feels most at home!" —Richard Neutra

A native of Vienna, Austria, Richard Joseph Neutra (1892-1970) had familial ties with the scions of the city’s avant-garde community; Ernest Freud, son of the famed psychologist, was a childhood friend, and his parents knew the artist Gustav Klimt and Arnold Schonberg, the famed composer. Richard received his architectural training at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna, where he studied under Adolph Loos (graduating in 1917). His early work experiences included a brief stint in the office of Berlin architect Erich Mendelsohn (1921-22), and later, in the United States, with the Chicago firm of Holabird and Roche (1924). This professional training disposed him to design values associated with the machine aesthetic and the potential of technological innovation. Coupled with this perspective was a fascination with natural phenomenon, which was nurtured during brief employment (Summer 1919) at Otto Froebel’s nursery and landscape firm located in Zurich. There, Richard came under the tutelage of Gustav Ammann, who encouraged an interest in botany, landscape and site planning, which the designer

In 1932 Neutra designed a home for himself in the Silverlake hills. The VDL Research House immediately received world recognition as one of the earliest “Modern” houses in the United States and “epitomized what became known as the International Style.” The plan of the house reflected the dual function of the building. The ground floor, which had a separate entry from Silver Lake Boulevard, served as Neutra’s office and architectural studio. A studio apartment located on the north side of the ground floor, was designed to house Neutra’s “collaborators”, such as Gregory Ain and Harwell Hamilton, who each lived in the apartment while working for Richard Neutra.

The young architect’s attraction to the United States was closely linked with his fascination for the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, with whom he briefly worked in Taliesin (1924). He also received considerable encouragement to venture further west from his childhood friend and fellow Austrian architect, R.M. Schindler. In 1925, Richard and his wife, Dioné, moved to Los Angeles. Their arrival further strengthened the region’s direct contact with Austrian and Germanic Modernism, which Schindler had initiated since his 1917 arrival in California as supervising architect on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House. Richard and Dioné moved into the Schindler residence located on Kings Road (now West Hollywood). Schindler and Richard formed a partnership that lasted until 1930, when the two had a falling out. While they were associated, Richard provided the landscape design for a number of Schindler’s architectural projects. These included the How and Lovell Beach Houses. As partners and independent practitioners, each designer contributed greatly to the development of modern architecture in southern California. Los Angeles’ mild climate, appetite for experimental lifestyle and sizeable population of European émigrés, made it the center of European Modernism in the United States during the inter-war years. As a key player in this phenomenon, Richard’s many works of architecture, his numerous lectures, and voluminous written documents, inclu

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