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Abstract
During the twentieth century, diverse cultures from around the globe served as vital
sources for architects who attempted to merge Modernist ideas with traditional values.
Richard Neutra (1892–1970) absorbed ideas from Japan, the American Middle West
and his own native Austria, and eventually his study of these regions deeply affected his
work. By analysing archival sources and period publications, this article reveals that
even before emigrating to the United States (1923), and throughout his career, the
cultures of California, Latin America and Spain were also sources for Neutra's work. He
travelled extensively throughout these regions, he researched their local customs and
architecture and he deftly and purposefully incorporated vernacular elements, such as
sun-shading devices, ventilation strategies and interior patios, into his own work. For his
Latin American and Spanish colleagues, his work exemplified a successful fusion
between their own traditions and Modernist principles.
A self-proclaimed ‘citizen of the planet’, Richard Neutra (1892–1970) was an
enthusiastic student of the local cultures and traditions that he had visited during his
international travels. 1 The Ukrainian architect Gregori Warchavchik (1896–1972), whose
emigration to Brazil in 1923 paralleled Neutra's to California, noted that even before
Neutra arrived in the United States he had already cultivated a deep respect for the
architecture and history of world cultures:
Asia, Africa, Europe, Central and South America are familiar to him, [and] global
circumstances are close to his heart. Travel, study, and work in many places have
unusually widened his horizon. 2
Like other architects of his generation, the first source beyond his own Austro-
Hungarian tradition to have inspired Neutra early on came from the ancient cultures of
the Mediterranean region. During a 1912 tour of the Adriatic coast, the architecture of
Renaissance Italy in general, and of Michelangelo and Palladio in particular, sparked in
the young Neutra a ‘general enthusiasm for the treasures of Italy’. 3 Later, during his tour
of duty as a reserve lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Army (1914–18), in
which he was stationed on the eastern shores of the Adriatic Sea, Neutra recorded the
region's historic Ottoman architecture in his early sketch diaries. 4
Like his mentor Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), Neutra also became keenly
interested in Japanese design, which he had begun to explore long before he visited
Japan for the first time in 1930. 5 This fact is clearly demonstrated in the letters
exchanged in the early 1920s between Neutra, then still living in central Europe, and
Rudolph Schindler (1887–1953), who had already emigrated to the United
States. 6 Neutra sustained this interest in Japanese culture throughout his career;
following his arrival in Los Angeles (in 1925), he travelled several times to Japan, and
during these visits he collected architectural drawings of recently-constructed
buildings. 7 He also recorded these visits with multiple travel sketches. 8 Knowing that
Neutra was a long-time student of Japanese design, David Engel invited him to write the
forward to his 1959 book Japanese Gardens for Today, in which Neutra demonstrated his
great respect for, and erudite study of, this Asian tradition. 9 He also left unpublished
manuscripts on the subject of Japanese architecture and design. 10 In addition to Japan,
Neutra was also fascinated by the indigenous architecture of Africa, central Asia and the
Indian subcontinent, as well as the shared history and traditions of California, Latin
America and Spain. His study of the architecture of these traditions, combined with his
exposure to Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos, Josef Maria Olbrich, Josef Hoffmann, Erich
Mendelsohn, Louis Sullivan, Holabird and Roche and Wright himself, constituted what
he called a ‘mixed-up paternity’ that deeply affected his view of the relationship between
historic and Modern forms. 11
From this plurality of sources, Neutra had also learned to appreciate open-air living
and direct connection between human beings, architecture and nature. Inklings of a
nascent interest in nature and life in the outdoors can already be seen in a few of
Neutra's earliest travel sketches dating from the early 1910s, as well as in his 1915
design for an officers tea house, which was constructed in Trebinje, Albania. From Otto
Wagner, Neutra had learned ‘to cherish the site, and to give allegiance to the wider
surrounding landscape’. 12 Barbara Lamprecht has determined that, as a young man in
Vienna, Neutra had studied Gestalt psychology, from which he learned that architecture
can be used to manipulate human perception of space; 13 similarly, from German
psychologist Wilhelm Wundt's Principles of Physiological Psychology (1874), he had
learned about human physiological responses to the environment. 14 In 1919, while
employed in Stafa, Switzerland, with Otto Froebel's plant nursery and landscaping firm,
he came into contact with Gustav Ammann, who introduced Neutra to botany and
landscape architecture. 15 His fascination with these professions was evident in his work
in the early 1920s, including his landscaping scheme (1921–24) for Mendelsohn's
Einstein Tower in Potsdam, his design (1922) for the Forest Cemetery in Luckenwalde
(Germany) and two private residential gardens (both 1922) in Berlin, one for Ernst
Freud, and the other for the parents of Ernst's wife, Lux. 16
Throughout his career, Neutra's architectural drawings and travel sketches reveal
this obsession with natural elements. Stylistically similar to the landscapes painted by
Gustav Klimt, whom he had known personally, Neutra's own renderings of natural
elements such as vegetation, sky and clouds are often in a heavy, romanticized and
highly textured manner, which can even obscure the architecture itself. 17 Wright was
also an obvious source in Neutra's developing ideas of connecting architecture to
landscape. In his autobiography, Neutra recalled that, even prior to arriving in the
American Middle West and to living and working with Wright at Taliesin (in 1924), he
had already begun to romanticise about the region's landscape and the ways in which
Wright had woven architecture and nature together in an indissoluble
relationship. 18 Neutra's ability to acknowledge local culture, tradition, climate and
landscape in his architectural design had thus begun developing long before his arrival
in Southern California in 1925.
It was in Southern California, however, that Neutra found a new cultural, climatic
and historic context that would serve as a key reference in his work throughout his
career. From his arrival there until his death in 1970, he researched the historic
architecture and the diverse cultures of the American Southwest, Latin America and
Spain, and applied what he learned in his own work. In order to illustrate that aspect of
Neutra's approach, this article consults several archival sources: unpublished
manuscripts kept in the Richard and Dion Neutra Papers at the University of California,
Los Angeles (UCLA); articles that Neutra wrote on Spanish and Latin American topics
for publication both in North American journals, such as Architectural Forum, Progressive
Architecture and House and Home, and in Spanish journals, such as Boletín de Información
de la Dirección General de Arquitectura and Informes de la Construcción; articles written
about Neutra by Spanish or Latin American authors, such as Francisco Prieto Moreno
(Spain), Carlos Obregón Santacilia (Mexico) and Gregori Warchavchik (Brazil); 19 books
that Neutra published, such as Architecture of Social Concern (1948), Survival through
Design (1954), Life and Human Habitat (1956) and Realismo biológico: un nuevo
renacimiento humanístico en arquitectura (1958). 20 This article will also pay attention to the
multiple travel sketches that Neutra used to document his journeys throughout the
American Southwest, Latin America and Spain, 21 and to the projects – both built and
unbuilt – that Neutra designed for clients in Spain and Latin America.

‘CALIFORNIA CALLS YOU’: SPANISH COLONIAL MEETS

INTERNATIONAL STYLE
In his 1962 autobiography, Neutra admitted that, like Loos, he had been drawn as a
young man to the United States in part by the technological innovations of the American
industrial system. 22 This fact is clear in his first published books Wie Baut Amerika (1927)
and Amerika (1930). 23 For this reason it was inevitable that Neutra would travel first to
the industrial capitals of New York (October 1923) and Chicago (February 1924).
Nonetheless, these cities were clearly not the ‘idyllic tropical island’ of which he had
dreamt while living in Central Europe, ‘where one does not have to fear the winter …
[and] can have a free spirit’. 24 Instead, as Thomas Hines has pointed out, Neutra's
ultimate destination in the United States had always been the warm-climate regions of
California. 25 Neutra himself remembered that, while strolling one day along
Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich, he passed the window of a travel agency that displayed a
poster with the slogan ‘California Calls You’. 26 Despite his then-rudimentary English, he
understood the message: ‘[I] put two and two together and concluded that I was
supposed to come to California.’ 27 For him, ‘Los Angeles was a very peculiar spot and
vantage point. It was clear that this romantically Spanish colonial country of California
might […] become a prototype industrial and research area’, and that it would ‘turn out
[to be] the most contemporary southland in search of a way of life for this day’. 28
In 1960, Esther McCoy noted that this southward gaze typified Neutra's persistent
search for timeless source material that he could merge with Modern architecture: ‘his
architecture is an eternal search for the southland, [the] cradle of civilization’. 29 Neutra's
books such as Architecture for Social Concern (1948), Survival Through Design (1954), Life
and Human Habitat (1956), Realismo biológico (1958) and Life and Shape (1962),
demonstrate his attraction to, and first-person familiarity with, warm-climate regions
around the globe, and in these texts he made regular mention of places as
geographically diverse as the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa and Polynesia. According
to Lamprecht, he traced human origins back to the African savannah, and he believed
that every modern human being innately longs for this place of origin. 30 He believed that
humankind
loves to immigrate to the south, or to conquer it. […] Like all Nordic barbarians we want to
go to sunny Hellas, or to the land where the lemon blooms and no icy storms trouble us. 31
Thanks to its bucolic climate, Neutra likened Southern California to the savannah, as if it
were the New World version of this place of origin. 32
Neutra's early interest in the American Southwest and Mexico was evident in his
transatlantic correspondence with Schindler prior to emigrating to the United States.
While central Europe was quickly descending into war at a continental scale, Neutra
kept abreast of political developments in the Mexican Revolution. In a letter to Schindler
dated 4 May 1914, he expressed his admiration for Schindler's early successes in
America, as well as the advances then being made by the ‘Mexican insurgents',
quipping that, if Schindler's successes in the New World continued, he would soon
replace Victoriano Huerta as Mexico's president. 33 Neutra's reading of current events in
Mexico had been acutely prescient as, just two months later, Huerta resigned. Neutra's
interest in Mexico and the American Southwest seems to have originally been stirred by
Schindler's report of his own tour, in August and September of 1915, to Denver, Salt
Lake City, Taos, Santa Fe, the Grand Canyon and Los Angeles; on this tour, Schindler
also visited the Panama-California Exposition in San Diego and the Panama-Pacific
Exposition in San Francisco. 34 Neutra's response contrasted the dismal situation of
Europe, then in the midst of the First World War, with the relative peace and calm he
idyllically imagined Schindler to be enjoying in the American Southwest: ‘You are on the
Mexican border and we bang away at each other mechanically each half year’. 35 Later,
when Neutra wrote to Schindler to request a description of outstanding American
architecture other than that of H.H. Richardson, Wright and Sullivan, Schindler
responded that there was no such thing as American architecture, since skyscrapers
‘have nothing human about them’, and the rest of the architecture produced in the
United States adhered to European styles that were imported to the New
World. 36 Instead, for Schindler,
the only buildings which testify to the deep feeling for soil on which they stand are the sun-
baked adobe buildings of the first immigrants and their successors—Spanish and Mexican
—in the Southwestern part of the country. 37
It was upon arriving in Los Angeles in 1925, as Lauren Weiss Bricker has pointed out,
that Neutra discovered that by the beginning of the twentieth century architects of the
American Southwest had developed an acute awareness of the natural landscape of the
region. 38 This awareness had arisen principally from the work of naturalist John Muir
(1838–1914) and the creation of the National Parks. 39 This interest in nature was
compatible with the values Neutra had inherited from fin-de-siècle Vienna, and he
visited many of the National Parks in person: the Grand Canyon in 1925 (en route from
Taliesin to Los Angeles); 40 Joshua Tree in 1938; 41 Death Valley in 1939 and
1957; 42 Zion in 1951; 43 and Yosemite (date unknown). 44 He demonstrated his
appreciation for the natural beauty of the National Parks in his Visitor's Center (1961) at
the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest in Arizona, designed in partnership with Robert
Alexander. They organised the rangers' homes in tight groupings in order to provide
mutual shelter and conservation of resources, and they employed interior patios in order
to provide sunlight and fresh air, while still protecting the privacy of the individual
residents. 45 Neutra himself attributed these strategies to the lessons he had learned
from the architecture of the Pueblo and Spanish Colonial heritages. 46
Prior to his arrival there in 1925, Neutra's dreamy concept of Southern California
had been a by-product of his own conjecture, his desire for warm climates, vague
reports sent to him by Schindler and the propaganda of travel agencies. Although
tenuous, this notion was squarely in line with what Carey McWilliams, writing in 1948,
called the ‘fantasy heritage’ that had been imagined by a white majority to endow the
region with an identity specific to itself. 47 Matthew Bokovoy has described this
phenomenon as anti-historic, and states that it had been invented for the economic
development of Southern California. 48 Phoebe Kropp has pointed out that, although not
entirely fabricated, such a sentimental attitude had resulted from selective
interpretations of the region's history by its various constituent groups, and that it had
reflected the dual need to respect local history and to establish for Southern California a
unique sense of identity. 49
When Neutra arrived in Los Angeles in 1925, he discovered that most buildings
designed and built in the region in the previous years tended to follow the lead of
Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (1869–1924) and the highly romanticised ‘Spanish Style’
of his Panama-California Exposition in San Diego (1915). 50 This resurgence of interest
in California's and Mexico's shared colonial past was not always the result of mindless
mimicry. Cristina López Uribe has pointed out that architects on either side of the border
often deliberately blended local historic forms with a sensitivity to materials and function,
inspired by both Rationalism and the Arts and Crafts movement, which had been
imported from Europe and the American Middle West; she also concluded that, in the
1920s and 1930s, architects from Mexico and California, including José Villagrán
Garcia, Enrique del Moral, Carlos Obregón Santacilia and Luis Barragán, had not
merely used the old colonial forms ‘in a nostalgic revivalist spirit, but also sometimes
reframed them within a modern conception’. 51 In a similar vein, Kropp has noted that
California's popular Spanish past is a ‘memory box’ full of varied, individual contributions,
some of which represent competing narratives. It is a collection to which Southern
Californians return again and again to assemble regional meanings. 52
Following a comparable track, Neutra would demonstrate by the 1930s the agility with
which he could enhance the Modernist ideas he had learned in Central Europe and the
American Middle West with a sensitivity towards the local landscape, history and
traditions of the American Southwest. His son and collaborator, the architect Dion
Neutra, has attributed this responsiveness to Neutra's abstract interpretation of the
inherent spatial qualities of Spanish Colonial architecture, and to his ability to transcend
formalist mimicry. 53 Dion has also noted that, when clients would hire his father to
design a ‘Spanish-Mediterranean’ house for them, he would probe the client to identify
the spatial qualities of this style that the client would find most appealing; and he would
then use those spatial qualities as the generative idea for a house that surpassed
questions of style, while still fulfilling the client's requirements. 54 According to Hines,
it was typical of Neutra and his generation that except occasionally in the most minimal
abstractions, their attempts to recapture the area's rich Hispanic tradition included no
allusions to Spanish Colonial architecture in any explicitly communicable form. 55
As Neutra searched for ways to create Modern forms using the local and vernacular
architecture of the American Southwest, he discovered precedents in Wright's
Californian work, as well as in that of three other émigrés, whose arrivals on the West
Coast had preceded Neutra's: Schindler, Irving Gill (1870–1936) and Gordon Kaufmann
(1888–1949). Wright's work, which Neutra had first seen in 1914, in the pages of
the Wasmuth Portfolio, was always a source for Neutra. 56 The house for Aline Barnsdall
on Olive Hill in Los Angeles (1921) and the textile block houses (Los Angeles and
Pasadena, 1923–24) were particularly important in this transfer, since they had all been
projects under development at the time when Neutra was working for Wright. 57 In these
projects, Wright clearly referenced sources extracted from the American Southwest,
claiming in his Autobiography that the Barnsdall House was ‘conceived and desired as a
California Romanza’. 58 According to Wright's son Lloyd, Wright depicted Aline Barnsdall
as an ‘Indian princess’ in the abstract relief he designed above the fireplace; Lloyd also
stated that the house's forms followed Pueblo architecture. 59 Donald Leslie Johnson has
agreed, citing the architecture of the Navajo, Walpi and Pueblo Indians as Wright's
sources for the Barnsdall and the textile block houses. 60 Alice Friedman, moreover, has
cited the adaptability of Pueblo architecture to the arid climate of the American
Southwest, as well as the theatrical qualities of interior-exterior spaces found in Pueblo
settlements, as likely reasons why Wright chose this architecture as a source for the
Barnsdall House. 61 Schindler, who oversaw the design and construction of these
Southern Californian projects in Wright's absence, later recalled that, in designing the
Barnsdall House, Wright was clearly thinking about Maya sources. 62
In 1915, after Schindler had visited the expositions in San Diego and San Francisco
and the pueblos of Taos (New Mexico) on his first travels through the American
Southwest, he returned to Chicago and began to experiment with this fusion in a
scheme for an adobe house (unbuilt) he designed that same year for Dr T.P. Martin in
Taos. 63 In this scheme, Schindler reinterpreted the changing levels and vertical
connection of interior spaces of Loos's Raumplan according to the spatial sequencing he
discovered in Taos. 64 Later schemes followed a comparable approach. The model he
constructed in 1916 during the initial design phases of the Hampden Club (Chicago),
which he designed while employed by the firm Ottenheimer, Stern and Reichel, likewise
reflected the lessons he had learned from Pueblo architecture. 65 Robert Sweeney and
Judith Sheine have described the tilt-slab concrete walls of his Schindler-Chase House
in Los Angeles (1921) as a translation of the lessons he had learned on his 1915 tour of
the American Southwest. 66 His Pueblo Ribera Courts in La Jolla (1923) were likewise
inspired by his 1915 visit to Taos. 67 According to McCoy, this fusion then became a
hallmark of Schindler's work in the 1930s. 68
Irving Gill was also a source for Neutra. Upon arrival in Los Angeles in 1925,
Neutra enjoyed ‘exploring Southern California and discovering, in particular, Gill's
abstract early twentieth-century interpretations of Spanish Colonial architecture’. 69 His
journey to Southern California in 1893, moreover, had prefigured Neutra's own: both
men arrived in California after brief periods in New York and Chicago, where both had
been connected with Sullivan and Wright. 70 Neutra, like Schindler, also noticed striking
formal similarities between Gill's works and those of Loos. 71 Both Gill and Loos had
been inspired by Sullivan's work and theories, and the two may have met personally in
Chicago during Loos's visit to the Middle West, precisely when Gill was employed in
Sullivan's studio. 72 It was Gill's austere, white, cubic forms that reminded Neutra and
Schindler of the work of their Viennese mentor, and provided them with evidence that
Modernist ideas could be merged with the vernacular forms of Southern California and
the American Southwest. One of Gill's most noteworthy buildings, the Dodge House
(1914–16; Fig. 1), was located at 950 Kings Road in Los Angeles, only a few blocks
from the Schindler-Chase House (835 Kings Road), where Neutra lived with his family
for the first five years of his career in the city. Hines has suggested that the flat roofs,
ribbon windows, stuccoed façades and lack of ornament of Gill's Dodge House, and
also his Banning House (Los Angeles, 1910) and the Horatio West Court (Santa
Monica, 1919), demonstrated to Neutra a successful blending of the lessons he had
learned from Loos with the forms of the Spanish Colonial style. The Dodge House made
a particularly lasting impression on Neutra, 73 and in 1970 he ardently, yet ultimately
unsuccessfully, protested against the building's demolition. 74
Fig. 1. Los Angeles, Irving Gill's Dodge House, main entrance (photograph by Thomas
Hines; with permission)
One of Gill's early Southern California commissions (received in 1899) had been
the restoration of the San Diego Mission, an authentic specimen of the austere,
Franciscan variety of the Spanish Baroque. Gill's investigation of this building became a
pivotal moment in his career, and his subsequent projects increasingly appropriated
elements of this historic style. 75 While working on this project, however, Gill also studied
the Spanish Colonial style; both the archival evidence and Gill's body of works
demonstrate that he purposefully avoided historicist mimicry, as noted by Gill's
contemporary George Wharton James:
Early impressed by the wonderful climate and scenic environment of California, he sought,
not as so many architects have done, to imitate […] but to absorb […] the original sources
of their inspiration. 76
As Hines noted, at its core, Gill's unique version of Modern architecture represents a
search for ‘the contemporary implications of California's Hispanic architectural
legacy’. 77 As for Neutra, he was so impressed by this fusion that, in 1930, he used his
own photographs of Gill's work to illustrate his second full-length
publication, Amerika (Fig. 2). 78
Fig. 2. Santa Monica, Irving Gill's Horatio West Court (photographs by Richard Neutra ca.
1929; from Neutra, Amerika; courtesy Dion Neutra, Architect © and Charles E. Young
Research Library, UCLA)
In order to provide for his growing family, Neutra took employment in 1925 with the
English-born architect Gordon Kaufmann, who had arrived in California in 1914. 79 This
architect also made a considerable impression on Neutra. In the early 1920s, Kaufmann
had collaborated with Reginald Johnson and Roland Coate, and from Johnson he had
learned to appreciate Goodhue's use of the Spanish Colonial style in the 1915 Panama-
California Exposition in San Diego. 80 Cristina López Uribe has recognised that since the
First World War, when travel to the Mediterranean Basin was not feasible, the so-called
‘Spanish Colonial’ had provided Californians with a locally available ‘Mediterranean’
theme. 81 Consequently, following his separation from Johnson and Coate in 1924,
Kaufmann adopted a style of architecture that was loosely Mediterranean; 82 Neutra
described it as following the ‘early Florentine Renaissance style’, and reminisced that
‘the marvelous large illustrated publications that form the source material awaken my
longings for Italy.’ 83 It was while he was employed in Kaufmann's studio that he
produced working drawings for the Eisner House in Los Angeles (1925), 84 a building
that features reflecting pools, clay tile roofs, white-washed stucco walls and three
vegetated interior courtyards. 85 Yet he continued to hold Kaufmann in high esteem, in
spite of the fact that Kaufman's 1920s projects quoted the historic styles of the faraway
Mediterranean region quite literally, and he did so even long after resigning his post in
Kaufmann's studio.
During the first decade of his Los Angeles career Neutra designed a series of
projects that reflect the ongoing maturation of his own modernist aesthetic. In addition to
his well-known projects in Los Angeles for the Jardinette Apartments (1927) and the
Lovell Health House (1927–29), he produced a competition entry (designed with
Schindler) for the League of Nations Building in Geneva (1926), a series of drawings for
the urban utopia that he called ‘Rush City Reformed’ (mid-1920s), as well as the unbuilt
schemes for the Colton Theatre (1927) and a skyscraper for the National Trading
Centre (1927), both in Los Angeles. 86 At the same time as he was developing these
avant garde projects, however, he also followed the examples set by Wright, Schindler,
Gill and Kaufmann in seeking a potential synthesis between his own Modern ideas and
the architecture of California's colonial past. In 1927, the same year he was working on
the Jardinette Apartments and the Lovell Health House, he supplemented the
insufficient wages he was earning from Kaufmann by designing several small houses
(unbuilt) for properties in and around Santa Monica (Fig. 3). 87 These houses, with their
arches, loggias, whitewashed stucco and pitched roofs clad in clay tiles, exchanged the
modernist aesthetic for stylistic experimentation with Spanish Colonial forms.
Fig. 3. Richard Neutra, sketch for a single-family house (c. 1927; unbuilt) in Santa Monica
(courtesy Dion Neutra, Architect © and Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA)
A similar attempt to incorporate historic forms can be seen in the drawings made by
Neutra and Schindler in 1928 for a civic centre in Richmond, California. 88 Their
description of this design indicates that they intended to reject the historicist mimicry of
monumental civic buildings from the past, such as the Doge's Palace in Venice or the
Baths of Caracalla in Rome, ostensibly because ‘we are now living in a mechanical,
rational, abstractly imaginative age and our architecture should bear the imprint of the
age’. 89 Notwithstanding this claim, McCoy has pointed out that the design for these
buildings was still deeply indebted to Goodhue's stylistic and planimetric formalism, and
she also noted that
there was no trace of Mendelsohn in them, or Wright, or Schindler's early houses, or even
the visions of flight found in Neutra's theoretical Rush City, which by then he had begun.
The formalism of the layout would have puzzled Loos. 90
Working on his own, Neutra also experimented with vernacular forms of the American
Southwest in his never-constructed project for the California Lambs Club in Hollywood
(1926) (Fig. 4), which he designed for the Fidelity Construction Company. 91 Unlike the
purely historicist styling of the houses in Santa Monica, for this project he juxtaposed
Spanish Colonial and Modern forms: he superimposed heavy volumes – articulated in a
way reminiscent of Wright's buildings such as the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo and the Larkin
Building in Buffalo – over a much lighter base of porticoes and arcades. A promotional
brochure advertised this work as ‘extreme Spanish design’. 92
Fig. 4. Richard Neutra, sketch of the California Lambs Club (1926; unbuilt) in Los Angeles,
as published in Dione Neutra, Richard Neutra, Promise and Fulfillment, 1919–1932 (courtesy
Dion Neutra, Architect © and University of Southern Illinois Press)
In 1926, Neutra followed the stylistic hodgepodge of the California Lambs Club with
his much more elegant, yet largely-unknown (perhaps because it was again unbuilt),
addition to the Baum family house in Santa Monica (Fig. 5). 93 The addition was
designed as a Rationalist prism containing a gymnasium and a playroom. With its
programmatic emphasis on wellness, physical activity and exposure to fresh air and
sunlight through ventilated and louvred screens, as well as its flat roof, horizontal lines
and lack of ornament, it was faithful to the Modernist agenda. However, it also
complemented the existing Spanish Colonial quinta (a traditional country house), which
Hines has noted
shows in its proportions and attention to detail how deftly Neutra could add a contemporary
wing to a traditionalist structure without compromising the original building or his own
modernist principles. 94
Later, his admittedly less successful addition to the Rajagopals House in Los Angeles of
1934 (Figs. 6, 7 and 8) similarly represents his struggle to merge Spanish Colonial and
Modern forms. 95 A more sensitive juxtaposition of Modern and historic forms, however,
occurred in the 1936 Ruben House in Los Angeles (although in this case the historic
style was Shingle and not Spanish Colonial). 96
Fig. 5. Richard Neutra, sketch for the Baum family house showing the addition of a
gymnasium (1926; unbuilt) in Santa Monica (courtesy Dion Neutra, Architect © and Richard
and Dion Neutra Papers, UCLA)
Fig. 6. Los Angeles, Richard Neutra's Rajagopals House, showing Neutra's second-floor
addition in the upper right (author's photograph, 2009)
Fig. 7. Los Angeles, Richard Neutra's Rajagopals House (author's photograph, 2009)
Fig. 8. Los Angeles, Richard Neutra's Rajagopals House (author's photograph, 2009)
Neutra's attempts to fuse the spirit of the architecture of the American Southwest
with his own Modern ideas gradually shifted, from the formalistic mimicry of the Santa
Monica houses and sensitive juxtaposition of contrasting forms in the Baum House, to a
more meaningful synthesis of Modern and traditional ideas. He had adapted vernacular
Californian sleeping porches for use in the 1927–29 Lovell Health House, 97 but in his
Corona Avenue School of 1935 in Los Angeles he used abstract reference to
California's colonial architecture. Undoubtedly, he had climatic concerns and
pedagogical innovation in mind when he designed the school's covered exterior
pathways, which connect the individual classrooms. 98 McCoy, however, has pointed out
that they are also an interpretation of the ‘arcaded passages’ that were common in
Spanish Colonial architecture. 99 Other projects in Los Angeles, such as the VDL
Research House (1932–39) and the von Sternberg House (1937; demolished), again
deftly incorporate strategies from Spanish Colonial architecture, such as the patio
(discussed further below). The forms of Neutra's Strathmore Apartments (1937) were
also inspired, as Hines has noted, by Spanish Colonial architecture, and by the
architecture of the cultures indigenous to the American Southwest:
Long impressed with the stacked mega-structures of the Pueblo Indians and of the more
recent systems of courtyard housing in Southern California, Neutra designed Strathmore as
a modernist updating of both vernaculars. 100
In addition to his architectural designs, his travel sketchbook also reveals that, up to his
death in 1970, Neutra continued to be intrigued by the vernacular architecture of the
American Southwest, as well as by the Spanish Colonial and Baroque styles. On his
many journeys through California and Latin America, he recorded views in his
sketchbook of notable exemplars of this style, such as the San Juan Cathedral (Puerto
Rico, 1540), Nuestra Señora del Carmen Church (Santo Domingo, 1615–1729), the
parish Church of the Holy Spirit and San Patricio (Loiza, Puerto Rico, 1645), the
Cathedral of San Cristobal (Havana, 1748–87), Mission San Antonio de Pala (Pala,
California, 1816) and Mission Santa Inés (Solvang, California, 1817). 101 Moreover, his
interest in these cultures extended beyond architecture alone; his travel diary also
includes many sketches of local cultural events, such as traditional dances, gauchos
riding on horseback, bullfights and ordinary daily activities. 102

