Richard Neutra

by Thomas S. Hines

"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 ma