One of Neutra's Zehlendorf houses, 1923. Photo by bml.

The quartet of small houses Richard Neutra designed in 1922 are located on Onkel Tom Strasse in Zehlendorf, a quiet, leafy, well-to-do Berlin suburb. Known as the Adolf Sommerfeld Residences, they were named after the rather eccentric developer who built them. (Sommerfeld proposed, and Neutra drew, a giant revolving turntable with three partitions, containing, for example, a piano in one section; a dining room table with places already set in a second; and a sitting area in the third. The massive mechanism, smack in the middle of the really-not-so-big living room, was a decidedly novel way to address one of early Modernism’s eternal quests: making space work harder for everyman. The more predictable approach to reconfiguring space would be sliding walls or curtains, seen in any number of German and Dutch experiments such as the Rietveld-Schröder House, Utrecht, 1924. On Onkel Tom Strasse, one turntable actually got built; alas, it is no more but the mechanism below the floor may be.)

Another Zehlendorf house, Neutra, 1923. Photo by bml.

Neutra designed these compact dwellings while his employer, Erich Mendelsohn, was working in Palestine. The four exemplify how Neutra could animate a potentially stolid, solid, white cube: a type pretty much the antithesis of his later command in completely eliminating a “box” in favour of exquisitely proportioned planes of glass, metal, stone, or stucco, all sliding past each other or into the landscape in a complex balance of asymmetry. The Zehlendorf boxes have deep punctures of solid and void befitting these sturdy houses. But even here you can see some of the gestures that would become much more emphatic in Neutra’s later work, such as elongating planes or extending a plane to wrap around a corner to create a balcony, something similar, if more tentative, than the jutting momentum of the Lovell Health House pool.

No, it’s what’s inside these houses that took my breath away and off my white-walled perch. Rooms are defined by hues so rich one feels saturated in color even after one leaves and steps back into the sunlight, like a musical chord that keeps resonating. And in contrast to his later deployment of a single plane of a color or material that continues from the inside to the outside, passing through glass to extinguish the boundary between exterior and interior, here in Zehlendorf the colors define space as discreet containers, as filled volumes, not as planes.

The foyer, leading to the blue living room. Photo by bml.

Upstairs in one of the Zehlendorf houses.

The ground floor bathroom. Photo by bml.

The living room. Photo by bml.

His use of color here reminds me of Le Corbusier’s Color Keys or, especially, Bruno Taut’s Berlin housing, beginning with his “Paint Box Estates” aka Falkenberg Housing, 1912.[1] Taut’s later manifesto of 1919 defends color without apologies, and just as capable as white in combating “the dirty grey” of houses:

“We do not want to build any more joyless houses, or see them built… Colour is not expensive like moulded decorations and sculptures, but colour means a joyful existence. As it can be provided with limited resources, we should, in the present time of need, particularly urge its use on all buildings that must now be constructed. We categorically denounce the absence of colour even if the house is in the midst of nature. There are not only the lush landscapes of spring and summer, but also the snow-covered scenes of winter, which cry out for colour. Let blue, red, yellow, green, black and white radiate in crisp, bright shades to replace the dirty grey of houses.”[2] 

As Peter Davey has pointed out, “Taut believed that color was also necessary because ‘it was a social duty of the architect to offer the inhabitants of social housing schemes an identification with their relatively modest living environment through the use of colour.’ Thus, he was calling for color for two reasons: one, for its ability to precipitate an emotion, in this case joy, and the second because color was a superb way in a chaotic, war-torn environment to weld emotional connections to the environment.”

Neutra would go on to dedicate his life to calibrating the psychological and physical, the emotional and the perceptual, in his architecture. He discussed color in Survival through Design in the chapter, “Light and Color Experience in Static Interiors”:

“The strong vivid colors in nature, like those of an impressive evening sky, would become hard to bear if viewed indefinitely; here the factor of fatigue appears operative. Undoubtedly, steady uniformity needs to be offset – just as seasonal change is an important element in our enjoyment of nature … The brightest reds and yellows in nature are not commonly found over extensive areas, or, if they are, they do not appear for prolonged periods of time.”

He then went on to discuss “bright xanthophyll,” that colors autumn foliage; the role of “red hemoglobin” in “hunting, war slaughter, and bloody murder,” and the “great exception,” chlorophyll: “Through countless millions of years animal and human retinas have been conditioned to tolerate immense expanses of green. Eyes have grown to relax in full view of them. A similar prevalence of bright yellow or red would indeed be unbearable.”

As far as I know, Neutra never again used color so dramatically or to define volumes as he did in Zehlendorf, but rather more in the spirt of what he advocated in Survival. More typically, he employed white and a deep, cold brown, a color so typically seen in his later work that I call the paint “Neutra brown,” when he wanted spaces to project (white) or recede (brown), a basic technique of Gestalt aesthetics. There is a fine story Dr. Stuart Bailey told me once about consulting Neutra on his Pacific Palisades home, Case Study House #20, 1946. The young Dr. Bailey was a dentist, who, one assumes, appreciated good light to see detail. He asked Neutra if the closet interiors could be painted white, to see things better, rather than dark. Seems a reasonable request. “Mr. Bailey, “ Neutra said sternly, “The closets must recede. If you paint them white, I will remove my name from the project.” The closets stayed dark. (Neutra also threatened to commit “public suicide” if trees were removed from a school property. The trees housed birds, which pooped on faculty cars. Neutra won that one, too.)

But the color that far and away most recalls Neutra is silver, no matter the decade, seen especially on wood trim such as window sills, posts, or on steel windows. Paint protected either material, of course, but silver, of all the colors, “dematerialized” these elements and dispersed light.[3] If glass technology couldn’t yet deliver the large spans of glass so prevalent in early and mid-century post-and-beam architecture, then the requisite framing members of smaller expanses of glass could best be visually suppressed by using silver; such suppression would aid the human eye to connect to the landscape beyond with as little impediment as possible. Light and space, whether considered mystically or scientifically, were vital concepts in the religious philosophy Theosophy and to Dutch Functionalist architects such as Leendert Cornelius van der Vlugt, principal architect of the famous Van Nelle Factory, 1929, and of the equally famous house he designed as principal in Brinkman and Van der Vlugt for Cornelius van der Leeuw, a rich industrialist, Theosophist, and rigorous Modernist who commissioned the light-filled factory, which, beyond mysticism, pragmatically encouraged worker safety and productivity.

Van Nelle Factory, Rotterdam, 1929. Leendert Van der Vlugt and Johannes Brinkman for Cornelius van der Leeuw. Photo by bml.

His Rotterdam house, with its exterior white walls and silver trim (with plenty of color inside), faces the lake at Kraslinge Plas, just as the Neutra family home, the white-and-silver VDL Research House I, 1932, and II, 1966, designed by Dion and Richard Neutra, face the Silverlake Reservoir in Los Angeles. Neutra named his own house after Van der Leeuw because he loaned the architect $3,000 to build his own house.[4]

Neutra often left colors for a wall or two up to the choice of his clients. In the Olan and Aida Hafley House in Long Beach, the clients chose a salmon and persimmon for the two walls of the master bedroom … but on the north wall, below the full-width band of casement and fixed windows, was Neutra brown while the ceiling was white. The unchanging, stable brown (also used in the closets, to make them recede) and the white play Renaissance to the colors’ Baroque.

South salmon (left) and west, persimmon, Olan and Aida Hafley House, 1953. Photo by b.lamprecht

The original color, Olan and Aida Hafley House, Long Beach, 1953. Photo by barbara lamprecht

In the Taylor House, Glendale, 1964, the walls of the bathroom were beautiful gradations of darker blue offsetting lighter yellow green, a precise color scheme that project architect John Blanton created after much trial and error, based on the client’s general wish for blue and green in the two bathrooms. While the colors in the bathroom are original, the current owner replaced the tile in each, with equally beautiful results. In the master bathroom, one can slide the glass wall away and commune directly with the groundcover’s dark, glossy greens and the rough bark of the oak trees just outside of the sunken shower/tub … talk about sensual.

The Maurice and Marceil Taylor House, master bath. Photo by bml.

Taylor House, master bath. Photo by bml.

In another home, and I honestly forget which one, Neutra was led to a then-unpainted bedroom wall by the little daughter of his clients.  It was to be her room. “What color would you like?” he asked, looking down at her and her turquoise snow jacket (the ones many little girls wore in the ‘50s and ‘60s, usually with hoods trimmed with fake white fur.) “Would you like the wall that color?” She was delighted.

In the Pescher Villa, Wuppertal, Germany, 1968, the bright yellow tile in a bathroom lifts one’s spirits on an overcast day. Outside, the entrance to the house would be soberly commanding without the red-painted steel work but it wouldn’t be lively. Here the color’s task is to knit the white and “Neutra brown” stucco planes, glass, and grauwache sandstone walls into a crisp, harmonious composition.

The Guenther Pescher Villa bathroom. Wuppertal, Germany, 1968. Photo by bml.

Pescher Villa bathroom. Photo by bml.

Pescher Villa bathroom. Photo by bml.

Mr. Guenther Pescher with his favorite statue. Photo by bml.

Mr. Pescher at home. Photo by bml.

In an undated, one-page, typed paper titled A Colorless Building Or Sculpture Is An Abstraction Which Was Not Known To Early Man And Particularly Not The Greeks, Neutra wrote this on color:

Color was – as in nature – a part of form, formal solution, and formal proportion. Color was no afterthought or afterchoice. It was – as it is in the reality of physiological and psychosomatic experiencing – “part and parcel.” I saw in Agrigentum[5] a temple with the triglyph and metope-frieze lacking, and it looked in better proportion to the columns, than with the frieze that had been spared on the other front of the ruin. Suddenly it dawned on me that I had – on the other side – been looking at a colorless remnant. No more were the red triglyphs between the blue “holes” of the metope against which the reliefs had been eliminated. All proportions had changed!”

Of course, it was actually the great German architect and theorist, Gottfried Semper, who drew attention to the Greeks’ use of color in temples. Pigment and paint could become a “bodiless coating” that permitted a dematerialized architecture of pure form, Semper’s highest ideal, as scholar Harry Mallgrave has pointed in his biography, Gottfried Semper: Architect of the 19th Century.

Color, whether in architecture or nature is a powerful tool to alter perception and mood, as any hospital designer, artist, graphic designer, etc. etc. can attest. It is an endless topic. When Neutra wrote about color and eye fatigue over half a century ago, it was a different world than our modern urban paradigm today, in which visual jinglejangle is unrelenting. Perhaps such stimuli will become our own chlorophyll, given some thousands of years.

I’ve been intrigued by the recent attacks on preservation, initially by Rem Koolhaus/OMA’s exhibition Cronocaos at the New Museum in New York, which closed June 6th; the title, presumably, grafting chronos, time, to chaos. Many articles and blogs posted responses to this provocative exhibition, but the NYT op-ed piece by Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Death by Nostalgia (June 10, 2011) caught my attention because I was baffled by what she identified as preservation’s major problem – the amateur, while I see it elsewhere. Here’s a small part of what she writes:

In other words, preservation morphed into a four-headed monster: a planning tool, a design review tool, a development tool and a tool to preserve genuinely valuable old neighborhoods and buildings. Today decisions about managing urban development are frequently framed as decisions about what and what not to preserve, with little sense of how those decisions affect the surrounding neighborhood.

Worse, these decisions are mostly left to the whims of overly empowered preservation boards, staffed by amateurs casting their nets too widely and indiscriminately. And too many buildings are preserved not because of their historic value or aesthetic significance, but because of political or economic deal-making.

While Koolhaus/OMA’s exhibition indicated that preservation encourages a lack of authenticity in favor of a sanitized (mostly white) past, Goldhagen takes aim at preservationists as narrow-minded amateurs with no sense of how local actions are affecting a wider community. Briefly, my experience when acting as a historic preservation specialist and a professional architectural historian, is quite the opposite. First, we are professionals who must be qualified to assess and analyze cultural resources in a variety of ways: why is a landscape, building, or site worth preserving? Is it because of the designer, because someone famous did something significant here, or because this place represents some broad cultural purpose? Is this the only place like it, or are there hundreds like it? Once we answer that, which can be an amazing adventure in research, our job is to distill that understanding in language that is rational, progresses logically and if need be, to stand up in court. Second, the range of preservation is changing, deliberately and methodically reaching out to minorities and wider definitions of what is valuable to a community: Maravilla Handball Court in East L.A.; China Alley in Ventura, John and Alice Coltrane’s house on Long Island may be as important to preserve as a thoroughbred example of the International Style. Third, the boards I deal with are populated with both ‘amateurs’ — if you mean local members of a community who care enough about their surroundings to show up for long, unpaid meetings– and architects, some of whom are I would vouchsafe are just as sensitive, creative, irreverent and dynamic as the Koolhauses of the world. Preservation boards need ‘amateurs’ because what we as environmental consultants do needs to be transparent to a community and population, and because amateurs force professionals to communicate in language that is forthright and not elitist: like a democracy, it’s all about checks and balances. Fourth, the regulations of preservation are far more flexible and collaborative than most unversed in these regulations may be aware. Fifth, the concept of ‘authenticity’ is one we in the profession think about and agonize over all the time.

Take mid-century Modern. I for one am bemused when Formica, that emblem of postwar optimism that spoke to the “good” in plastics and the chutzpah of creating radical architecture with humble, inexpensive materials, is removed as oh-so-tacky, disappearing into the blender of homogenized contemporary good taste: Off-white engineered quartz and high-end woods replace the Formica and paint-grade wood, and that’s just the beginning of the sanitizing blade in some of the houses whose interiors are gutted. I love Duravit fixtures and Fleetwood or Metal Window Corps. windows as well as the next person, but does everything have to look like a Dwell feature? Why not acknowledge the staying power of Formica (I can’t believe I’m arguing for plastic meant to look like walnut, that moment in The Graduate) or build a new house and riddle it with as much good taste as much as you like? As one veteran of World War II, USC-trained Lyman Ennis, buddy of Connie Buff, Cal Straub, Don Hensman, told me not long before he died, “We had just won a war. How difficult could it be to build a house?” That kind of optimism, embodied by the $10-per-square-foot post-and-beam pre-Title 24 and seismic requirements that would weigh down the breathtakingly slender but elastic wood framing … that peculiar optimism is long gone, replaced by irony, and maybe the paralyzing self-conscious anxiety of getting it right.. perhaps that is why we both worship mid-century and clean it up, make it pretty, making it cool.  There are seven terms that speak to a property’s integrity, or authenticity: location, design, workmanship, association, feeling, setting and materials. Feeling, especially, is subjective and has to be thoughtfully, carefully, thought through because though touchy-feely at first glance, it is also a technical term. What kind of feeling does a property convey? Does it feel authentic, or does it feel wrong, somehow, too perfect, all its authenticity banished? Does that example of postwar architecture convey that feeling of optimism … through, for example, preserving that Formica?

And if something does need to change to meet 21st century needs, again, my experience is that regulations do have oxygen, and the process of deciding what can be jettisoned or altered can be collaborative and thoughtful, eliciting great philosophical discussions and imaginative moves. If you visit the ultra-famous Eames House, apart from how remarkable it is, what also strikes me, unexpectedly, is the sense of humility and simplicity that percolates through a construct that feels an awful lot like joy. And what contributes to that feeling of humility leads us back to analyzing materials, workmanship, and design, and how they work in concert to convey that feeling.

I see the problem not with amateur status of boards ill-equipped to judge. Rather, I see the problem far earlier in the process. A client hires an architect to do X, who does so, and along the way each invests the other with the emerging deliverable, a project, which increasingly gets hard-lined, reified, and paid for. This is then presented as a fait accompli to a board. While the architects are working and the developers are running around dealing with entitlements and investors, someone remembers that the area where the new project will be located has to be evaluated to see whether any cultural resources might be affected, e.g. demolished or impacted in some deleterious way. Because all this is happening in parallel but with no collaboration, by the time it reaches a review board, either a planning board or a citizens’ review board, everyone involved with the project has a significant amount of expertise, time and money invested in a piece of knowledge or a vision.  Lines get drawn, and everyone runs around being shocked, shocked, that A didn’t know that the context had to be addressed, and B can’t embrace a truly great project, etc., etc. Everyone runs around with bandaids, heels dig in, more time and money is spent, and finally, when the project gets built, it is watered down because the changes are superficial and last minute, no one’s happy, and still the public is shocked, shocked, that X-1 or -2 got built, how could “they (and by this point everyone is up for blame: architects, preservationists, historians, developers, planners) get away with this?”

What is missing is a brief discussion at the beginning of the project, in which a short report indicates there may be some historic resources in the area. If the resource is a building, is there a way to exploit existing proportions, materials, rhythms, datum lines, landscape or plantings, other subtle relationships that might inform an addition or renovation? … tasks that architects often impose on themselves even with a blank canvas, as any student who had to use the lessons of D’Arcy Thompson’s “On Growth and Form,” Edmund Husserl’s lessons in seeing familiar things in new ways, or Ernst Haeckel’s revelations on natural forms. (Thompson was a favorite assignment in the late 19th century at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, affiliated with the École, where renowned Classicists such as Richard Hunt and Charles McKim trained as well as brilliant iconoclasts Louis Sullivan and Henry Hobson Richardson; Thompson is au courant today in schools like the Southern California Institute of Architecture, aka Sci-Arc, and Woodbury University in Burbank, both influential institutions in architectural education.)

In my opinion, preservation preserves diversity. It doesn’t necessarily eliminate change or growth and rarely can stop demolition if that is what a community finally determines it wants, issuing a “Statement of Overriding Concerns” after the transparent process of evaluation and comment. Preservation is also a question of scale: a community left to developers is a promise of slick, branded, ultimately flaccid homogeneity, diminishing our sense of a rich, colorful, diverse history with a thinner historical fabric in which the remaining players have, unfairly, more symbolic work to do, and maybe more than they were ever intended to bear. Or it means leaving the Formica-that-will-not-die in place.

The Taylor House, Richard Neutra, 1964, Glendale. View looking south. Photo by Larry Schaffer.

©barbaralamprecht2011 The text below is based on a talk I gave on Saturday June 11, 2011, for the Society of Architectural Historians, Southern California Chapter, at Richard Neutra’s Maurice and Marceil Taylor House, 1964, in Glendale, California. It was a beautiful day. The full-height glass walls on the north were thrown open so the 40-odd people could arrange themselves as they wanted, some standing a little removed on the sheltered terrace or under the oak tree off the living room, some draped on sofas and chairs, perched on the wide hearth of the floating brick fireplace, or sat on the floor. [1]

Breaking the box, thinking outside of the box, being boxed in: all are phrases that speak to the inflexibility of “the box.” In Modernist architecture, however, the right-angled box — at least dissembled and unskinned — was intended to be liberating, not confining. Some of Southern California’s finest “boxes” are a stone’s throw from where we’re sitting: in the Pasadena/Glendale area alone, there is the 1976 Art Center College of Design, by Craig Ellwood and Jim Tyler; Ellwood’s Don and Salley Kubly House, 1964; a host of excellent post-war projects by “USC School” architects such as Buff, Straub and Hensman, Whitney Smith, Wayne Williams, Thornton Ladd; and houses by Richard Neutra and his protégés Gregory Ain and Harwell Hamilton Harris. What distinguishes a Modernist box from the rest of boxes in architectural history is that the Modernist box is bigger than its actual footprint, as a Mies van der Rohe (1886 – 1969) anecdote illuminates: As the chief organizer of the 1927 experimental Weissenhof Siedlung housing complex in Stuttgart, Mies laid out the overall scheme, which included houses designed by great names such as Peter Behrens, Walter Gropius, Mies, Le Corbusier, Hans Poelzig, Max and Bruno Taut, Johannes Oud. Mies made a model of the hillside site plan: rows of little white flat-topped boxes, some bigger, some smaller, depending on whether they were single-family, multi-unit, or apartment blocks. Some were free-standing, some were detached, all staggered so that no box lined up with another above it or below it, and all were oriented parallel to the slope of the hill. The deliberately staggered configuration of volumes of different sizes, heights, and distances from one another collectively defined the little boxes as unified urban fabric, which a rigid alignment would not have achieved.

