Mariners Medical Art Center, Newport Beach, California
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 … Read more
Endangered Ecstasy: The Connell House, Pebble Beach, Richard Neutra, 1958
The facade simultaneously invites entry but affords privacy, shielding both the house beyond as well as the sweeping views from the cliff down to the sea, views privileged to the owner. Note, too, how Neutra slows your journey to the front door, a strategy he witnessed in Japan. The flawlessly sited 4,124-square-foot 1958 Connell House by … Read more
January 12 Lecture at the Goethe-Institut Chicago: Richard Neutra Bridging American and European Modern Architecture
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 great city where the American heartland met the steel skyscraper and fell in love … Please … Read more
Is Fallingwater Modern? Not According to the Wall Street Journal
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 … Read more
Is Frank Lloyd Wright a Modernist? Is Fallingwater Modern?
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 … Read more
Dead Man Walking? The Kronish House in Beverly Hills
©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, … Read more
The Most Beautiful Box: Neutra’s Taylor House, Mies, and the “effect beyond four walls”
©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 … Read more
Responding to Rem: Is preservation really a creeping disease?
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 … Read more
The Colors of Neutra
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 … Read more
Mills Act 2010: Calvin Straub’s Mello House, 1957, Pasadena
In 2010, I had the privilege of writing the successful nomination for listing the Mello House, 1957, in the National Register of Historic Places. I was then asked by the owner to apply for the Mills Act, as the family trust wished to sell the home with permanent safeguards. Under a Mills Act contract, the … Read more
Richard Neutra – Complete Works
