L'ARCHITECTURE D'AUJOURD'HUI
Special issue devoted to Richard Neutra: Mai – Juin 1946
Alexandre Persitz, Andre Bloc [Directeur]
[Neutra, Richard] Andre Bloc [Directeur]: L'ARCHITECTURE D'AUJOURD'HUI [Revue Mensuelle]. Paris: Art d'Aujourd'hui, No. 6 Mai-Juin 1946. Original edition. Text in French with parallel English translations throughout. Photographically printed letterpress scored thick wrappers. Side stapled text block. 90 pp. Text and advertisements. Spine nicely reinforced with clear tape. Wrappers mildly edgeworn. Textblock edges sunned with a gentle bump to upper corner. A very good or better copy.
9.5 x 12.25 magazine with 90 pages of text, photographs and period advertisements early and late. Special issue devoted to Richard J. Neutra prepared by Alexandre Persitz. Principal photography by Julius Shulman.
Contents:
- Message a la France: Richard J. Neutra. One-page introduction with portrait and facsimile signature.
- Visite a Neutra: Marcel Lods.
- Rationalisation et Architecture: Richard J. Neutra. 2 pages with 32 images.
- Un Architecte D'aujourd'hui: Alexandre Persitz. 6 pages with 18 photographs and diagrams.
- Methodes de Travail. 4 pages with 9 photographs and diagrams.
- Details Techniques. 7 building details.
- L'Ecole Centre Vital de la Commune. 4 pages with 12 photographs and diagrams.
- Realisations 1935-1945. Housing projects: Avion Village, Amity Village; Residences for J. Von Sternberg, Dr. Sciobretty, Dr. Alvin Eurich, Philip Gill, J. N. Brown, Mainard Lyndon, Sidney Kahn, H. G. Mckintosh, William Dawey, Charles Maxwell, M. Van Cleef, Dr. Grant Beckstrandt, John Nesbitt; Apartments: Kelton Apartments, National Youth Administration, Channel Heights. 41 pages and 134 photographs and diagrams.
- Projets pour Porto Rico. 6 pages and 28 photographs and diagrams.
- La Prefabrication dans le Monde. R. Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House; Donald Gibson's Coventry House; and W. H. Hamlin's metal house
- Low-Cost Furniture
- Surrealism in Architecture
- New Paintings by Le Corbusier
Richard Neutra (1892-1970) was an Austrian-American architect whose building career in Southern California established him as one of the preeminent Modern Architects of the 20th century.
Neutra studied under Adolf Loos at the Vienna University of Technology (1910–1918) where he was a student of Max Fabiani and Karl Mayreder. In 1912 he undertook a study trip to Italy and Balkans with Ernst Ludwig Freud (son of Sigmund Freud). In June 1914, Neutra's studies were interrupted when he was ordered to Trebinje; he served as a lieutenant in the artillery in the Balkans until the end of the war. He took a leave in 1917 to return to the Technische Hochschule to take his final examinations.
After World War I Neutra went to Switzerland where he worked with the landscape architect Gustav Ammann. In 1921 he served briefly as city architect in the German town of Luckenwalde, and later in the same year he joined the office of Erich Mendelsohn in Berlin. Neutra contributed to the firm's competition entry for a new commercial centre for Haifa, Palestine (1922), and to the Zehlendorf housing project in Berlin (1923). He married Dione Niedermann, the daughter of an architect, in 1922. They had three sons, Frank L (1924–2008), Dion (1926–) an architect and his father's partner and Raymond Richard (1939–) a physician and environmental epidemiologist.
Neutra moved to the United States by 1923 and became a naturalized citizen in 1929. Neutra worked briefly for Frank Lloyd Wright before accepting an invitation from his close friend and university companion Rudolf Schindler to work and live communally in Schindler's Kings Road House in Los Angeles. Neutra’s first work in California was in landscape architecture, where he provided the design for the garden of Schindler’s beach house (1922–5), designed for Philip Lovell, Newport Beach, and for a pergola and wading pool for Wright and Schindler’s complex for Aline Barnsdall on Olive Hill (1925), Hollywood. Schindler and Neutra collaborated on an entry for the League of Nations Competition of 1926–7; in the same year they formed a firm with the planner Carol Aronovici (1881–1957) called the Architectural Group for Industry and Commerce (AGIC). He subsequently developed his own practice and went on to design numerous buildings embodying the International Style, twelve of which are designated as Historic Cultural Monuments (HCM), including the Lovell Health House (HCM #123; 1929) and the Richard and Dion Neutra VDL Research House (HCM #640; 1966). In California, he became celebrated for rigorously geometric but airy structures that symbolized a West Coast variation on the mid-century modern residence. Clients included Edgar J. Kaufmann, Galka Scheyer, and Walter Conrad Arensberg. In the early 1930s, Neutra's Los Angeles practice trained several young architects who went on to independent success, including Gregory Ain, Harwell Hamilton Harris, and Raphael Soriano. In 1932, he tried to move to the Soviet Union, to help design workers' housing that could be easily constructed, as a means of helping with the housing shortage.
In 1932, Neutra was included in the seminal MoMA exhibition on modern architecture, curated by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock. In 1949 Neutra formed a partnership with Robert E. Alexander that lasted until 1958, which finally gave him the opportunity to design larger commercial and institutional buildings. In 1955, the United States Department of State commissioned Neutra to design a new embassy in Karachi. Neutra's appointment was part of an ambitious program of architectural commissions to renowned architects, which included embassies by Walter Gropius in Athens, Edward Durrell Stone in New Delhi, Marcel Breuer in The Hague, Josep Lluis Sert in Baghdad, and Eero Saarinen in London. In 1965 Neutra formed a partnership with his son Dion Neutra. Between 1960 and 1970, Neutra created eight villas in Europe, four in Switzerland, three in Germany, and one in France. Prominent clients in this period included Gerd Bucerius, publisher of Die Zeit, as well as figures from commerce and science.
He was famous for the attention he gave to defining the real needs of his clients, regardless of the size of the project, in contrast to other architects eager to impose their artistic vision on a client. Neutra sometimes used detailed questionnaires to discover his client's needs, much to their surprise. His domestic architecture was a blend of art, landscape, and practical comfort.
In a 1947 article for the Los Angeles Times, "The Changing House," Neutra emphasizes the "ready-for-anything" plan – stressing an open, multifunctional plan for living spaces that are flexible, adaptable and easily modified for any type of life or event. In 1977, he was posthumously awarded the AIA Gold Medal, and in 2015 he was honored with a Golden Palm Star on the Walk of Stars in Palm Springs, California. [neutransp]
Andre Bloc founded "Art d'Aujourd'hui" in 1949. He began his career as an engineer and turned to architecture (after a fateful meeting with Le Corbusier in 1921) and finally, to sculpture. In 1951, he formed "Espace," a group intent on bringing constructivism and neo-plasticism to urbanism and the social arena. This group included such artists and urbanists as Jean Dewasne, Etienne Bóthy, Jean Gorin, Félix Del Marle, Edgard Pillet, Victor Vasarely and Nicolas Schöffer.