Postcard, Weissenhof Siedlung Stuttgart, posted by Rafael Carzola

When a colleague on the organizing committee, a devout Modernist, challenged Mies’s apparently arbitrary scheme as not having enough Sachlichkeit,[2] Mies acidly retorted, “You seem to understand a plan only in the old sense, as so many separate building parcels. The model was meant to convey a general idea, not actual sizes. I believe it is necessary to strike … a new course. I believe that the new dwelling must have an effect beyond its four walls [my italics].”[3]That is, these boxes engaged the outdoors – the landscape, the sky – and other surrounding buildings — in new ways, and do so in ways that required elastic consideration of how much space there should be around a building. In effect, through the intentionally fluid location of his buildings on the site, Mies was asserting his individual will, acting against Sachlichkeit’s more formulaic and comforting retreat into the “functional.” Obviously buildings throughout history, such as free-standing Greek temples dramatically sited in a larger complex against a backdrop of rugged hills or contemporary structures ala Zaha Hadid, have always had a visual “effect beyond its four walls.” But these are not houses, let alone houses for the working or middle classes. Even Renaissance palazzos, villas for the rich with facades of masonry walls and “punched-in” windows, faced streets or squares with principal elevations. But the presence of glass, and a lot of it, complicates that effect. Glass dictated a far more calibrated relationship with their environment, but equally if not more importantly, the inhabitant also now has a much more complex relationship with whatever lay beyond the building footprint, which is what I’m exploring in this essay. The Modernists accomplished this larger Miesian effect in two ways: first, through transparency, by using ganged glass casement windows or with full-height glass walls, or both. Full-height windows elicit different psychological and physiological responses than casement windows, whose sills are about waist height; they also differ from highly placed clerestory height windows. Floor-to-ceiling glass assumes the full impact of a landscape or a view. The engagement with the outdoors is unmitigated, without shirking, no matter whether that provokes dread at full exposure or delight in expansiveness. And without a shield or window covering, this happens day and night.

Dana-Thomas House, Springfield, Illinois, Frank Lloyd Wright, 1904. Source: U.S. Library of Congress.

The second thing Modernists did was to dissemble the box into volumes and then into discrete lines or planes. Initially, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867 – 1959) started to break the box by stretching it in one dimension, almost making it seem ready to rip in tension. Soon he broke the box in terms of volumes that thrust out into the landscape, typically connected by narrow necks and bridges, beginning in the late 19^th century with his houses in Springfield, Illinois, such as the Susan Lawrence Dana House, begun 1899, completed 1904. Certainly the Bauhaus in Dessau and the beautiful “Master” houses for faculty Lionel Feiniger, Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky/Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, all designed by Walter Gropius in 1926, together are the collective celebrity of the idea of the white 20^th century box dissembled into discreet volumes of glass and concrete. The “free plan” anchored Le Corbusier’s Five Points of Architecture, which he developed in the early 1920s. And surely one of the world’s most beautiful boxes is that of architect formidable Eileen Gray, whose E1027, Roquebrune near Monaco, with Jean Badovici, 1930, is bravely but brilliantly sited on the side of a precipice. And then there is Michael Hopkin’s exquisitely small-boned steel box of a house in Hampstead Heath, London, 1976:

Hopkins House, Hopkins Architects, Hampstead, 1976. Photo by Steve Cadman and used with permission, Flixkr

This idea of a connected group of volumes has retained its currency for architects for decades, such as the houses of the Case Study House architect and educator, the high-spirited Ralph Rapson.[4] He seemed unendingly curious about how to take apart a volume and put it back together, evident in his postwar and mid-century houses (I just returned from a trip to the Midwest, and stumbled on the famous University Grove, a group of 103 stellar Modern houses built for University of Minnesota faculty and staff on a leafy plot of land, including nine houses by Rapson and many more by the brilliant Close Associates, Winston Close and Elizabeth Scheu.[5])

Livermore House, view east. B. Lamprecht

Livermore House, Ralph Rapson, 1968, University Grove, MN. View northeast. B Lamprecht

We can see that dissembled series of volumes at the Community Facilities Planners Complex in South Pasadena, Smith and Williams, 1958. Instead of designing one monolithic structure housing offices, the architects created four intimate interlocking one- and two-story buildings interwoven with outdoor landscaped “rooms” by landscape Architects (Garrett) Eckbo, Dean, Austin and Williams:

Community Facilities Planners Complex, Smith and Williams, 1958. Photo by Barbara Lamprecht

Or we can see the idea of the dissembled volume, with far more opportunities to reach into the landscape and to avail the building of sunlight and air in the recently restored Zonnestraal Sanatorium [for tuberculosis], Jan Duiker, 1931, in Hilversum, Holland. I saw it in 2009 when the utterly abandoned buildings of glass and concrete were being restored, but Raymond Neutra, RJN’s son, photographed it quite recently in its newly restored glory:

Zonnestraal Sanatorium, Jan Duiker, 1931, Hilversum, the Netherlands. Photo by Raymond Neutra.

On the other side of the ocean, especially in Germany, Austria and Holland, Wright’s 1911 watershed Wasmuth Portfolio of drawings, preceded by the March 1908 issue of Architectural Record, which published Wright drawings and photographs, was enormously influential in breaking the box, certainly for Rudolf M. Schindler (1887 – 1953), and Neutra. The other major influence was the de Stijl art movement founded in 1917 in Amsterdam. De Stijl, which comes from stile, or post, was based on sources including the ideas of Dutch mathematician M. H. J. Schoenmaekers (1875 – 1944); the architectural writings, drawings, and projects of Wright and Hendrik Berlage (1856 – 1934); and the religious philosophy of Theosophy. De Stijl held a similar understanding of “space” as did the Theosophists – that is, the “underlying and absolute All,” and the primary substance of Modern architecture. This was a view held by Schindler, who famously wrote “the most important building material of the 20^thcentury is space itself”).

Rhythms of a Russian Dance, Theo van Doesburg, 1918. Source: Freebase.

This primacy of space leads to the third component of Modernist boxes, which is the concept of the flowing, uninterrupted space, especially demonstrated by the paintings of Bauhaus masters Klee, Kandinsky, Theo van Doesburg, and Piet Mondrian. Van Doesburg and Mondrian’s abstractions of nature, music, and city life were rendered in color, shapes, and straight lines of different lengths that did not intersect, which underscored the idea of a space free to move, especially diagonally, and to be everywhere simultaneously, a posture assumed by Modern architecture. Two decades before Wright, the great 19^th century architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White introduced flowing space in the firm’s “radical spatial reconception of the domestic interior, in their huge, sweeping Shingle Style houses typically sited on the shores of the American East Coast,” as critic Martin Filler has pointed out. This reconception, based on centuries-old Japanese vernacular architecture,  was a “breathtaking expansiveness quite the opposite of typically compartmentalized Victorian residences, in which every room was a veritable room unto itself.”[6] (It should be added that the Victorians and turn-of-the-century arbiters of design mediated space very precisely to regulate social relationships, especially gender, status, and age. The McKim, Mead, and White work was therefore more radical in disorienting these often rigid spatial relationships.) The new, voluptuous sense of space in their work was in turn organized and disciplined by light wooden grilles above the openings.[7] And almost a half century before McKim, Mead and White, Catherine Beecher Stowe’s floor plan for the new American House, published in her Treatise on Domestic Economy, 1841, is riveting in opening up the ground floor to be altogether more flexible and functional, somewhat in the spirit of the Rietveld-Schröder House in Utrecht, Gerrit Rietveld, 1924, with its sliding and movable parts. However, this new, exhilarating sense of spaciousness in this early McKim, Mead and White work could not be completed, i.e. could not be realized, without the second, critical addition of “broad expanses of multipaned windows, often on two sides of the room, which in many cases gave onto the firm’s signature enveloping verandas” [just as the glass walls of the Taylor House opens to the terrace, as do thousands of walls in pedigreed and in millions of lesser status houses]. The fourth factor in facilitating the dissemblage of the box is the denial of a static frontal elevation; the denial of single-point perspective and the vanishing point and the rise of the diagonal. In a pinwheel plan, as seen in Mies’s Brick Country Villa, 1924, or Neutra’s Kaufmann Desert House, 1946, space immediately moves. It is no longer shepherded along in straight lines, halted or rigidly constrained. No longer static, space can move beyond hierarchy, diagonally or back and forth.

Brick Country Villa, Mies van der Rohe, 1924

Another way to consider the emergence of the diagonal is the right angle, where two straight perpendicular lines converge. The hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is implied. With glass walls that meet at right angles (e.g., at the corners of walls) that diagonal “hypotenuse” view is realized. One can see this in the sweeping glass corners of Neutra’s early employer, architect Erich Mendelsohn, in his commercial work, especially the Berliner Tageblatt building (1923), which Neutra worked on. One can easily also see at least the desire for a diagonal view in the windows aligned with corners in Arts and Crafts architecture of the early 20^thcentury. Obviously, we can see that idea of the implicit diagonal and free space in plan here in the Taylor House. But the free space is controlled. For example, the longitudinal axis on the east, private side of the house, is glassed at both ends as a strong linear anchor.

Taylor House, longitudinal axis. View south. Photo by barbara lamprecht

This ordered, traditional strategy provides a sweeping view through the entire length of the house and out of it, a very “Julius” moment.[8] Dancing against that axis are dynamic diagonal views and paths. In the language of environmental psychology, Neutra proffers “affordances,” or opportunities, to move axially or diagonally within this space, movement that in turn extends to the landscape and to the “natural” ornament of plantings, leaves, rough bark, clouds, which both animate the space and orient our visual and neural systems to scale and place. That, ultimately, is the point: physical and emotional well-being. If a building goes beyond its footprint in the precise way that Neutra designed, it allows the inhabitant, at a very primal level, to feel more secure, more connected to place, and assured of what is happening in the area beyond the walls. That ancient assurance, of the ability to apprise our environment, allows us to defend ourselves if necessary, but also provides us the affordance, the opportunity, to concentrate on other things that require more intellectual work, more neural activity.                            Taylor House. Floor Plan w/ longitudinal and diagonal axes. Image barbara lamprecht

In this very rectilinear box, you can see specific trajectories for diagonal movement in the path from the carport south to the living area, a private path, and then to the outdoors; or from the front door west to the living area and then to the outdoors. In Neutra’s Ward House, 1939, the relationship between the fireplace, glass wall, and outdoor space speaks directly to the blurring of the boundary between indoors and outdoors. Neutra doesn’t locate the fireplace in the standard “hearth” location, centered on a wall, where the descendants of hairy humans gather round, well protected from nature. No, he does something that would be labeled crazy anywhere a real winter exists. Neutra’s gesture proclaims not only a benevolent climate — this is Southern California, could be East Africa, this fireplace announces — but also embraces the outdoors and the natural landscape as an equal partner in the act of dwelling, even at night. The brickwork is even painted white, just as the exterior stucco is, drawing the outdoors into the living room. Many other Neutra houses follow this pattern — including the Taylor House, in which the fireplace floats parallel to and a meter or so away from east window wall and the threatened Kronish House, 1955, in Beverly Hills:

The Ward House, Richard Neutra, Los Angeles, 1939. Photo by Julius Shulman. Print location: University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Special Collections. Julius Shulman images now owned by Getty Research Institute. Low-res scan source: Richard Neutra - Complete Works by Barbara Lamprecht.

The Kronish House, Richard Neutra, Beverly Hills, 1955. Fireplace. View west. Photo by Julius Shulman and used courtesy of Dion Neutra.

For Neutra, the Taylor House is no less organic for its precise right-angles. That is, “organic” in the sense of the complex functional feedback and interaction of parts characteristic of living “organisms.” The building of inorganic materials was nonetheless holistic. The relationship between naturalscape and builtscape created a “thrilling dialectic,” in Neutra’s words. Most of us inhabit boxes, or decorated sheds, as architect/authors/urban planners Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown and Steven Izenour would say, some sheds and boxes more opaque than others.[9] If we think about inhabiting a box, they can be closed, in which case from inside we would have no sense of anything beyond the walls, unless we are inhabit a house with the aforementioned atrium. In the 19^th century, not only did large plate glass not exist, but Nature was still too volatile to be trusted all the time, although theorist/architects such as Andrew Jackson Downing extolled the virtues of country living in his cottage designs. In lieu of woodland living, by and large out of reach for an increasingly industrialized society, the Victorians dragged the outdoors in, taming it with dried, dead bits of nature stuck in vases or covering their walls with patterns of the outdoors. Nature was other, and was only invited indoors when it behaved properly.[10] (Simultaneously, restorative garden cemeteries and public parks, newly available to the working and middle classes, became popular as appropriate venues for outdoor activities, a reaction to the Industrial Revolution that fouled nature and blackened the lungs of city dwellers and factory workers.) Nature was not the only thing a closed box could control. Privacy was another, especially if the world beyond the walls was increasingly incoherent. As the famous Viennese architect, iconoclast, and critic Adolf Loos declared, “The building should be dumb outside …” His early 20th century houses — his white boxes — are closed not because nature is the problem but because people are. His exterior walls embodied hostility and mistrust to a different “other,” e.g., the hypocrisies of the Hapsburg Empire and the Viennese public. Ironically, the Industrial Revolution also led to the perfection of manufacturing large-span plate glass. No longer a luxury, huge openings could frame views and permit abundant exposure to light, sun and nature. Like sanitoria, such access to the outdoors confounded dark dank spaces, bacteria, and killer airborne disease. Not long after my lecture I read a recent New York Review of Books article that startled me both in timing and in content. It noted that “organisms have skin, but their total environments do not. It is by no means clear how to delineate the effective environment of an organism.”[11] The author, geneticist Richard Lewontin, even included an old children’s song:

… or not, if you’re a house with a lot of glass. Glass makes opaque skin a transparent membrane. A close friend of the owner of the Taylor House, the late sculptor/artist Gordon Matta Clark, would take a saw to create large holes in opaque boxes to expose us, if jaggedly, to the inner workings, the secrets opacity hides.) We don’t need a blowtorch or Sawzall with glass. It is a multivalent phenomenon. Looking into a glass house makes one a voyeur. To be inside such a house looking out has no such predatory connotation but rather is a wholesome exercise. Glass is the means or extending one’s self beyond the building envelope into nature, just as the building itself is having “an effect beyond its four walls.” In Modernism’s hands, glass afforded both access to nature and privacy, as the Taylor House demonstrates with its opaque street facade and its utter openness to nature for its inhabitants. The house is indeed a free-standing rectangular box of 1,350 square feet, but as a work of architecture it demonstrates how the act of perception can be altered to create feelings of expansion, or what the environmental psychologists Neutra followed so closely would call “prospect,” meaning looking out above your surroundings from a commanding position … afforded by glass walls. In contrast, the kitchen and the bedroom/dressing area, with their walls of warm mahogany, create the counterweight to prospect in the quality called “refuge,” or shelter, or what Gaston Bachelard called the cave. Both prospect and refuge are necessary to us.  Neutra delivered a small space that feels expansive, not cramped, because it has an effect beyond its four walls. As he often said, his goal with small houses was to “stretch space” through another set of tools, Gestalt aesthetics, where dark and light paint were enlisted on behalf of his goal of prospect and refuge. But why a box? Why not curves, aren’t they more organic? Rectilinearity is as old as the Roman axis of cardo maximus and decumanus maxima, the north-south and east-west axis, respectively. Legend has it that Roman seers had to first examine the entrails of beasts in areas where a Roman city or military outpost was contemplated. This may sound superstitious but in fact is quite pragmatic. Bright, fat entrails meant food and water were nearby, portending a prosperous economy. And practically, standardized patterns for stone, wood, and metal are easier to use in design and in construction, and last longer than sun-dried bricks or mud. Neutra’s architecture is to a degree standardized. It acknowledged and acquiesced to Western building traditions, but his appreciation for the straight line and right angle (which in fact was sometimes tempered by a radiused curve, seen in some early interiors) goes deeper than that. He was always searching for reasons for why things should be a certain way; his architecture always reveals itself as a profoundly intuitive art that was grounded in science. The apparently quite banal Los Angeles County Hall of Records, designed by Neutra and his erstwhile partner Robert Alexander and completed in 1961, comes to mind. A T-shaped building anchoring the north end of the city’s civic plaza, the south-facing stem of the T is a massive closed box devoted to the storage of paper records, today a consummate symbol of an outdated paradigm. But for the rest of the T, occupied by hundreds of civil servants, planners, clerks, and policy makers, among other consultants Neutra hired a “kinetic ophthalmologist” to assist the design team in understanding how tracking the sunlight and changes in daylight over the day could ultimately be correlated to worker productivity and well-being. (If I hadn’t read the phrase and the consultant’s name, I wouldn’t have believed there was such a profession, but Neutra managed to find one – or upgrade a regular opthamologist — to sway politicians.) Calibrated exposure to the outdoors was necessary for the building to act organically and to promote human health, emotional and/or physical. “Rectangularity, the intersection of the plumb and the level, is a biological fact,” Neutra said. “We have a wonderfully acute sense for it in the vestibulum of our inner ear where resides our precious sense of equilibrium. The plumb shows us precisely the direction of the pull of gravity and its relation to the water level of the horizon with which it, and the vertical, intersect in a crisp sharp emotionally satisfying right angle. Piet Mondrian was no false saint. A sense for it [rectilinearity] has truly been grown into us by creation.” Thus, Neutra makes no apologies for the straight line, which he often extended into the natural landscape along with his famous “spider legs” to connect landscape to building. Mies didn’t apologize either, and one recalls that he appropriated the thinking of the great 19th century German architect, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who considered architecture as an abstraction of nature. In the Taylor House, the floor-to-ceiling wood storage cabinets and closets are largely massed in the core of the building, allowing, even in comparison to many of his houses, many expanses of floor to ceiling glass. And I don’t think in any other house will you feel as liberated without abandoning the feeling of shelter if you want or need it. There are very few doors to regulate privacy, a sensual editing decision, at first glance, for this older couple whose children were grown and gone. But privacy is nonetheless there, rendered spatially rather than through the use of doors. The house also faces, primarily, east-west, usually an architectural no-no. But that brings us to the trees, and to the artistic way that Neutra sited this building: I can’t imagine a more richly textured dialectic, between the angles and curves and kinks of the oak trees, that is, the squirrels’ thoroughfare, and the rhythm of the square silver-painted posts and transparent glass? Think about it: in the VDL Research House II, Neutra objected to his son Dion’s inclusion of the open-tread diagonal staircase from the upper floor to the rooftop penthouse. Here in the Taylor House, the diagonals are present but in their natural form, as part of the tree, not part of the house. The only place that is curved is near the front door, where nature slips under the glass as a small, curved pond (once water, now Japanese river stones) that compresses a Roberto Burle Marx garden into a slight and economical gesture ….

