"An important contribution to the understanding of 'modernist' culture in the United States and a perceptive analysis of the achievement of a major American architect, with a European background and an international reputation."--William Jordy, Brown University "This study, part biography and part architectural analysis, is a modern masterpiece of architectural history. The prose is lucid and sometimes elegant--very much like the work of Richard Neutra which it so brilliantly examines."--Peter Gay, Yale University "An important contribution to the understanding of 'modernist' culture in the United States and a perceptive analysis of the achievement of a major American architect, with a European background and an international reputation."--William Jordy, Brown University
Richard Neutra's landmark publication Survival Through Design, in print again for the first time in decades, is a cycle of essays providing insights far ahead of their time. With a new introduction by Dr. Barbara Lamprecht and foreword by Dr. Raymond Neutra, it is richly illustrated and intended as a reference for years to come. Neutra's themes are wide-ranging and he extensively plumbs through history to develop his insights, however, the general theme of man-made environment and its impact on human physiological, neurological, emotional states over time, and the designer's potential role as mediator of these conditions, is a constant throughout Survival Through Design with ever greater relevance for the present day. Richard Neutra's landmark publication Survival Through Design, in print again for the first time in decades, is a cycle of essays providing insights far ahead of their time. With a new introduction by Dr. Barbara Lamprecht and foreword by Dr. Raymond Neutra, it is richly illustrated and intended as a reference for years to come.
Born and raised in Vienna, Richard Neutra (1872 1970) came to America early in his career, settling in California. His influence on post-war architecture is undisputed, the sunny climate and rich landscape being particularly suited to his cool, sleek modern style. Neutra had a keen appreciation for the relationship between people and nature; his trademark plate glass walls and ceilings which turn into deep overhangs have the effect of connecting the indoors with the outdoors. Neutra ability to incorporate technology, aesthetics, science, and nature into his designs him recognition as one of Modernist architecture greatest talents.
Two Austrian-born designers have left their indelible mark on California?s residential architecture of the 1930s to 1960s: Richard Neutra (1892?1970) and Rudolph M. Schindler (1887?1953) combined modern form and inventive construction with new materials to create a truly modern vision of living that remains inspirational to the present day.00This new book features twenty famous and lesser known houses from that period, designed by the two pioneers and other architects that were influenced by Neutra?s and Schindler?s ideas. All are marked by highly economical use and outstanding quality of space, a minimalist aesthetic, and by their ideal adaption to climatic conditions. They are monuments of a period as well as timeless models for contemporary and future architecture.00The images by photographer David Schreyer show the buildings in their present state as a commodity of highest quality that can be, and should be, altered to meet today?s changed demands to a living space. Andreas Nierhaus?s texts, based on interviews, explore the relationship of the present inhabitants to their homes and what they mean to them. Together, the authors offer uniquely intimate insights into a sophisticated way of life still too little known outside California.