NEUTRA'S FIELD STUDIES IN LATIN AMERICA AND SPAIN

As has been discussed by Lauren Weiss Bricker, architects practising in the American
Southwest in the 1930s were asked about their sources for inspiration. 103 In response,
they did not cite European architects but instead Japanese precedents and Latin
American architects, such as Juan O'Gorman. They also cited local climatic,
topographic and cultural conditions. It is therefore no surprise that Neutra, too, was
inspired by the architecture created by the diverse cultures he encountered during his
extensive travels throughout Latin America. During the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s he
travelled to practically every continent, yet his archives and sketchbooks reveal that,
along with Japan, the countries of Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula were among
his most preferred and documented international destinations. His reasons for travelling
extensively throughout Latin America are likely due to the historical connections
between these regions and California, as well as to the personal connections he felt
with the people of these places; for example, Neutra's son Dion remembers that his
father was so interested in these cultures that, during his visits to Cuba, Venezuela and
Puerto Rico, he made an effort to learn the Spanish language. 104 In this way, Neutra
distinguished himself from Wright, Gill and Schindler, who appear to have focused their
studies of indigenous American architecture on the specific cultures of the Maya (in
Wright's case), or the American Southwest (in Gill's and Schindler's). While Neutra did
indeed study these cultures, his interests in, and references to, Latin American
architecture also included other cultures, such as the Aztec and Inca civilisations, and
extended southwards from Baja California and the Caribbean to as far as Tierra del
Fuego.
Naturally, given his early interest in it even before emigrating to the New World,
Neutra's first Latin American destination was Mexico. He claimed that:
As a child in Vienna I sang the anthem glorifying the last, long-lived ruler of the Hapsburg
dynasty upon whose far-flung empire the sun at one time had never set. Mexico was the
heart of it, and for me, a place of wonder. When I first saw Mexico many years later, I felt
immediately at home. 105
He first travelled to Mexico in 1925, only months after arriving in Southern California. On
this first visit to Latin America, he was impressed by the canals and chinampas (floating
gardens) of Xochimilco, which he documented in a travel sketch showing ‘a man rowing
a group of passengers on a flower-decorated Trajinera (boat)’. 106 He then continued to
visit Mexico throughout the following decades. 107 In 1935, he visited Mexico City and
Toluca, 108 and his third visit, in 1937, resulted from the invitation of Carlos Contreras to
give a guest lecture in Mexico City; during this visit, Barragán arranged for him to tour
Guadalajara and to participate in a conference in Chapala. 109 In 1937, he also visited the
pyramids in Mexico City, together with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, whom, according
to Hines, he ‘had long admired’. 110 He commemorated the encounter in a travel sketch
(Fig. 9) that pictures Rivera and Kahlo standing in front of the Tenayuca Pyramid. 111 Of
the encounter he wrote:
on the sunny street, I met the immense, the colossus Rivera and soon afterwards his
diminutive, black-haired doll, his wife. […] Finally we drive to Guadeloupe [sic] where
thousands of Indians are on a pilgrimage from December 12th to observe the yearly Fiesta
of the Holy Virgin. […] On the way I see an excellent housing project as well as Aztec
villages unchanged from a thousand years ago. Finally we reach the […] fantastic pyramid
encircled by granite stone snakes. Night falls as we carefully climb higher and higher, not
wanting to break our necks on this steep incline. Then a long drive back in the darkness.
We have a good time together. 112
On that same visit, he attended a bullfight, which he recorded in a travel sketch entitled
‘Una Tarde De Toros’ (Fig. 10). 113 He was particularly fascinated, however, by the
Spanish Baroque architecture that he found throughout Mexico. He referred to Mexico
City's cathedral as ‘the greatest church in the world (except St. Peter's in Rome)’ and he
called the adjacent Zócalo ‘the grandest plaza in Christendom’. 114
Fig. 9. Richard Neutra, Tan Yuka Pyramid/Serpent Diego & Frieda [sic] Rivera, Mexico City,
1937 (courtesy Dion Neutra, Architect © and Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA)
Fig. 10. Richard Neutra, Una Tarde De Toros, Mexico, 12 December 1937 (courtesy Dion
Neutra, Architect © and Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA)
Throughout these visits, Neutra was impressed by the ways in which Mexican
architects had successfully synthesized Mexico's history and tradition with its increasing
modernisation. During the 1937 visit he also met Juan O'Gorman, who had already
completed several projects, notably Rivera and Kahlo's house in Mexico City (1929–30),
and who had served as Head of the Architectural Office of the Ministry of Public
Education since the early 1930s. 115 Neutra later visited other O'Gorman projects, not
least his Central Library (1950–53) at the National Autonomous University of Mexico
(UNAM, Mexico City, designed in collaboration with Gustavo Saavedra and Juan
Martínez de Velasco), which Neutra saw in 1957. 116 He was also familiar with the works
of José Villagrán García, who, from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, collaborated with
O'Gorman, Enrique del Moral, Mario Pani, Carlos Lazo and others to design the campus
and buildings of UNAM. 117 In 1952, Neutra commended Villagrán García for building
Modern architecture in Mexico as early as 1925, precisely the same moment as Neutra
himself had been struggling to reconcile his own Modern ideas with the revival of the
Spanish Colonial style that prevailed in California. 118 Likewise, he probably also
appreciated the fusion of Mexican history and Modern architecture that is evident in
Pedro Ramírez Vázquez's acclaimed National Museum of Anthropology and History,
which was completed in Mexico City in 1964, only months after Neutra lectured at the
International Congress of Architects there, in 1963. 119
During his visits to Mexico, Neutra discovered, as Obregón Santacilia has
explained, that even in the earliest days of the colonial period, Mexican architecture had
demonstrated a synthesis of the cultures of various indigenous groups and the Spanish
colonisers. As evidence, Obregón Santacilia has cited examples of architectural
ornamentation from buildings built across Mexico from the sixteenth to the nineteenth
centuries. 120 Neutra's appreciation of this fusion was plainly evident to Irving Myers, who,
in 1950, was awarded a fellowship by the National Institute of Fine Arts of Mexico to
study contemporary Mexican architecture, the result of which was his book of
1952 Mexico's Modern Architecture. 121 In this book, he acknowledged Neutra ‘for
guidance, encouragement and inspiration over a period of years’, and he invited him to
write the introduction. 122 There, Neutra remarked that, because of ‘their consciousness
of the past fused with the problems of the present’, Mexican artists such as Rivera,
Kahlo and O'Gorman were unrivalled on the international scene, and that ‘Mexico is
beginning to take its deserved place in the civilization of industrial technology, [and] it
has almost simultaneously rediscovered new values in its pre-European past.’ 123
Geographically, Mexico was the Latin American country nearest to Neutra's home
in Los Angeles, but it was not his only frequent travel destination south of the border. In
the early 1940s, he was commissioned by the Committee on Design of Public Works of
Puerto Rico, and specifically through the person of Rexford G. Tugwell, the island's
governor. 124 In this commission, Neutra served as lead architect for a comprehensive
project to design prototypes for public facilities in Puerto Rico, including schools and
rural health centres for more than 150 locations across the island, as well as five large
hospitals, staff housing and a home for young girls. 125
For the editors of Architectural Forum who, in 1945, ran a feature article on this
project, Neutra had been the obvious choice for this commission, because of his ‘unique
design approach’, in which ‘architectural treatment was entirely compatible with the
warm tropical climate’. 126 In a 1944 article written by Neutra himself and published
in Survey Graphic, he expressed the view that his appointment as this project's director
of design had resulted from his own ‘considerable experience as an architect in the
tropics’, which is clearly a reference to his work in other former Spanish
colonies. 127 Prior to the publication of this article in 1944, all of Neutra's built work in
warm or semi-tropical climates had been located in California, Texas and Florida. 128
As was the case in Mexico, Neutra was keenly interested here in the island's
historic architecture and its people. The many travel sketches he recorded during
several visits to the island in 1944 and 1945 include historic buildings such as small
cottages and the San Patricio church (both in Loiza), as well as the Cathedral of San
Juan. 129 He also sketched several of the island's natural features, such as the El Yunque
Forest, beaches and tropical vegetation. 130 This two-year project, in addition, facilitated
direct contact between him and the island's people, and he also developed professional
relationships with Puerto Rico's most talented young architects. 131 As for the buildings
he designed for the island, these reflect his study of elements of local Puerto Rican
culture. Thus, when planning the three prototypes for health centres, he situated the
milk dispensary, a programmatic function that would serve as a natural community
gathering point, between an enclosed children's play patio and an outdoor extension of
the interior waiting room (Fig. 11). He described these twin exterior spaces as:
a spacious porch with a concrete bench running around it as a place for meetings, lectures,
entertainments, and broadcasts for the mountain community. Our purpose was to avoid any
institutional character, making these buildings genuinely belong to the people. Here they
can play their dominoes, strum their guitars, and dance—and incidentally, learn something
about child care, diet, and more practical housekeeping. 132
Prior to his time in Puerto Rico, Neutra had used several small porches in single-family
residences, such as the sleeping porches of the Lovell Health House and the VDL
Research House, but he had never employed them to house community activity on a
large scale. Subsequently, in his Eagle Rock Park Clubhouse (Los Angeles, 1953),
designed in collaboration with his son Dion, he replicated these twin ‘spacious porches’
as two exterior spaces that flank the indoor community room and play hall (Fig. 12). As
with the Puerto Rico health centres of the previous decade, these porches were
intended to provide flexible spaces that allow for diverse, everyday activities to occur,
seamlessly, indoors and out. 133 Echoing his own description of the ‘spacious porches’ in
Puerto Rico, Lamprecht has described the porches at Eagle Rock as ‘a delight for
children playing underneath them in rain or sun’. 134
Fig. 11. Richard Neutra, plan of ‘B’ Type Urban Health Center, Puerto Rico, 1944 (as
redrawn by author after the original)
Fig. 12. Los Angeles, Richard Neutra's Eagle Rock Park Clubhouse, showing the ‘play
porch’ along the building's east side (photograph by Julius Shulman; courtesy Dion Neutra,
Architect ©; and © J. Paul Getty Trust)
Immediately following his work in Puerto Rico, in 1945, Neutra travelled throughout
various regions in Latin America as an official envoy of the US Department of State (Fig.
13); and in 1946 he published his ‘observations on Latin America’ in Architectural Forum,
whose editors declared ‘that Mr. Neutra's opinions should be stimulating to both North
and South American readers and […] they have significant bearing on the over-all
problems of planning in general’. 135 Notwithstanding any covert political agenda the
State Department might have had for this purportedly goodwill tour, Neutra himself had
understood it as a mutual exchange of ideas, in which he had as much to learn from his
Latin American counterparts as they did from him:
It is interesting to speculate on how much different cities and regions might profit from the
exchange of ideas and comparison with the experiences of others. Such cross fertilization
can start with simple questions: What are the new problems with you and with us? On what
might additional emphasis be placed here and there? What, outside of established local
routine, might be tackled to advantage? 136
Warchavchik likewise concluded that this tour was as instructive for Neutra as it was for
Latin America's architects. He described Neutra as ‘a receptive artist, whose crayon
miraculously fixed pictorial notes into his travel sketchbook’, and as a
deeply agreeable human being, irradiating his specific kind of sympathy, unselfishly helpful,
a man warmly admiring the work of other creative men, and still—instinctively and without
faltering—wandering along his own path and lifeline. 137
The ‘observations’ Neutra made on this tour also reveal that he was impressed by
advances currently being made in the region, such as Modern city planning strategies
that included the progressive, pre-emptive action exercised by the planners of Brazil's
coastal towns, and which had been designed to protect local beaches from
‘metropolitanization’ and over-development. 138 He also discovered that, in locations as
diverse as Monterrey, Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo, the building trades had overcome
the inability to import high-tech, mass-produced goods from more developed countries
by inventing new manufacturing processes and building infrastructure in ways that were
uniquely suited to the local context. 139 He observed that:
The current lack of certain materials and equipment has made Mexican, Argentinian, and
Brazilian manufacturers inventive; their AVANT-GARDE architects, experimental; their
engineers, daring; and their building ordinances (in some cases), very open-minded. Much
has been gained; their industry adds considerably to the diversity of world production. 140
In Buenos Aires, he noted the ways in which the activity and industrial infrastructure of
the city's extensive seaport had been integrated successfully with public spaces, a
lesson which he encouraged North American architects to learn from their Argentine
counterparts. 141 In Lima, he discovered that, instead of destroying the city's heritage,
local architects had used Modern city planning to promote local history by opening
‘vistas to beautiful old structures like the monastery, Las Nazarenas, which for centuries
was hidden from view’. 142
Fig. 13. Richard Neutra, Machu Picchu, 1945 (courtesy Dion Neutra, Architect © and Charles
E. Young Research Library, UCLA)
Neutra visited locations both throughout Latin America and in the Iberian Peninsula:
Mexico (1925, 1935, 1937, 1951, 1957, 1962 and 1963), Puerto Rico (1943–45),
Argentina (1945), Brazil (1945), Panama (1945), Peru (1945), the Dominican Republic
(1945–48), Cuba (1945 and 1956), Guatemala (1951 and 1957), Spain (1954, 1956 and
1969), Venezuela (1955), Colombia (1957) and Portugal (1963–64). He documented
these places in at least seventy-nine individual travel sketches. 143 Moreover, he not only
visited them, but he also proposed architectural designs for many sites in these
countries, including two unbuilt projects for Caracas (in which he collaborated with the
internationally-renowned Spanish engineer Eduardo Torroja), the urban design and
planning for the Central Redevelopment of the Port of Caracas (1955–57) 144 and the
‘Trebol la Hayada’ commercial district (Caracas; 1955–57). 145 He also built the sprawling
DeShulthess House (1956) in Havana, and the Gonzales-Gorrondona House (1962) in
Caracas. 146 For the latter of these projects, he collaborated with Spanish landscape
architect Eduardo Robles Piquer, who was then in exile in Venezuela following the
Spanish Civil War, and who, like Neutra had done elsewhere, used a combination of
organic and rectilinear forms to extend the house's interior spaces into the surrounding
vegetation. 147
Neutra also studied the cultures of the Europeans, particularly those from Spain,
who had colonised Latin America. He readily acknowledged the distinctions between
the various regions in Latin America, as well as the ways in which they had diverged
culturally and politically from their former colonisers. Yet he was intrigued too by the
historical and socio-cultural values that still linked these regions. In a 1954 lecture in
Madrid, he stated that, thanks to these still-evident cultural connections, his frequent
visits to Latin America had indirectly prepared him for his first visit to Spain in
1954. 148 He also claimed that:
This visit has been satisfying for me, and [it is] the fulfilment […] of an old desire. I would
like to know more of Spain, but I know it very little, although already before now, from my
readings and my professional work, I had a basic knowledge of it. 149
Immediately following this visit, César Ortiz-Echagüe remarked that Neutra's
knowledge about Spanish history, for a foreigner, was surprisingly extensive, and even
commented that ‘Philip the Second is an old friend in his cultural world.’ 150 For Neutra,
this first visit did not disappoint. Despite spending only a single week in Spain on this
trip, he travelled to Barcelona, Granada, Madrid, Ávila, Segovia and El Escorial, and he
experienced at first-hand – with several of Spain's most noteworthy architects as guides
– many treasures of Spain's architectural past. With Rafael de la Joya, he toured the
prime example of Moorish 151 architecture, the fortress-palace of the Alhambra in
Granada; 152 with Carlos de Miguel, in Madrid he visited Juan Bautista de Toledo's El
Prado palace (by then a museum) and watched a bullfight, which his wife Dione
described as ‘a most interesting experience’; 153 and with Ortiz-Echagüe and Miguel
Fisac, he visited the city walls of Ávila, the Roman aqueduct in Segovia and the
monastery-palace at El Escorial, which interested him so much that he requested to visit
it again a few days later with Modesto López Otero (the director of the School of
Architecture in Madrid). 154 Among the famous buildings forming the complex at El
Escorial, he was most captivated by the Basilica of San Lorenzo, and Ortiz-Echagüe
later recounted that, for Neutra, ‘this church was one of the best in the world, if not the
very best among those that he had seen.’ 155
After returning home to Los Angeles, he wrote to Fisac that ‘we loved your country
and certainly hope we may see you all again.’ 156 During this visit, Neutra had explored
the rich tradition that, for centuries, had produced the buildings and cities that had
inspired much of the historic architecture he had been studying for years in California
and Latin America. Despite the astonishing number of important sites he toured, he was
still disappointed that the brevity of this first visit had not afforded him the opportunity to
develop an intimate understanding of Spanish architecture and culture, taking the view
that ‘first you need to become acquainted with the people, […] absorb their way of
thinking and feeling, and then try to comprehend their architecture.’ 157
However, a new opportunity was not long in coming. In 1956, a team of over forty
Spanish architects and engineers invited Neutra to take the lead in designing prototype
housing units (unbuilt) for US Air Force personnel stationed in four locations in
Spain. 158 Apparently, his Spanish collaborators had selected Neutra to head the team for
two reasons. First, they had hoped that his name would improve their chances of
success with the competition's jury. Secondly, they recognised that his interest in their
traditions transcended that of an erudite tourist, having seen evidence that he had
already successfully merged elements of Modern architecture with the vernacular
architecture of California, Latin America and Spain, in his buildings from previous
decades. Such amalgamations included the patios at the Corona Avenue School (Los
Angeles, 1935), the Kaufmann Desert House (Palm Springs, 1946), the passive
ventilation strategies of the Tremaine House (Montecito, 1948), the sun-shading devices
of the Northwestern Mutual Fire Association Building (Los Angeles, 1950) and the
‘spacious porch’ of the Eagle Rock Park Clubhouse (Los Angeles, 1953). 159 For Neutra,
it was a rare opportunity to acquaint himself with the Spanish people, and ‘to try to
comprehend their architecture’, and integrate Spanish cultural values with his own
Modern ideas. 160

ADAPTING STRATEGIES FROM THE ARCHITECTURE OF

LATIN AMERICA AND SPAIN
In the September 1965 issue of the Madrid journal Arquitectura, Francisco Prieto
Moreno, the leading expert on Spain's Moorish architecture and chief conservation
architect for the Alhambra, published an article entitled ‘Coincidencias de Neutra con las
arquitecturas orientales’ (‘Correspondences between Neutra and Oriental
Architectures’). 161 There, he identified remarkable similarities between, on the one hand,
the Alhambra, the gardens of the Generalife, and the typical Andalusian country house,
and, on the other, Neutra's works, such as the Hafley-Moore Houses (Long Beach,
1953), the Kronish House (Beverly Hills, 1955) and the Slavin House (Santa Barbara,
1956). He attributed such ‘correspondences’ to a similar sense of human scale and to
the fact that both Neutra and Spain's Moorish architects had adapted architecture to the
natural condition of the site. 162 In both Neutra's work and Moorish architecture, he also
discovered an analogous use of vegetation, and translucent privacy screens and
features exploiting sun and shade patterns, as well as the seamless connection of
interior and exterior spaces. 163 For Prieto Moreno, Neutra's attempts to reconnect the
human being to nature, which had been initially inspired by his reading of Wundt, also
paralleled the ‘vegetative ideal’ as defined by the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y
Gasset (1883–1955), which Prieto Moreno described as a rejection of perfect geometry
(and rules involving the Golden Section) as determinants of architectural form, in favour
of an architecture that used natural elements and organic shapes to stimulate the
senses. 164
Perhaps because of the high level of celebrity that Neutra, by 1965, had gained in
Spain and Latin America, Prieto Moreno side-stepped any implication that Neutra's use
of such concepts in his own work might, in any way, have been actually inspired by
Spain's Moorish architecture. However, these supposed correspondences between
Neutra's work and vernacular architecture of Latin America and Spain were no mere
coincidence, because, instead, they had resulted from his study of these regions. The
Spaniard Fernando Higueras remembered that, during his visit to the Escuela Técnica
Superior de Arquitectura in Madrid in 1954, Neutra had publicly acknowledged that ‘the
true spatial essence of my work is extracted from the architectural heritage of Spain,
especially [from] the Alhambra of Granada.’ 165 Likewise, in his 1954 book Life and Human
Habitat, he compared the shared green spaces of his 1942 Channel Heights project and
his unbuilt Elysian Park Heights project (Los Angeles, 1949–59) with the plazas and
patios that he had visited and sketched during his travels in Mexico, Peru and Cuba. 166
From his studies of buildings in the American Southwest, Latin America and Spain,
Neutra had adapted three architectural strategies to deal with life in warm climates: sun-
control devices, ‘sub-soffit ventilation’ in which the exterior wall stops short of the roof
deck to allow continuous air exchange, and the interior patio as a means of uniting
interior and exterior spaces. In a 1946 article in Progressive Architecture, he claimed that,
since the early 1930s, he had been experimenting with shading strategies, although, by
his own admission, he ‘did not pursue [these] ideas to an ultimate conclusion’. 167 The
two-year project in Puerto Rico (1943–45) and his 1945 tour through Latin America had
then given him the opportunity to study the elegant, efficient sun-control devices that
had been used on Modern buildings in Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and
Pampulho. The movable vertical louvres, designed and patented by the Argentinian
architect and city planner Julio Villalobos, had particularly interested him, and he used
his article to promote Villalobos's sun-control devices to North American
architects. 168 He also noted that this device had been used widely throughout Latin
America, such as by Jorge Ferrari Hardoy and Juan Kurchen in Argentina, and Oscar
Niemeyer and Eudardo Agusto Kneese de Mello in Brazil. Neutra also highlighted the
‘glass louvers operated by concealed cables, roll shutters and mechanized, custom-built
metal sash and doors’ designed by Warchavchik and Wladimir Acosta for buildings in
Brazil. 169 He himself then began to incorporate sun-shading louvres into his own
projects. Their earliest applications are in his Kaufmann Desert House (1946), the
Northwestern Mutual Fire Association building (1950; Fig. 14) and the second VDL
Research House (1966; Fig. 15), which all postdate the studies he conducted of such
devices during his visits to Puerto Rico and other parts of Latin America between 1930
and 1945.
Fig. 14. Los Angeles, Richard Neutra's Northwestern Mutual Fire Association, showing sun-
shading devices (author's photograph, 2009)
Fig. 15. Los Angeles, Richard Neutra's VDL Research House II, showing vertical sun-
shading devices at far right (author's photograph, 2009)
According to Dion Neutra, the two-year experience in Puerto Rico was pivotal for
his father. There, Neutra had learned, for example, the need for adequate consideration
of trade-winds and their implications for architectural design, as well as a correct
response to other ‘natural conditions’, such as topography, orientation, vegetation,
climate and sun shading. 170 He had already used cross-ventilation as a cooling strategy
prior to his work in Puerto Rico, in projects such as the 1935 Corona Avenue School;
but in Puerto Rico he refined this strategy. Inspired by local climate-responsive
techniques of natural ventilation that take advantage of ‘the prevailing breezes, which
are such a boon to the island’, he developed what he referred to as ‘sub-soffit
ventilation’ (Fig. 16), in which the voids between the roof's concrete T-joists are left
uncapped at both ends, allowing warm air to be drawn quickly out of the interior spaces
by prevailing breezes. 171 He replicated this system in his Tremaine House in Montecito,
California (1948), although this time filling the voids between the concrete T-joists with
openable glazing. 172 He believed that the strategies for tropical climates he had
developed during his time in Puerto Rico were so appropriate for sites in warm humid
zones of Latin America that, in his 1948 book Architecture for Social Concern, he
promoted the results of his work on the island as a guide for Modern construction
throughout these Latin American regions. 173
Fig. 16. Richard Neutra, sketch of the continuous soffit vents he designed for buildings in
Puerto Rico, 1944 (as redrawn by author after the original)
Neutra was also inspired by the uses of fully-enclosed interior patios, which he
discovered during his travels in California, Latin America and Spain. 174 However, he was
not the only architect of central European origin who, in the 1920s and 1930s, exploited
the patio as a means of providing exposure to sunlight and fresh air, but without
compromising the privacy of the single-family home; Mies van der Rohe's courtyard
houses of the early 1930s and Walter Gropius's own house (Lincoln, Massachusetts,
1938), all organise interior spaces around fully-enclosed exterior patios. 175 In a 1956
article published in House and Home, Neutra acknowledged that the patio had been used
commonly in other parts of the world, such as Greece, Rome and Japan, and his sketch
diaries indicate that his interest in patios and courtyards had begun long before his
initial personal contact with the historic architecture and warm climates of California,
Latin America and Spain. 176 Not surprisingly, Spanish-speaking architects such as
Barragán and Josep Lluis Sert had also been inspired by the patios of their own
heritages. However, Neutra's central European origin sets him apart in regard to his
apparent preference for the patios of Spain and Latin America. In his House and
Home article, his search for ancient sources of this spatial prototype is presented as
being focused most frequently on civilisations of Spanish or Latin American heritage,
such as Altamira (located in Cantabria in northern Spain) and the Incas. 177 Moreover,
while Neutra's patios were, indeed, effective technical solutions for the Mediterranean
climate of coastal Southern California, as well as the deserts of the American
Southwest, they were also deft interpretations, as McCoy has proposed, of the
vernacular forms of Spain and Latin America. For example, she has suggested that the
interior patios in Neutra's 1961 Painted Desert and Petrified Forest Visitors Center were
inspired by the quadrangle of the Mayan Nunnery at Uxmal (Mexico), which Neutra may
have visited in the late 1930s. 178
The fully-enclosed patio did not emerge as a common theme in Neutra's built work
until after his arrival in Los Angeles. The 1923 houses in the Zehlendorf district in Berlin,
designed while Neutra was employed by Mendelsohn, are indeed arranged around a
loosely-defined exterior space, but this space is not as clearly defined as the fully-
enclosed exterior patio that would come to mark his later work in California. 179 In 1927,
however, only two years after arriving in Los Angeles, he designed three projects with
fully-enclosed interior patios. First, in his unbuilt schemes for houses on sites in and
around Santa Monica, which he designed in the Spanish Colonial style, the dining room,
living room and breakfast room open onto a small colonnaded patio. 180 Second, his first
built project in Southern California, the 1927 Jardinette Apartment building, is likewise
organised around a tight patio, defined on three sides by the building's façades, and on
the fourth by a half-height garden wall. 181 Third, similar to the Jardinette, his unbuilt
Ambrose Apartment building, which he designed in 1927 for another site in Los
Angeles, is organised around a ‘garden court’. 182
Despite its ample natural light and ventilation, the 1932 VDL Research House (Fig.
17) had been more stylistically akin, in its original form, to the International-Style white
boxes of the 1927 Weissenhofsiedlung than to Neutra's mature works of the 1940s and
1950s, which seamlessly connect interior and exterior spaces. Nevertheless, a series of
buildings Neutra designed subsequently, and before the addition of the VDL Garden
House in 1939, reveal an increasing incorporation of interior-exterior spaces, all
designed as outdoor rooms reminiscent of Spanish and Latin American patios.
Fig. 17. Richard Neutra, VDL Research House I, plan showing the house as originally
designed, 1932 Los Angeles (author's drawing)
Following the VDL Research House, Neutra's little-known, and once more unbuilt,
project of the mid-1930s for agricultural workers’ co-operative housing in Riverside,
California (Fig. 18) constitutes one of his earliest attempts to use the patio in a small-
scale residence as a means of expanding interior space towards the
exterior. 183 Although the project's programmatic and budgetary restrictions did not allow
for large interior living spaces, Neutra compensated by incorporating exterior living
spaces, which he designed as comfortable outdoor extensions of the interior rooms.
With large sliding glass walls, which he had used previously in his Beard House in
Altadena (1934), he joined the rows of dormitory rooms to outdoor patios that were
completely enclosed by the L-shaped building's two wings, and by a curving hedge to
provide privacy. As in Latin American and Spanish patios, these outdoor spaces were
shaded by roof overhangs, trees and vegetated pergolas, and they also featured a
combination of lawn and paving in order to provide the flexibility to accommodate a
variety of activities. 184
Fig. 18. Richard Neutra, sketch of the Agricultural Workers Cooperative Housing (c. mid-
1930s; unbuilt) at Riverside, California (courtesy Dion Neutra, Architect © and Charles E.
Young Research Library, UCLA)
Neutra again used the vernacular Spanish and Latin American patio in his 1935
Corona Avenue School (Fig. 19). By using sliding glass walls, he expanded the interior
space of each classroom into an adjacent outdoor patio, so that educational activities
could move fluidly from inside to outside, and in order to improve student learning and
health. 185 Obregón Santacilia recognised this innovative use of the patio in his 1939
book El maquinismo, la vida y la arquitectura, and he recommended it to his readers as an
appropriate feature to incorporate into Modern schools in Mexico. 186 Throughout the
following years, this notion of indoor/outdoor education became a hallmark of Neutra's
school designs. It re-appeared in his children's centre for the National Charity League in
Los Angeles (1955) (Fig. 20), in his 1956 design for schools for the US Air Force Bases
in Spain, in his UCLA Elementary School (Los Angeles, 1957), in his Richard J. Neutra
School at the Naval Air Base in Lemoore (1961) and in the Palos Verdes High School
(Los Angeles, 1961). 187
Fig. 19. Los Angeles, Richard Neutra's Corona Avenue School, showing the exterior patio in
use (photograph by Julius Shulman; courtesy Dion Neutra, Architect ©; and © J. Paul Getty
Trust)
Fig. 20. Los Angeles, Richard Neutra's National Charity League, showing interior patio
(author's drawing)
Neutra's appropriation of the patio in his own work evidently crystallised in the 1939
addition to the original VDL Research House. Dion Neutra remembers that when Neutra
designed the first VDL Research house (1931–32) he did not plan the future addition of
the garden house. 188 The intervening years between the two projects therefore
constitute an evolution in his work: from the pure geometry of the Modernist white box to
the diaphanous interior/exterior spaces that characterise his later works. He located the
single-storey VDL Garden House along the rear property line, in accordance with what
he described as ‘the old Spanish custom’ of building up to the property lines, in order to
carve out an interior patio. 189 He believed that this technique of maximizing available
building space had been perfected
on the Island of Capri and in the mountain villages of Spain centuries ago. There a series of
patios would supplement skimpy indoor floor areas and provide outdoor rooms separated
from the neighbors by walls that assured privacy to each family. A contemporary house can
solve the small lot problem in the same way. 190
The VDL Garden House (Fig. 21) was connected to the original house through a
sequence of single-storey rooms that subdivided the property into two patios, one for
service functions and the other for family life. The larger of these patios also functioned
as the primary access to the interior living room of the Garden House, and it served as
an additional exterior living space too. 191 By means of another sliding glass wall, the new
interior living room was then seamlessly joined to the exterior patio (Fig. 22). This patio
was designed as a physical and spiritual haven: ‘A patio is very different from a mere
terrace. A house surrounded by a garden is one thing, but a house that has an
articulated outer extension of the living area is another thing for body and soul.’ 192 Barragán,
who enjoyed a week-long stay in the VDL Research House, remembered its patio as
the most comfortable space of the house, thanks to its privacy and the inclusion of
vegetation. 193
Fig. 21. Los Angeles, Richard Neutra's addition of the garden house to the VDL Research
House I (author's drawing)
Fig. 22. Los Angeles, Richard Neutra's VDL Research House II, showing the 1939 Garden
House in the background and the interior patio as rebuilt in 1966 after the original was
destroyed by fire in 1963 (author's photograph, 2009)
In the years following the completion of the VDL Garden House, the fully-enclosed
patio continued to appear in Neutra's works. For the 1953 Hafley-Moore houses, Neutra
chose to unite these two separate residences with a shared, L-shaped patio and a
pergola, and he used large expanses of glass to link the patio to several of the homes’
interior spaces. In his 1956 House and Home article he used the exterior space between
the two houses to illustrate the ways in which the patio can be a shared space, while
maintaining the requisite privacy of a single-family dwelling. 194 For Prieto Moreno, the
patio of these twin houses was essentially ‘Andalusian’ because of Neutra's skilful use
of vegetation to create effects of dappled light and shifting shadows. This feature, in his
view, made this space ‘identical’ to the typical Andalusian carmen (walled garden): 195
The fabric of pergolas, closed and open patios, exterior garden, and swimming pool, with
their extremely varied internal environments, recalls, in a great way, the design of
the carmen of Granada, charged with Muslim influences. 196
He also stated that, in the case of Neutra's 1955 Kronish House,
the living spaces are centred in a way similar to [that of] the living spaces in the [Moorish]
house, with perspectives in various directions towards interior patios, and towards exterior
gardens. 197
Other Spanish architects were similarly impressed by Neutra's use of the patio, which
they also believed to have been derived from their own architectural tradition. In their
introduction to Neutra's film The Ideas of Richard Neutra, which premiered in Madrid in
1969, the architects Francisco Zamora and Rafael Alfonso highlighted Neutra's use of
the patio as a means of uniting interior and exterior spaces; but they also noted that
Neutra's ability to fuse his own ideas of Modern architecture with a spatial configuration
that he had learned from their own tradition had ultimately resulted in the creation of an
entirely new type of patio. 198