The description of the Taylor House from Richard Neutra – Complete Works (Taschen 2000):

The narrow rectangle lies on an equally narrow strip of a site sits on “a really unapproachable piece of land at the end of a dead-end street” Neutra wrote.  Surrounded by oaks, the small house is spacious, highly organized, easy-going. No attitude. What looks to be a judicious use of lines and planes unfolds into a complex integration of events that knit the house together seamlessly and created the context for dwelling. The Taylors’ children were grown. This was the couple’s pied-a-terre. In the little house, all the standard Neutra moves are here but compressed, as though the neatly rendered small stroke works just as well as the grand gesture. In plan, the private path starts from the carport to the northwest, leads to the kitchen and opens out to either an outdoor terrace on the northeast, to the dining/sitting area, or through an opening to the “book” end of the living room.  It continues flowing diagonally past this central space with its east floor-to-ceiling glass wall. The transition to the master suite begins with the fireplace. Here the path forks, either to the smaller bedroom and bath on the southwest or the master bedroom at the southeast corner.  In classic Neutra language, the over-scaled fireplace is pulled away from the window wall and placed perpendicular to it. By cantilevering it and enlarging the hearth, Neutra conferred its sense of weightlessness; he added texture by using both Roman and common red brick around a plaster firebox. Beyond the fireplace, the core of bathrooms, floor-to-ceiling cabinetry and the dressing area creates privacy for the master suite. There are few doors in the house, supplanted by other full-height mahogany built-in cabinetry throughout the entire house. Other small gestures occur at the front door (Neutra typically separated public and private access, which usually connected to the kitchen) where a simple dark burlap panel compresses space and prolongs the delay in seeing the entire living room’s wall of glass and, typically, a squirrel or two sliding and darting along the big oak branches beyond.  The dwelling stands above fairly dense suburbia, and yet once inside, privacy and a stunning up-close panorama of the oaks as well as the San Fernando Valley confer instant serenity. The master bath adds a special feature, making it feel like a rustic Japanese bath. Here one glass wall faces a sunken bathtub. One could easily rub noses with a coyote or deer drifting who inhabit the low Los Angeles mountains all around.

Glass is the membrane separating nature alert but at ease beyond the glass, observing nature alert but at ease inside the glass. View east. Photo by John Solomon.

Early rendering. Richard J.Neutra, Kronish House, 1953, pastel on paper. Courtesy Palm Springs Art Museum.

©barbaralamprecht2011

The Beverly Hills City Council meeting Tuesday, Aug. 2 turned from regular into extraordinary. The meeting began at 7:17, and the room was packed for one agenda item: the proposed ministerial demolition of the Richard Neutra’s Kronish House. After normal city business including city pensions and trees that blocked expensive view corridors, Linda Dishman, the executive director of the Los Angeles Conservancy, stepped up to the podium. She was the first of perhaps 30 speakers, some from far away but many passionate and outspoken Beverly Hills residents, all articulating variations on a theme of preserving not only this house, but also establishing a preservation ordinance for one of the few Southland cities without one.  The owner’s representatives spoke too, equipped with visuals that were a painfully obvious attempt to make the house look its worst, images with holes from asbestos! termite damage! mold!, images that were mildly amusing and somewhat irritating to any preservationist or restoration architect who had likely restored far worse. And to add insult to injury, the images were — apparently — of a guest house that Neutra had not designed. The evening twisted again when the owners previous to SODA, owners who vacated the house in April, announced that they had lawsuits pending with SODA, a statement so stunning to everyone there that Council members asked the former owner present to repeat his claim (which to my knowledge has not been substantiated.) One councilman turned to the city lawyer and asked whether a demolition permit could even be authorized if the title wasn’t clear. In any case, you could see the heads turning as people gasped to others around them … what the ….?  To the astonishment of many, expecting confrontation rather than cordial deliberation, the City fully endorsed the proposal for creating an ordinance, hopefully one that changes a “ministerial” action, i.e., an action that occurs as a matter of city law and not requiring a review, to a “discretionary” action, i.e., an action requiring review. Altogether, it was an exhilarating night that didn’t end until 12:30 am.

All this is a prelude to the below, which compares this big-boned, upscale house to others Neutra designed at roughly the same size and cost, no matter their age or location, and then compares this large 1955 residence to the very small, low-budget Perkins House, built in the same year. My goal is to discuss two different kinds of “range” Neutra demonstrated in creating big or small houses, always predicted on a specific response to a client and budget with a specific site, (which is why his houses especially far poorly in attempts to relocate them, with perhaps one exception.) What follows is still true, and was uploaded on July 21 — it’s been a very fast-paced two weeks:

Just as a prisoner is prepared for execution step by step, first numbed before the lethal injection, preliminary permits (to check and cap gas/sewer lines) have been pulled for the possible demolition of what is probably the largest and one of the most imposing houses designed by Richard Neutra in North America.

Not that preserving the work of a master is predicated on size.

Early rendering. Richard J.Neutra, Kronish House, 1953, pastel on paper. Courtesy Palm Springs Art Museum.

Completed in 1955, the 6,891-square-foot, pinwheel plan Kronish House is almost 1,100 square feet smaller than the Alfred de Schulthess House, completed a year later in 1956 – but the de Schulthess, beautifully landscaped by the great landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, is in Havana, Cuba … and in fine condition.

The De Schulthess House, Richard Neutra with Raul Alverez, Havana, Cuba, 1956. Photo courtesy of Roy Dowell and Lari Pittman.

Then there is the José Joaquín Gonzalez-Gorrondona House, 1962, designed for Venezuela’s Minister of Communications, another large-scale villa with libraries (plural), conference room, dormitories, lecture and music rooms … but that is in Caracas. Like its Latin American neighbor to the north, the South American house is also in fine condition. The Gunther Pescher Villa, 1968, in Wuppertal, Germany, is in exquisite condition, as is the Prof. Martin and Christina Rang Villa, 1961, in Königstein im Taunus.

In the U.S., the Kronish House is 900 square feet larger than the très chic Rice House, designed for Ambassador Walter and Mrs. Inger Rice and completed in 1964. There Neutra integrated the elongated structure into a precipitous site, carved into the side of a man-made island overlooking the rocky banks of the broad James River in Richmond, Virginia.

Ambassador Walter and Inger Rice House, Richmond, Virginia, 1964, Richard and Dion Neutra. Now owned by the Science Museum of Virginia. Photo by Barbara Lamprecht

In contrast to the prospective fate of the Kronish, the client, Mrs. Rice, bequeathed the house to a benevolent guardian, the Science Museum of Virginia. The Museum and a new group of Friends are restoring the property, using it for a range of programs, all with Inger’s active, supporting presence. The lines of the house are sleek and cool, typically Neutra, right?, but what is also “typical Neutra” is the full complement of nature-near elements and explicit responses for a specific client: the dance floor for the Ambassador, a floor plan that alertly responds to the social niceties and requisites of diplomacy, and a very mod bomb shelter … it was the ’60s, didn’t we all have a mod bomb shelter? Even the walkway to the basement shelter is angled so that a straight bullet shot or grenade toss was impossible.

But where the Rice House is a long two-story rectangle stretched along an outcrop of rocks and trees, the Kronish House is a pinwheel plan on steroids. A kindred spirit to the Kaufmann Desert House in Palm Springs, 1947, the arms of the Kronish House are even bigger and longer.  The interstitial spaces are filled with pools and plantings, akin to Roman villas with interior atria and impluvia, with an elaborate spatial sequence of outdoor and indoor rooms and ever-changing views of landscape and plantings.

The Kronish House, Richard Neutra, Beverly Hills, 1955. Entry. View east. Photo courtesy of Neutra Architecture.

In 1955, the same year the roughly  7,000-square-foot Kronish House was built, Neutra designed 14 built projects and one very small perfect one. The Constance Perkins House, a deStijlian composition of descending lines and planes on a hilly site in Pasadena, is a mere 1,310 square feet. It was designed as a response to a challenge from a feisty, not-so-well-endowed professor of art and art history, Dr. Perkins, who walked up to Neutra after a lecture he gave on how he could build a great house on a tight budget, and asked him to do just that. The result is a tiny house with a big heart, now one of the star contributors to the Poppy Peak Historic District, listed in 2010 in the National Register of Historic Places. It is Pasadena’s newest district and one of the few in the nation devoted to residential Modernism.

Perkins House, Poppy Peak, Pasadena, Richard Neutra, 1955. Project architect: John Blanton. Photo by Raymond Neutra.

As I write this, the house is empty and dark. Its design strategies, its affordances, lie unknown and unexploited. They cannot support the life of an inhabitant or a family as intended. Use it or lose it, your trainer will say. In a Neutra dwelling, those strategies are rendered with precision in section, plan, and elevation to allow someone to accomplish their life however they life: with cool type A clarity, with elegance, with children with jam and dirt all over … Were the Kronish to be demolished, along with “character-defining features,” those strategies, all that thought and architectural genius, are lost to history.

How can buildings like the 1962 Maslon House, Rancho Mirage, demolished overnight in 2004 (I was there the next day and at least I got two mortared bricks from the chimney, Berlin wall-esque) or the Kronish House, be eradicated without thought? How can a work by Richard Neutra, or any master architect, be demolished as a “ministerial” gesture? Have you looked up “ministerial”? Essentially, it means without judgment. Under orders. Without thought. It is the antithesis of “discretionary.”

What witness to the art of living do we lose as a society if a Neutra, or an Ain, or a Schindler, etc., etc., is demolished under orders and without thought? We tore down the storied Josef Von Sternberg villa in the early ’70s. We cannot forget Irving Gill’s masterpiece across from R.M.’s Kings Road House, 1916 – 1970.

The proposed demolition of any work anywhere by a master architect is automatically discretionary. Period.

Is Frank Lloyd Wright a Modernist? Is Fallingwater Modern?

I was stunned by one part of a short Q-and-A published May 7, 2011 in the Wall Street Journal, titled “What’s So Great About Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater?” It begins,

The fabled house Frank Lloyd Wright built for the Kaufmann family over a stream in southwestern Pennsylvania turns 75 this year. Below are bits of wisdom gleaned from ‘Fallingwater,’ a new book edited by Lynda Waggoner and with beautiful photography by Christopher Little.”

The second of four question-answers posed to the authors is,

Is Fallingwater a work of modernism?  ”No. Philip Johnson’s Glass House is a modernist building. Lever House is a modernist building. Fallingwater is modern in the sense that its form is untraditional, but not Modern in terms of belonging to a school of architecture like that propagated by Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. It is a unique example of a path championed by Wright and not taken up by the field generally: a kind of streamlined, handmade, organic architecture that at the top of its list of goals relates to, and celebrates, nature. Fallingwater was seen as beacon and highly appreciated in its time—the first M)MA show devoted to this house was in 1938, and the accolades have continued ever since—but still almost everybody went the other way.”

Fallingwater, 1935, is a modern modernist modernistic building born of modernity. Its floor plan; asymmetry; the use of the same materials inside and outside; the alternating unornamented rectilinearity of powerful solids punctured and balanced by equally powerful voids; a rhythm as bold, as self-confident and as apparently indifferent to blending in with “nature” as Eileen Gray’s E1027, 1929; Walter Gropius’s “Master Houses,” at Bauhaus Dessau, 1926; Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, 1931; Mies van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat, 1930; Richard Neutra’s Lovell Health House, 1929 … all (and all unique, by the way) speak to an original way of thinking that fully exploits 20th century issues of newly defined spatial relationships; a newly kinetic interaction between outdoors and indoors for the inhabitants;  relationship to a newly kineticized space; the radical, radical importance of the diagonal view, in which movement is implicit, countering the static view of the elevation view favored in the Renaissance or in the protocols of the École des Beaux Arts, an elevation and view compounded by symmetry; what else … oh, yes, a daring exploitation of 20th century technology in that outrageously presumptuous cantilever stretching out Bear Run, a cantilever so literally eccentric, apart from its asymmetry, that decades later it required the world’s best structural engineers to align.

Fallingwater was as handmade as any of the early Modern experimental structures that, while earnestly seeking the hallowed label of prefabrication, were largely handmade, with lumpy (handcrafted!) white stucco that was smooth only if you were two miles away. Like finally seeing a real Mondrian, with all of its beautiful “imperfections,” much of building today still remains “handmade” even when it means the final connections that make a building sing.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wasmuth Portfolios, published in Germany in 1910, were quite modern and startled all of Europe, who continued the implications of his ribbon windows, diminished ornament, “honest” use of materials, and above all his floor plans. These highly scrutinized drawings were indeed “taken up by the field generally.”

Like many of us, I imagine, I’ve pondered what, exactly, is “modern”? Is it capitalized, if so, under what circumstances? In historic preservation, “the Modern Movement” (Style No. 70) is a style; so is the “International Style” (Style No. 72.) One can also classify a building under Style No. 80, “Other,” or Style No. 90, “Mixed.” But is Modernism a style — a set of characteristic features?” If, for example, modern = flat roof, no wonder Harwell Hamilton Harris, that gentle protégé of both Wright and Neutra who often pitched his roofs, was never invited to design a house for the postwar Case Study House series. If one considers Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s essay on Wright in “Modern Architecture International Exhibition,” pp. 29 – 37, published contemporaneously with the 1932 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art unapologetically championing the International Style, one flinches at Hitchcock’s indictment, with very faint praise, of Wright’s place in Modernism, citing the “exuberance of the inappropriate ornament” in one case; and, more importantly, Wright’s isolation (“Behind Wright was only Sullivan.”) versus the hip cliques and, could one say, groupthink?, of like-informed Euros abroad. The “large areas of painted decoration on the upper surfaces [of the 1908 Coonley House] are less authentic and integral than the rambling functionalism and the native stone walls of Taliesin. Finally, “at the bottom they are classicists and he a romantic,” sticking him firmly in the nineteenth century with bosoms heaving picturesque and sublime.[1] But what might it mean to have “only” Sullivan behind one? Through his own connections and especially Dankmar Adler, his partner, Sullivan was connected to the German (!) intelligentsia, architects and engineers, who were slowly infusing the design of skyscrapers with imagination and precision. Sullivan trained at MIT and the École, but nonetheless thought his way through all that influence to give us a deeply poetical understanding of the relationship between form and function. As a preservation specialist, at my work, I label buildings as Modern in style, and know it is important to do so because in that context the nomenclature serves as an anchor that can be elaborated. Privately, I struggled, especially when I began to read Walter Benjamin’s stringent, even anguished, writings on modernity. It struck me that Modernism was not a look or a set of feature but the questions an architect raised and how he/she resolved them. What is the architect critiquing, what value does that question have in light of a particular time, place, and set of circumstances? What alternatives does the architect propose? Each Modernist, I realized, had their own critique, their own relationship to cities, to politics, to nature — landscape, geography, light, air, sun, color  – and to the role of technology and the promise, if any, of prefabrication. Unless Wright had something to critique, his architecture would not be known today. It would be accomplished, but not original. Not Modern.

I recently had a great talk with a friend, and we were agonizing and laughing over when to capitalize “modern” in addition to defining it. Like the questions the early Modernists raised for themselves, it depends on the context and the individual using the term. And later, on-line, while looking for something else (of course), I came across a great quote by Eric Owen Moss, F.A.I.A., the well-known architect and director of Sci-Arc, the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles, holder of two M.Arch. degrees, who said what I had said, but better:

Remember the appendix to Hitchcock and Johnson’s International Style? Philip told us how we could all be modern architects. And NYMOMA was his enforcer. Just follow the rules. And that codification didn’t begin the modern era. That book and his exhibit ended modern architecture as speculation, and began modernism as style. Study. Learn. Replicate. [2]

Is Frank Lloyd Wright a Modernist? Is Fallingwater Modern?

I was stunned by one part of a short Q-and-A published May 7, 2011 in the Wall Street Journal, titled “What’s So Great About Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater?” It begins,

The fabled house Frank Lloyd Wright built for the Kaufmann family over a stream in southwestern Pennsylvania turns 75 this year. Below are bits of wisdom gleaned from ‘Fallingwater,’ a new book edited by Lynda Waggoner and with beautiful photography by Christopher Little.”

The second of four question-answers posed to the authors is,

“2. Is Fallingwater a work of modernism?  No. Philip Johnson’s Glass House is a modernist building. Lever House is a modernist building. Fallingwater is modern in the sense that its form is untraditional, but not Modern in terms of belonging to a school of architecture like that propagated by Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. It is a unique example of a path championed by Wright and not taken up by the field generally: a kind of streamlined, handmade, organic architecture that at the top of its list of goals relates to, and celebrates, nature. Fallingwater was seen as beacon and highly appreciated in its time—the first MoMA show devoted to this house was in 1938, and the accolades have continued ever since—but still almost everybody went the other way.”

Fallingwater,  1935, is a modern modernist modernistic building born of modernity. Its floor plan; asymmetry; the use of the same materials inside and outside; the alternating unornamented rectilinearity of powerful solids punctured and balanced by equally powerful voids; a rhythm as bold, as self-confident and as apparently indifferent to blending in with “nature” as Eileen Gray’s E1027, 1929; Walter Gropius’s “Master Houses,” at Bauhaus Dessau, 1926; Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, 1931; Mies van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat, 1930; Richard Neutra’s Lovell Health House, 1929 … all unique, all speaking to an original way of thinking that fully exploits 20th century issues of freshly conceived spatial relationships; a newly kinetic interaction among outdoors, indoors, and human being;  the radical importance of the diagonal view in which movement is implicit, countering the static view of the elevation view favored in the Renaissance or in the protocols of the Ecole des Beaux Arts, an elevation and view compounded by symmetry; what else … oh, yes, for Wright in particular, a daring exploitation of 20th century technology in that outrageously presumptuous cantilever stretching out Bear Run, a cantilever so literally eccentric, apart from its visual asymmetry, that decades later it required the world’s best structural engineers to restore.

Fallingwater was as handmade as any of the early Modern experimental structures that, while earnestly seeking the hallowed label of prefabrication, were largely handmade, with lumpy (handcrafted!) white stucco that was smooth only if you were two miles away. Like finally seeing a real Mondrian, with all of its beautiful “imperfections,” much of building today still remains “handmade” even when it means the final connections that make a building sing.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wasmuth Portfolios, published in Germany in 1910, were quite modern and startled all of Europe, who continued the implications of his ribbon windows, diminished ornament, “honest” use of materials, and above all his floor plans. These highly scrutinized drawings were indeed “taken up by the field generally.”