Since he followed it all of his life, Richard Neutra (1892-1970) must have relished the maxim of the Greek philosopher Socrates: "The unexamined life is not worth living." In his books, articles, lectures, correspondence, and even casual conversations, Neutra constantly examined, not only his own life, but the lives of others - present and past - and the human and natural world they inhabited. Nowhere was this truer than in his autobiography "Life and Shape", first published in 1962, which now, after years of being out of print, has again happily come back to life. As opposed to "Survival Through Design" (1954), his superb collection of densely philosophical essays, Neutra took a different tack in "Life and Shape", following a lighter and more deliberately relaxed approach. It was as if the usually serious and intense Neutra was giving himself permission to reveal his richly ironic sense of humor and to probe areas in his personal experience which he had not examined as closely before. These included hitherto unrecorded memories of his parents, siblings, and his childhood and education in imperial Vienna, his numbing experiences as an Austrian artillery officer in World War I, and the beginnings of his architectural consciousness in his response to the work of Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos, Erich Mendelsohn, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright. As in the autobiographies of Sullivan and Wright, "Life and Shape" concentrates on Neutra's earlier years, both in Europe and America. While he naturally recounts his memories of such well-known commissions as the Lovell Health House (1929), his own Van der Leeuv Research House (1933) and the von Sternberg House (1935), he also muses on such less famous buildings as the small, and now virtually forgotten, Mosk House (1933). "Life and Shape" also confirms Neutra's obsession with the passage of time and his firm resolution never to waste it. Like Sullivan and Wright, Neutra eschewed writing a factual chronicle, and - at the age of 70 - composed instead a meditation on the aspects of his life and work that seemed, in retrospect, to be the most interesting and significant. He felt no need to try to "include everything" but rather to present an honest recounting of his memory of his life. In writing my own "Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture" [Oxford University Press, 1982; Rizzoli Press, 2006], I relied on "Life and Shape" when I wanted an account of Neutra's experiences told in his own authentic voice. For future generations of architects, historian, and readers, it is good to have it back. - Thomas S. Hines, UCLA Professor Emeritus of History and Architecture
How modern architecture came to embrace the urges and fears of the affective unconscious. "Eight million Americans a year cool their heels in psychiatric waiting rooms. Design can help lower this nervous overhead."—Richard Neutra, 1954 Sylvia Lavin's Form Follows Libido argues that by the 1950s, some architects felt an urge to steer the cool abstraction of high modernism away from a neutral formalism toward the production of more erotic, affective environments. Lavin turns to the architecture of Richard Neutra (1892-1970) to explore the genesis of these new mood-inducing environments. In a series of engaging essays weaving through the designs and writings of this Vienna-born, California-based architect, Lavin discovers in Neutra a sustained and poignant psychoanalytic reflection set in the context of a burgeoning psychoanalytic culture in America. Lavin shows that Neutra's redirection of modernism constituted not a lyrical regression to sentimentality but a deliberate advance of architectural theory and technique to engage the unconscious mind, fueled by the ideas of psychoanalysis that were being rapidly disseminated at the time. In Neutra's responses to a vivid range of issues, from psychoanalysis proper to the popular psychology of tele-evangelical prayer, Lavin uncovers a radical reconstitution of the architectural discipline. Arguing persuasively that the received historical views of both psychoanalysis and architecture have led to a suppression of their compelling coincidences and unorthodoxies, Lavin sets out to unleash midcentury architecture's hidden libido. Neither Neutra nor psychoanalysis emerges unscathed from her investigation of how architecture came to be saturated by the intrigues of affect, often against its will. If Reyner Banham sought to put architecture "on the couch," then Lavin, through Neutra, leaps beyond Banham's ameliorative aim to lure contemporary architecture into the lush and dangerous liaisons of environmental design.
Ernst L. Freud (1892–1970) was a son of Sigmund Freud and the father of painter Lucian Freud and the late Sir Clement Freud, politician and broadcaster. After his studies in Munich and Vienna, where he and his friend Richard Neutra attended Adolf Loos’s private Bauschule, Freud practiced in Berlin and, after 1933, in London. Even though his work focused on domestic architecture and interiors, Freud was possibly the first architect to design psychoanalytical consulting rooms—including the customary couches—a subject dealt with here for the first time. By interweaving an account of Freud’s professional and personal life in Vienna, Berlin, and London with a critical discussion of selected examples of his domestic architecture, interior designs, and psychoanalytic consulting rooms, the author offers a rich tapestry of Ernst L. Freud’s world. His clients constituted a “Who’s Who” of the Jewish and non-Jewish bourgeoisie in 1920s Berlin and later in London, among them the S. Fischer publisher family, Melanie Klein, Ernest Jones, the Spenders, and Julian Huxley. While moving within a social class known for its cultural and avant-garde activities, Freud refrained from spatial, formal, or technological experiments. Instead, he focused on creating modern homes for his bourgeois clients.