CONCLUSION
In his ‘search for the southland’, Richard Neutra had learned from a diverse array of
global cultures, yet, as this article has explored, a principal source was the shared
heritage and local idiosyncrasies of the American Southwest, Latin America and Spain.
Years before he emigrated to the United States, he had already demonstrated a keen
interest in California, Mexico and other parts of Latin America, which is plainly evident
as early as 1914 in his correspondence with Rudolph Schindler. Experts on these
regions, such as César Ortiz-Echagüe, Gregori Warchavchik and Irving Myers,
remarked that, even before visiting them, Neutra had already studied the architecture of
these regions, as well as their diverse climates, geographies, cultural idiosyncrasies,
politics, traditions and histories.
Neutra's study of these regions, moreover, was more extensive than that of other
architects practising in North America, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Irving Gill, Rudolph
Schindler and Gordon Kaufmann, and it eventually had a profound effect on his own
professional work. It is well-known that, during the first several years following his arrival
in Los Angeles, he had refined his modernist aesthetic and had produced several of his
most internationally-acclaimed, avant-garde projects, such as the 1927 Jardinette
Apartments, the 1927–29 Lovell Health House and the original portion of the 1932 VDL
Research House. This article, however, has demonstrated that at the same time as he
was designing these examples of Modern architecture he was also experimenting with –
and sometimes even copying – the forms of the Spanish Colonial style, this being
evident in such projects as the 1927 Santa Monica Houses and the 1928 Richmond
Civic Centre. Initially, these two trends in his work had seemed to be at odds with each
other but, even as early as 1926, he began to utilise sympathetic juxtapositions of
forms, as seen in the Modernist gymnasium addition to the Baum house, a Spanish
Colonial quinta.
Over the course of his first decade in Los Angeles, following the lead of Wright,
Schindler, Gill and Kaufmann, Neutra eventually transcended sympathetic
juxtapositions of forms and successfully achieved a synthesis of Modern ideas and the
local architectural traditions of California and Latin America, a trait he had appreciated
in the work of Mexican architects such as Obregón Santacilia and Juan O'Gorman. At
the Lovell Health House, he adapted the Californian sleeping porch for use in a home
focused on Modern standards of health, hygiene and exercise. The fully-enclosed patio
he had seen on his early tours through California (in the mid-1920s) and his first visit to
Mexico (in 1925) emerged as a frequent theme in his work, beginning with the fully-
enclosed patio that appeared in the 1927 Jardinette Apartments, just two years after his
arrival in Los Angeles. In the 1935 Corona Avenue School, he adapted the open-air
patio to suit modern pedagogical models. In the 1937 von Sternberg House (Los
Angeles) and the 1939 addition of the Garden House to the VDL Research House, he
then appropriated the patio in order to promote the Modern ideal of life en plein air, and
to realise fully the fluid connection between interior and exterior space that he had
sought ever since his first readings of Wundt's Principles of Physiological
Psychology. Even his later works, such as the 1961 Petrified Forest and Painted Desert
Visitor's Center, openly referenced the forms of indigenous pueblos of the American
Southwest.
Neutra's tours through Central and South America also offered him the opportunity
to research architectural strategies for responding to the unique climatic and cultural
conditions of subtropical locations. While working in Puerto Rico in the early 1940s he
experimented with the ‘spacious porch’ in the prototype health centres that he designed
for locations across the island; 199 the 1953 Eagle Rock Park Clubhouse features similar
porches, which Neutra conceived as outdoor extensions of indoor spaces. In Puerto
Rico, he had also developed a cooling strategy that he called ‘sub-soffit ventilation’, and
which he later used in the 1948 Tremaine House. Prior to his 1945 tour of Latin America
he had experimented with sun-shading devices, yet, by his own admission, it was only
during this tour that he learned the proper use and application of such devices, which he
subsequently exploited in projects such as the 1946 Kaufmann House, the 1950
Northwestern Mutual Fire Association building and the 1966 reconstruction of the VDL
Research House.
The fact that Neutra's ‘search for the southland’ had led him to study the
architecture and cultures of the American Southwest, Latin America and Spain, and to
apply these lessons in his own work, was plainly evident to the architects who were
native to or made their own homes in these regions. The Mexican architects Carlos
Obregón Santacilia and Luis Barragán, whose own work had represented a fusion of
Mexican tradition and Modern ideas, also discovered evidence of this fusion in Neutra's
work. Gregori Warchavchik described Neutra as an open-minded artist whose
sketchbook reflected a deep understanding of the cultures he visited on his travels
through Latin America. Spanish architects also appreciated Neutra's study of their own
history and tradition; Francisco Prieto Moreno recognised deep similarities between
Neutra's work and Moorish architecture; César Ortiz-Echagüe remarked that, for a
foreigner, Neutra was unusually familiar with Spanish history and tradition; and, in 1956,
a team of Spanish architects selected Neutra to lead their design of housing for the US
Air Force Bases in Spain, in part because he had demonstrated to them that his version
of Modern architecture was inherently compatible with Spanish sensibilities.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For their help in the preparation and publication of this article, I would like to
acknowledge the contributions made by the following people. The idea to investigate
Neutra's interest in the architecture of California, Latin America and Spain originated in
2009 from my conversations with my doctoral dissertation chair, Dr Miguel Alonso del
Val. Thomas Hines and Dion Neutra have also provided critical insight into the subject. I
thank the blind referee and Judi Loach for their critique of the ideas and text. I also
thank Dion Neutra, the J. Paul Getty Trust, the Getty Research Institute, Thomas Hines
and the University of Southern Illinois Press, for graciously granting me permission to
publish several of these images, and I thank Simon Elliott and the staff of the
Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA, for their
assistance in locating and scanning some of them. Finally, I thank the College of
Architecture and Environmental Design and the University Libraries at Kent State
University, which provided funding for copyright and reproduction fees.
All foreign-language quotations are the author's translations unless otherwise
stated.