Like many of us, I imagine, I’ve pondered what, exactly, is “modern”? Is it capitalized, if so, under what circumstances. In historic preservation, “the Modern Movement” (Style No. 70) is a style; so is the “International Style” (Style No. 72.) One can also classify a building under Style No. 80, “Other,” or Style No. 90, “Mixed.” But is Modernism a style — a set of characteristic features?” If, for example, modern = flat roof, no wonder Harwell Hamilton Harris, that gentle protege of both Wright and Neutra who often pitched his roofs, was never invited to design a house for the postwar Case Study House series. If one considers Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s essay on Wright in “Modern Architecture International Exhibition,” pp. 29 – 37, published contemporaneously with the 1932 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art unapologetically championing the International Style, one flinches at Hitchcock’s indictment, with very faint praise, of Wright’s place in Modernism, citing the “exuberance of the inappropriate ornament” in one case; and, more importantly, Wright’s isolation (“Behind Wright was only Sullivan.”) versus the hip cliques and, could one say, groupthink?, of like-informed Euros abroad. The “large areas of painted decoration on the upper surfaces [of the 1908 Coonley House] are less authentic and integral than the rambling functionalism and the native stone walls of Taleisin. Finally, “at the bottom they are classicists and he a romantic,” sticking him in the mid-nineteenth century with bosoms heaving picturesque and sublime. (One could argue that Mies was romantic, too, considering his search for the spiritual, the Platonic ideal form, the universal, in his work, a search that quickly shook off smaller minds intent on rigid adherence to a particular architectural platform. Mies didn’t get off scot-free, either: in the same book, Philip Johnson calls Mies, among other things, “a decorator in the best sense,” alluding to Mies’s “luxurious amounts of [high-end] materials,” employed with the “able assistance of his associate, Lilly Reich.”) But what might it mean to have “only” Sullivan behind one? Through his own connections and especially Dankmar Adler, his partner, Sullivan was connected to the German (!) intelligentsia, architects and engineers, who were slowly infusing the design of skyscrapers with imagination and precision. Sullivan trained at MIT and the Ecole, but nonetheless thought his way through all that influence to give us a deeply poetical understanding of the relationship between form and function. As a preservation specialist, at my work, I label buildings as Modern in style, and know it is important to do so because in that context the nomenclature serves as an anchor that can be elaborated. Privately, I struggled, especially when I began to read Walter Benjamin’s stringent, even anguished, writings on modernity. It struck me that Modernism was not a look or a set of feature but the questions an architect raised and how he/she resolved them. What is the architect critiquing, what value does that question have in light of a particular time, place, and set of circumstances? What alternatives does the architect propose? Each Modernist, I realized, had their own critique, their own relationship to cities, to politics, to nature — landscape, geography, light, air, sun, color  – and to the role of technology and the promise, if any, of prefabrication. Unless Wright had something to critique, his architecture would not be known today. It would be accomplished, but not original. Not Modern.

I recently had a great talk with a friend, and we were agonizing and laughing over when to capitalize “modern” in addition to defining it. Like the early Modernists themselves, it depends on the context and the individual using the term. And later, on-line, while looking for something else (of course), I came across a great quote by Eric Owen Moss, F.A.I.A., the well-known architect, director of Sci-Arc, the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles, holder of two M.Arch. degrees, who said what I had said, but better:

Remember the appendix to Hitchcock and Johnson’s International Style? Philip told us how we could all be modern architects. And NYMOMA was his enforcer. Just follow the rules. And that codification didn’t begin the modern era. That book and his exhibit ended modern architecture as speculation, and began modernism as style. Study. Learn. Replicate.

Wie Baut Amerika. Stuttgart: Julius Hoffman, 1927

I lectured on Richard Neutra’s own ‘crossroad’ in America, Chicago, where he arrived “one drizzly morning at the Illinois Central depot” in 1924: Chicago, where Frank Lloyd Wright, Adolf Loos, Louis Sullivan, and Jane Addams all converged in that

Pescher House, garden meadow elevation. Photo by BLamprecht

great city where the American heartland met  the steel skyscraper and fell in love … Please see http://www.wbez.org/story/barbara-lamprecht-cross-pollination-american-and-european-architecture-shown-through-work-rich

The  flawlessly sited 4,124-square-foot 1958 Connell House by Richard Neutra may be demolished in favor of a  11,933 (12,000) -square-foot house, downsized from a total 16,385 square feet proposed in December. The Neutra occupies the east end of  what is a transcendent 2.13 acre site — to the west is the rugged Pacific coastline, while the iconic Cypress Point Golf Course wraps the south and east views … it doesn’t get closer to heaven than this.

Below is a letter I’ve written to the Planning Commission, Monterey County, and urge you to consider writing one, too. The photos are by Dr. Anthony Kirk; below my  letter is the link to the December agenda item listing the many permissions  the new mansion would require.

The proposal recalls the demolition of the expansive, Frank Sinatra-chic 1962 Maslon House, with an important exception. The Maslon was also flawlessly sited (and thus doomed), the broad site jutting into a commanding view of an exclusive golf course in Rancho Mirage on two sides. It was razed for its trouble in 2002 in a ministerial (not requiring review, though it should have been evaluated for significance) and surprise move virtually overnight. I walked the chaotic ruin the next morning, and took a small section of the chimney, two bricks worth, home. The Connell House, in contrast to the lost Maslon House, does require review. That is the important exception, and our window of opportunity.

February 1, 2012

Ms. Delinda Robinson

Monterey County Planning Department

168 W. Alisal St., 2nd floor

Salinas, CA 93901

Re: Connell House

Dear Ms. Robinson,

I am writing to on behalf of the Connell House, designed by Richard J. Neutra (1892 – 1970) and completed in 1958.

Allow me to introduce myself. As the author of Richard Neutra – Complete Works, and Neutra – Selected Projects (Taschen, 2000, 2004), I am a scholar of Neutra’s works, numbering some 450 projects worldwide, and am completing a Ph.D. on his work at the University of Liverpool. Professionally, I am a qualified architectural historian according to the Secretary of the Interior Standards 36 CFR Part 61. Trained as an architect with an M.Arch. degree, both privately and as Senior Architectural Historian, ICF International, Los Angeles, I evaluate buildings for historic significance for lead agencies and developers; assist architects with interpreting the Standards; prepare National Register and Landmark nominations, among other duties typical of my profession. I am writing you in my capacity as an expert on Neutra’s works, though I apply professional standards, objectivity, and expertise in considering his projects.

Given his prolific contribution to 20^th century architecture, while undoubtedly a master architect, it is nonetheless unwise to assume anything a master architect designed is worthy of National Register consideration, as the Register guidelines for criteria remind us. Before I received word of potential demolition of the Connell House from Dr. Anthony Kirk, I had only a superficial acquaintance with the dwelling, primarily for writing the Complete Works. But the more I considered the house, the more I am convinced that Monterey County can be proud of having a highly accomplished example of Neutra’s work in its midst, an aesthetically compelling, spatially complex house perfectly wedded to its site.

Apart from Neutra’s well-known books such as Survival Through Design and Nature Near, both championing the requisite of nature in an architecture tailored to essential human needs, he also wrote a book directed at laypeople titled Mystery and Realities of the Site. Through this poetic little volume dense with images, he taught how building and landscape could be integrated to create an indelible experience on behalf of the environment as well as the occupant, delivering a compressed building footprint that nonetheless conferred a sense of expansiveness and tranquility for its inhabitants. The Art Connell House acquits Neutra’s convictions in both arenas addressed by these books. Ironically, his acute attention to site (he was renowned for helping clients to choose sites, even walking the site with his clients to evaluate it for both day as well as night conditions) now threatens these houses: because the site is so exquisite and often generous in size, the house itself becomes an impediment to development, typically a much larger dwelling.

The two-level Art Connell House exemplifies Neutra’s signature trademarks in its careful asymmetric composition of volumes and opposing opaque (stucco) and transparent (glass) planes. Roof planes of disparate sizes, adding visual interest, extend over those areas where protection from the sun is important. In its resolution of volumetric complexity, the house can be favorably compared with the 1957 Sorrells House, Shoshone, and the 1961 Villa Rang, Königstein, Germany.

Of special note is Neutra’s exploitation of the sharply sloping site. Here, the user is led down a right-angled path, slowing the procession into the house (a strategy dating back to his 1930 trip to Japan). He placed the private wing below the larger living area, largely hidden by the discrete front entry, a move similar to his design for the 1936 Kun House, Los Angeles, which is sited on a canyon. In the Art Connell House, the long elevation, containing both the upper living areas and lower bedroom levels, faces the ocean to the west. The bedroom wing steps back below the deck above, affording more privacy, protecting these areas from the western sun but also allowing use in inclement weather, another Neutra strategy in pragmatically but artfully wedding indoors and outdoors. This west elevation can be favorably compared with the 1962 Gonzales-Gorrondona House, Caracas, Venezuela, built for a government official, and the 1958 Rados House, San Pedro, designed for a wealthy ship builder. (Images of these houses are on-line or are in Complete Works.)

The bedroom room, below, is recessed below, affording shade from the western sun. Neutra often used tempered Masonite for portions of exteriors, here painted panels below bedroom windows.

Typical is the varying use of full-height and partial-height glass walls, defining primary view and secondary spaces; planes that extend into the landscape, both connecting building to site and affording privacy; a dual indoor-outdoor fireplace located at a pivotal location; the use of tempered Masonite, here painted given the ocean salt, for exterior base panels below some windows, and a virtually intact open plan interior. While his inclusion of a central courtyard, providing a gathering area sheltered from the window, is not typical, he employed a similar courtyard in the Flavin House, Los Angeles, completed the same year as the Connell House, 1958, but lacking such a dramatic site.

The architects for the 1992 addition/alteration on the south end of the house, located well away from the primary elevations, should be commended for one of the most thoughtful and compatible additions to a work by master architect I’ve ever seen. This later work exploits the footprint of a rear, little-seen service yard. The large south-facing picture window of the addition is framed by the surrounding wall, distinguishing it from Neutra’s fenestration strategies; the fascia is deeper; the roof extended less than those of other elevations; and the addition’s stucco finish is rendered in a slightly darker tone than the extant original shade elsewhere. All are moves that clearly delineate the new from the old while being compatible with the original character of the Neutra design per the Secretary of the Interior Standards for Rehabilitation No. 9. The minor and few reversible window changes, largely replacing jalousies, are quite typical alterations of the houses of many mid-century architects (jalousies were briefly popular but proved drafty and hard to maintain) and have not affected the integrity of the residence, nor has the inclusion of a later light fixture, also reversible, under an extended roof plane.

Thus, in my opinion, the Art Connell House would be considered a historical resource under CEQA. I urge your consideration in retaining this superb example of Neutra’s work. As one of the ‘first generation’ Modern architects who influenced Bay Area Modernism, Pebble Beach is fortunate in boasting an accomplished work by master architect Richard Neutra.

Sincerely,

Barbara Lamprecht, M.Arch.

author, Richard Neutra – Complete Works; Neutra – Selected Projects (Taschen 2000, 2004)

http://www.co.monterey.ca.us/planning/major/Pebble%20Beach%20Company/DMFAgenda.pdf

Below is my response May 3, 2012, to a proposal that would drastically alter one of Neutra’s best works, Mariners Medical Arts Center. The original project architect was John Blanton, a lead designer in Neutra’s office, an especially gifted designer who while self-effacing, skillfully acquitted Neutra’s intentions. The letter, addressed to the planner in charge of the project, is now public record: 

. A compatible addition to a historic property should be subordinate to the resource. It should defer in size, be set back from, and delineated spatially from the original. It should not be highly visible from the street. As presented, this two-story addition/alteration is substantially larger than the largest building (A), now partially replaced. The new addition/alteration overwhelms the composition rather than deferring to it.

. With regard to the new volume, its broad overhang, L-shaped massing, and ribboned fenestration appear to be very similar in strategy, materials, and proportion to the existing original fenestration seen elsewhere, so much so that perhaps even an expert, let alone a lay person, could not differentiate between new and original construction. This appears to be an attempt to replicate the original and thus not in accordance with the Secretary of the Interior Standards for Rehabilitation.

. The long two-story addition is directly attached to the building with no feature that alerts the viewer/user otherwise. Dissolving historic Building A into the new distorts the established and distinctive relationship among the three original buildings, one of a hierarchical gradation of solids and voids.

. Neutra carefully articulated three discrete volumes, Buildings A, B, and C, each with a different shape and size and of different shapes and sizes. However, he also unified these three volumes in several ways. First, through a consistent architectural vocabulary. Second, he also unified the composition by extending structure into the setting, sheltering walkways and other features. Additionally, he located water, hardscape, and landscape elements so that they weave through the site, enriching it greatly. Comprehensively, the design promoted well-being and reduced the typical anxieties associated with medical visits and treatments. This well-scaled and intentional balance of asymmetrical elements greatly enhances the setting (an aspect of integrity that was of primary importance both to this project and to the architect). However, this poised relationship is annulled by the attached addition/alteration, whose long monolithic bulk does not demonstrate the articulation of volumes and range of scale evident elsewhere.

I would suggest that the areas proposed to be demolished should be evaluated to determine their importance to the overall development and to its integrity. If found to have  less than significant impact, the addition should be redesigned following Preservation Brief 14, http://www.nps.gov/history/hps/tps/briefs/brief14.htm. The architect should consider measures to reduce the building mass down to the height of the historic building, break up the proposed long monolithic volume, and create more distance between the new and original structures. Finally, the original composition should be restored, for example, the exterior lighting strips placed on the far side of the overhangs sheltering walkways. These flush-mounted strips are an important character defining feature. They demonstrate the techniques the firm used based on Neutra’s prescient readings in the biological sciences. (In this case, the location near the outer edge made it possible for those inside the offices to have a continuous and wider radius of illumination at night, addressing a genetic “fight or flight” response.)

The Mariners’ Medical Arts Center is the finest example of the Neutra firm’s medical building type in the country. As more and more Neutra and Associates buildings are demolished or substantially altered, this delicate complex becomes even more significant. It succinctly demonstrates how even in an urban area and by exploiting a small footprint, one can effectively introduce landscape to create a very fine holistic setting. Finally, it is a respected and cherished member of the Newport Beach  community, serving generations of patients. It deserves the same rigorous consideration in response.

Sincerely,

Barbara Lamprecht, M.Arch.

Qualified Architectural Historian

author, Richard Neutra – Complete Works; Neutra – Selected Projects (2000, 2004)

Mariners Medical Arts Center

The Porte Cochere. Camera faces west. Photo by Arif Belgaumi, June 7, 2012.

View of the former U.S. Embassy, Karachi, Pakistan. Photo by Lucien Hervé. Source: scanned from Richard Neutra 1961 – 1966, Buildings and Projects, Thames and Hudson. Camera facing southwest.

Dedicated to the Honorable John Christopher Stevens, Ambassador of the United States of America:

What happens to an outmoded mid-century American embassy? Given the consistently tortured relationship between Pakistan and the U.S., the names of the cities, Karachi and Islamabad, are quite familiar. But it wasn’t until the former U.S. Embassy in Karachi was threatened  – by demolition, not by assault — that I actually looked up the cities because it was designed by famous Modernist Richard Neutra and his partner Robert Alexander. Where these cities were  geographically, one the current and the other the old capitol, was, eerily, linked to the fate of the Karachi complex. Even as it is stands today, silent and abandoned, the sleek complex still effortlessly exudes the optimism of postwar America. In fact, the embassy was doubly endowed with optimism because its primary design architect, Richard Neutra, was himself the most earnestly optimistic and least ironic of all the Modernist greats. Here, in Karachi, he applied his full repertoire of faith in the future here … after almost losing the commission because of suspicions that the German-speaking, Viennese-born Neutra wasn’t a loyal American. 

However, it is irony, not optimism, that frames the life of the former embassy. Sparked by a 1958 attack on a South American embassy, the U.S. was already issuing directives on strengthening embassies just as the Karachi facility, designed to pre-1958 security standards, neared completion. Sure, it had plenty of individual secure features, but its overall democratic gestalt of decentralized buildings, inviting gardens, and a proud glass public entry proved too difficult to “harden.” Worse, the capitol moved from Karachi to Islamabad in 1961, jerking the political raison d’etre rug out from the complex just as it was completed.

Given its prestigious location in downtown Karachi and with no formal protection as a historic resource, the former embassy is a viable candidate for demolition … or reuse: a group of Pakistani architects and community leaders are in the process of applying for a Heritage listing, thus preventing demolition or major exterior alterations. They are also in discussions with the U.S. State Department, hoping to adapt the building for community use. As of June 1 the two offers for the building were around Rs 1.2 billion (Rs = rupees), or $12.8 million; by the end of the month these appeared to be on hold pending conversation between the U.S. government and the Pakistani architects.1] They want to see a new role for this Cold War veteran. They are audacious enough to be … optimistic. Here is the larger story: 

In 1961, the Berlin Wall rose and the U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs in Cuba failed. That same year Pakistan moved its capital from Karachi, the old colonial port city on the lip of the Arabian Sea, to a raw new city under construction 700 miles to the north. The shift pushed the capital deep into Asia’s belly. Land-locked (and thus less vulnerable from attacks from the sea), the new capital, Islamabad, occupies the edge of a high plateau. It is the antithesis of sea-level Karachi, at the mouth of the River Indus and due east of the Gulf of Oman. This transportation nexus of rail, sea, and river made perfect sense to the British, who ruled from the 1840s to 1947, when Pakistan became independent. As with India, the Brits infused Karachi with the essence of Raj, with beautiful parks and the 19^th century classical and Victorian architecture is so associated with civic Raj sensibilities. Raj held such cultural hegemony that the notorious explorer, Richard Burton – same name, different man – could spurn one architectural proposal for a new and exclusive men’s club downtown, the Sind Club, saying, “the Veneto-Gothic [a decidedly bombastic Victorian style of architecture used for the nearby Frere Hall, 1865], so fit for Venice, so unfit for Karachi …” Burton and his British peers, not the natives, decided what suited the city.

The Sind Club, 1890s. Photographer unknown. Copyright © British Library Foundation. Source: Eurocana.

So, a classier Italianate style was used for the Sind, completed in 1871, but the club did make sure to maintain the de rigueur sign, “Natives and dogs not allowed.” The sign stayed in place for 76 years until August 14, 1947, a day after the first Governor-General of Pakistan took his oath. The capital’s move north 14 years later signaled a a new self-defined future for the new nation, rejecting Karachi’s colonial roots and its fragile location by the sea. Despite its loss of political status, Karachi remains the nation’s economic powerhouse.

That same year, 1961, just as Pakistan’s government was heading north, the U.S. dedicated its new embassy complex in downtown Karachi. It was a prestigious site on Abdullah Haroon Road,[2]facing east and the old trees, lawns, and verdant greenery surrounding Frere Hall and the Sind Club. Designed by Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander, the embassy complex was regraded to consulate status in 1966, when the Ambassador and embassy staff decamped to Islamabad.

An Associated Press image from Sept. 30, probably 1960. Courtesy Arif Belgaumi.

In 1999, the one barrier, a steel picket fence in front of the embassy–the slenderness of the fence itself a signal of optimism–was encased in concrete. The formal entrance driveway was also sealed off so that the sole remaining entry was from the service entry, Brunton Road to the south. The complex was “hardened” after a series of attacks began after 2000, but the intensity and frequency of the attacks continued to increase. After a 2002 bombing and at a cost of $10 million, the consulate staff moved from the long, four-story main building to the [3] one-story warehouse behind it to the west; in any case the low-slung warehouse was already more difficult to access from the street given its protection on the east by the big main building. Although part of the original design, the warehouse was clearly déclassé, not appropriate to consulate duties and constant public interaction, obviously difficult to adapt, and in any case still too vulnerable. In the face of such troubles, the complex’s sense of optimistic cool, suddenly seemed naïve, outmoded, dysfunctional, gauche. In 2006, the Office of Overseas Buildings Operations (OBO) acquired a new site for a new consulate office and housing complex, now completed, commissioned, and occupied.[4] The Consulate moved out of the property completely in January 2011 just as Frere Hall was reopened. It closed after the 2002 attack, which had killed both Pakistani and American diplomatic staff.

