Only a great lesson has the power to spread everywhere, overcoming the resistence of time.

Only a great Master has within himself the strenght to settle messages, works, theachings that are renewed and fed with the passage of time.

In the firmament of twentieth century architecture, Richard J. Neutra (1892-1970), whose fifthieth anniversary of his death falls this year, expresses one of the most cultured peaks of International Modernism. That “white orchid” that took its roots in the land of lotus, California, at the dawn of that movement that pervaded the whole of the twentieth century, today, thanks to its elective resistance to the arbitrariness of fashions, sterile formalisms and arid cultural terrains, faces a new century to shine with the strenght of its resilient lesson. It is ready to nurture a Modernism that from being revolutionary – as it was in the last century – needs to evolve by accompanying Technique with Ethics, interpreting the real needs and vital aspirations of Human Being.

“Dominion of Nature does not mean reckless perversion of its forms and processes, but rather the art of  tuning the Man’s action to its order”

(Richard Neutra, 1953).

Born in the golden sunset of Imperial Vienna, where he frequented Freud, Klimt, Schoenberg and his mentor Adolf Loos, Neutra continued his training first in neutral Switzerland and then in Berlin, with Erich Mendelsohn. In 1923 America “called him” to his fate: in Chicago he worked at Holabird & Roche and met his other ideal mentor, Luis Sullivan, at whose funeral he met F.L. Wright. At the call of his friend R.M. Schindler, Neutra moves to California, where to nearly 50 years he will translate the “perception of his time” into works that “truly proclaimed the right revolution”.

While Thomas Mann depicts “the dramatic decline of the old European bourgeoisie in the spiritual experience of Art”, Neutra introduces the young America to the multisensory experience of Man in Nature.

Through the “exultant dance of connectdeness” – recalling the beautiful phrase of William Cousins – Richard Neutra’s fiftieth anniversary embraces on the ocean, overcoming constraints of space, time and pandemics, in a similar vision on present and future trajectories of contemporary Modernism.

Thinking of Henri Matisse eternal painting (Dance, 1910) – an olympic embrace of dancing figures on a otherworldly world – Neutra’s lesson concentrated by his son Dion in the famous prophecy “Architecture Placing Man in Relationship to Nature”, reaffirms the role of Architecture in its purpose of investigating the supreme truths of being in the infinite harmonies of the universe.

This is confirmed by Barbara Lamprecht, author of several books on Neutra, in the following passage taken from a recent unpublished paper sent to us for the occasion, “Neutra’s Biorealism: It Only Looks Modern”.

“When Richard Neutra protested that his architecture was “not International Style, but NEUTRA!” a resonable response might be, ‘god, yet another megalomaniacal architect’. Even if now Modernism is considered a series of questions rather than a set of features, Neutra’s “correction” also suggests that the language of his Modernism, his currency, had a different agenda. He intended an architecture far mor ambitious: the basic. The essential.

Perhaps more hubris? After all, the outstanding quality of Neutra’s buildings is usually considered in terms of architectural form-making, as superb in composition, as elegant in proportion. But the stuff that drove that form-making – an obsession with the human as architecture’s raison d’etre – has been largely ignored. His endless curiosity about his fellow human, rather than an endless search for form its own sake, was his life’s work. Form didn’t follow function. It enabled it”. (©barbaralamprecht2020)

This was Richard J. Neutra’s intention. This was and is the profound and living lesson with which that “whithe orchid” will shine in the 21st century: “Tuning the Man’s action to the order of Nature”.

Biografia

Hines, Thomas S. “Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture”, Oxford University Press, New York, 1982;

Hines, Thomas S. ”Richard Neutra (1892-1970)”, Electa, Milano, 1992;

Drexler, Arthur e Thomas S. Hines “The architecture of Richard Neutra: from International Style to California Modern”, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1982;

Neutra, Richard J. “Progettare per sopravvivere”, Comunità Editrice, Roma/Ivrea, 2015;

Lamprecht, Barbara “Neutra: Complete Works”, Taschen Verlag, Köln, 2000;

Lamprecht, Barbara “Richard Neutra (1892-1970): Architettura per una vita migliore”, Taschen Verlag, Köln, 2004.