NOTES
1 The phrase used is ‘ciudadano del planeta’; see Neutra, Richard, La arquitectura como factor
humano (Madrid, 1954), p. 5 Google Scholar. This article is a transcription of the keynote
address Neutra gave, under the same title, at the Instituto de la Construcción y del
Cemento in Madrid on 24 November 1954.
2 Warchavchik, Gregory, ‘Introduction’, in Neutra, Richard, Architecture of Social Concern in
Regions of Mild Climate (Sao Paulo, 1948), pp. 10–34 Google Scholar (p. 28). This volume uses
the Anglicised version of Warchavchik's given name, Gregori.
3 Hines, Thomas, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture (New York, 1982),
p. 15 Google Scholar.
4 Ibid., p. 25.
5 Drexler, Arthur and Hines, Thomas, The Architecture of Richard Neutra: From International Style
to California Modern (New York, 1982), p. 23 Google Scholar.
6 In a letter dated 12 March 1921, Schindler informed Neutra that Wright was currently in
Japan, and that he might invite Neutra to join him there as a collaborator. Neutra was open
to this possibility, and it appears that Wright was indeed interested; ultimately, however,
Wright was unable to commit to inviting Neutra to Japan, presumably due to uncertainty in
his workflow. See McCoy, Esther, Vienna to Los Angeles: Two Journeys (Santa Monica, 1979),
pp. 134–35Google Scholar.
7 Neutra kept drawings (probably not travel sketches) of many buildings designed by
Japanese architects: Los Angeles, Richard and Dion Neutra Papers, 1925–70, Collection
1179, Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los
Angeles, Oversize Folder 2016. Hereinafter, this source will be cited as ‘UCLA’, followed by
the item's box number and folder number. The drawings are of a weather station in Kyushu
designed by S. Horikuti (drawing undated), an apartment building in Shimodera (drawing
undated), JAL office building in Tokyo (drawing undated but perhaps a later insertion since
this building may have been constructed much later than 1930) and Osaka Central
Wholesale Market built in 1931(drawing undated), plus a map of Tokyo City (drawing dated
1930) and a map of Osaka Municipal Retail Market (built in 1927).
8 For travel sketches that Neutra drew while in Japan in 1930, see UCLA, Box 2, Folders 1–
19, and UCLA, Box 1287, Folders 1–5. Neutra also made travel sketches of sites in Japan
on two subsequent visits: 1952 (UCLA, Box 1902, Folder 33) and 1960 (UCLA, Box 1902,
Folder 32). While not documented with travel sketches, he also visited Japan in 1964
(UCLA, Box 133, Folder 11) and 1966–67 (UCLA, Box 893, Folder 1).
9 Neutra, Richard, ‘Foreword’ (February 1959), in Engel, David H., Japanese Gardens for
Today (Rutland, Vt–Tokyo, 1959)Google Scholar, pp. xi–xiii (p. xi).
10 For example, ‘Japan and Total Composition of Environment’, dated 10 August 1959:
UCLA, Box 162, Folder 37. For more extensive analyses of Neutra's fascination with Japan,
see Lamprecht, Barbara, Neutra: Complete Works (Cologne, 2010), pp. 34–42 Google Scholar,
and Lamprecht, Barbara, ‘From Neutra in Japan, 1930, to His European Audiences and Southern
California Work’, Southern California Quarterly, 92 (2010), pp. 215–42CrossRef | Google Scholar.
11 Neutra, Richard, Life and Shape (New York, 1962), p. 181 Google Scholar.
12 McCoy, Esther, Richard Neutra (New York, 1960), p. 9 Google Scholar.
13 Lamprecht, ‘From Neutra in Japan’, p. 216.
14 Neutra, Richard, Life and Human Habitat (Stuttgart, 1956), p. 29 Google Scholar.
15 Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture, p. 26.
16 Hines mentions the Forest Cemetery in Luckenwalde and the private residential gardens;
Ibid., p. 31. For Neutra's own account of his work in Luckenwalde, see Neutra, Life and
Shape, pp. 149–52. Both Kathleen James and Regina Stephan have attributed the
landscape design for Mendelsohn's Einstein Tower to Neutra; see James, Kathleen,
‘“Organic!”: Einstein, Finlay-Freundlich, Mendelsohn, and the Einstein Tower in Potsdam’, in Erich
Mendelsohn, Architect 1887–1953, ed. Stephan, Regina (New York, 1999), pp. 26–37 Google
Scholar (p. 29); and Stephan, Regina, ‘“One of the Most Loveable People and at the Same Time
One of the Most Unpleasant”: Mendelsohn and His Assistants in the 1920s and Early 1930s’,
in Erich Mendelsohn, Architect 1887–1953, ed. Stephan, Regina (New York, 1999), pp. 152–
59Google Scholar (p. 154).
17 Hines briefly notes Neutra's personal connection with Klimt; see Hines, Richard Neutra
and the Search for Modern Architecture, p. 5. While Neutra's travel sketches have never been
widely researched or published, they figured prominently in the exhibition ‘Richard Neutra,
Architect: Sketches & Drawings’ at the Los Angeles Public Library in 2009, curated by
Thomas Hines. To my knowledge, no catalogue of this exhibition was produced, although
the six podcast interviews that formed part of the audio tour (with Sarah Lorenzen, Victoria
Steele, Ray Kappe, Kelly Lynch, Leo Marmol and Dion Neutra) have remained available for
download on the LAPL website,
at http://www.lapl.org/collections-resources/e-media/podcasts/exhibition, last accessed on
12 March 2016.
18 Neutra, Life and Shape, p. 173. For a detailed account of Neutra's impressions of the
architecture of Wright's Taliesin (Spring Green), see Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for
Modern Architecture, pp. 52–55.
19 Moreno, Francisco Prieto, ‘Coincidencas de Neutra con las arquitecturas
orientales’, Arquitectura, 81 (1965), pp. 19–30 Google Scholar; Santacilia, Carlos Obregón, El
maquinismo, la vida y la arquitectura (Mexico City, 1939), p. 23 Google Scholar; Warchavchik,
‘Introduction’, pp. 26–34.
20 Neutra, Richard, Architecture of Social Concern, (Sao Paulo, 1947)Google
Scholar; Neutra, Richard, Survival Through Design (New York, 1954)Google
Scholar; Neutra, Richard, Life and Human Habitat (Stuttgart, 1956)Google
Scholar; Neutra, Richard, Realismo biológico. Un nuevo Renacimiento humanístico en
arquitectura (Buenos Aires, 1958)Google Scholar.
21 The subjects of these sketches, and their locations in the UCLA archive, are detailed
below in notes 101, 102, 106, 107, 111, 113, 116, 129, 130 and 143.
22 Neutra, Life and Shape, pp. 160–70.
23 Neutra, Richard, Wie Baut Amerika? (Stuttgart, 1927)Google Scholar;
and Neutra, Richard, Amerika: Die Stilbildung Des Neuen Bauens in Den Vereinigten
Staaten (Vienna, 1930)Google Scholar.
24 Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture, p. 28.
25 Ibid., p. 47.
26 Neutra, Life and Shape, p. 207.
27 Ibid., p. 207.
28 Ibid., p. 212.
29 McCoy, Richard Neutra, pp. 7–8.
30 Lamprecht, ‘From Neutra in Japan’, p. 218.
31 McCoy, Richard Neutra, pp. 7–8.
32 Lamprecht, ‘From Neutra in Japan’, p. 218.
33 Letter from Richard Neutra to Rudolph Schindler, dated 4 May 1914, published in
McCoy, Vienna to Los Angeles, p. 107. Neutra's letters to Schindler also indicate a desire to
travel to Japan.
34 Gebhard, David, Schindler (New York, 1972), pp. 27–30 Google Scholar; Sheine, Judith, R.M.
Schindler (London, 2001), p. 25 Google Scholar.
35 Letter from Richard Neutra to Rudolph Schindler, dated 1 May 1916, published in
McCoy, Vienna to Los Angeles, p. 111.
36 Ibid., pp. 129–30.
37 Ibid., p. 129.
38 Bricker, Lauren Weiss, ‘Western Pragmatists and the Modern American House’, Southern
California Quarterly, 91 (2010), pp. 413–27CrossRef | Google Scholar (p. 415).
39 The first park, Yellowstone, was established by Congress on 1 March 1872, and the
National Parks Service was established by President Woodrow Wilson on 15 August 1916.
See ‘History’, National Park Service, at http://www.nps.gov/aboutus/history.htm (accessed on
14 September 2015).
40 Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture, p. 56.
41 UCLA, Box 1288, Folder 9.
42 UCLA, Box 1904, Folder 3 and UCLA, Box 2, Folder 71, respectively.
43 UCLA, Box 3, Folders 17, 18 and 19.
44 UCLA, Box 134, Folder 22.
45 Lamprecht, Neutra: Complete Works, p. 400.
46 Neutra, Richard J. and Alexander, Robert, ‘El “Painted Desert & Petrified Forest”, centro
turístico, en Arizona U.S.A.’, in Richard J. Neutra, ed. Casinello, Fernando (Madrid, 1968)Google
Scholar, without pagination.
47 McWilliams, Carey, North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States (New
York, 1948, reprinted in 1968), pp. 35–47 Google Scholar, cited in Bokovoy, Matthew F., The San
Diego World's Fairs and Southwestern Memory, 1880–1940 (Albuquerque, 2005)Google Scholar, p.
xvi.
48 Ibid. In the notes on p. 227, Bokovoy also cites several works on California's ‘fantasy
heritage’ by Douglas Monroy.
49 Kropp, Phoebe, California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American
Place (Berkeley, 2006), pp. 1 Google Scholar and 5.
50 For a detailed account of Goodhue's use of the Spanish Baroque for the 1915 Panama-
Pacific Exposition in San Diego, and its influence in the architecture of Southern California,
see Bokovoy, The San Diego World's Fairs.
51 Uribe, Cristina López, ‘Reflections of the “Colonial”’, in Latin American Modern Architectures:
Ambiguous Territories, ed. del Real, Patricio and Gyger, Helen (New York, 2013), pp. 215–
34Google Scholar (p. 215).
52 Kropp, Phoebe, review of Bokovoy, Matthew F., The San Diego World's Fairs and Southwestern
Memory, 1880–1940, Southern California Quarterly, 88 (2007), pp. 480–82Google Scholar (p.
482).
53 Richard Neutra, Architect: Sketches & Drawings.
54 Ibid.
55 Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture, p. 229.
56 Ibid., p. 22.
57 While working with Wright at Taliesin, Neutra served as draftsman for the 1923 Millard
House in Pasadena; see Lamprecht, Neutra: Complete Works, p. 22. In 1925 he collaborated
with Schindler to design the pergola and wading pool for the Barnsdall House; see
Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture, p. 59.
58 Cited in Friedman, Alice, Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and
Architectural History (New York, 1998), p. 51 Google Scholar.
59 Cited in Simo, Melanie, Barnsdall Park: A New Master Plan for Frank Lloyd Wright's
California Romanza (Washington, DC, 1997), p. 26 Google Scholar.
60 Johnson, Donald Leslie, On Frank Lloyd Wright's Concrete Adobe: Irving Gill, Rudolph
Schindler and the American Southwest (Farnham, 2013), pp. 122–29Google Scholar. The reference
to Navajo, Walpi and Pueblo Indian architecture occurs on p. 126. This passage of
Johnson's text refers specifically to the Barnsdall House, but on page 164 he identifies the
visual similarities between Wright's textile block houses, including the Millard House, and
the indigenous architecture of the American Southwest: ‘The only difference in
external appearance between those houses, [Irving] Gill's, and the Indians' high desert
buildings was the textured walls' (emphasis in original).
61 Friedman, Women and the Making of the Modern House, p. 51. Friedman also includes a
helpful list of sources that confirm Wright's interest in Maya architecture and the architecture
of the American Southwest.
62 Smith, Kathryn, Frank Lloyd Wright, Hollyhock House and Olive Hill: Buildings and Projects for
Aline Barnsdall (New York, 1992), p. 43 Google Scholar. For a more complete analysis of
Wright's study of Mayan architecture (particularly in the context of textile block houses),
see Tselos, Dimitri, ‘Frank Lloyd Wright and World Architecture’, Journal of the Society of
Architectural Historians, 28 (1969), pp. 58–72 CrossRef | Google Scholar; and Ingle, Marjorie
I., The Mayan Revival Style: Art Deco Mayan Fantasy (Salt Lake City, 1984), pp. 13–19 Google
Scholar.
63 Sheine, Judith, R. M. Schindler (London, 2001), pp. 27–28 Google Scholar; Gebhard, Schindler,
p. 30.
64 Sheine has described Schindler's design for the T.P. Martin House as a reinterpretation
of Loos' Raumplan in Ibid.
65 McCoy, Esther, Five California Architects (New York, 1960), p. 153 Google Scholar.
66 Sweeney, Robert and Sheine, Judith, Schindler, Kings Road, and Southern California
Modernism (Berkeley, 2012), p. 77 Google Scholar.
67 Perhaps David Gebhard exaggerated when he stated that these two projects ‘could,
within reason, be labelled Pueblo Revival’, yet Schindler's use of local materials (e.g.
stucco) and forms (e.g. canted wall panels) are indeed easily related to his study of local
architecture; see Gebhard, Schindler, p. 47.
68 McCoy, Vienna to Los Angeles, p. 26.
69 Drexler, The Architecture of Richard Neutra, p. 7.
70 Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture, p. 59;
and Hines, Thomas, Irving Gill and the Architecture of Reform (New York, 2000), pp. 34–
38 Google Scholar and 242.
71 Hines, Irving Gill, p. 258.
72 Thomas Hines has stated that Loos visited Chicago at precisely the time as when Gill
and Wright were working in Sullivan's studio, although Hines does not state that Loos and
Gill actually met personally; see Ibid., p. 129.
73 Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture, p. 59.
74 Hines, Irving Gill, p. 260.
75 Hines, Irving Gill, pp. 77–78.
76 Ibid., p. 78.
77 Ibid., p. 70.
78 Neutra, Amerika, pp. 76, 118–19, 121 and 124–27. Neutra also dedicated a section of the
text in this book (pp. 46–50) to the theories of Wright and Gill.
79 Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture, p. 59.
80 Clark, Alson, ‘The “Californian” Architecture of Gordon B. Kaufmann’, Society of Architectural
Historians Southern California Chapter Review, 3 (1982), pp. 1–8 Google Scholar (p. 3).
81 López Uribe, ‘Reflections’, p. 217.
82 Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture, p. 59.
83 Richard Neutra to Lilly Müller Niedermann (‘Mütterli’), dated March 1925; published
in Neutra, Dione, Richard Neutra, Promise and Fulfillment, 1919–1932 (Carbondale, Ill., 1986),
p. 137 Google Scholar. This collection typically dates the letters according to month and year,
but not day.
84 Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture, p. 59.
85 Clark, ‘The “Californian” Architecture of Gordon B. Kaufmann’, pp. 3–4.
86 Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture, pp. 59, 61 and 70–73. Hines
clarifies that all of these projects were collaborations between Neutra and Schindler in just
name, since the ideas generating their designs were mostly Neutra's (except for the wading
pool at the Barnsdall House, which was a more truly collaborative endeavour).
87 Ibid., p. 60. The exact date of these houses in unknown, but Hines lists it as ‘circa 1927’.
The original drawings for these houses are kept in UCLA, Oversize Folder 943.
88 Neutra's working drawings for the Richmond Civic Centre survive, and are kept in UCLA,
Box 585.
89 Cited in McCoy, Vienna to Los Angeles, p. 53.
90 Ibid., p. 53.
91 Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture, p. 59.
92 Cited in Ibid.
93 UCLA, Oversize Folder 1252.
94 Richard Neutra, Architect: Sketches & Drawings.
95 Hines described the Rajagopals addition as ‘a strikingly “modern” but sympathetic
addition’; see Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture, p. 141. However,
Neutra's decision to treat the addition as a second-storey apartment over only half of the
original house, and his addition of ribbon windows and aluminium panelling, disregard the
symmetrical composition and material palette that contribute to the spirit of the original
house.
96 Lamprecht, Neutra: Complete Works, p. 117.
97 On page 82 of Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture, Hines includes a
reproduction of Neutra's original floor plans for the Lovell Health House, in which two
spaces on the top floor are labelled ‘sleeping porches’. In his autobiography, Neutra
indicated that it was in the Lovell Health House that he first experimented with ‘sleeping
porches’; see Neutra, Life and Shape, p. 224. He was probably inspired by Schindler's use of
‘sleeping porches’ in the 1921 Schindler-Chase House.
98 Lamprecht, Barbara, Richard Neutra, 1892–1970: Survival Through Design (Cologne–
London, 2004), p. 35 Google Scholar.
99 McCoy, Richard Neutra, p. 20.
100 Hines, Richard Neutra, Architect: Sketches & Drawings.
101 Neutra's sketches of these buildings are in the UCLA archive. The Cathedral of San
Juan (1945): UCLA, Box 3, Folder 8; Nuestra Señora del Carmen (1945): UCLA, Box 1,
Folder 53; San Patricio Parish (1944; mistakenly labelled ‘S. Patricia’ by the archivist):
UCLA; Box 3, Folder 15; the Cathedral of San Cristobal (1945): UCLA, Box 1, Folder 48;
Mission San Antonio de Pala (1939): UCLA, Box 1904, Folder 8; and Mission Santa Inés
(1941): UCLA, Box 2, Folders 86–87.
102 For example, the Neutra sketch entitled ‘Valenciana 1956’ shows ‘a view of three
women wearing in costume [sic] dancing in front of a man and a woman in Comunidad
Valenciana’ (description supplied by the archivist); UCLA, Box 1903, Folder 14. Another
sketch is entitled ‘Argentina 1945, Nuns and Gauchos over the Pampas’, although the
archivist described it as ‘View of a nun and children riding in a horse drawn carriage. A
gaucho riding a horse is in the right foreground’; UCLA, Box 1, Folder 5.
103 Weiss Bricker, ‘Western Pragmatists’, p. 414.
104 Dion Neutra, interview by Brett Tippey (Los Angeles, 23 June 2009).
105 Neutra, Richard, ‘Introduction’, in Myers, Irving, Mexico's Modern Architecture (New
York, 1952), p. 20 Google Scholar. Seven years after publishing his introduction to Myers's
book, Neutra made a similar statement about feeling ‘at home’ in Japan; see Neutra,
‘Foreword’, in Engel, Japanese Gardens for Today, p. xi.
106 The quote is the archivist's description of the sketch. Neutra's original title simply reads
‘Xochimilco’; UCLA, Box 1903, Folder 6.
107 The UCLA archive keeps multiple travel sketches that document Neutra's trips to
Mexico in the following years: 1937 (UCLA, Box 2, Folder 22); 1951 (UCLA, Box 1903,
Folders 1–4); 1962 (UCLA, Box 2, Folder 21); and 1963–64 (UCLA, Box 133, Folder 12).
Neutra also visited Mexico in 1952 to participate in the VIII Congreso Panamericano de
Arquitectos, as documented in ‘VIII Congreso Panamericano de arquitectos: Méjico
1952’, Revista nacional de arquitectura, 127 (1952), pp. 38–39 Google Scholar (p. 38). It is likely
that he visited many more times, although such trips are not documented in the archives.
108 UCLA, Box 2, Folders 24 and 28.
109 Ingersoll, Richard, ‘In the Shadows of Barragán’, in Luis Barragán: The Quiet Revolution,
ed. Zanco, Federica (Milano, 2001), p. 218 Google Scholar.
110 Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture, p. 189.
111 Travel sketch entitled ‘Tan Yuka Pyramid, Serpent, Diego & Frida Rivera, 1937’; UCLA,
Box 1287, Folder 7.
112 Cited in Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture, p. 189.
113 Travel sketch entitled ‘Una Tarde De Toros, Mexico, 1937, Dec. 12’; UCLA, Box 2,
Folder 27.
114 Neutra, ‘Introduction’, p. 20.
115 Carranza, Luis E., Architecture as Revolution (Austin, Texas, 2010), p. 144 Google Scholar.
116 Travel sketch entitled ‘Universidad, Mexico’, dated (by the archivist) 1957; UCLA, Box
1903, Folder 5.
117 Curtis, William, Modern Architecture Since 1900 (London, 1996), p. 493 Google Scholar.
118 Neutra, ‘Introduction’, p. 21.
119 Neutra's participation in the 1963 conference in Mexico City is documented in UCLA,
Box 1419, Folder 42, which is entitled by the archivist ‘International Congress of Architects
1963’. Box 133, Folder 12 (entitled ‘Trip Contacts-Mexico: 1963–1964’) also gives evidence
of this visit. It is unknown whether or not Neutra actually visited the National Museum of
Anthropology and History, but throughout his travels, such important buildings typically did
not escape his notice.
120 Santacilia, Carlos Obregón, México como eje de las antiguas arquitecturas de América (Mexico
City, 1947), pp. 30–39 Google Scholar.