Not only was complex politically obsolete as an embassy in 1961. Even at that early date it was already on the road to being physically obsolete as well. In 1959, security at all embassies suddenly became more urgent when 10,000 Bolivians stoned the American embassy in La Paz. “Security officially entered into the embassy building consciousness in 1964,” with calls for less glass, more perimeter fencing, and better protection of openings.”[5]

Neutra and Alexander’s effort was one of many embassy commissions, all reflecting the decision to rapidly populate the globe with a dignified but powerful—but not too obviously powerful—American presence after its World War II triumph and emergence as the world power. The State Department was quite aware of the acclaim of Modernism in buildings such as Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building, 1958, in New York. For a while, the Department managed to overcome the relatively mild Congressional grousing about the style, and became the preferred vehicle for exporting American values in concrete, glass and steel. Around 1950, the Office of Foreign Building Operations (FBO, the precursor to the OBO) commissioned internationally distinguished architects such as Walter Gropius/TAC; Jose Luis Sert; Skidmore, Owings & Merrill; Edward Durrell Stone, virtually all Modernists in style and conviction, to convey this new American identity. Crisp, suave Modernism, almost invariably featuring plenty of glass, replaced the government’s sober “starved” classicism of the 1920s and ‘30s. I was astounded to learn that architect Ralph Rapson was one of the first architects to be chosen: astounded because the now-venerable Rapson, later a faculty member of MIT before becoming the University of Minnesota Dean of Architecture, was one of the most creative and playful of all the designers in the elite Case Study House program, a postwar program of experimental Modern residential architecture.[6]

Ralph Rapson’s famous, or infamous, unbuilt but highly influential “Greenbelt” project, 1945. While iconic because of the housewife in curlers at her laundry, waving gaily to her helicoptering husband, Man-in-the-Gray-Suit meets George Jetson, Greenbelt is a thoughtful illumination of the critical role nature should play in domestic environments in a project that internalizes landscape.

In 1951 he was charged with four European embassies, for which there were “virtually no programs, no set budgets, no precedents … and little overall supervision” – perfect petri conditions for Rapson and his partner, John van der Meulen. Needless to say, such freedom didn’t last long.

Postwar and Mid-Century Embassies The “little overall supervision” that Rapson and van der Meulen had enjoyed soon became a thicket of requirements throughout the 1950s. The Pakistan embassy followed the now standard FBO design brief for embassies/consulates that was simultaneously, maddeningly, a daunting task: The new outposts were to be legibly American and convey strength, yet not be too assertive or flamboyant; the design should be Modern, excellent, and worthy of peer acclaim, but not too radical, befitting a dignified American outpost; it should be physically secure and robust, but not too costly let it alarm the American tax payer and thus Congress.[8] Programmatically, the embassies were “much like the headquarters for a small corporation,” including extensive, flexible office space for consular needs; staff and executive/ambassadorial offices; special facilities open to the public on occasion or for related government agencies such as the United States Information Agency (USIA) and the United States Information Service (USIS).[9] Other requirements specific to Pakistan included a controlled service yard and parking area; a substantial water storage tank, an electrical generator and “extensive warehouses to harbor American Governmental employees from neighboring countries and possibly their families and belongings in case of emergency.”[10] More subtle aspects of the FBO brief encouraged a “sympathetic, regional expression of our own architectural thinking” in designs that to some degree acknowledged the host country’s architectural traditions, climate, and culture.[11] (For Neutra, who had long argued that a building could readily be Modern yet synthesize just such a sympathetic response, the directive was no less than obvious.) Such a delicate balancing act is still very much a charge in embassy design half a century later. In a May 2011 article by OBO Acting Director Adam Namm, published in Ambassadors Review, the directives for the new “Design Excellence Program” for the design and construction of diplomatic facilities are strikingly familiar:

But this unchanging directive has been made far more strenuous by the contemporary repertoire of security concerns along with the need to incorporate sustainability and “green” building strategies, both predictable even if necessary and laudable. What’s interesting, however, is the new role that landscape architecture will play:

“The grounds and landscaping will be as important as the architecture, and together are to be conceived as an integrated whole. The grounds will be viewed as functional and representational space, and will be sustainable, and include indigenous plantings and incorporate existing site resources, such as mature trees … 

The Architects

Neutra 1960s, Rang House, Koenigstein, Germany. Photographer unknown, perhaps Martin or Christina Rang, whom I visited in 2010.

Richard Neutra
In the pantheon of iconic 20^th century Modernists, Richard Joseph Neutra is acknowledged for his exquisitely sensitive approach to the site. Mystery and Realities of the Site (1951), Bauen und die Sinneswelt (Building and the World of the Senses) 1980,[12] Plant Water Stone Light, 1974[13] and virtually every bit of the rest of his writings, legendary in their volume, are ceaseless calls to weave the natural world into architecture. For Neutra, this was an adventure linking curiosity about his human client with a close investigation into a site’s genius loci: equally legendary, for example, was Neutra tramping a prospective site, bemused but impressed clients trailing behind, struggling to keep up – in one instance, through the mud and wet undergrowth one moonlit night as Neutra traversed gullies and ravines outside of Washington, D.C.[14] As he told them, architecture was equally experienced at night as well as the day, so he scheduled his flight from Los Angeles to coincide with the full moon. (Of course. Every architect does that.)

Along with his fellow Viennese architect Rudolf M. Schindler, Neutra arrived in Southern California in the 1920s. Both were drawn to America through the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose 1910 Wasmuth Portfolio of drawings destroyed “the box,” that is, conventional contained volumes. The Portfolio electrified European architectural circles, including the young Schindler and Neutra. By the 1920s, their distinctive approaches, completely different from one another in both philosophy and execution yet both devoted to a new vision, recharged Southern California architecture, contentedly devoted to Craftsman and Spanish/Mediterranean paradigms. Today Los Angeles boasts the finest collection of single-family Modern houses in the world, largely fostered by the pioneering lessons of Wright, Neutra, and Schindler and later their followers and proteges including John Lautner, Harwell Hamilton Harris, and Gregory Ain.[15]

Neutra’s Philosophy: Biorealism 

Neutra’s Lovell Health House, 1929, Los Angeles, and the Kaufmann Desert House, 1947, Palm Springs, propelled him to worldwide fame along with Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Walter Gropius. Neutra is unique, however, in seeing nascent 20^th century industrial technologies such as large plate glass, steel, Masonite, Formica, plastics, and waterproof plywood not as ends in themselves nor as enemies to Nature. Rather, he understood them as vehicles for apprehending his ultimate goal, an environment melding human construction and the natural world. Along with unearthing a site’s secrets and potential, his other primary objective was to understand human biology, cultural anthropology, and cognitive systems so that he could serve his client better.

While Neutra is renowned for his houses, asymmetrical assemblies of lines and planes that coolly slide out into the landscape, his work in schools is even more radical because it reconceived education along with the building.

Neutra’s theoretical “Ring School,” 1925, decentralized education and brought learning down to the ground plane. Each classroom opened out to the landscape to double available space, but also opened to the center courtyard and play area for corporate gatherings. The revolutionary scheme was realized at the R.J. Neutra School at the Naval Air Station Lemoore, California. It was completed in 1961, the same year the Embassy was completed.

He took the model of the four or five story monolithic masonry schoolhouse and brought it down to ground level. He spread classrooms and libraries and auditoriums into the landscape so that children could avail themselves of nature through glass sliding doors and broad overhangs to shade a classroom or provide protection from the rain. Dynamic, bombastic, brilliant, emotionally needy, deeply thoughtful, his writings reflect his passion for science blended by a voracious curiosity about humanity.

Robert E. Alexander. Photographer unknown.

Robert Alexander

Educated at Cornell University, Robert Evans Alexander was a distinguished architect and urban planner whose achievements included the co-design of Baldwin Hills Village, an award-winning master plan development for over 600 units built in 1945 in Los Angeles. As Neutra biographer Thomas S. Hines has pointed out, Alexander’s savvy with politicians and urban issues along with his expertise in large-scale projects make him a natural choice for Neutra. Neutra and Alexander designed college campuses, churches, military housing, commercial buildings; one of their most famous projects is the Lincoln Museum and Visitors Center, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, 1961.[16] The partnership began in the early 1950s with the ill-fated master plan development called Elysian Park Heights. If built, the project would have uprooted the longstanding community, primarily Hispanic, living in the hills above downtown Los Angeles, a place known as Chavez Ravine. In any case, the 230-acre public housing project was been denounced as a “socialist plot,” terminated. The land is now a baseball stadium. Though the very public failure hurt the architects, the project had enough legs to bite the architects a second time when the Embassy project appeared.

By the time the commission for the Embassy arose, Neutra was world-famous, a globe trotter of the first rank, used to swimming easily in cultures that might have been foreign to others but were quite native to him. The reflecting pools and water channels, for example, that skillfully weave the Karachi embassy together in a subtle but critical way, could be interpreted as solely honoring and including Muslim garden traditions into the complex per the State Department brief relating to local traditions and culture. (Yes and no. I believe Neutra would have done this anyway.)

The budgeted cost was $1,000,000, comparable with other embassies. Much of the expenditure was not from an outlay of American dollars but foreign postwar credits owed to the U.S, allowing the U.S. Treasury to obtain equipment, materials, and labor in exchange for a particular country’s debts.[17] To Robert Alexander’s consternation, foreign currency (in this case, the fluctuating rupee, far more volatile than the dollar) would also be used to pay architectural fees for American firms working abroad. His letter of protest to the State Department apparently almost cost the partnership the job when the Department of State curtly returned its contract to them unsigned, stating basically that that was the deal, take it or leave it. They were, presumably, off the job. Herculean efforts by Neutra followed that were savvy, manipulative, and a little hysterical. He frantically contacted any number of influential officials including congressmen, senators, and State Department directors.

My research indicates that there might have been more to the government’s sudden refusal than Alexander’s protest, though he believed himself to be fully to blame in jeopardizing the job and Neutra’s prestige. It was the early 1950s, and Elysian Park Heights, a large urban renewal and workforce housing project in Chavez Ravine, Los Angeles, was already underway. Suddenly the political ground shifted with the election of a new mayor in 1953 who wanted no part of public housing. The project’s demise was ensured when a leading Los Angeles housing official and proponent of the project refused to answer whether he was affiliated with groups being investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).[18] The project was painted with the red brush of socialism. Furthermore, with regard to the Karachi contract, one senator told Neutra in the summer 1954 that “There seems to be a question of [your] membership in the Hollywood chapter of the Arts, Sciences and Professions Council,” which was then being investigated by HUAC as part of the suspected “Communist infiltration of the Motion-Picture Industry, 1951 – 1952.”[19] Less than a month later, Alexander wrote the FBO giving permission to be investigated. After his own interview, Neutra wrote to Isaac White Carpenter, assistant secretary of state. “’As to my own loyalty to my country or testimony for it, I know there can be no doubt. I am more than glad to answer any question or stand any test so as to support with my best services our government in these perilous times,” he declared, suggesting that the “American rational approach to the design of buildings” was itself patriotic, a novel apologia I venture was never raised before or since.

By the end of March 1955 the contracts were finally signed. By early April, Neutra and his wife, Dione, were on a plane to Karachi.

Constructing the Embassy
The lot is located in downtown Karachi in a prestigious area developed by the British in the 19^th century. Now considered an economic hub, the area is populated today with government buildings, financial institutions, foreign consulates, and the famous Sind Club mentioned earlier. It is set back from Abdullah Haroon Road (Victoria Road) about 60 feet.

Site Plan, U.S. Embassy, Karachi, Pakistan. Ground Floor.

The primary building is a long four-story 90,000-square-foot box. It is asymmetrically divided into large and smaller wings, the smaller portion on the north angled a little to the west. The angle formed by that difference also defines the primary entry. Here, a vertical thrust of full-height glass panels and metal rises full-height. This main building is connected to a large one-story warehouse by an interstitial two-story building. This intermediary building, later known as The American Center, originally housed  the cafeteria, reproductive services, and a small “motion picture room.” A secured service yard and covered garage bays occupies the southwest quadrant of the lot. The entire complex is markedly different from other downtown buildings by the broad lawns and extensive landscaping and hardscape features.

Embassy complex looking east. Warehouse on the right, main administration building on the left. Photo by ©Rondal Partridge and used with his family’s kind permission.

Largely designed between 1955 and 1956 in Los Angeles, actually getting the embassy constructed could be termed as torture to some and as an opportunity for cross-cultural collaboration to others. The primary and interstitial buildings of reinforced concrete reflect the engineering methodology standard for large-scale postwar buildings engineered in the U.S.: rational in character, the methodology had long absorbed the lessons of Henry Ford and 19^th century efficiency expert Frederick Winslow Taylor. Parker, Zehnder and Associates was a well-respected and published engineering practice and the “go-to” firm for Neutra and Alexander; the engineers were simultaneously working on the firm’s much more daring steel design for the Cyclorama Building at the Gettysburg National Military Park, completed in 1962 and now in imminent danger of being demolished.[20]

In contrast, the Karachi warehouse was decidedly low-tech, with walls of an earthen-coloured concrete block with hollow clay tile infill used for the open arches. The concrete, both block and poured, tile, terrazzo were locally procured and mixed on site. As Annabel Jane Wharton remarked in Building the Cold War, “Making the Modern abroad was, after all, not so easy. Indeed, the effort required in the realization of a monumental Modernity where none had previously existed was nothing short of heroic. Basic building materials were difficult to obtain in Europe after World War II; they were completely lacking in the Middle East.”[21]

While researching Neutra’s landscape theories in a different archive, material from the 1930s, I found primary corroboration of the above in a slender folder in a corner cabinet; it was one of those moments where it’s the end of your research day, you are fairly satisfied. Your eye falls on something else and the world stops.

The folder contained a faded piece of smooth teletype paper, unknown today but doubtless from one of those kind of clattery machines in chaotic newsrooms one sees in old movies. To my astonishment, it was an undated, unbylined piece by a UPI reporter who told it like he saw it in Karachi, confirming what scholar Wharton stated and what Americans abroad knew first hand. Apparently never published, here is his exasperated report verbatim, including case changes for f/Fakir:

“The curse of a 19^th century fakir [22]seems to have settled on the skeleton of a new American embassy being built here. According to a story widely accepted in Karachi, the Fakir cursed the embassy site years ago. He claimed the plot contained the tomb of a holy man and warned against construction of any kind. To illustrate his point, he toppled over dead. The property was then owned by a wealthy Parsi[23] merchant who ignored the fakir and went ahead with plans to build a mansion. The house later became known as “Sudden Death Lodge” after the merchant, his son, three workmen, and an English couple all died by accident or violence. The house was torn down in 1925 and the plot given over to a garbage dump until chosen as a site for the new American embassy. Construction began in Sept. 1957. To date, there has only been one death – that of an electrician. But the curse lingers on in more subtle ways. The new four-story embassy, designed by California’s RJN and REA [Richard J. Neutra and Robert E. Alexander], was scheduled for completion last March. Contractors now feel the building might be finished by late 1960. Others doubtfully mention a year later. [It was apparently completed in 1961.] Huge amounts of governmental red tape and an admirable desire to hold down U.S. dollar expenditures have helped the curse along. Although building cost estimates run 31.2 million, Washington has decreed only a tenth of that will be in dollars. The rest is to come from local currency accounts which the U.S. air programs have built up in foreign currencies. This has reduced a monumental procurement problem particularly with Pakistan lacking most of the equipment and building materials required to meet U.S. government specifications.”.

This is something Horace Hildreth, the ambassador to Pakistan 1953 – 1957, understood only too well — and six years earlier. Acknowledging that labor was being donated by the “Government of Pakistan,” in a 1955 letter to an FBO official Hildreth wrote,

His apprehensions were well founded. Five years later, construction underway at long last, co-architect Robert Alexander “complained loudly to the FBO that the concrete mix at Karachi was being watered down by the local contractor. He even warned of a possible building collapse (which fortunately never occurred), but he could do nothing to correct the problem because his firm had no contract to provide supervision and his complaints were dismissed.”^[24]In one of his books, Neutra’s caption for a photograph of a Pakistani workman says it all. The photograph appears to be taken at night by flash, and portrays the workman apparently troweling a wall (troweling on point, an odd sight) that is uneven, typical of an initial “brown” coat of plaster, although it could also be a lack of craftsmanship, given the photo. Neutra enthusiastically writes, “The Asiatic workman must build a new architecture with the most primitive means …’

Neutra’s “Karachi workman.” Source: scan, Richard Neutra 1961 – 1966 Buildings and Projects. Photographer: attributed to Lucien Hervé.

In any case, the building the Embassy represents the attempt of the State Department to insert and to some extent integrate an American construction paradigm into the local Pakistan building and craft culture.

The Building and Its Setting

In 1955, Neutra wrote a letter describing his ideas for the building to the distinguished Modern architect Pietro Belluschi. Belluschi was not only the dean of the School of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but more pertinent to any embassy project had just been appointed to the newly formed Architectural Advisory Committee (AAC), established in January 1954. The AAC, replete with architectural stars and American Institute of Architect Gold Medal winners and headed by a former Foreign Service officer, had been created in response to a growing Congressional alarm over the “so-called international” style of architecture used for important buildings abroad. In his letter, Neutra used a voice one would use only among confidantes and peers:

Rather disingenuously, given Alexander’s frustrations with the barrel vaults, Neutra tells Belluschi – who as a member of the AAC has some power over the design — that he was “inspired by the motif he saw elsewhere in south Asia with its rhythmically rolling one-story gables.” Then he gets more honest again: “There is practically no pleasant solution on the west front. All windows are a thermal nuisance and noo matter what we do the outlook is dismal. No embellishment of the yard will help – the sun will glare, and the best is to consider shaded narrow strips of openings here, in the direction of the Arabian Sea breezes. I wish the sea were close and visible …”

To be a little more specific, the “fortissimo enrichment” is the dramatic – if not downright gaudy – entrance. It comprised an elongated porte-cochere of seven large gold anodized aluminum beams with a thin metal roof, supported by seven steel cables aligned with the seven gold anodized aluminum vertical ribs dividing six full-height sections of glass windows.

U.S. Embassy, 2012. Photographed by Pakistani architect Arif Belgaumi, and used with permission. View looking southwest.

Neutra was not the only architect using gold-colored touches to highlight his embassy. Eero Saarinen’s design for the American Embassy, London, has plenty of gilded touches, included the massive gold anodized aluminum bald eagle adorning the cornice. Like the Karachi facility, that 1960 building, listed as a protected Grade II structure, has been sold. It is to be replaced by a new $1 billion embassy under construction. The new embassy, along the south bank of the River Thames near Battersea Park, will be surrounded by a green belt that in turn is will be be surrounded by a moat. Photo by Barbara Lamprecht, July 2012.

Behind the main building lies the entrance to the American Center (the small two-story building linking the warehouse and the main building). A short run of terrazzo steps leads down to the terrazzo patio and reflecting pool, where it joins a covered walkway leading to the warehouse area. Of note in this area is a signature Neutra trademark: this is an exterior light strip flush to a walkway ceiling and located at the far edge of the soffit. This asymmetric placement not only illuminated the path of travel, but also afforded a greater expanse of viewing radius at night for inhabitants inside a glass wall of a building. The gesture exemplifies Neutra’s concept of “biorealistic” architecture responding to ancient, primal human needs of “flight or fight.”

