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56 ARCHITECT | DESIGN | BUILD 1920 S P H OTO O F T H E N E U T R A S + M R . S C H I N D L E R AT K I N G ' S ROA D H O U S E e Neutras and R.M. Schindler at Schindler House, West Hollywood, 1928. Dion Neutra, seated, left and Dione Neutra, seated, right. Richard Neutra, standing, left, and R.M. Schindler, standing, right. Photographer, Unidentied. here's been a re-emergence of the Modernist home in Southern California lately, with an ever-growing number of streamlined homes, flat-roofed and framed in glass and steel, rising up along beach communities from Malibu to Palos Verdes. If you've noticed it, you may also be wondering from where this style first originated. Look to the name of architectural master Richard Neutra, a founding father of the movement. Born in Vienna in 1892, he would become a son of Los Angeles, articulating through his designs a blueprint that would serve as the thematic springboard for many who followed. A WO RT H Y D I S C I P L E In his important 1929 book, Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration, architectural historian and teacher Henry-Russell Hitchcock singles out Neutra as the most notable foreign architect working in the United States, adding that "Neutra alone is a worthy disciple of [Frank Lloyd] Wright." And when the most high-profile buildings of the day were being canvassed for inclusion in the 1932 International Style show at the Museum of Modern Art, an event that, even today, is never-ending in its influence, it was Neutra's first major residential L.A. commission that made the cut. The 1929 Lovell Health House, which still stands pristinely atop a Los Feliz hilltop and is seen in the 1997 film L.A. Confidential, was among just five U.S. buildings selected, and the only one West of the Mississippi. From there, the commissions, buildings and accolades piled up, and by August 1949, the architect's intent blue-eyed gaze, framed by thick eyebrows and a wave of silver hair, gazed at America from the cover of TIME magazine, which bore the heading, "What will the neighbors think?" Though he passed away in 1970, Neutra and his firm have to date designed well over 400 structures—the bulk of them in Southern California, and Los Angeles in particular. Single-family residences mostly, and plenty of commercial buildings as well, starting in the 1920s, when he arrived in the United States and subsequently made his way to Los Angeles. N E U T R A D E S I G N F O R L I V I N G The Lovell Health House was designed around the idea of promoting physical well-being, and enabled its inhabitants to indulge in ample doses of fresh air and California sunshine. Its look, majestically minimalist, pure white and full of glass, was radical for its time, and it earned Neutra extra distinction for being the first steel-framed residence erected in the nation. Other high-profile commissions followed, including the clean-cut Laemmle Office Building at the corner of Hollywood and Vine, completed in 1933, and the gorgeously curvilinear Von Sternberg House. Built in 1935 on over 10 acres in then-rural Chatsworth, the residence, which included a moat and a ship's searchlight, was home to director Josef Von Sternberg and philosopher/novelist Ayn Rand before being demolished in 1972. A look at the entire body of work of Neutra and his firm—a talent factory whose roster included the likes of Gregory Ain and Harwell Hamilton Harris, both of whom established distinguished careers of their own, and designed abundantly in Los Angeles—reveals them as architects of the people, designing buildings across 20 states and four continents, from apartment buildings and schools to offices, bars and even a chrome-outfitted ticket office, designed in 1937, where one could book passage to Catalina Island. (For this, Richard Neutra was hired by owner of the island, chewing-gum magnate Philip Wrigley himself.) A R C H I T E C T U R A L P R O F I L E O N N E U T R A T

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