121 Yañez, Enrique, ‘Forward’, in Mexico's Modern Architecture, ed. Myers, Irving (New
York, 1952), pp. 9–14 Google Scholar (p. 9). Irving Myers had apprenticed with Neutra, and he
and his wife maintained contact with Neutra and his wife Dione, particularly in 1951–52. A
series of letters between the Myers’ and the Neutras are kept in the Neutra Archive at UCLA
in Box 217, Folder 10.
122 Myers, Irving, Mexico's Modern Architecture (New York, 1952), p. 18 Google Scholar.
123 Neutra, ‘Introduction’, p. 21.
124 ‘Puerto Rico’, Architectural Forum (March 1945), pp. 119–31 (p. 121).
125 Ibid.
126 Ibid.
127 Richard Neutra, ‘Puerto Rico – Island of Promise’, Survey Graphic, 33 (June 1944), pp.
293–95 (p. 293).
128 In addition to the many projects he had constructed prior to 1944 in California, Neutra
had also completed two in Texas: the 1937 Kraigher House (Brownsville) and the 1942
Avion Village Housing Project (Grand Prairie); see Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for
Modern Architecture, pp. 309–11. In 1939, Neutra also designed the unbuilt Park Living
Colony for Jacksonville, Florida; see McCoy, Richard Neutra, p. 103.
129 Travel sketches, UCLA, Box 3, Folder 8 (Cathedral of San Juan); Folder 11 (cottages in
Loiza); and Folder 15 (San Patricio Church).
130 Travel sketches, UCLA, Box 3, Folder 9 (El Yunque Forest); Folders 12 and 14
(beaches); and Folders 13 and 16 (tropical vegetation).
131 ‘Puerto Rico’, Architectural Forum, p. 121. According to this article (p. 121), the intention
of the US Federal Government was that Neutra would ‘turn out trainees to serve the island
and its various new industries […]. The workers thus trained would also be encouraged to
emigrate to other countries in need of skilled artisans, preferably to parts of Latin America’.
Most noteworthy among Neutra's collaborators on the project was German immigrant Henry
Klumb (1905–84), whose work in Puerto Rico in the following decades became a prime
model for Modern architecture in the tropics; see Arango, Silvia, ‘Henry Klumb and the
University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus: The Logic of the Results’, in Henry Klumb: an
Architecture of Social Concern,] ed. Farage, Enrique Vivoni (San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2006), pp. 81–
142 Google Scholar (p. 157).
132 Neutra, ‘Puerto Rico – Island of Promise’, p. 293.
133 Barbara Lamprecht has described the flexibility of these spaces in Lamprecht, Neutra:
Complete Works, pp. 86 and 260.
134 Lamprecht, Richard Neutra, 1892–1970: Survival Through Design, p. 79.
135 The editors made this statement in a foreword to the article. See also Richard Neutra,
‘Observations on Latin America’, Progressive Architecture, 27 (May 1946), pp. 67–72 (p. 67).
136 Ibid., p. 72.
137 Warchavchik, Introduction, p. 34.
138 Neutra, ‘Observations’, p. 68.
139 Ibid., p. 68.
140 Ibid., p. 72 (emphasis original).
141 Ibid., p. 70.
142 Ibid., p. 71.
143 Neutra documented his visits through Latin America and Spain with travel sketches,
which are kept, typically one per folder, in the UCLA archive: seventeen sketches in Mexico
(UCLA, Box 2, Folders 20–28; Box 1287, Folders 6–7; and Box 1903, Folders 1–6); nine in
Puerto Rico (UCLA, Box 3, Folders 8–16); two in Argentina (UCLA, Box 1, Folders 5–6);
nine in Brazil (UCLA, Box 1, Folders 13–21); one in Panama (UCLA, Box 2, Folder 31);
nineteen in Peru, including Machu Picchu, Pisac, Lake Titicaca, Arequipa, Cuzco, Lima and
Juliaca (UCLA, Box 2, Folders 32–46 and Box 1287, Folders 9–12); six in Dominican
Republic (UCLA, Box 1, Folders 52–57); three in Cuba (UCLA, Box 1, Folders 48–50); four
in Guatemala (UCLA, Box 1902, Folders 20–23); four in Spain (UCLA, Box 1287, Folder 14;
Box 1903, Folder 14; and Box 2, Folders 49–50); one in Venezuela (UCLA, Box 135, Folder
8); and four in Colombia (UCLA, Box 1902, Folders 9–12). Apparently, Neutra did not
produce any sketches during his visit to Portugal in 1963–64, but his ‘trip contacts’ are kept
in UCLA, Box 133, Folder 15. There may well be other sketches of sites in Latin America
and the Iberian Peninsula scattered throughout the more than 2000 boxes in the Neutra
archive.
144 UCLA, Box 143 contains several presentation panels of the unbuilt project entitled ‘Red
Four Blocks in Caracas, Venezuela’. A few of these drawings appear in McCoy, Richard
Neutra, p. 112. Torroja also kept six large-format drawings from this project, and they can be
consulted in his archive in Madrid: Archivo Torroja, CEHOPU-CEDEX ETM-410, or online
at http://www.cehopu.cedex.es/etm/expt/ETM-410-001.htm (last accessed 13 March 2016).
145 UCLA, Box 1485, Folder 12, entitled (by the archivist) ‘Trebol, Caracas 1957–1958’.
146 The De Schultess House, which now serves as the Swiss Embassy in Cuba, has not
been the subject of much published research, although it appears in photographs in
Lamprecht, Neutra: Complete Works, pp. 308–10; it is also discussed briefly in Hines, Richard
Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture, p. 273. The Gonzales-Gorrondona House (also
known as the ‘Quinta Gorrondona’) is featured in Neutra, Richard, ‘Quinta Gorrondona en
Caracas’, Informes de la Construcción, 196 (1967)Google Scholar, article number 161–135 (this
journal does not use normal pagination but instead assigns a hyphenated catalogue number
to each article). The article is reprinted under the same title in Richard J. Neutra, ed.
Casinello (again without pagination).
147 Richard J. Neutra, ed. Casinello, without pagination (section entitled ‘Quinta Gorrondona
en Caracas’). To date, little has been published on Robles Piquer, but a brief summary of
his professional career appeared in Armada, Alfonso, ‘Eduardo Robles Piquer’ El País (Madrid),
5 October 1987 Google Scholar.
148 ‘Recepción del arquitecto Richard Neutra en la Escuela Superior de Arquitectura de
Madrid’, Boletín de Información de la Dirección General de Arquitectura, 8 (1954), pp. 11–
14 Google Scholar (p. 11). This article is a transcription of Neutra's lecture at the School of
Architecture in Madrid (November 1954), translated from German to Spanish by José
Fonseca.
149 ‘Esta visita ha sido para mí una satisfacción, y el cumplimiento […] de un viejo deseo.
Quisiera poder conocer mejor a España; pero la conozco muy poco, aunque ya antes de
ahora, por mis lecturas y por mi actividad profesional, tenía de ella cierta
información’: Recepción, p. 11.
150 ‘Felipe II es un viejo conocido en su mundo cultural’: Ortiz-Echagüe, César, ‘Con Neutra
por tierras de Castilla’, Boletín de información de la Dirección General de
Arquitectura, 8 (December 1954), pp. 22–23 Google Scholar. Valerie Fraser has noted that,
during the first half of the twentieth century, many North American architects were
fascinated by the architecture of Latin America, both historical and current. As evidence,
Fraser cites Wright's study of Mayan architecture, the 1943 ‘Brazil Builds’ exhibition held at
the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Neutra's 1945 goodwill tour;
see Fraser, Valerie, Building the New World: Studies in the Modern Architecture of Latin America
1930–1960 (London, 2000), pp. 11–15 Google Scholar.
151 Admittedly, ‘Moorish’ (‘morisco’ in Spanish) is a difficult term; in Spain and other parts of
the West it is often used pejoratively to refer to Muslims. Nonetheless, no other term so
amply accommodates the vastness and diversity of the contributions Muslims had made
over the course of several centuries to Spain's artistic heritage. ‘Berber’ is equally
pejorative. ‘Muslim’ and ‘Islamic’ are overly broad and do not reflect the secularized, multi-
faith culture of Medieval Spain; ‘Andalusian’ connotes Spain's current autonomous
community of Andalusia, thereby excluding the important artistic production of Muslims in
other geographic regions of Spain; ‘mozárabe’ is incorrect because, largely, Spain's Muslim
rulers were not ethnically Arab; ‘Umayyad’ is too geographically diverse, since, in addition to
Spain, this dynasty had ruled parts of North Africa and the Middle East; and ‘Nasrid’ refers
to a specific dynasty that had ruled immediately prior to the Spanish Reconquista, during
the final two-and-a-half centuries of the almost eight centuries of Muslim dominance in
Spain.
152 The visit to the Alhambra in 1954 is recorded in a letter from Dione Neutra to Vicente
Mas, dated 10 March 1969: UCLA, Box 1502, Folder 10. That de la Joya accompanied
them on the 1954 trip to Granada is confirmed in a letter from Rafael de la Joya to Dione
Neutra, undated (the date is likely December 1954 or January 1955, given de la Joya's New
Year's wishes, 1955): UCLA, Box 1941, Folder 6.
153 Letter from Dione Neutra to Carlos de Miguel, dated 30 December 1954: UCLA, Box
1941, Folder 6.
154 Ortiz-Echagüe, ‘Con Neutra en Tierras de Castilla’, p. 23.
155 ‘esta iglesia era una de las mejores del mundo, si no la mejor entre las que él conocía’:
Ibid. For a more complete analysis of Neutra's visit to Spain in 1954, see Tippey, Brett,
‘Bienvenido Míster Neutra: Modernización y humanismo en el primer viaje de Richard J. Neutra a
España, 1954’, in Viajes en la transición española hacia la modernidad, ed. Pozo, José
Manuel and Villarías, Héctor García-Diego (Pamplona, 2010), pp. 495–502 Google Scholar.
156 Letter from Richard Neutra to Miguel Fisac, dated 30 December 1954: UCLA, Box
1941, Folder 6.
157 ‘primero hay que conocer a las gentes, empaparse bien de su modo de pensar y sentir
y entonces intentar comprender su arquitectura’: ‘Recepción’, p. 14.
158 Letter dated November 1955 from Construcciones y Contratas, S.A. to Richard Neutra;
and letter dated 29 November 1955 from Richard Neutra to Construcciones y Contratas:
both in UCLA, Box 146, Folder 6.
159 All of these buildings had been published in Spain prior to 1956. The Corona Avenue
School: Roth, Alfred, ‘Planificación y construcción en Estados Unidos’, Revista nacional de
arquitectura, 49 (1946), pp. 29–39 Google Scholar (p. 38); the Kaufmann Desert House:
Neutra, La arquitectura como factor humano (cited in note 1); the Tremaine House: ‘Dos
viviendas proyectadas por R. J. Neutra’, Informes de la construcción, 35 (1951)Google Scholar,
article number 161–15; the Northwestern Mutual Fire Association Building: de Miguel, Carlos,
‘Oficinas de una compañía de seguros, Los Ángeles’, Revista nacional de arquitectura, 138 (1953),
pp. 35–38 Google Scholar; and the Eagle Rock Park Clubhouse: ‘Los arquitectos opinan de
arquitectura: Richard J. Neutra’, Informes de la construcción, 76 (1955)Google Scholar, article
number 100–13.
160 For a more extensive discussion of the ways in which Neutra had incorporated Spanish
traditional domestic values into his design for the United States Air Force Housing in Spain,
see Tippey, Brett, ‘Genuine Invariants: The Origins of Regional Modernity in Twentieth Century
Spain’, Architectural History, 56 (2013), pp. 299–342 Google Scholar (pp. 317–20).
161 Prieto Moreno, ‘Coincidencas’. For samples of his research on Spain's Moorish
architectural heritage, see Moreno, Francisco Prieto, ‘El jardín doméstico hispanoárabe’, Boletín
de información de la Dirección General de Arquitectura, 17 (1950), pp. 5–8 Google
Scholar; Moreno, Francisco Prieto ‘Los jardines de Granada’, Boletín de información de la
Dirección General de Arquitectura, 23 (1952), pp. 28–30 Google Scholar; and Moreno, Francisco
Prieto, ‘Teatro al aire libre en los jardines del Generalife’, Revista Nacional de
Arquitectura, 148 (1954), pp. 21–25 Google Scholar.
162 Prieto Moreno, ‘Coincidencias’, pp. 22 and 25.
163 Ibid., p. 19.
164 Ibid., p. 19. Ortega y Gasset's essay entitled ‘El ideal vegetativo’ was originally
published in 1927 in the Spanish journal El Sol. It was reprinted in José Ortega y
Gasset, Obras Completas, 9 vols (Madrid, 1964), VI, pp. 116–20Google Scholar. Hines opens the
introduction to his book Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture with a quote (on
p. 3) from Ortega y Gasset but, in an email exchange with me, Hines confirmed that he has
no knowledge of any direct connection between Neutra and Ortega y Gasset. To date, the
most comprehensive comparison of the theories of Neutra and Ortega y Gasset appears
in Castillo, José Vela, Richard Neutra. Un lugar para el orden. Un estudio sobre la arquitectura
natural (Seville, 2003), pp. 48–49 Google Scholar.
165 ‘la verdadera esencia espacial de mi trabajo esta extraída de los patrimonios
arquitectónicos de España, especialmente la Alhambra de Granada’; cited in Navarro, María
Isabel, ‘Desde el origen: la arquitectura de Fernando Higueras’, Basa 24 (2001), p. 4 Google Scholar.
166 Neutra, Life and Human Habitat, pp. 31–38.
167 Neutra, Richard, ‘Sun Control Devices’, Progressive Architecture, 10 (1946), pp. 88–91 Google
Scholar (p. 88).
168 Ibid.
169 Ibid.
170 Dion Neutra, interview.
171 Neutra, ‘Puerto Rico – Island of Promise’, p. 293.
172 Lamprecht derives Neutra's use of continuous ventilation in the Tremaine House from
two sources: his 1923 project for the Diatom House, and his work in Puerto Rico; see
Lamprecht, Richard Neutra, 1892–1970: Survival Through Design, p. 63.
173 Neutra, Architecture of Social Concern. Neutra's design for ‘sub-soffit ventilation’ can be
seen on pp. 48–49, 76 and 126.
174 For a more complete discussion of Neutra's use of the patio see Tippey, Brett, ‘At Home
in the Subtropics: Richard Neutra and the Hispanic Patio’, in Subtropical Cities 2013, Braving a New
World: Design Interventions for Changing Climates,
ed. Abbate, Anthony and Kennedy, Rosemary (Washington, DC, 2013), pp. 300–08Google Scholar.
175 The patio of Walter Gropius's own house in Lincoln is well known. Mies van der Rohe's
experimentation with the patio in single-family housing of the early to mid-1930s is fully
discussed in Riley, Terrence and Bergdoll, Barry, Mies in Berlin (New York, 2001)Google Scholar,
which includes detailed descriptions of the following projects, all of which utilise patios: the
Exhibition House and Apartment for a Bachelor (Berlin, 1931): pp. 264–67; the Gericke
House (Berlin, 1932, unbuilt): pp. 268–71; the Lemke House (Berlin, 1932—33): pp. 272–
75; the Hubbe House (Magdeburg, Germany, 1934–35, unbuilt): pp. 288–91; Mies's Court-
House Studies (designed for various locations, 1934–35, unbuilt): pp. 292–95; the Ulrich
Lange House (Krefeld, Germany, 1935, unbuilt), pp. 296–99. Also relevant to this
discussion are Bergdoll's essay, ‘The Nature of Mies's Space’, pp. 66–105, and Riley's
essay, ‘From Bauhaus to Court-House’, pp. 330–37.
176 Richard Neutra, ‘The Patio House – A Note by Richard J. Neutra, FAIA’, House and
Home, vol. 10, no. 2 (August 1956), pp. 127 and 196–97 (p. 196).
177 Ibid. Neutra typically referred to the culture at Altamira by the name Monte Castillo,
which denotes the complex of caves (discovered in 1879) that includes the more well-
known Altamira cave. Like their counterparts in Lascaux, France (discovered in 1940),
these caves are famous for their Palaeolithic paintings, in which many Modernist architects,
including Neutra, were very interested. Neutra's unpublished (and undated) manuscript
entitled ‘Patios’ also cites courtyards from ‘Spanish mountain villages’: UCLA, Box 161,
Folder 32.
178 McCoy, Richard Neutra, p. 21. It is not clear whether or not Neutra ever visited Uxmal in
person, but in 1937 he is known to have visited the ruins at nearby Chichen Itza, which he
recorded in a sketch entitled ‘Chich Niza Maya Pyr, 1937’ (UCLA, Box 2, Folder 2).
179 Little has been written about the houses Neutra designed and built in the Zehelendorf
district in Berlin. While the commission for this project was awarded to Mendelsohn's office,
it does not appear in any of the following accounts of Mendelsohn's work: Erich
Mendelsohn, Erich Mendelsohn: Das Gesamtschaffen Des Architekten (Berlin, 1930); Arnold
Whittick, Eric Mendelsohn (London, 1940); Bruno Zevi, Erich Mendelsohn (Bologna, 1982);
or Erich Mendelsohn, Architect 1887–1953, ed. Regina Stephan (New York, 1999). In a 1999
text, Zevi attributed this project to Neutra, but stated that it, and Neutra's 1927 Jardinette
Apartments, ‘were merely variations on Mendelsohn's designs’; see Bruno Zevi, Erich
Mendelsohn: The Complete Works (Basel, 1999), p. LVII. In an endnote to her text, Kathleen
James makes brief mention of the project, and states that Mendelsohn gave Neutra full
credit for the design; see Kathleen James, Erich Mendelsohn and the Architecture of German
Modernism (Cambridge, 1997), p. 278 (note 72). To date, Thomas Hines's brief account of
this project, which he describes in terms of Neutra's collaboration with Mendelsohn, is the
most thorough; see Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture, pp. 34–35.
180 See Fig. 3, above. Neutra's drawings for these houses are kept in UCLA, Oversize
Folder 943.
181 The Jardinette's fully-enclosed exterior patio is evident in the plan drawing (redrawn
after Neutra's original) in Lamprecht, Neutra: Complete Works, p. 90. Neutra's original
drawings of this project are kept in UCLA, Box 371; Box 825, Folder 7; and Oversize Folder
1134.
182 Neutra published a plan of the Ambrose Apartments on page 156 of his 1930
book Amerika (cited above), in which the entrance patio is labelled ‘garden court’. Neutra's
original drawings for this project are kept in UCLA, Oversize Folder 1143.
183 Neutra's drawings for this project (88 pieces in total) are kept in UCLA Oversize Folder
1131.
184 Neutra's design for Agricultural Workers Cooperative Housing in Riverside has not been
the subject of much research, although it did appear in the exhibition ‘Richard Neutra,
Architect: Sketches & Drawings’.
185 Lamprecht, Richard Neutra, 1892–1970: Survival Through Design, p. 34.
186 Obregón Santacilia, El maquinismo, p. 23.
187 Photographs of the indoor-outdoor classrooms in these schools appear in
Lamprecht, Neutra: Complete Works, pp. 363–64 (National Charity League); pp. 349–50
(UCLA Elementary School); p. 395 (Richard J. Neutra School at the Lemoore Naval Air
Base); and pp. 402–03 (Palos Verdes High School). For plans of the schools Neutra
designed for the US Air Force bases in Spain, see UCLA, Box 146, Folder 5.
188 Dion Neutra, interview.
189 VDL Research House: Richard Neutra's Studio & Residence, DVD produced by Cal Poly
Pomona (Pomona, 2007).
190 Neutra, ‘The Patio House’, p. 196.
191 Dion Neutra remembers that the family occasionally took their meals in this patio (Dion
Neutra, interview).
192 Neutra, ‘The Patio House’, p. 196 (emphasis in original).
193 Ingersoll, ‘In the Shadows of Barragán’, p. 219. According to Ingersoll, the exact date of
this visit cannot be determined, but it most likely coincided with Barragán's 1951 visit to
California to attend an architect's convention on Coronado Island, off the coast of San
Diego (p. 218).
194 Neutra, ‘The Patio House’, p. 196.
195 Prieto Moreno, ‘Coincidencias’, p. 20.
196 ‘EI trazado de pérgolas, patios cerrados y abiertos, jardín exterior y piscina, con sus
variadísimos ambientes internos, recuerda en gran manera la traza del carmen granadino,
con sus acusadas influencias musulmanas’: Ibid., p. 26.
197 ‘Los espacios de estar se centran de modo semejante a las estancias de la casa
oriental, con perspectivas en varias direcciones hacia patios interiores y hacia los jardines
exteriores’: Ibid., p. 20.
198 Unpublished manuscript dated 30 May 1969: UCLA, Box 1502, Folder 9.
199 As described above, Neutra had used the term ‘spacious porch’ to define the outdoor
extensions of indoor spaces that he designed for the prototype health centers in Puerto
Rico; see Neutra, ‘Puerto Rico – Island of Promise’, p. 293.