Both east and west elevations of the main building are characterized by a series of three continuous lengths of windows running the entire façade, the same windows Neutra rued in his letter to Belluschi. The windows are fronted by operable metal louvers with insect screens (Karachi is hot and humid.) The continuous strips of windows accentuate the structure’s strong horizontality and monumental presence.

Elevated one story, the executive/ambassadorial wing cantilevers northwest, supported by a long central pier aligned north south. A decorative one-story wall runs underneath the uplifted wing. The wall is perforated, a technique intended to respond to the long established Islamic/Arabic/Mogul architectural tradition of the mashrabiyah, a perforated wall that provides semi-privacy, animates a façade, and permits breezes. Many architects designing postwar embassies used such walls, and with greater abandon, such as the tour-de-force embassy in New Delhi, 1959, by Edward Durrell Stone; Baghdad, 1959, by Josep Lluis Sert; Manila, 1959, by Alfred Aydelott, and many others.[25]

On the left is the plan view (a bird’s eye view) of the water channel leading from the reflecting pool; on the right you can see this in section (a view ‘cut through’.)

The Role of Water

Water is a continuous presence in the embassy in many identities: a broad, calm reflecting pool, a deeply incised channel, a waterfall, an ablution fountain, and a second pool at the property’s southeast prow. They all percolate through the complex, helping to unify the overall composition and mitigate, at least to some degree, a potential sense of disjointedness among the architectural pieces. They also introduce a refreshing microclimate and acoustical tempering—Neutra invariably required a detail to do double, or in this case triple, duty.

I’d like to discuss this intimacy with water a little more. Neutra had long included reflecting pools into his designs, either adjacent to a building, as he did for Rev. Robert Schuller’s Community Drive-In Church, Garden Grove, 1962;

A familiar image of Richard Neutra outside the rooftop penthouse at the VDL Research House II, designed by Dion and Richard Neutra, Los Angeles, 1966. Photography by Julius Shulman.

wandering in and out of a glass wall, as in the John Nesbitt House, Los Angeles, 1942, or the Constance Perkins House, Pasadena, 1955; or locating water on top of a house, he did for his own home, designed by Richard and Dion Neutra, Los Angeles, 1966.

The Community Drive-In Church, Garden Grove, 1962. Photograph by Barbara Lamprecht

The Constance Perkins House, Poppy Peak, Pasadena, 1953. Photograph by Raymond Richard Neutra and used with his permission.

That said, the way he used water in Karachi, aligning a strip of landscaping with an identical width channel of water flanking the plantings, particularly resonated with a reverence for water in the dry Middle East. For example, deeply set water channels still nourish the roots of serried ranks of trees in gardens centuries old at Isfahan, Persia’s fabled garden city in central Iran. But in contrast to many Islamic/Arabic/Mogul gardens, which are often quite symmetrical, where Neutra located his channels and pools demonstrate the Modernist tenet of balanced asymmetry, or “dynamic symmetry.” He did this not because it was a stated tenet of the International Style as laid down by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock in 1932, but because he believed, based on his readings of human biology and cognitive systems, that such asymmetry was more natural that the “empty geometricity” of classical architecture (which he nonetheless admired.) In fact, he disliked the term “International Style” because its very name celebrated form-making at the expense of user needs. In contrast, through listening and probing he could then manipulate his refined kit of parts whose variables were client, site, culture, and budget. That is why Neutra and Alexander attended to Islamic ritual cleansing at Karachi, a sensitive gesture rarely seen in embassy design, a well-placed source told me. Neutra

The tradition of open water channels cut deeply into the earth, called jubes, and centered fountains anchoring four cardinal jubes, called chahar bagh (chahar, four, and bagh, garden) is an ancient tradition in the Middle East and the subject of a vast literature. “Gudea, ruler of Lagash in Neo-Sumeria (c. 2100 BCE) said, ‘He who controls the rivers controls life’ … Water has always been the antithesis of desert and the necessary life-giver and the source of many gardens. Indeed, gardens cannot be conceived of without water.

The Warehouse 

Babur’s garden, Baburnama, 16th c. British Library. Source (and also the source for the quote on Gudea, is Electrummagazine’s superb essay on Persian Gardens at http://www.electrummagazine.com/2011/07/paradise-gardens-of-persia-eden-and-beyond-as-chahar-bagh/

Nine thin-shell concrete barrel vaults roof the warehouse, and there is a good story connected to that as well. Alexander was not happy with the initial design: While visiting Karachi, he learned of

The moment of exquisite tension, where water, so historically precious in the Middle East, assumes a quiet hegemony as the element that unifies the composition. Photographer: Rondal Partridge, and used with the kind permission of his family.

This is how the reflecting pool looks today. Photographer: Arif Belgaumi, used with permission.

The “interstitial” American Center in the middle; main administration (including the ‘Ambassadorial Wing’ on the left, warehouses on the right. Photo by ©Rondal Partridge and used with his family’s kind permission.

… and a good look at “The American Center,” showing it acts as an interstitial construction between the main building and the warehouse. Not a great transition, to be sure. Photograph by Arif Belgaumi and used with permission.

The overall footprint of the warehouse responds to the site. Configured as a rectangle in plan, its rear wall is perpendicular to Abdullah Haroon Road. In contrast, and demonstrating how property lines can be harnessed for design, its angled northern wall is parallel to the north property line. Each vault steps back sequentially on the north moving from east to west.

The complex has been criticized for its disparate building components. I did too, before deciding I didn’t mind its abrupt transitions, but liked its frank expression of function and how thoughtfully it exploits its site. It is neither Neutra’s or Neutra and Alexander’s best work. It is, rather, a good mid-century building with plenty of life left. But there is one very fine moment here, at least to me, and that is where[28] the last, east-most barrel vault of the nine-arch warehouse enters the reflecting pool. It is a wonderfully ambivalent moment. American design using a Pakistani concrete building form enters that sacred element, water … but even more importantly, just as the vault pierces the water, the water assume a quite command in its role of unifying the entire complex  … perhaps a good omen for the building’s future. (If the vault just hung above the water, rather than actually entering it, the effect would be much different, and weaker: any potential unity would be mildly suggested rather than implemented.) The photographs above illustrate how critical water is to the success of the site plan and how unity and fluidity are lost without it.

Given the careful hierarchy of plantings and his telltale drafting style when drawing landscaping on any plan, including this one, it is quite likely that Neutra himself designed the landscaped setting and gardens. No information on a landscape architect has come to light, and in any case Neutra was a master at landscape since his 1919 tutelage working with the famous Swiss botanist and landscape theorist Gustav Ammann. Tall, dark shrubs located in front of the warehouse opened out to an “American” lawn, a long swath of grass-like ground cover—even an embassy needs an American lawn!, for Neutra a stand-in for our evolutionary heritage and the sweep of the African savanna—in front of the warehouse labeled “Embassy Park.” The area was dotted with a few palm trees and mid-height plantings at the originally low perimeter wall on the north and a similar treatment was accorded for the primary elevation.

Understanding the Client: Neutra’s Other Projects in former West and East Pakistan
Neutra empirically observed all his life. Just as his “client interrogations” allowed him to inspect the individual, his never-ending international trips, commissions, lectures and appointments ensured that Neutra did not patronize local cultures but attempted to work with them. He employed a similar approach with regard to user needs and culture over 2,200 miles to the east, in Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan. One standard route from Karachi to Bangladesh, crossing all of India, includes Lahore, Pakistan, south of Islamabad, and the site of Neutra’s last project in Pakistan. Both were academic settings. In 1963, he was hired to design the university laboratories and library at the Bangladesh Agricultural University, Mymensingh, in collaboration with Noon Qayum and Associates, Architects and Engineers. Although recent photographs suggest the library and other buildings may not have been built according to plan, perhaps because like the Embassy, construction administration was impossible, Neutra is credited for the library in plans at the University.[29] Other aspects of the large-scale project included departments in fishery, forestry, bee culture, silk weaving and pottery. Neutra’s January 1963 notes on the project indicate the range of his concerns in understanding his client; if ever an approach could be called a “character defining feature”—a phrase used in historic preservation to denote an important architectural element in a historic structure—understanding the client through what he called “client interrogations,” that included client-written narratives journaling daily activities from dawn to dusk would be Neutra’s “character defining feature. For example, Neutra’s notes include the Pakistani preference for a type of white rice; the daily caloric intake of the East Pakistan peasant (1,700, according to Neutra); and the need for the Pakistani rural community to stop using buffalo dung as fertilizer because of its negative long-range effects on the land, demonstrating his prescient thinking far exceeding the range of the immediate building.)

In Nature Near, Neutra described his experience in Bangladesh that speaks to his curiosity.

Through such initial and then subsequent closer observation, Neutra threw out the foreboding fortress-like design he encountered and instead designed a campus that was more approachable to the rural poor it was supposed to help, surrounding it with huge water for water fowl, in a sense mimicking the watery rice fields. He designed a “distinctive domed silhouette” for the mosque. “I wanted [the peasants] to know that some real praying was done in these new precincts, and to hear the old muessin’s voice wafting out over the rice fields.”[30] As he had done in American schools, Neutra was also not above a bit of social re-engineering, arguing against separate schools for faculty and peasants and building a common school instead, which also conserved resources.

Neutra’s third and last project in Pakistan was the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, 1965-66, again with Noon Qyayum and Associates. In a draft letter in August 1965, he wrote a mission statement similar to FBO and OBO directives past and present:  “The [Lahore] University should belong to the nation and be immediately recognizable as an Islamic institution, not as a foreign enclave. I have, therefore, suggested, that the mosque and the minaret symbolizing the spiritual link of this institution of learning to be visible and a very conspicuous symbol …” That sentiment notwithstanding, the schematic design sketches for this large-scale unbuilt project show an uninspired group of bland buildings made coherent by their planning, which in its partly open, partly closed building massing acts to both define the campus as one community and reach out to the rural community beyond. Neutra created a difficult brief for himself in wanting not to alienate the surrounding population (thus adding a gigantic mosque and minaret) while designing a Western, progressive, state-of-the-art technical institution.

In historic preservation parlance, a historic building has to communicate its “period of significance,” and usually historians begin investigating a potentially historic property by evaluating its integrity of design, materials, setting, etc. But significance of the Karachi Embassy, begins far below the exterior. Every member of its steel reinforced concrete frame was efficiently dimensioned by an American machine on an American factory floor and delivered by rail or ship to a port. The men who designed those steel girders, beams, columns, and struts were often American veterans who returned home to attend college and suck up an education under the newly revamped G.I. Bill.[31] Those steel members speak to the assumptions of prowess that reflected the wartime dedication and can-do, do-it-now discipline of those who said, as World War II veteran, the late architect Lyman Ennis said to me, “We just won a war, how hard could it be to build a house?” Likewise, the vertical thrust of clear glass rearing up in the middle of the Neutra and Alexander façade not only speaks to the industrialized 20^th century technology of plate glass. The huge expanses of glass, so assured, so postwar self-confident, were literally and symbolically transparent. They embody the optimism of democracy, perfectly paired with Neutra’s optimism, even as both also contained a darker complexity. Still, it’s in part why retro is cool. We no longer trust the future but can buy the past. We are post Modern, post optimism. This building says: this what optimism looked like. It is foreign, perhaps far more foreign than Pakistan.

The Future 

Interior Second Floor. Photo by Arif Belgaumi. June 7, 2012

Touring the former Embassy. Note the concealed curved soffit for ambient ceiling washing of light. Photo by Arif Belgaumi. June 7, 2012.

Today a group of distinguished Pakistani citizens are working toward finding a way to preserve the embassy and to reuse it as the Neutra Cultural Center. Step by step they have developed contacts with officials both in the U.S. State Department as well as the Pakistani officials overseeing listing the building. They recently toured the empty building, and have witnessed how much of the interior has been left untouched (some of the images show Neutra-type soffits for concealed light fixtures to wash ceilings with light, though they are crudely done – and so what). Led by Arif Belgaumi, who has been mounting a global campaign, the group includes: Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy, Shahab Ghani, Arshad Faruqui and myself. Ms Chinoy is a documentary film maker and the founder of the Citizen Archive Project, one of the stakeholders in the proposal for the Neutra Cultural Center. Earlier this year she won an Oscar – Pakistan’s first – for a documentary of hers.  Mr Ghani is the President of the Institute of Architects Pakistan (IAP) and has done a lot to garner support for the preservation of this building from various institutions like the AIA and the UIA. Mr Faruqui is Chairman of the Karachi Chapter of the IAP.

Neural networks, courtesy of a lot of white pantyhose and even more creativity.

Two conferences on neuroscience and architecture, the first in September and oriented to science, the second in November more weighted in architecture and architectural theory, are comment itself on the growing recognition of the potential connection between the two disciplines. It’s difficult not to compare the two gatherings. Both venues were masterworks designed by great masters of architecture: the first, the ANFA-sponsored symposium at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, designed by Louis Kahn and completed in 1966; the second, a collaborative effort between ANFA and the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, held at Taliesin West, Wright’s western home and school in Scottsdale, Arizona, established in 1937. At the first, the horizon meets the sea; at the second, the horizon meets the desert. At the first, we met in one large, air-conditioned, meticulously detailed concrete volume; at the second, we were often moving among low, stone-and-wood hand-made buildings set into the landscape, bundling up or taking layers off, always aware of the changing sun, the earth, the wind … and the temperature, mostly falling.

For many, including myself, new to ANFA but not to the topic, the promise of such dialogues between the two disciplines in such extraordinary places among well-known practitioners and thinkers couldn’t be more alluring.

The Salk event unfolded as a real attempt to find common ground between the two disciplines, finding points of discovery on an arc that spans from the cellular level of the brain to the far cruder metric of a constructed building. There were a couple of talks by young neuroscientists that were beyond me (perfectly acceptable, as part of the reason for going was to be confounded at some point) Some findings that to many architects would be familiar from required courses in environmental psychology or through their métier—intense observation and acute awareness of their environment—were treated as new discoveries, which was somewhat alarming, for example: incorporating natural scenes and daylighting in hospital spaces to accelerate healing. However, there was no doubt that in one collaborative project, armed with new and far more nuanced findings in circadian rhythms and the visible spectrum, not only added authority to the architects’ decisions —thus helping to justify, and budget for, a move they might have already come up with—but also appeared to propel the design process, sharpening the designers’ creative prowess in arriving at an elegant solution. The solution demonstrated dialogue at its most productive. In the afternoon, architectural historian Harry Francis Mallgrave, renowned in architecture circles for his exceptional scholarship, proffered a different kind of bridge between neuroscience and architecture through his latest book. The Architect’s Brain: Neuroscience, Creativity, and Architecture, is startling because it so fluidly weaves together recent advances in neuroscience with the work of historic figures in architecture, such as the Renaissance architect Alberti, or the brilliant Frenchman, Perrault, both of whom, especially Perrault, applied creative and original thought to how long-standing rules might be broken on behalf of the architectural experience … in which of course all the senses are complicit. Using the lens of cognitive science, Mallgrave interprets great architecture in history and the intuitive leaps great architects made, in turn illuminating the deep relationship between the two disciplines. The book goes back and forth between the two quite easily, the ease alone underscoring Mallgrave’s facile immersion into both worlds: only five pages separates one of eight diagrams of the brain and a picture of a famous Alberti façade, Santa Maria Novella, Florence, 1470. I know of no other historian to take up such serious grappling with the connections among neuroscience, the senses, perception, and the built environment, let alone do it so well.

Logistically, the ANFA conference couldn’t have been more beautifully run. All the trains ran on time: breakfast, coffee quality, lunch choices, were delicious and at the ready. You could choose between blackberries and pastel-colored petit fours, giving you the complete spectrum from health to decadence. If I had to choose an architect based on the choreography and sequencing of the food service, a worthy design problem in its own right, the Salk conference wins hands down. Taliesin caterers, take note.

The Taliesin conference was remarkable because in addition to the conference, it was also Taliesin West’s 75^th anniversary as well as the reunion of the “Taliesin Fellows,” those respected honorees who worked for or studied with Wright. Some were in walkers and wheelchairs but were as alive and feisty as ever. The symposium was attended by many of them, in addition to students from the school. And what a privilege to have the run of the place, especially experiencing Taliesin’s magic at sunset and at night. We could visit students in their historic studio space, see what they were working on … I found a small bathroom, clad in beautiful horizontally oriented aged redwood, to claim as my own temporary digs to change into fancy duds for the evening’s glittering celebration. No such ‘occupation’ would ever be afforded a tour-goer, nor would they be encouraged to linger in various places in the compound, to take in the interaction between land, building, and people.

Moderator Sarah Robinson gathered a truly formidable group of speakers, including neuroscientist and USC professor Michael Arbib: architect Jeanne Gang, principal of the increasingly high-profile Chicago-based Studio Gang Architects; Scottish psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist; Finnish architect, professor, and writer/theoretician Juhani Pallasmaa; and architectural historian and professor Alberto Pérez-Gómez, author of one of the watershed books in architectural history, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science, published in 1984.

The last three presenters are all accomplished authors who each have addressed the historical division of science and the arts in history and the subsequent loss of humanness as a consequence of those reified dualities. Their attempts to examine and to redress those divisions were reflected in the presentations each made. McGilchrist’s 2011 book, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, was the basis for his talk. He argued that society needs to restore the integration and balance between our left (stressing the detail over the whole; more technocratic) and right brains by reviving the less-present right half because it is, he said, more intuitive, and addressed the real “embodied” world and was “wise about the whole,” even if that whole wasn’t altogether known. McGilchrist’s talk reprised many he has recently given on behalf of his book; an amusing version for Ted Talks, an homage to the “right brain,” is at http://www.ted.com/talks/iain_mcgilchrist_the_divided_brain.html. Pallasmaa, known for his 1996 book The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses and more recently The Thinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture, re-membered architecture as biologically and culturally grounded, rejecting rationality as the only valid means to apprehend architecture. That is, architecture’s primary tasks go beyond shelter and the emphasis on the surface and visual appearance to housing memories, desires, dreams, through a far richer repertoire of all the senses, which he summed up as “fast” vs. “slow” architecture. His talk especially resonated with the architects in the audience, especially architects aligned with Taliesin West and Wright’s richly sensual compositions, embodied in the body and in the land. The talk by Arbib was a game attempt to explore how neuroscience informed Pallassma’s “thinking hand; it was the only talk that attempted to engage and bridge these two disciplines. He noted that “anything which participates in the conscious movement of the body is attached to the mind.” But while a valiant attempt to address why we had gathered here in the first place, each power point slide was dense with text, pictures, and new terms. Trying to read and listen simultaneously proved beyond me.

Jeanne Gang addresses the Taliesin West audience. Photo by Steve Lamb.

Architect Gang’s presentation was electrifying to the architects because she simply and clearly explained each step of her studio’s process in getting to product, steps that included the engaged imagination of her entire staff. These included the role of history in alerting the team to possibilities; hands-on making and craft; melding cutting-edge and old technologies; harnessing a range of scales, whether urban or landscape, specific to the site and project, all of which fueled the studio’s ultimate design resolution … which were breathtaking because each result was so tailored to enrich the client’s purpose. Many of us who attended architecture school in the last 15 years or so may recall being taught this multivalent technique of problem-solving. It originated with philosopher Edmund Husserl’s advice on ways to investigating a hard or potentially hackneyed problem anew. Few, however, have the ability, the freedom, or the budget to take the approach to such thoughtful ends as Studio Gang does. Easily the day’s most memorable image was of a peregrine falcon sitting contentedly at the very edge of a concrete patio so thin it looked like a freshly flattened pancake, one of the patios making up the undulating texture of the practice’s celebrated Aqua Tower. High in space above Chicago’s skyline, the falcon’s swift recognition of a fine perch saluted the firm’s desire to preserve biodiversity and avian flight paths in the city. Not all clients are human, Studio Gang seems to say, and some clients pay not in dollars but by staying very much alive. Gang’s combination of modesty, humility, and rigor impressed me. Absent was The Architect’s predictable uniform of overly nuanced minimalism.

