Happy Birthday Richard Neutra (April 8, 1892 – April 16, 1970)

Richard Neutra. Photo: Ed Clarke.

Vienna-Hietzing competition, 1924  Neutra project. Published in Menorah Nov-Dec 1929. from Krinsky, Synagogues of Europe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985).

Happy Birthday Richard Neutra (April 8, 1892 – April 16, 1970)
by Samuel D. Gruber

Yesterday was the birthday of the great Austrian-born California modernist, one of a generation who transformed American residential architecture.

On the occasion, I post a passage from an (unpublished) paper I gave at the College Art Association in 2012 titled  "Newish and Jewish from Europe: Refugees, Survivors and the Spread of Modernism in the Post-World War II American Jewish Community." the paper deals with work by many Jewish emigre and refugee architects: Mendelsohn, Nathan, Neutra, Schindler, Soriano, Moed, Troller, and others.

Neutra had worked in Berlin for the Expressionist Erich Mendelsohn, and with Mendelsohn had contacts as early as 1922 with Jewish clients when the two submitted a successful proposal for a commercial center in Haifa, Palestine. Almost immediately upon arriving in New York in 1923 Neutra was engaged by an International Zionist committee, including Albert Einstein, Rabbi Stephen Wise and Modechai Kaplan, to design a library for the new Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The audacious building, which combines elements of Wright and Mendelsohn, was promoted by the committee but never built.

Richard Neutra. Unbuilt design for Jewish Library, Jerusalem, 1923.

Moving to Chicago, Neutra found a job with Holabird and Roche, but took creative work on the side for the North Shore Temple, designing a new building – without pay, but for the stimulation. The unbuilt design, influenced by Wright, includes formal features not found in synagogues until the 1960s.

Richard Neutra. Unbuilt design for Northshore Temple, Chicago, 1924.

Vienna-Hietzing competition, 1924  Neutra project. Published in Menorah Nov-Dec 1929. from Krinsky, Synagogues of Europe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985).

In November 1924 he achieved his dream – and went to work with Wright at Taliesin. Sometime in this period he prepared the synagogue-center design submitted unsuccessfully to a Vienna competition. This also owes much to Wright and Mendelsohn, for whom Neutra was interpreter and liaison when Mendelsohn visited Taliesen for several days. Neutra continued to play this role throughout his career, interpreting and blending ideas from the two masters. But even though many of Neutra's Jewish Center ideas were later picked up by other architects, including Mendelsohn, in America; none of the LA architects needed to, or chose to express, a strong Jewish identity. Maybe three rejections were enough for Neutra

After this, Neutra turned almost exclusivity to residential architecture and helped create a new style of modern design in south California and the west. There was nothing Jewish implicit or explicit in Neutra's ( or Schindler's and Soriano's) residential work. Still, many of the clients of this modernist group were Jewish; such as natural-living guru Philip Lovell and wife Leah; the German-Jewish painter Galka Emmy Scheyer; and the Pittsburgh Kaufmanns, patrons of the now-iconic Desert House. The professional and social world in which these architects and clients flourished had a strong German and New York Jewish presence.  Historian Gavriel Rosenfeld has grouped Neutra and Schindler as “Non-Jewish” Jewish Architects: Profiles in Evasion;” in his recent book Building after Auschwitz: Jewish Architecture and the Memory of the Holocaust, but I think the situation is more nuanced; even simple encounters with their buildings made other Jews more modern, and thus modernism more Jewish. Their buildings made other Jews more modern, and thus modernism more Jewish.

Lovell House,Los Angeles, CA. Richard Neutra, arch. 1927-29.

Kaufmann Desert House. Palm Springs, CA. Richard Neutra, architect 1946. Photos: Thomas Watson.

The literature on Neutra as an architect and style-maker is vast. A discussion of his Jewish roots, and the extended German-Jewish community in which he lived and moved for much of his LA life remains to be adequately explored.