Richard Neutra’s Therapeutic Architecture

Maarten Overdijk
Although slightly silly at times, and failing miserably at curing neuroses,
Richard Neutra’s psycho-physical work offers an early insight into the
often awkward relationship between architecture and psychology.
esc
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Austrian-American modernist Richard Neutra (1892-1970)

articulated a peculiar type of therapeutic architecture. Influenced
by developments in modern psychology he insisted his designs
could cure his clients from neuroses. His vision became popular
on the American west coast and particularly within Hollywood,
caught as it was in the slipstream of Freud’s psychoanalysis.
Although slightly silly at times, and failing miserably at curing
neuroses, Neutra’s eclectic modernism offers important insights
into the relationship between architecture and psychology.
In 1929, four years after he established himself as an
independent architect on the west coast, Richard Neutra
completed his masterpiece, the Lovell Health House. Nested in a
seemingly impossible to reach location in the Hollywood Hills
the house offers a spectacular view of the city of Los Angeles
and a tempting glimpse of the ocean behind. All this is brought
to the fore by the house’s geometrical scheme of straight lines
and glass, at the time a novelty for the West Coast, as was a
construction made entirely out of steel. The analysis that lay at
the heart of the design was also particularly innovative. This
young architect, who had a preoccupation with the human
psyche and a vision about the way his houses could affect its
condition, followed the behaviours and motivations of the
Lovell family in minute detail.
The house was called Lovell Health House for a reason. It
contains an open-air fitness suite, rooms for sunbathing and
sleeping out in the open, and various dietary and therapeutic
services. Upon its completion an organized tour attracted a huge
crowd. Around 15.000 visitors made their way through the
house to marvel at the modernity of it all. Yet most of them were
unable to see how anyone could actually live in it. The house
was unlike anything they had seen before, the style entirely new
and strange. ‘Moon-architecture’, one of the visitors was said to
have muttered.
In a black-and-white photograph from around that time the
house can be seen lying at a distance, half sunken into the hills.
To the contemporary observer it must have looked like some
kind of futuristic research institute, a place where people in
white coats worked secretly on speculative projects. The house
breathes the spirit of the age. It was the breakthrough the young
architect had hoped for.
Lovell Health House, 1929.
DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, CHARLES E. YOUNG RESEARCH LIBRARY, UCLA.