All of the speakers were invited because they had explored areas beyond the typical limits of their discipline. Senses, perception, experience, the body, the brain, the mind, mattered. While there were some overlapping areas of agreement, disagreement centered on architectural experience and intuition “vs.” what was characterized as neuroscience’s attempt to supplant such intuition, or that neuroscience only confirmed what architects had known and implemented for centuries, or that neuroscience failed to appreciate the poetry inherent in the meaning of architecture. In contrast to the dialogue between the scientists and the architects at the Salk, brokered by Mallgrave’s contribution, the Taliesin conference was much more a series of parallel presentations: All were provocative and elegant, and all rather hermetically self-contained, so that for the architects I spoke with later there was no clear idea about what, exactly, the connection between neuroscience and architecture was, or what neuroscience had to teach them. After all, while architects love to dwell in the esoteric and the senses, only too keenly aware of how a change in angle or light source or a height can inform emotion and perception, they have another life: codes, liability, zoning, soils reports, structural analyses, competing user agendas, surrounding context, potential historic significance, budget, a poor economy, mercurial clients, and deadlines … to name just a few. On the other hand, it was evident that everyone was engaged and hungry for more information and bridges.

For all the talk about eradicating the historic duality between mind and body, or between science and art, the separation between the two seemed to be irreconcilable Taliesin. Even so, the disagreements revealed the very gaps where agreement or collaboration could be fostered, gaps that couldn’t have appeared had the conference, precipitated by Robinson’s clear curiosity about the topic, not been held. Like architects, scientists have those rare moments of thrilling intuition, arising out of a critical mass of neural pathways, the established track comingling with the new connection. Pragmatically, scientists may need convincing research topics, say, in the built environment, to win grants. Architects may need to convince bureaucrats and developers that X design decision is grounded in biology and science, not just their arbitrary will.

I came away being more convinced than ever that neuroscience helps to expand the radius and topography of architecture. I also hope that environmental psychologists—the traditional bridging discipline between neuroscience and architecture—will be invited to speak at future symposia, because they occupy the critical middle range of the spectrum, neither the cellular level of neuroscience or the exponentially different scale of a building. Their absence was peculiar.

Both Salk and Taliesin conferences made me think of something John Ruskin wrote in 1885, in The Lamp of Beauty, one of his Seven Lamps of Architecture. He showed how closely he observes his environment to define the rules of architectural composition he proposes. In fact, observation and exploration are not an option but required, something both neuroscientist and architect can agree on:

A man must lie down on the bank of grass, on his breast, and set himself to watch and penetrate the intertwining of it, before he finds that which is good to be gathered by the architect. So then while Nature is at all times pleasant to us, and while the sight and sense of her work may mingle happily with all our thoughts, and labors, and times of existence, that image of her which the architect carries away represents what we can only perceive in her by direct intellectual exertion, and demands from us, wherever it appears, an intellectual exertion of a similar kind in order to understand and feel it. It is the written or seal impression of a thing sought out, it is the shaped result of inquiry and bodily expression of thought.

Much later, the after-dinner entertainment included a string quartet and piano playing a piece by Schumann, whether Robert or Clara. escapes me. Everyone, young and old, was engaged by the musicianship. Music was long a tradition at either Taliesin. I imagined Wright sitting there, one leg crossed over the other, listening intently.

All the neuroscience in the world can’t create architecture that feeds us. Intuition, skill, and the architect’s synthesizing mind do matter, as Modernist architect Richard Neutra reminds us in his many books — but so does understanding our cognitive and limbic equipment. As he said,

 “The base of design is the insight that responses are traced into our being,before and after we are born, and run on subtle tracks which we better consider earnestly … or die of a broken heart.”

My thanks to Dr. James Wise, who supplied the pithy title.

Photo courtesy of Matthew Amster.

After a well-executed legal battle of 13 years, including a 1998 determination by the National Register of Historic Places of its “exceptional historic and architectural significance,” the Gettysburg Memorial known as the Cyclorama has been demolished by the National Park Service. Dedicated November 19, 1962, demolition of the structure commenced February 18, 2013 with asbestos removal and was substantially destroyed ten days later.

Designed by the partnership of Richard J. Neutra and Robert E. Alexander the concrete, glass, stone, and steel Modern structure was considered a crown jewel of Mission 66, the famous mid-century program dedicated to improve federal parks through contemporary architecture commissioned by well-known architects. The Cyclorama was emblematic of postwar optimism and American confidence, a hallmark of the program.

The Cyclorama’s dramatic shape, a long rectangle terminating in a massive pure cylindrical drum mediated by flanking semi-circular arcs, resolved an equally compelling brief. The cylinder contained the 359-foot-long 26-foot high replica of an 1883 oil painting by French artist Paul Philippoteaux of Pickett’s doomed charge of Cemetery Ridge, which enveloped the viewer in a 360-degree circle.The desired unobstructed view required innovative engineering reminiscent of a circus tent, comprising a cable-suspe

The innovative “circus tent” engineering by Parker and Zehnder Associates. Photo from “Modern Steel Construction” January 1962.

nded roof of five 22-foot-long radiating steel trusses attached to a 3 ½-foot diameter, 18-foot tall cylindrical central pier. The engineering also facilitated a breathtaking connection to the site at the ground-floor auditorium. Here, sliding glass walls separated by “fins” clad in local stone, “Blue Mountain split-face Pennsylvania sandstone” engaged Cemetery Ridge and Ziegler’s Grove itself; the stone face, here at ground level below the smooth-troweled white concrete face of the cylinder, integrated structure and site. In a classic Neutra gesture melding interior and exterior, this north end opened to copses of trees and the battlefield, anticipating outdoor audiences gathered for speeches commemorating President’s Lincoln’s immortal address. The long rectangle to the south, with glass walls and vertical screen of metal louvers (intended to recall sober Classical facades) served administration. On the west it featured a ramp leading to a viewing station overlooking the battlefield. The majestic length of the ramp embodied the sense of somber procession memorializing a nation in crisis. Interior features of note included indirect lighting to enhance views of the site from many parts of the building.

Ironically, the engineering firm Parker and Zehnder, responsible for the Cyclorama’s “circus tent” truss system, also designed the engineering for another remarkable commission for Neutra and Alexander, the former U.S. Embassy in Karachi, Pakistan, completed virtually the same time in late 1961. Recalling the Cyclorama in its layout of strong concrete forms speaking to internal functions, its glass entry façade expressed a transparent democracy and American confidence, now abroad in the world. Its careful distribution of landscape elements included reflecting pools and ablution basins for Islamic employees that percolated throughout the compound, a gesture important to Neutra.

The former U.S. Embassy, looking east. Photo by Lucien Herve,

The Karachi structure also faced likely demolition after its decommissioning and potential sale. In contrast to the actions of the NPS, led by a group of concerned citizens and architects of the Institute of Architects, Pakistan (IAP), and encouraged by the U.S. State Department, especially Ambassador Robin Raphel, the government of Pakistan’s Heritage Committee declared it a national heritage on December 17, 2012. The former embassy will be rehabilitated and adaptively reused.

– Barbara Lamprecht
author, Richard Neutra – Complete Works

Neutra’s “recipe” for constructing the Boomerang Chair, along with instructions for building laundry hampers and cleaning glass. Woman’s Day Magazine, 1947.

The Boomerang Chair, apparently, is a contradiction. Its playful shape, its materials of cloth and plywood, is not what we expect from a proper mid-century chair. And it certainly doesn’t fit our stereotype of Richard Neutra: a thoroughly pedigreed Modernism: sleek and coolly sophisticated. Shouldn’t his furniture be all chrome and black leather, or pale oyster, or walnut … not something that looks like it walked out of a child’s cartoon?

A little history. The chair was born in 1942, an important date because of the larger historical context. America was now immersed  in World War II, declared December 7, 1941. Neutra had just won an amazing commission as part of that effort, a 600-unit project housing for defense workers at the San Pedro harbor. Channel Heights, as it was called, was fast-track and ultra low-cost, but nonetheless is still known as a masterpiece of community design. It included a variety of dwelling types, a school, a supermarket with a sweeping timber and glass façade, playgrounds and a community center. Neutra maintained the hilly topography with a minimum of cut-and-fill, a strategy that aligned with budget no less than design intent, leading to a far more animated setting for the community.

Channel Heights Housing Project Site Plan

Curving walking paths separated pedestrians, especially children, from Neutra’s nemesis, “rolling traffic.” He designed the furniture as well because he wanted the spaces to work as he intended. Life would be harder to navigate if the furniture wasn’t compact and sturdy — just as fit for wartime as the ships being readied for battle. War also meant that building materials close to Neutra’s heart, such as steel, aluminum, and chrome, were strictly regulated if not forbidden. Ditto luxe fabrics like silk and nylon. Thus redwood, brick, and stucco became the new medium for Neutra’s Modernism, whether for Channel Heights or the house he designed for television personality and producer John Nesbitt House, also completed in 1942.

Modernism, after all, was more than the straight line, bigger than chrome and white stucco, and Neutra more a humanist than a rigid practitioner of the International Style.

John Nesbitt House, Brentwood, 1942

So. To pick up the story: Into this intensely focused war effort saunters Boomerang, made of tough, plain cloth fabric and humble woods you could pick up from your local lumber yard. Maybe its cheerful shape, with its implication of relax, babe, I know it’s been a long day in the defense factory, all that boom boom noise, all that urgency, was just the antidote those fearsome times needed. The Boomerang’s impudence thumbs its nose as taking yourself too seriously. Neutra intended the chair as a do-it-yourself project, even publishing a “recipe” for making it, including a pattern, in Woman’s Day Magazine, hardly the venue for avant-garde furniture design. So perhaps it’s no accident that its shape is easy-going enough that it’ll still look good even if it’s not quite perfect, even if you didn’t get the “recipe” just right. In other words, Neutra is taking wartime pressures into consideration, letting you off the hook, at least for a few years, from the formal aesthetic demands of pure orthogonality, beautiful as it is. Because as much as Neutra loved the right angle, he loved contrast as well, curves playing off the straight line.What anchors that familiar sleek Neutra image is not a palette of materials but a deeply rooted belief in humanity: he was always more interested in the people living at the foot of the cathedral than in designing a cathedral.

The war ended. Men and woman, veterans and war workers, came home, just like a real Boomerang returns to the hand that threw it. And while Channel Heights is long gone after a slow deterioration and lack of care, the chair went on to its own illustrious career. Its shape has become iconic, like a painting by the abstract artist Jean Arp, or a voluptuous landscape design by Neutra’s dear friend, the Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx. And Neutra clearly loved the chair, making sure it figured prominently in publicity photographs of any number of his houses whether the owner ordered one or not. In one famous photograph by Julius Shulman, six of the chairs are arranged on the elongated terrace of the majestic 1948 Tremaine House. Now, the Tremaine is a very adult, very cool, very suave tour de force in glass and concrete, perfect for a martini. Is this any venue for humble furniture for defense workers? Yet here are the Boomerangs, right at home, taking over the terrace. One can easily imagine the chairs scampering, chattering amongst themselves, likely plotting something that might not be exactly to the Tremaine’s taste.

But that is Neutra’s point: the Boomerang fit any setting, could fit anyone. Embedded in the chair may be all the realities and sacrifices America endured during World War II. Today, though, the chair is timeless: pure Neutra.

East Facade with new “Untamed Orange” panel, the former Garden Grove Community Church, now “The Arboretum,” part of the campus of Christ Cathedral, Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange. Photo by B. Lamprecht

Throughout the entire campus of the former Crystal Cathedral there is only one single note of color on a building. A large orange panel terminates the long length of glass on the east face of the former Garden Grove Community Church, the famous “drive-in” church designed by Richard Neutra (1892 – 1970) in 1960 and completed in 1961. It faces the entrance on Lewis Street and the famous parking lot where the evangelist of the Dutch Reformed Church in America, the Rev. Robert Schuller (1926 – ), preached to families parked in their handsome steel boats, those long mid-century cars recalling a different America. The decision to restore orange after decades of absence speaks, ultimately, to a trust as bold as the color itself: trust in the architect who chose it, trust in the decision to bring it back, trust in this version of the color, and trust that the public and new church goers would accept it. Redemption and rebirth are words that are just as acceptable in preservation as in theology.

Color in Modernist architecture has always been problematic. There are scores of seminal examples of the use of color by iconic architects, but these are mostly known only by cognoscenti. The “painted ladies” of Victoriana and the brilliant terra cotta tile of Art Deco notwithstanding, for public buildings architects generally leave color to the interior, to ephemeral flourishes, or to the landscapers. Earlier centuries didn’t have it much easier. In 1835, the mighty German architect and theorist Gottfried Semper was commissioned to redesign a royal palace interior in Dresden. The rooms were to showcase Greek and Roman antiquities. Semper, young and untried in the powerful art circles of sophisticated Dresden, changed very little spatially. What startled his audience, and ensured considerable buzz, was his use of color. He saturated panels with color as a backdrop to the marble sculpture, typically human figures in some fluid motion.[1] Even if his peers were dismayed by his impudence, no one could deny that the statues were far more dramatic against the strong colors. They popped!, we’d say today.

Semper was among those who championed the controversial new view that Classical temples were not bone white, as traditionally understood, but sharply distinguished by color. And these colors were not just subtly toned down hues or pastels (which might have made them palatable, if grudgingly) but brilliant blues, reds, yellows, greens. Such an unapologetic palette contradicts most architects’ long-standing preference for a repertoire of balanced neutral colors complemented by a range of textures and shapes, a love that owes a great deal to beautiful old grainy rich black-and-white or sepia photographs of ancient temples like Paestum or Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion. Creams, whites, blacks, browns, silvers, earth tones. Perforations, striations, rustifications. Not primary colors, especially next to one another as Semper advocated. How vulgar.

Certainly those preferences are evident at the Christ Cathedral Campus, now owned by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange. Throughout the roughly 34-acre compound, the colors and materials are Modernism’s standard palette. There is the crisp delineation of board-formed concrete at the Tower of Hope, designed by Richard and his architect son, Dion, completed in 1968. There are the 35,000 square feet of glass in the “Cathedral” of Hour of Power fame, designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee, completed in 1981. There are the embossed stainless steel panels of the “International Center for Possibility Thinking,” (a visitor’s center, café, bookstore and museum) designed by Richard Meier, completed in 2002.

Early this summer, the developer, the Christ Catholic Cathedral Corporation (CCCC), asked me to help on various aspects of the original design as they rehabilitated the sanctuary, including the missing orange panel. To do that required recalling the purpose of the panel. Why was it there in the first place?

Neutra’s building is literally overshadowed by Johnson’s celebrated glass building just across the entrance to the north, and is likewise overshadowed in popular culture. However, the smaller church is far more complex as a study in asymmetry and contrasts in light and dark. It is a slender pavilion supported by narrow steel columns that add rhythm to the tall bays of glass comprising the long facades. Years ago, the church was famous in its own right because of an outrageous move Schuller made and Neutra implemented. This was an act of pure theatre, embodied in the long white-painted platform extending from inside to outside of the church. The platform is essentially an elongated pulpit stretching beyond the building envelope, about ten feet above the ground plane, where large glass doors slid open to the outdoors.

Striding back and forth, physically enacting how fluid the relationship between indoors and out could be, the platform allowed Schuller to address the congregation in the nave (embodying the traditional collected body of worshippers), or the other, new, foreign, paradigm: people parked in their cars. Every parking space was equipped with a free-standing speaker, not much different than the speaker you’d lean into to buy an A&W root beer float back in the day. Going to church without leaving your Chevy: only in America, only in Southern California, only in a car culture, only in the land where the individual trumps community: Schuller preached the positive gospel of individual self-esteem. Architecture could help propel that message, especially an architecture that was intended to further well-being, as Neutra argued his did.

Los Angles Times, Nov. 12, 1961. Rev. Schuller was accompanied by the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale.

Neutra himself long practiced architecture as an act of perception. He employed a repertoire of psychological strategies in his architecture. These were part of his philosophy of “biorealism,” which harnessed human biology, especially cognitive sciences and evolutionary biology, to realize the effects he desired in his architecture. With regard to this most theatrical event, the robed pastor addressing a sea of cars, the architect’s goal was to attract one’s eye immediately to Schuller. How to do it? Neutra employed Gestalt aesthetics, especially “figure vs. ground,” a form against a backdrop. This was a technique he had learned decades earlier and refined at the Bauhaus in 1930, when Neutra taught there in 1930.  Thus, although the Arboretum, as Neutra’s building is now called, is so emphatically a formal, glass well disciplined into a clear arrangement of rhythmic bays, a single opaque wall section of ORANGE suddenly terminates the east wall. Obviously, this move recalls Semper’s own strategy at the Donner Pavilion in Dresden, where he, too, dramatized a marble human figure in motion, against his own panels of color. Both architects employed color as a theatrical device.

Neutra’s panel had been removed long ago. When, no one knew. It was replaced with glass to match the existing glass bays, though the new glass was reflective to resist heat gain, revealing its non-original character. The loss of the panel indicates that the original, historic orange panel was unwanted – even though it directly blocked the sun. It didn’t match the preconceptions of the Neutra they knew, or wanted to know.

I found no color swatch or specification in Neutra’s archives. The few photographs available didn’t really help either, especially the ones taken at sunset when the whole building was bathed in amber. One image did show the orange in daylight. The expert paint analyst, Patti Grant, did deliver a fine match based on little physical evidence. Even so, should we reinstate this exact orange?

Garden Grove Community Church, late 1960s/early 1970s.

The initial orange alternative was mute, in a way, and reminded me of freeway safety vests. It had little to say about the radical offer of redemption, which was, after all, the point of all this effort. I wanted to find an orange that acquitted three briefs: First, find an orange that met the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation, whose guidelines include, “Where the severity of deterioration requires replacement of a distinctive feature, the new feature will match the old in design, color, texture, and, where possible, materials.” (The proportions, design, what could be discerned about texture, and an updated, robust material, all were in carefully replicated.) Second, find an orange that articulated Neutra’s convictions about the role of vision and cognition, emotion and the senses. It had to convey his shrewd exploitation of color and his keen knowledge of its powerful role in affecting perception: everyone thinks of “Neutra Brown,” “Neutra Silver” and “Neutra White,” but few associate Neutra with orange, or persimmon, or yellow, or teal, all of which he used with flair, just as other Modernists from Taut and Le Corbusier to Wright and Schindler did. [2] Neutra alluded to Semper in one of his books, and seeming to recall Semper’s own views on color, after a trip to Sicily and Greece he wrote:

Color was – as in nature – a part of form, formal solution, and formal proportion. Color was no afterthought. It was – as it is in the reality of physiological and psychosomatic experiencing – “part and parcel.” I saw in Agrigentum a temple with the triglyph ad metope-frieze lacking, and it looked in better proportion to the columns than with the frieze that had been spared on the other front of the ruin.[3] Suddenly it dawned on me that I had – on the other side – been looking at a colorless remnant. No more were the red triglyphs between the blue “holes” of the metope against which the reliefs had been eliminated. All proportions had changed!” 

