mid-century ascendancy. By interweaving Neutra's life with the history of modernism, this definitive study depicts architecture's struggle to find new meaning in the twentieth century.
Born in Vienna in 1892, Neutra moved to the United States in 1923 and quickly became, in the words of the 1932 Museum of the Modern Art catalogue, "the leading modern architect of the West Coast ... second only to Frank Lloyd Wright in international stature." His work was distinguished by the way it embraced nature, felicitously adapting the standard modernist elements - ribbon windows, flat roofs, built-in furniture, glass walls - to the California environment. The lightness and skeletal strength in his buildings reified the essence of the International Style. Neutra's favorite building materials were steel, stucco, concrete, wood, and glass, and his basic structure was the simple, timeless post and beam, with cantilevered roof slabs extending into space. As a follower of Wright and of the new architecture of Europe, Neutra bridged, perhaps better than any other modernist, the frequently polarized worlds of Taliesin and the Bauhaus. A lifelong student of the psychological, physiological, and ecological dimensions of architecture, Neutra's credo became the title of his most influential book, Survival Through Design.
Thomas Hines analyzes not only Neutra's contributions to modernism but also the architect's relationships with his mentors and contemporaries, including Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos, Erich Mendelsohn, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Rudolph Schindler, and Wright. He also explores Neutra's interaction with clients, among them Philip and Leah Lovell, who commissioned Neutra's famous steel-framed Health House, and film director Josef von Sternberg, for whom Neutra built a modern aluminum, moat-enclosed villa, later acquired by novelist Ayn Rand. It was a measure of Neutra's fame that Edgar Kaufmann, who had commissioned Wright's Fallingwater house of 1936, chose Neutra ten years later to design his desert house in Palm Springs.
Richly illustrated and published in an oversized format (10x11.25"), this volume provides a thorough history of Neutra's youth, education, and influences in Vienna and his prolific career in the US. First published in 1982 as an exhibition catalogue (a paperback reprint was published by U. of California Press in 1994), this edition contains some corrections in the text and notes by Hines (history and architecture, UCLA), though the bibliography has not been updated. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Richard Neutra's work, his life experience, and his search for modern architecture coincided neatly with the lifespan of the modern movement. He experienced the buoyant struggles of the movement's early years, the heady triumph of its mid-century ascendancy, and the critique it faced in the 1960s and 1970s. His reputation enjoyed a resurgence that was hard to predict when Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture was first published over twenty years ago. In his seminal critical biography of this modernist master, Thomas S. Hines explores the efforts of Neutra and his modernist contemporaries to find the forms that would be most expressive of the twentieth century. In researching this classic of architectural scholarship, Hines enjoyed unparalleled access to the Neutra archives. Its collection of outstanding black-and-white photography includes a remarkable cache of photographs taken by Julius Shulman-the undisputed master of twentieth-century architectural photography-whose work is beautifully featured here. This revised edition of Richard Neutra includes a new introduction by the author. "This study, part biography, part architectural analysis, is a modern masterpiece of architectural history. The prose is lucid and sometimes elegant-very much like the work of Richard Neutra which it so brilliantly examines." -Peter Gay