Neutra rose to become the main representative of the

International Style in North America, and in the thirties, forties
and fifties he built a large number of houses for private clients
on the West Coast. The man had some striking ideas about the
movement, convinced as he was that his houses could affect the
psyche of their inhabitants. In itself this was not a remarkable
sentiment in a period where psychology permeated society, but
Neutra took it one step further: he believed that he was able to
cure his clients from neuroses through his houses. The key to
this cure, he argued, lay in a fluent relation of interior and
exterior. His aim was not a seamless connection of architecture
and landscape, á la Frank Lloyd Wright, but an unlocking of
the mental interior of the inhabitants. Neutra believed he was
able to destabilize the barriers between the psyche and its natural
surroundings in such a way that psychic energy would be
allowed to float freely.
To be sure Neutra was not the most innovative of modernist
architects, nor was he the most famous. But what was unique
about his work was the relation it entered into with a ‘new’ form
of science: modern psychology. As a student Neutra was
fascinated by the Principles of physiological psychology, the
seminal work by Wilhelm Wundt which defined psychology as
an experimental science. Wundt’s ideas shed a completely new
light on the ways in which human consciousness is connected
through the senses with the environment, and it is precisely this
connection that Neutra was interested in. Splitting up the
mystery of consciousness into comprehensible parts, and
reducing these separate mental functions to sensory and
neurological processes, fitted perfectly with modernist ideas of
function and standardization. Modern psychology provided
Neutra with the tools to design the optimal psycho-physical
connection – at least, in theory.
Lovell Health house, construction site, 1928.
DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, CHARLES E. YOUNG RESEARCH LIBRARY, UCLA.

In fin de siècle Vienna, where Neutra was born and raised, there

was another branch of psychology on the rise: Psychoanalysis.
From the moment he befriended Sigmund Freud’s eldest son,
Neutra became a regular visitor to the family house. He was
deeply impressed by Freud’s ideas about the unconscious, in
particular by the idea that repressed psychical energy finds its
way to the outside world through projection – this notion would
strongly impact his later practice.
Whereas Vienna symbolized the birth of psychoanalysis,
Neutra’s contemporary Los Angeles illustrated the way in which
it penetrated society in the years thereafter. When Neutra
established himself in the city in 1925, he bore witness to an
unprecedented popularization of Freud’s ideas. And if there was
one place where these ideas were embraced to the fullest it was
surely Hollywood. No coincidence, then, that Neutra found
some of his most valuable clients there.
Neutra carried out lengthy intake procedures and produced
comprehensive files about the daily routines and social habits of
his clients. Soon he developed a reputation as an architect that
understood how to probe the deeper layers of life. His designs
appeared in Palm Springs and Santa Monica Beach, along
Sunset Boulevard and Mulholland Drive, built mostly for
writers, producers, directors and actors. As Thomas Hines has
highlighted, almost all of his Los Angeles houses of the thirties
and forties were connected to Hollywood and the film industry.
Richard Neutra working in Beard house, Altadena, California, 1935.
COLLEGE OF ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN, CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY POMONA.

Around this time you begin to see a recurrence of certain design

features that eventually coalesced into a set of principles. Of
particular importance was the prevalence of walls made entirely
out of glass. This was not just to offer panoramic views, but also
to describe vectorsfor projection and to organize the flow of
energy throughout the house. Neutra termed this the pulse. His
designs focused on glass corners and it was at these corners
‘where instability and insecurity collect, and where desires are
projected onto’.
Within this scheme, the position of the house in the landscape
was of the utmost importance. Not just because of the open
horizon and the view, but also because of the natural energy of
the place. There are stories about how Neutra took to flying at
night to inspect locations by moonlight, and about excursions he
made with his clients through the forest in order to explore the
energetic potential of a particular place. It is easy to imagine
how California’s exotic landscape was perhaps the perfect
setting for his obscure brand of psycho-physical architecture.
Moore house, Ojai (CA), Sketch, around 1950.
DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, CHARLES E. YOUNG RESEARCH LIBRARY, UCLA.

In the fifties Neutra’s vision matured. This is made clear by

projects such as the Perkins house of 1955 or the Chuey house a
year later. What characterized this development was the way in
which these houses sought to manipulate the senses. Through
elements that move uninterrupted from inside to outside, like the
‘spider legs’ – extended ceiling beams that are fixed into the
landscape. Or the exterior overhang above the terrace with a
pool that lies partly inside and partly outside. The micro-climate,
warmed by heaters, with bushes and plants along the water on
both sides of the glass. Outside, silver paneling and the
reflection of the pool in front of the house generate further
doubling and perceptual confusion. A spatial continuum
emerges, in the words of Sylvia Lavin, an unbounded
environment ‘oscillating between opacity and transparency,
interiority and exteriority, solidity and fluidity’.
Perkins House, Pasadena, 1955.
JULIUS SHULMAN

Neutra’s psycho-physical architecture is functional and modern,

but the thought behind it is as mystical as it is rational. In an
essay, posthumously published, he writes: “The universe of
which we are a part is a dynamic continuum. It extends from the
most distant galactic systems into our atmosphere, biosphere,
and even deeper into an energetic array of molecular and
subatomic events that configure all matter, motion, and mind.
[…] The most remote contours of the cosmos are not just ‘out
there somewhere’ but causally interlaced with the nearest and
deepest folds of our interior landscape.”
This reflection illustrates the romantic and eclectic character of
Neutra’s modernism. At the same time, the notion of space as a
‘field’ filled with energy – derived from physics – was a popular
one within the contemporary psychology. Gestalt, the latest
brand of form-psychology, viewed the psyche and its
environment as a dynamic and interactive whole, and Neutra
stretches this insight to cosmic proportions. In an odd mix of
Wundt, Freud and Gestalt, he embraced the principles of
projection and psychic energy, stirred them with the new notion
of ‘environment’, and made it all part of his cosmic ecology.
It is easy to dismiss Neutra’s eclectic thought as merely a
curiosity. But in our time of seamless connectivity his
proposition makes for an interesting case, not least because it
poses an alternative to the idea of body and architecture as
container-in-a-container. As an architect of environments and
 atmospheres Richard Neutra is an innovator. And a pioneer of
what nowadays would be called environmental psychology.
Still, there was never any evidence of his architecture’s
therapeutic or healing effects, despite his claim to the contrary.
And while Neutra’s houses affect mood and create atmosphere,
they fail miserably at curing neuroses. Although many of his
clients praised their Neutra home, not all of them were entirely
sold on his vision. It is difficult to live in a glass house. Constant
visibility from both sides of the glass results in constant
exposure, and problems trying to recede from such exposure
were an inevitable side-effect. “From the inside of a Neutra
house,” one resident said “one has the feeling of being outside
inside, if you get what I mean. That’s my trouble with Neutra. I
don’t want to be outside. I don’t want to be one with my
neighbors”.
Transparency is a common trope in modernism. Yet in Neutra’s
hands it is not so much a symbol of spatial hygiene, but rather of
the open, seamless connection with the environment. This kind
of transparency carries an imminent threat. As the resident
suggests, becoming one with your surroundings – the loss of a
sense of difference – can lead to disorientation. The spaces in
and around the house are quickly filled with spatial phobias
similar to those experienced in the modern city. The fear of
becoming consumed or absorbed. The fear of being watched.
The fear of a vast, open space – nature – staring back at you.
What could be less therapeutic than that?
The Modern Interior and the Excitation Response: Richard Neutra’s
Ocular-centric Phenomenology

 Abstract
 Reference

 Full-Text PDF

 Full-Text HTML
Michael J Ostwald, Raeana Henderson
School of Architecture and Built Environment, The University of Newcastle, NSW, 2308,
Australia
Correspondence to: Michael  J Ostwald, School of Architecture and Built Environment, The
University of Newcastle, NSW, 2308, Australia.
Email:

Copyright © 2012 Scientific & Academic Publishing. All Rights Reserved.

Abstract
While typically characterised as a canonical Modernist, Richard Neutra’s design theory
repeatedly refers to the central role played in his architecture by the works of experimental
psychologist Wilhelm Wundt. In the late Nineteenth Century Wundt used laboratory
experiments to demonstrate that human responses to sensory stimuli were both immediate
and predictable. Despite Wundt’s importance in many fields, architectural scholars have
tended to disregard Neutra’s fascination with Wundt’s complex physiological and biological
theories. However, this paper revisits Neutra’s design theory, accepting, prima facie, his
belief in the causal relationship between physiology and psychology to suggest an
alternative reading of his architecture. By tracing the influence of Wundt’s ideas on Neutra’s
design theory, the paper identifies a singular ocular-centric, phenomenological tendency in
the resultant architecture. The implications of this approach are then considered in the
context of three facets of Neutra’s domestic architecture in general and the Kaufmann
Desert House in particular. Computer models and diagrammatic analysis are used to
support this reading of Wundt’s influence on Neutra’s design.
Keywords: Richard Neutra, Phenomenological Analysis, Interiority, Modernism
Article Outline
1. Introduction

2. Ocular-Centric Phenomenology

3. Designing Reflexive Architecture

    3.1. Pinwheel Plan

    3.2. Planar Juxtaposition

    3.3. Dematerialising Columns

4. Conclusions

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

1. Introduction
Despite his reputation for producing stark, white, geometric designs, which otherwise
appear to conform to early Twentieth Century Modernist ideals, Richard Joseph Neutra
repeatedly described his architecture as serving to choreograph the sensory and
emotional responses of the human body[1-3]. Long before architects became interested
in the philosophy of phenomenology, Neutra called on the theories of pioneering
psychologist Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt, to argue that the most important purpose of
design was to control the senses to clarify the body’s position in space. Superficially at
least, this view has much in common with those of Christian Norberg-Schulz[4] and
Juhani Pallasmaa[5]; amongst the key proponents of architectural phenomenology in the
late Twentieth Century. However, these authors have been highly critical of both
Modernism and of the privileging of vision that accompanied the rise of functionalist
thinking in architecture[6]. The origins of this division, between the theories of Neutra
and those of the architectural phenomenologists, can be traced to the conflicting views of
their predecessors; respectively Wilhelm Wundt and the philosopher Edmund Husserl.

While Husserl was a student at Leipzig University in 1879he attended the lectures of
Wundt, who was at that time formulating a way of isolating and measuring bodily
responses to external stimuli (like heat or sound). Whereas, over the following two
decades the scientific world grew to embrace Wundt’s vision, Husserl rejected this
paradigm and began to formulate a counter-position that relied on
the primacy and irreducibility of human experience. Husserl’s philosophy of
phenomenology argued that human knowledge and awareness is necessarily reliant on
the experience of the world through all of the senses[7]. Husserl’s student Martin
Heidegger developed this theory to support an inquiry into the nature of being and
existence[8]. However, in the hands of architectural scholars, the spiritual dimension of
Heidegger’s philosophy was translated into an argument for the existence of a
transcendent quality in certain buildings or places. While it no longer bears a strong
connection to its philosophical antecedents, in contemporary use architectural
phenomenology is typically presented as a search for authenticity or truth, through the
production of architecture that evokes a deep, sensory appreciation of place, space or
tectonics. A position which has several elements in common with Neutra’s call for
architecture to strategically use space and form to shape each individual’s sensory
response to their place in the world.

The division between contemporary architectural phenomenology and Neutra’s theory of

sensory choreography (called “biorealism”) is essentially one between, respectively,
poetry and science. This is not to say that Neutra’s ideas lack poetry nor that Norberg-
Schulz’s, for example, have no recourse to science. But rather, that Neutra’s ideas
privilege a particular scientific or clinical foundation for his design theory while those of
the architectural phenomenologists tend to valorise the poetic and the metaphysical. In
much the same way that both Wundt and Husserl were fascinated with the role played by
the human senses in understanding the world, but resorted to different ways of achieving
their ontological goals, so too Neutra, despite obvious differences with Norberg-Schulz
and Pallasmaa, cannot be so easily detached from the phenomenological tradition.

This paradox, as several scholars have noted, begins to explain why Neutra occupies such
a contradictory place in Twentieth Century architecture[9-10]. He was a designer whose
work appeared to be defiantly modern but who was more interested in the way the
human body reacts to space and form. Moreover, Neutra’s theories were rarely easily
accessible, with Kruft describing Neutra’s books as “repetitive”, “unsystematic” and “hard
to read”[11 p432]. The lack of clear connection between his ideas and his buildings
served to exacerbate this problem, leading to a proliferation of interpretations of his
architecture with little regard for the theory underlying them[12-13]. It is through such
scholarship that Neutra’s architecture has been repeatedly categorised as a type of
socially informed, technologically enabled, response to the zeitgeist. However, more
 recently researchers have begun to take Neutra’s theory more seriously and in doing so
have identified aspects of anthropology and Freudian psychoanalysis that are deeply
significant[14-15]. Furthermore, Neutra’s dislike of elevations – he typically presented
perspective views and plans to clients – has triggered renewed consideration of the visual
qualities of his architecture[9],[16]. In all of these recent cases there has been an
attempt to reconcile Neutra’s complex psychological and physiological theories with his
architecture.

The present paper, which is an extension of this recent research, proposes a reading of
Neutra’s theory and architecture that is premised on reinstating the significance of
Wundt’s ideas. This research is not concerned with whether Neutra’s (or Wundt’s) claims
about the human body and sensory perception are accurate, but only that they have been
used to make a particular case about the relationship between the body and the
environment. By using Wundt’s theories as a catalyst, it is possible to focus the research
on a set of narrow but repeated assertions in Neutra’s writings about architecture.
Through this new analysis, the centrality of the eye in Neutra’s theory is affirmed, not
only as enabler of sight but also as a predictable physiological system. By focussing on
the importance of the eye in shaping bodily responses to space and form, the immediacy
of the interior experience in Neutra’s domestic works is stressed. Viewed in this way, it is
possible to interpret Neutra’s domestic interiors as a type of a laboratory apparatus,
attuned to controlling excitation response.

This paper commences with a review of a critical passage from Wundt’s work, which Neutra
was later to repeatedly paraphrase as an explanation for his design decisions. In this section
two important themes are identified. First, the role of the eye, as the primary sensory
apparatus, which Neutra believed shaped the actions of the body. Second, the time taken
for the body to react to external stimuli. Thereafter, Neutra’s imagined narrative of the
body’s involuntary excitation in response to the visual properties of one of his designs is
analysed, finding similar themes to those identified in the previous review of Wundt’s
influence. In the penultimate part of the paper three examples of Neutra’s possible
adaptation of design to reflect his extrapolation of Wundt’s theories are traced in his
domestic works, before particular examples from the Kaufmann Desert House are described.
These three examples include a planning strategy, a formal approach and detailing practice.
The interpretation offered by this section of the paper is supported by several computer-
generated images, isovist views and diagrams that broadly reflect Neutra’s arguments about
the eye and movement. Because the primary purpose of these computer images is to
illustrate the text of this paper, the full detail of their generation is not provided, but
references are given for the techniques that have been used. Thus, these images and
figures support a particular interpretation rather than providing a universal proof. Just, as
the evidence for architectural phenomenology has been criticised for being self-referential
and arbitrary[17], so too this reading of Neutra’s theory of how people will react in space is
similarly conjectural. However, the purpose of this paper is not to justify a design theory or
approach, or to debate the merits of phenomenology. If Neutra’s claims about the way the
body will react in space are taken as argumentum a fortiori, then this approach is a
reasonable way to posit a reading of one of his buildings.

2. Ocular-Centric Phenomenology
Early Twentieth Century physiologists described the involuntary muscular contraction that
occurs in reaction to external stimulus as a reflex action or excitation response[18]. An
example of a reflex action is when a crossed leg is lightly struck on the knee, the leg will
respond with an immediate tremor. This is because the quadriceps muscle in the top of
the thigh contracts in response to the pressure, triggering the lower leg to move. A
similar, but more complex reaction was thought to occur when the eye reacts to
something it sees. As Wundt explains, we can readily understand that reactions to light
impressions can be released in the mesencephalon, without any participation of the
principal path; released as reflexes to the oculomotor system, by way of the
transferences effected in the quadrigemina, and as reflexes to other muscles of the body,
by way of the other connexions.[19 p90]

In this instance, Wundt theorised that the responsive cells at the base of the eye
(quadrigemina) send a message to the midbrain (mesencephalon), which in turn signals
the muscles surrounding the eye, and at the base of the eyelid (the oculomotor nerves)
to control the way the head is facing. Such a reaction to visual stimuli was not only
thought to be immediate, it was also assumed to be pervasive; that is, all people with
normal neurone and muscle connections would react in a similar way. When Neutra
began his architectural studies in 1911 at Vienna’s Technical University, he discovered a
copy of Wundt’s famous Principles of Physiological Psychology wherein this passage about
the eye, body and human experience is contained. Sylvia Lavin describes this text as a
most influential work, “to which Neutra refers countless times”[20 p35] in his design
theory. Barbara Lamprecht[9] similarly observes that Neutra was repeatedly drawn to
Wundt's text and Neutra attributed his abiding interest in “biological and behavioral
heritage” to “the writings of[this] influential German physiologist”[21 p30].