Third, find an orange that could meet the liturgical needs, rituals, vestments, and ornaments of the Catholic Church. What would be an appropriate backdrop to those moving priestly figures, to those embellishments? The fountains symbolized the cleansing water of everlasting life, the 12 original jets embodying the 12 apostles. What could portray, for example, John the Baptist’s prediction about Jesus; “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire …” and in the Psalms, where David notes that God’s ministers were “a flaming fire,” to quote only a few of the references to fire in the Bible. What orange could be a welcome participant throughout the liturgical calendar, which relies on colors to notate significant events, holy days, or periods for the Church: white, purity; red, blood; black, mourning; violet, penance; and the warm green of “Ordinary Time,” that is, most of the church year.

And perhaps it goes without saying, but after all, this is Orange County, and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange.

So I looked for an orange that had the ability to resonate with all those issues. If used, the freeway safety orange would, I thought, displease and disappoint the Church and embarrass the truly astounding efforts of the developer, the architect, and the builders. I went through sample decks from four manufacturers, weighing and thinking … well, it’s only paint. It is among the most “reversible” of treatments to historic structures. Finally, I found one, and to my delight (I have to admit), its name was “Untamed Orange,” which could speak either to ignoring established hierarchies but in a larger sense, refer to the unbridled generosity of God’s love for the world.[4] In any case, it was a fiery orange, the kind of color that would lift the spirits on a grey and rainy Sunday morning in February, or match the color of a rising or setting sun.

Schuller himself commissioned Neutra because both men were visionaries, embarking on uncharted territory, he believed. “There was a mutual chemistry,” Schuller remarked in a 2009 interview. “We were both driven by a compulsion to excellence. Neutra was fascinated by something that was different (the drive-in concept.) ‘I am not a Modern architect,’ he said. ‘I am a Classical architect. I deal with space and light and the emotions,’ ” Schuller recalled. “We talked often. What does a human being need? How does architecture relate to self-esteem? How can design be in harmony with Nature?” Schuller also recalled the sense of serenity and peace in the church, a quality that the evangelist Norman Vincent Peale remarked on as well.

Long after the church was completed, Schuller and Neutra remained close, especially during Neutra’s bouts of depression in the late 1960s, when he sought the minister’s counsel. In private, there was an intense communion between two highly intelligent men who were equals as figures who shifted the trajectory of the 20^th century. In public, they were lions of men. Each parsed their vision, honing their message, according to their unique audiences, which became one at Garden Grove. Both, I think, had a little “Untamed Orange” in their souls.

As ever, Neutra sought to convey his ideas in any medium he could. I love how the Woman’s Day art director had no problem painting the sacred design a bright blue

http://www.vs-neutra.com/#

We know the architecture of Richard Neutra as sleek and sophisticated.  All those straight lines and planes of wood, glass, or stucco … all sliding and shifting in elegant compositions of asymmetry. It’s thoroughly pedigreed. Metacool Modernism.

I think that’s what many of us, especially those of us who don’t own a Neutra house, envision when we ‘think Neutra.’

That’s not the whole story, of course. There is a phrase in German, a phrase popular among the theorists of Early Modernism; “Befreites Wohnen.” It translates as “liberated living.” That was the goal: to create an architecture where every square foot is working so that you can accomplish your life — whatever shape that life takes — more efficiently, more effectively, more eloquently  … That is the real essence of Neutra: a frank expression of fairly humble, everyday materials integrated with precision to deliver that “liberated living.” That was the true luxury.  The “index of livability,” he called it.

Still, Neutra houses, so proportionally perfect, so apparently austere, well … they can still be intimidating.

Woman’s Day April 1947.

Until we get to the Boomerang Chair, which shouldn’t even be in the Neutra canon – it doesn’t follow the rules. It’s impudent, playful, easy-going. It’s not serious. Depending on your background, it MAY remind you of a boomerang; after all, Neutra said that furniture was an extension of the body, and a boomerang certainly extends one’s body into space. Or maybe the shape reminds you of a sculpture bythe abstract artist, Jean Arp; or perhaps a garden plan by Neutra’s dear friend, the Brazilian master of landscape architecture Roberto Burle Marx, with his swirling curves of color and texture.

The Boomerang reeks cheerfulness and optimism, even a droll comic sense that recalls … oh, say, someone like Carole Lombard. And we don’t “do” those qualities these days, that whole postwar wholesome America attitude thing. We’re rather more at home in irony or cynicism.

Boomerang will have none of it.

The chair was born in 1942, just as America entered World War Two. The same year, the newly established “War Production Board” forbade the non-essential use of steel and aluminum – materials dear to Neutra’s heart. He was commissioned to design a housing project in San Pedro for defense workers at the Port of Los Angeles, called Channel Heights. Despite the hilly ruggedness, the site for 600 dwellings was chosen because it was close to the harbor, critical for defense workers working at all hours of the day and night. Neutra designed the buildings — including housing units, a community center, a market and a school building — out of redwood and cement plaster, and built in haste. He designed the furniture to go with it: simple, out of inexpensive lumber, plywood, and tough woven fabric, but also following the government’s dictates to be well and sturdily made. In a 1943 article for California Arts and Architecture, he argued that “in manufacture it runs as low as nine dollars and fifty cents and will replaced in wear and comfort an upholstered chair for thirty dollars. A reliable upholstered chair, even in peacetime, costs considerably more.”

“Few defense workers,” he went on, determined to make his case, “have time to do a great deal of furniture shopping.” Perhaps Neutra’s intent was that even if the government didn’t produce it the defense workers would build it themselves: he certainly made it into a do-it-yourself project for Woman’s Day Magazine, hardly the native habitat for avant-garde architecture.

Neutra visited the new inhabitants sometimes, teaching them how to make cushions for the stools he designed and curtains for kitchen base cabinets, since cabinet doors couldn’t, or wouldn’t, be funded. In teaching thus, perhaps he was a typical architect wanting perfection in his Gesamtwerk, his total environment. While it’s quite true that he was a perfectionist about details, and counted the famous among his friends, Neutra was also a humanist who got down in the trenches with people’s needs.

That same year, 1942, Neutra designed a home for a well-known radio personality named John Nesbitt: a Hollywood elite client, culturally sophisticated well beyond The Industry norm,  who embodied the antithesis of the Channel Heights defense worker. But even more so than the workers’ housing, here at the Nesbitt House Neutra abandoned his signature International Style of smooth silver and white stucco  for materials far more earthy and textured: brick flowing inside and out; slumped grout, redwood, glass, and the intimate greenery of plants and trees. Neutra designed a version of the Boomerang for the Nesbitts as well as a repertoire of free-standing and built-in furniture very similar to those for the Channel Heights families. The house was built by carpenters too old for wartime service and speaks to resourceful, creative exploitation of what is available, for example, wood barrel vaults submerged into the ground became down-market — but effective — versions of Neutra’s beloved “reflecting pools.” The entrance is serene and quiet: you walk along a low serpentine brick planter leading to the front door, where a lily pond slips under the door. It was Mrs. Dione Neutra’s favorite house; it’s since been smartly updated,  that quality of authentic rusticity hardly tangible.

The Nesbitt House proved a turning point in Neutra’s career. After that, his suburban houses are no less precise but are little more relaxed, comfortable within their leafy environments, a series of asymmetrical planes capped by broad overhangs looking out to distant mountains. Meanwhile, the light-hearted, optimistic Boomerang, embodying the “can-do” attitude of postwar America, went on to its own illustrious career. Clearly beloved, it appeared in all manner of publicity photographs for Neutra’s houses. It even appears as a group of six cavorting on the long terrace of the 1948 Tremaine House, one of Neutra’s masterpieces in concrete. The Boomerang, ever intent on having a good time, pays no attention to all the austere monumental majesty the house is known for. “Come on,” the now-iconic chair beseeches. “Kick back, hang out. Play a little. Chill.”

“Life is short.”

I had always considered the Los Angeles County Hall of Records, 1962, to be a soldierly but stolid example of mid-century Modernism. Reconsidering it through a visit and looking at correspondence was a revelation. In fact, this building, primarily famous for the technical prowess of its striking 120-foot-tall, south-facing aluminum louvers, is really a lesson in designing for sustained productivity. When peppered by reporters’ questions about the louvers, co-lead architect Richard Neutra said, “All technical things are auxiliary to human well being and an aid to vitality. … The most important thing about the louvers is that responsible government officials have been convinced by Mr. Neutra’s biological approach to protect the 1,200 employees working inside from unfavorable physiological conditions. The physiology of the eye, of vision, the fatigue and irritations produced were discussed by Mr. Neutra in open political meetings and reported in all Los Angeles newspapers …”

The 15-storey structure was designed by a consortium of architects led by then-partners Neutra and Robert Alexander, a distinguished architect and urban designer, to house those banal but critical government functions such as regional planning, probation, and legal records. The T-shaped building is sited in a pivotal position helping to define the north edge of the city’s civic core. To the west lies the contemporary glitterati of Gehry’s Concert Hall and Moneo’s Cathedral; to the northeast is the older Art Deco + Beaux Arts-style City Hall. The big concrete-framed windowless stem of the T, pointing south and clad in white terra cotta, stores paper records, with floor plates at 8’-6” to maximize storage capacity, while offices, with a doubled plate of 17,’ occupy the steel-framed east-west stroke.

Although it’s a little rough around the edges, the Hall of Records is an intelligent workhorse, with prescient responses to the ergonomics of working and environmental and solar issues. Its finishes of granite, brown and white terra cotta tiles (vertically oriented to acknowledge their non-structural purpose), stainless steel, glass and aluminum, were chosen to endure hard and incessant use. (There is no stucco anywhere.) Rendered in various scales, weavings and panels, these elements often run into the interior to connect indoors to out. On the exterior, the effect is one of layers of subtly rich textures that articulate and soften the large volumes. The strategy speaks to a century of dialogue on cladding: Neutra studied with Adolf Loos, whose views on cladding were informed by 19^th century German theorist Gottfried Semper. And then there are minor miracles, like the exquisite shaded outdoor terraces scattered throughout, a reflecting pool (now empty) near the lobby that “eliminated ground cover and serves the psychology of the entrance,” a mosaic wall sculpture by Joseph Young, (slated, with the pool, for restoration), and stainless steel light fixtures looking like a hybrid of Brancusi and Darth Vadar in what must have been a sleekly handsome cafeteria (now converted to office warrens) overlooking all the city. Not bad for a county office worker.

The architects layered functions as well. For example, the louvers, built by the same manufacturers who built the louvers at Neutra’s famed 1947 Desert (Kaufmann) House, were designed to do several things. They eliminated solar gain before sun hit the glass. (The architects presented a cost/benefit analysis showing a $113,650 savings over five compared to “air-conditioning and Venetian blinds.”) The hollow blades act as flues to encourage air flow outside the building envelope. Their sensual shape and silver coating diffuse light and provide ambient side lighting, reducing glare. (“Perpetually shaded and agreeably diffused, to the delight to human beings inside, whose comfort and efficiency, not impaired by fatigue and irritation, soon pays back for the millions of dollars investment in psychosomatic health,” Neutra wrote to the county.) Finally, the “verticalness” of the louvers saluted the legacy of the columns of a “dignified” classical building and drew on all those “emotional associations that go with wonderful tallness,” Neutra wrote.

The building is rife with such intelligence. Smaller fixed fins on the north side of the building “provided shade after 8 a.m. all year long.” Because the architects wanted to reduce the cumulative eye fatigue created by intense contrasts of light and dark, the architects argued against “punched-in” windows, noting that the eyes of our genetic ancestors were attuned to sudden contrasts as a survival mechanism, not exactly helpful in an office setting. Instead, armed with research from leading eye physiologists, they proposed “continuous fenestration carried to the ceiling, like the high windows in Georgian architecture or from trees, reducing contrast by reflecting ample light on light-colored ceilings and partitions … “

The 17’ plate height also permitted the architects to engage in some good Wrightian (or Loosian, your preference) games in section: offices suddenly change in height, so that employees could feel both protected near the core of the building and then enjoy a feeling of expansiveness near the windows.

As I walked through the building, it occurred to me that I was seeing several moves that I had seen in Neutra houses. That is because Neutra did not distinguish between the human at work and the human at home. Their cognitive, emotional and sensory systems were ancient. Buildings needed to respond organically, no matter whether the building was home or office, Georgian or Modern.

The  flawlessly sited 4,124-square-foot 1958 Connell House by Richard Neutra may be demolished in favor of a  11,933 (12,000) -square-foot house, downsized from a total 16,385 square feet proposed in December. The Neutra occupies the east end of  what is a transcendent 2.13 acre site — to the west is the rugged Pacific coastline, while the iconic Cypress Point Golf Course wraps the south and east views … it doesn’t get closer to heaven than this.

Below is a letter I’ve written to the Planning Commission, Monterey County, and urge you to consider writing one, too. The photos are by Dr. Anthony Kirk; below my  letter is the link to the December agenda item listing the many permissions  the new mansion would require.

The proposal recalls the demolition of the expansive, Frank Sinatra-chic 1962 Maslon House, with an important exception. The Maslon was also flawlessly sited (and thus doomed), the broad site jutting into a commanding view of an exclusive golf course in Rancho Mirage on two sides. It was razed for its trouble in 2002 in a ministerial (not requiring review, though it should have been evaluated for significance) and surprise move virtually overnight. I walked the chaotic ruin the next morning, and took a small section of the chimney, two bricks worth, home. The Connell House, in contrast to the lost Maslon House, does require review. That is the important exception, and our window of opportunity.

February 1, 2012

Ms. Delinda Robinson

Monterey County Planning Department

168 W. Alisal St., 2nd floor

Salinas, CA 93901

Re: Connell House

Dear Ms. Robinson,

I am writing to on behalf of the Connell House, designed by Richard J. Neutra (1892 – 1970) and completed in 1958.

Allow me to introduce myself. As the author of Richard Neutra – Complete Works, and Neutra – Selected Projects (Taschen, 2000, 2004), I am a scholar of Neutra’s works, numbering some 450 projects worldwide, and am completing a Ph.D. on his work at the University of Liverpool. Professionally, I am a qualified architectural historian according to the Secretary of the Interior Standards 36 CFR Part 61. Trained as an architect with an M.Arch. degree, both privately and as Senior Architectural Historian, ICF International, Los Angeles, I evaluate buildings for historic significance for lead agencies and developers; assist architects with interpreting the Standards; prepare National Register and Landmark nominations, among other duties typical of my profession. I am writing you in my capacity as an expert on Neutra’s works, though I apply professional standards, objectivity, and expertise in considering his projects.

Given his prolific contribution to 20^th century architecture, while undoubtedly a master architect, it is nonetheless unwise to assume anything a master architect designed is worthy of National Register consideration, as the Register guidelines for criteria remind us. Before I received word of potential demolition of the Connell House from Dr. Anthony Kirk, I had only a superficial acquaintance with the dwelling, primarily for writing the Complete Works. But the more I considered the house, the more I am convinced that Monterey County can be proud of having a highly accomplished example of Neutra’s work in its midst, an aesthetically compelling, spatially complex house perfectly wedded to its site.

Apart from Neutra’s well-known books such as Survival Through Design and Nature Near, both championing the requisite of nature in an architecture tailored to essential human needs, he also wrote a book directed at laypeople titled Mystery and Realities of the Site. Through this poetic little volume dense with images, he taught how building and landscape could be integrated to create an indelible experience on behalf of the environment as well as the occupant, delivering a compressed building footprint that nonetheless conferred a sense of expansiveness and tranquility for its inhabitants. The Art Connell House acquits Neutra’s convictions in both arenas addressed by these books. Ironically, his acute attention to site (he was renowned for helping clients to choose sites, even walking the site with his clients to evaluate it for both day as well as night conditions) now threatens these houses: because the site is so exquisite and often generous in size, the house itself becomes an impediment to development, typically a much larger dwelling.

The two-level Art Connell House exemplifies Neutra’s signature trademarks in its careful asymmetric composition of volumes and opposing opaque (stucco) and transparent (glass) planes. Roof planes of disparate sizes, adding visual interest, extend over those areas where protection from the sun is important. In its resolution of volumetric complexity, the house can be favorably compared with the 1957 Sorrells House, Shoshone, and the 1961 Villa Rang, Königstein, Germany.

Of special note is Neutra’s exploitation of the sharply sloping site. Here, the user is led down a right-angled path, slowing the procession into the house (a strategy dating back to his 1930 trip to Japan). He placed the private wing below the larger living area, largely hidden by the discrete front entry, a move similar to his design for the 1936 Kun House, Los Angeles, which is sited on a canyon. In the Art Connell House, the long elevation, containing both the upper living areas and lower bedroom levels, faces the ocean to the west. The bedroom wing steps back below the deck above, affording more privacy, protecting these areas from the western sun but also allowing use in inclement weather, another Neutra strategy in pragmatically but artfully wedding indoors and outdoors. This west elevation can be favorably compared with the 1962 Gonzales-Gorrondona House, Caracas, Venezuela, built for a government official, and the 1958 Rados House, San Pedro, designed for a wealthy ship builder. (Images of these houses are on-line or are in Complete Works.)

The bedroom room, below, is recessed below, affording shade from the western sun. Neutra often used tempered Masonite for portions of exteriors, here painted panels below bedroom windows.

Typical is the varying use of full-height and partial-height glass walls, defining primary view and secondary spaces; planes that extend into the landscape, both connecting building to site and affording privacy; a dual indoor-outdoor fireplace located at a pivotal location; the use of tempered Masonite, here painted given the ocean salt, for exterior base panels below some windows, and a virtually intact open plan interior. While his inclusion of a central courtyard, providing a gathering area sheltered from the window, is not typical, he employed a similar courtyard in the Flavin House, Los Angeles, completed the same year as the Connell House, 1958, but lacking such a dramatic site.

The architects for the 1992 addition/alteration on the south end of the house, located well away from the primary elevations, should be commended for one of the most thoughtful and compatible additions to a work by master architect I’ve ever seen. This later work exploits the footprint of a rear, little-seen service yard. The large south-facing picture window of the addition is framed by the surrounding wall, distinguishing it from Neutra’s fenestration strategies; the fascia is deeper; the roof extended less than those of other elevations; and the addition’s stucco finish is rendered in a slightly darker tone than the extant original shade elsewhere. All are moves that clearly delineate the new from the old while being compatible with the original character of the Neutra design per the Secretary of the Interior Standards for Rehabilitation No. 9. The minor and few reversible window changes, largely replacing jalousies, are quite typical alterations of the houses of many mid-century architects (jalousies were briefly popular but proved drafty and hard to maintain) and have not affected the integrity of the residence, nor has the inclusion of a later light fixture, also reversible, under an extended roof plane.

Thus, in my opinion, the Art Connell House would be considered a historical resource under CEQA. I urge your consideration in retaining this superb example of Neutra’s work. As one of the ‘first generation’ Modern architects who influenced Bay Area Modernism, Pebble Beach is fortunate in boasting an accomplished work by master architect Richard Neutra.

Sincerely,

Barbara Lamprecht, M.Arch.

author, Richard Neutra – Complete Works; Neutra – Selected Projects (Taschen 2000, 2004)

http://www.co.monterey.ca.us/planning/major/Pebble%20Beach%20Company/DMFAgenda.pdf

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