While pursuing his goal to make mass-producible, low-cost, high-quality building available and attractive to all classes, Richard Neutra came to rely on simpler, lighter, more modular means than any of his Modernist contemporaries. His work is distinguished by the way it...
[more]While pursuing his goal to make mass-producible, low-cost, high-quality building available and attractive to all classes, Richard Neutra came to rely on simpler, lighter, more modular means than any of his Modernist contemporaries. His work is distinguished by the way it embraces nature, felicitously adapting standard Modernist elements -- ribbon windows, flat roofs, built-in furniture, glass walls -- to the California lifestyle. The lightness and skeletal-like strength of his buildings reify the essence of the International style. His favorite building materials were steel, stucco, concrete, wood, and glass; his basic structure was the simple, timeless post and beam, with cantilevered roof slabs extending into space. A Modernist and a life-long student of the psychological, physiological, and ecological dimensions of architecture, his credo became the title of his most famous book, "Survival Through Design." The Jardinette Apartments (Hollywood, 1927), Neutra's first major design in America, are five-story apartment houses that feature flat roof gardens, bands of steel casement windows, and cantilevered balconies. The Jardinette is a perfect example of the Modernist trend at the time. "The new garden apartments bridge a gap between the worker's place of business and his home," wrote a journalist for the Christian Science Monitor. "Light and sunshine flood the apartment house and create a new harmony of family life and contentment, with every room as efficiently planned for service as the most modern business office." Neutra's masterpiece, however, is the Lovell House (Los Feliz Hills near Hollywood's Griffith Observatory, 1929), the first major example in America of what has become known as the International style. The house includes open sleeping porches, private areas for nude sunbathing, and special provisions in the kitchen and bathing areas for dietary and therapeutic needs. Gently and wittily illuminated by Model-T Ford headlights, the Lovell stairway has become one of the grandest and most exhilarating spaces in Modernist architecture.
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