However, despite all of Neutra’s references to Wundt, architectural scholars have tended
to ignore this connection. Alternatively, if they have broached the topic of Neutra’s
singular view of phenomenology, they have interpreted it from a Freudian
psychoanalytical perspective. But, as Thomas Hines notes, in his youth Neutra rejected
Freud’s theories drawing instead “on the more scientifically based revelations of Wilhelm
Wundt”[10 p12]. According to Lavin, to a young Neutra “Wundt's discussions of nerve
endings, ganglia, modulations of the retina, and sensory receptors[…] was both
progressively precise and reassuringly familiar”[20 p35]. It is through Wundt’s work that
Neutra “sought to identify the myriad steps involved in transferring a physical object in
the world along the chain of perception until it became first a sensation registered in the
brain and then a feeling”[20 p35].

In a view that parallels Wundt’s theories[19][22], in his seminal 1956 book Life and
Human Habitat, Neutra argues that,

various and intimate are the nerve connections between the emotional tract of the
thalamus, the middle brain, and those highly developed associations of the cerebral
cortex, the sensory reactions, the muscle activations, and the secretion of internal
glands, all of which in integration have deep meaning to our life and determine
psychosomatic rhythm, tempo, and intensity.[23 p22]

From this conceptual foundation, Neutra developed the proposition that the human body
is a responsive system and that certain sensory experiences will elicit immediate and
predictable excitation reactions. Neutra goes on to argue, like Wundt before him, that the
human eye’s “influence on consciousness seems stronger than that of all our other sense
receptors”[24 p138]. Furthermore, Neutra stresses this position when he proposes that
“the human eye is much more developed and more sharply focused than the ear”[24
p138] because it is “equipped to be stimulated not only by light and colour but by form
and movement as well”[24 p181]. While Neutra does not ignore the other senses
– describing both the olfactory and auditory in some detail –he repeatedly privileges the
eye in his writing. In order to translate this way of viewing the human body and its
senses into a theory which could support design, Neutra highlighted two qualities of the
psycho-physiology of the eye. The first of these is associated with the belief that the eye
can trigger involuntary responses in the body and the second is about the time taken for
this reaction to occur.

One of Wundt’s most seductive propositions was that “the reflex to the muscles that
move the eye-ball is connected[…] with contraction of the corresponding muscles for
movement of the head”[19 p294]. By inference, Neutra argues that this means that
vision is a necessary precursor to movement. While, on a quotidian level, this is almost
always true, Neutra actually means that if the eye is involuntarily drawn to see
something, this will trigger the head to turn towards that visual stimuli, which will in turn
change the direction the entire body is moving in. Thus Neutra’s famous maxim is; “we
‘see not merely to see’ but see in order to act upon vision”[23 p13]. Or alternatively,
vision “will activate a person's locomotor urges”[23 p14]. In these claims, Neutra makes
the first step towards conflating the eye and the body, a tactic that was to later become a
standard part of his design rhetoric. Because the eye both guides the body and activates
the most powerful of its responsive urges, Neutra often distilled the body and its actions
into the responses of the ocular nerves and associated muscles. In essence, the human
body was interpreted as a mass of responsive tissue in the service of the eye.

The second facet of Neutra’s design theory about the eye involves time; a factor which
plays a paradoxical role in the work of both Wundt and Neutra. With the assistance of
new laboratory apparatus in the late Nineteenth Century it had become possible to
measure smaller units of time that had previously been dismissed as effectively
instantaneous. However, despite these advances, the technology was still not able to
measure response rates with any accuracy[25-26]. This situation was problematic
because Wundt understood that all sensation was transmitted through a sequence of
muscles and nerves before a reaction could occur. He reasoned that this response could
not occur without some passage of time, but in practice the time interval between
stimulus and response was so small as to defy measurement. The solution was to imagine
the reactions as occurring in the present. This was effectively a compromise between
observed and measured behaviour or a way of reconciling the relationship between the
theorised understanding of the nervous system and the apparent immediacy of the reflex
response. Neutra’s development of this idea is similarly fraught with compromise. For
example, Neutra understood that that body’s response to vision is “by no means
instantaneous”[24 p181]. However, in practice, Neutra described muscular responses as
occurring in parallel with the moment of stimulation. In order to accommodate this
blurring of time, Neutra began to imagine the body experiencing and reacting to stimuli in
a sequence which was continuously occurring. Thus, the body was thought of as not only
reacting in the present, but also as existing in a perpetual present state. That, in
hindsight, the body always exists in a perpetual present state is not important[25]. What
is more interesting is the way in which these concepts – the role of the eye as surrogate
body and as agent of the present – were to find a role in both Neutra’s design theory and
in his architecture.
 Neutra identifies four types of ocular-centric reflex responses; a base state, a “defence
reflex” and two excitation responses, “startle” and “orientation” (figure 1). Each of these
behavioural patterns is a result of visual-spatial stimuli that cause involuntary reactions in
the body’s nervous system. This belief is not only founded on Wundt’s ideas, but on
anthropological research which argued that human physiology is a result of evolutionary
processes derived from primitive human survival instincts. Thus, the “fittest” of the
human species are those who have developed a type of constant sensory awareness of
their surroundings that is conducive to survival[2-3]. It is this concept that Neutra
ultimately adopts to justify a transparent architecture; one with appropriate prospect or
surveillance potential. However, before examining the connection to architecture in detail,
the four types of reflex situation, which make up the core of Neutra’s evolutionary
thought, are further considered.

Figure 1. Diagrammatic and hierarchical representation of the types of reflex response mapped to t
Kaufmann Desert House examples in this paper. (A) directional; (B) defence; (C) orientation and sta

3. Designing Reflexive Architecture

In Life and Human Habitat, Neutra outlines the principles of biorealism; a theory which he
had primarily developed through his residential designs. In this work he identifies the
home as the single place on “the surface of the globe which we get to know
intimately”[23 p21]. Neutra believed that the constructed environment is “full of[…]
visual collision, of turmoil to the eye, and of neglected optical litter” and that it is the
most intimate spaces of the home which are often the cause of “visual conflict”[23 p166].
In response to this situation he set out to produce designs that could shape the combined
physical and psychological responses of the body. In practice, this meant that he not only
presented his designs as perspective drawings, an approach which accentuates the
centrality of the eye, but he also provided a parallel, imagined account of the experience
of the design. These accounts typically focussed on the visual connections between the
body and form. For example, when describing the experience of a house, he provided the
following imagined account.

As we approach we raise our head to recognize the house number, and in the motion we
possibly glance over the roof, its configuration and skyline. As we tilt our head upward,
the equilibrium or inner ear organ immediately functions and combines the manifold
record of our body position with pure vision and its ever-changing perspectives. We roll
our eyes by means of that ingenious muscle cluster around our eyeballs which is
intricately and neurally tied up with those tools which we use unconsciously for turning
and tilting the head.[…] Now, with our hand touching the knob of the entrance door,
tactile and thermal experience of conductive and polished metal comes to us through the
fingers and palms of the hands, while at the same time the muscle senses faithfully
report from below about the rubber mat on which we have stepped.[23 p13]

In this account Neutra immediately connects sight with physical response; “we raise our
head to recognize the house number.” Furthermore, by referring to a house number,
Neutra infers the presence of a suburban street and, as the viewer’s gaze rises over the
roof, they observe nature, which possibly suggests an affluent neighbourhood. All of this
 information constructs a picture, through the visitor’s imagined sensory response, of a
desirable setting. Notably, Neutra’s description is constructed from a collective, universal
perspective; magnified through the use of the first-person, collective pronoun “we”
throughout.

Of similar importance in Neutra’s narrative is the use of present tense to describe

physical reactions as they occur. This is not only a literary conceit, but it reinforces the
idea that universal anatomical reactions are constantly occurring in parallel to the visual
experience of environmental conditions. Thus, Neutra identifies that the muscles around
the eye are connected to muscles of the head; recognising that both eye movement and
head movement are inseparable. Because Neutra argues that vision precedes any
movement of the body, then external visual stimulus must first prompt the combined
reactions of both the muscles of the eye and of the head. Hence, in his description of the
approach to the house, sight always precedes reaction, although the response is
effectively instantaneous, occurring in a perpetual present state. Thus he describes how,
“we raise our head” and “glance over the roof.”

The presence of gravity and the depiction of perspective in the account confirms the eye’s
complicity in the loss of the body. First, the “eyes[…] discern the ceiling, walls, and
window frames in perspective related to the horizon”[23 p18]. The presence of the
horizon affirms the role of the body both resisting gravity and as armature of the senses.
Neutra theorised that “gravitational sensibility[…] deeply affects our appreciation of[an]
architectural environment”[24 p53)]. The body’s internal responses to gravity also
combine with the “visual impressions” recorded by the eye, creating “oblique
perspectives” through which the design is experienced[24].

On the pages of his seminal books, these imagined accounts were presented alongside
photographs, plans and perspective drawings of Neutra’s houses suggesting graphically that
the designs somehow illustrated the accounts. Nevertheless, meaningful connections
between the text and the designs are rare, with most operating at a very general level. For
example, if the text stressed the importance of the landscape, a photograph might be
presented of a building against a natural backdrop. Similarly, if the text described the role
played by an entry in framing the experience of the living room, the accompanying image
would be of the door to the living room. Without further annotation or description the
connections implied by this juxtaposition of images and words remains abstract. However,
there are three partial exceptions to this rule, associated with a specific planning strategy, a
form-making approach and a curious detailing practice. Each of these three are considered
hereafter, first as applied in various different buildings, before their presence is traced in
one of Neutra’s most famous works, the Kaufmann Desert House (figures 2, 3 and 4).

3.1. Pinwheel Plan

Neutra was an advocate of the “pinwheel” floor plan, a cruciform spatial arrangement
which is found in many of his houses[9-10][27]. In such plans, each quadrant typically
has a circulation edge with a solid wall to one side and a glass or open wall on the
opposite side. Thus, each quadrant has a dominant visual orientation that is controlled by
the location of screens or walls. This planning strategy is evident in the Moore and
Kramer houses where specific “transparent walls open upon a panoramic view of
mountains and valleys”[12 p18]. Neutra argues that such planning directly responds to
human visual needs, claiming, “the architect would have no chance to impress human
beings in space if there were no peripheral vision”[23 p13].
 Figure 2. Kaufmann Desert House, Palm Springs (1946), Richard Neutra

Figure 3. Kaufmann Desert House, Perspective view

Figure 4. Kaufmann Desert House, Perspective view

Figure 5. Parallel perspective (upper) and isovist (lower) views of the Kaufmann Desert House,
annotated to identify predicted reflex response

The Kaufmann Desert House is not only one of Neutra’s most well known works, but it
has also previously been the subject of a comprehensive visual and geometric mapping
analysis which informs the present reading[28-29]. In this house, the entry doorway
provides one of the strongest directional reflexes; a path initially defined by a long garage
wall which then steps into the plan, before continuing through the dining area and by way
of a semi-enclosed courtyard to the guest wing. While traversing the early stage of this
route, the visitor is enclosed within a stone-lined corridor, but thereafter a clear visual
path leads across the dining area, parallel with a long stone wall, and towards a small,
vertical orientation reflex view, to the left of the original directional path (figure 5).
However, soon after passing only the direction path, and a peripheral orientation view to
the south-east, a major vista, elicited by the second-order defence reflex, between the
arms of the pinwheel plan draws the body to look towards the distant mountains in the
north-east. The courtyard surface is paved in a stepped pattern to accommodate the
body’s involuntary passage towards this vista. Walls or banks of louvres tightly control all
other views along this original path including framing (figure 6).

Figure 6. Parallel perspective (upper) and isovist (lower) views of the Kaufmann Desert House,
annotated to identify predicted reflex response

The single longest visual path through the interior of the Kaufmann Desert House
connects the servant’s wing, through the entry foyer and living room, out to the pool
 terrace[29]. This directional reflex path crosses the previous one in the doorway between
the entry and the open plan living area. The key moment in this house occurs at this
intersection, not coincidentally the site of several famous photographs of the
interior[9,16]. While the primary directional reflex draws the visitor through the living
room, and along the edge of the terrace, a series of substantial second order reflexes pull
the eye, and the body, towards the pool and the landscape beyond. The pool itself, like
the courtyard paving in the previous example, steps out from the cruciform walls at the
heart of the plan, drawing the eye and accommodating the body’s movement along the
new path[29].
Neutra argues that it is possible to choreograph human experience, using space and form to
cause the eye “to jump to the perception of accentuated points or features in the design,
and thus the eye, the head, even the whole body will turn readily towards such
attraction”[23 p13]. This is the case in the two examples of vision and movement in the
Kaufmann Desert House.

3.2. Planar Juxtaposition

Figure 7. Parallel perspective (upper) and isovist (lower) views of the Kaufmann Desert House,
annotated to identify predicted reflex response

Neutra’s use of the flat, horizontal planes in his houses is another common formal
strategy. This approach is typically used in combination with pinwheel planning strategies
to control the vertical extent of a person’s cone of vision. For Neutra, these horizontal
planes situated over transparent walls “allow a wider scope for peripheral vision”[9 p48]
which controls the defence and orientation reflex responses, thereby connecting vision
and movement. An example of this is found in Neutra’s Bailey House (1946) which
features a horizontal roof and floor to ceiling glass walls. This combination of forms lead
the client to observe that the design “does not just sit here passively” rather it “acts
on[him] in a most beneficial manner”[qtd in 10 p235]. Attracting attention from visitors,
Bailey also records that the house caused physical responses from such people who were
always “adjusting their gazes” within the home. Bailey even wondered whether, as
Neutra proposed, the visitors felt the same way about the home as Bailey did, asking “is
it that the building acts on them too[and] tells them some archetypal truth which sets
them free?”[10 p235].
McCoy describes the Kaufmann House as a structure dominated by “horizontal
planes[which] hover over transparent walls”[12 p16]. This approach is especially evident in
the corner of the living room adjacent to the pool terrace. As described in the previous
section, in plan this space is notable for having a directional reflex parallel to the walls of
the house, and a defence reflex angling the body to the south east of this line of sight,
across the terrace itself. The horizontal roof over this area, which other than a single
supporting column (described in the following section), is sited above the intersection of two
glass walls. From the interior the roof is extended to the east, narrowing the cone of vision
and directing the view through a large pane of glass accentuating the original directional
impulse[12]. However, the roof does not extend beyond the line of the glass wall to the
south, meaning that the primary directional reflex is tightly framed by the roof, while the
defence reflex path is more sudden, twisting the viewer to the south, possibly causing
Neutra’s third-order, startle or orientation responses (figure 7).

3.3. Dematerialising Columns

Hines considers the idea that, because Neutra was “striving for industrial effects to
suggest the possibilities of replicable mass production” he painted many surfaces in his
designs silver; a practice which might be regarded as “’dishonest’[…] according to
modernist moral canons”[10 p131]. However, if technology is of less importance than the
body’s response to visual stimulus, then Neutra’s well-known practice of painting
particular columns silver, might have another explanation. For example, some of Neutra’s
residential designs, including the Beard House (1935) and the von Sternberg House
(1936), required protective coatings as they were entirely steel-framed and these may
have been painted for practical reasons. However, when using stainless steel cladding,
such as in the Brown House (1955), Neutra particularly chose to use silver “only in those
places where the sightline is affected”, a decision he claimed was specifically in order to
“dematerialize” the structure[qtd in 9 p34]. Furthermore, in his later works, such as the
Clark House (1957), the silver paint was applied in accordance with sightlines generated
only from within the home “because it was the view out that mattered”[9 p34]. In both
cases it is clear that the silver paint was not applied to artificially conform to modernist
expectations but was motivated by the desire to shape the visual impact of the structure
on the body’s reflex system. Thus, in Survival Through Design Neutra maintains that in
certain circumstances the visual dominance of columns could prevent the “natural
gratification in feeling visually unimpeded and in being free for action, at liberty, not
caged and incarcerated”[24 p219].

In the previous two sections, on the pinwheel planning strategy and floating roof planes,
a critical location in the Kaufmann Desert House was identified where the longest visual
path across the plan, corresponding to the first-order directional reflex, is momentarily
diverted, through the use of horizontal and vertical forms, by a second-order defence
reflex, and thereafter by a third-order, startle or orientation reaction. This progressive
transition from first, to second to third-order reactions in the body is reliant on the
combination of uninterrupted glass walls, from the south and east sides of the living
room, which meet in the corner of the space. These glass walls share a single joint, which
is also the only structure supporting the overhanging roofline, a silver painted, steel and
timber post (figure 8). This moment in the house is singled out by Lamprecht as the most
important in the entire house because “[t]o stand there is to be engaged in a physically
charged moment”[9 p179]. This moment, which previous scholars have identified as
being central to the experience and presentation of the house[9-10,12,16], is a rare
instance in Neutra’s architecture when his phenomenological agenda may be traced, by
way of his imaged choreography of human visual experience, in the design and detailing
of a single project.

Figure 8. Parallel perspective (upper) and isovist (lower) views of the Kaufmann Desert House,
annotated to identify predicted reflex response
4. Conclusions
The standard encyclopedia entry describes Neutra as one of “the most celebrated of the
founders of modern architecture” and as a designer “who managed to capture the spirit
of modernism in a powerful and memorable way”[30 p917]. Yet, throughout his life,
Neutra remained committed to producing an architecture for an eternal present, a type of
endless, instantaneous reflex response apparatus, where the eye (and the body as
extension of the eye) responds to a safe, controlled environment; a place where fear is
minimized and delight is choreographed. Neutra’s architecture is not that of a physician
advocating wellness –the other traditional interpretation – but of an experimental
psychologist, tuning his spatial laboratory to achieve excitation control.

While past research has acknowledged Neutra psychological proclivities[14-15,20] the

particular ocular-centric phenomenology that Wundt promulgated has not previously been
considered in this way, nor has an attempt been made to trace evidence for this position in
his architecture.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
An ARC Fellowship (FT0991309) and an ARC Discovery Grant (DP1094154) supported the
research undertaken in this paper. All figures by Michael Dawes and Michael Ostwald.

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