Homes Inside Out

The name Richard Joseph Neutra means nothing at all to most Americans. Of all architects who have made their reputations in the U.S., Richard Neutra ranks second only to lordly Frank Lloyd Wright.

Last week publishers in Italy and South America were planning books about Neutra. And an issue of the French magazine L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui, devoted almost entirely to him, had reached the U.S.

Neutra has done as much as any modern architect to prove that glass, steel and concrete are practical, if not cosy. His wide, white houses perch perkily on the hills around Los Angeles where he lives, and they alter more distant landscapes too. He is versatile enough to have designed both a moated desert mansion for Movie Director Josef von Sternberg and an elaborate system of low-cost schools and hospitals for Puerto Rico. Neutra's buildings are pondered and imitated (especially in technical details of construction) by architects around the world. Says noted French Architect Marcel Lods in L'Architecture : "[He] is already a classic and . . . will be more so tomorrow. Neutra offers us an infinitely precious message."

Inside-out House. To deliver that message, Vienna-born Neutra (pronounced Noytra) had come a long way from his first assignment in 1915: a tea house for the fortress of Trebinje, Herzegovina. Neutra came to the U.S. in 1923, sat at the feet of famed Skyscraper Architect Louis Sullivan, the father of modern, functional architecture and the teacher of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Neutra met Wright at Sullivan's funeral in 1924. Soon afterwards, with his wife and mother-in-law, he paid a long visit to Wright's Wisconsin home, Taliesin. Neutra named his eldest son for Wright, went forth to preach the gospel of modern architecture on lecture tours which took him from Rome to Tokyo. He long ago fashioned a style of his own, and made mass housing his main interest.

Now, at 54, Neutra is designing a Palm Springs desert hideaway for Pittsburgh Millionaire Edgar J. Kaufmann, whose famed house in Bear Run, Pa.--designed by Wright--overhangs a waterfall. Compared with Wright's cantilevered castle-in-the-air, Neutra's Kaufmann house will be down to earth, with the low-flying flat roofs, glass walls and furnished terraces of a house turned inside out. To make life as smooth outdoors as in, the four courtyards will have walls and floors piped for summer cooling and winter heating.

Low-Cost Exodus. Like most modern architects (who think of houses not as just places to live but as "machines for living"), Neutra tailors houses to his clients. But he takes it on himself to decide what is best for them, carefully explains to those who come with prepared floor plans that he is "more interested in the plan of your life." He requires all adults in a client's family to detail their actions for a week--their sleeping habits, the friends they see, etc. As a result, Neutra-designed houses are likely to be more livable than they look.

On vastly expensive jobs like the Kaufmann house (cost $150,000), Neutra likes to try out ideas to use later in his low-cost projects such as his 600-house Channel Heights project in San Pedro, Calif. Says he: "I have . . . always felt that it was the job of ours and the next following generation to make true the promise of the [industrial] revolution . . . the promise of a general exodus from our metropolitan slums, from rural hovels and, in short, from the pre-industrial standards of living and housing. . . . Whatever we design today . . . has its true contemporary significance only if it does not aim at uniqueness but an applicability for [mass] production."

Neutra, who has the pointed eyebrows and sharp beak of a silvery owl, often gets up in the pre-dawn blackness of 4 a.m. to blue-print his ideas. He will travel anywhere to make sure his buildings fit the landscape, the people and the weather. Last week he got set for a long journey; he had just accepted a commission to design a string of hotels and hospitals for the princely Deccan States, India.

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