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I Love Richard Neutra: Reduction & Revision
Lucas Goldbach
Master’s of Architecture Candidate
Semper and Beyond: History of Architecture and Technology
Prof. Michael Golec
December 15, 2011
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I Love Richard Neutra: Reduction & Revision
Sylvia Lavin’s Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic
Culture, attempts to establish Richard Neutra as an architect of an affective architecture in a
psychoanalytic culture of the 1950’s. It is perhaps more of a critique of the historiography
of modernist architecture that questions the reductive approach of ‘major’ and ‘minor’
figures in the movement. Lavin questions the view of Neutra in the existing cannon of
architectural theory and argues that he should not be viewed through the traditional lens
of modernism. Lavin would argue that Neutra was an architect, architectural theorist and
an individual who sought a marriage of psychoanalysis of space to create environments of
aesthetic pleasure. Instead, this book intended to multiply the view of Richard Neutra again
reduces him while attempting to place him among the leading thinkers of Modernist
architecture.
The study questions, using Neutra as an example, the existing hierarchical relationships
in historiography of architecture and in so doing attempts to place him at higher point in
that system. The spell that Neutra had over his clients seems to have taken Lavin as well.
This book builds up Richard Neutra, places him among the leaders of Modernism without a
critical evaluation of his work. He may be more than what he is traditionally seen as, but
this study serves to reveal the limitations of his practice. Is it that these historiographies
needn’t be revised? Is Richard Neutra a less significant figure in Modernism for a reason?
Did he really create an affective architecture or something else? Could this be a work of
revisionist history that allowed the author transference for her neurosis?
Lavin begins her study by a chapter curiously called “History by Choice” where she
attempts to explain the methodology and reasons for choosing Neutra and examples of his
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work. She begins by trying to divorce him from existing historiography of architectural
history and theory. “The conclusion I draw from this quite astonishing resistance to the
patina of historicism is that the current interest in the midcentury—of which my own
interest in Neutra is an example—is not exclusively historical.”1 Historical scholarship of
the past is too limiting in her eyes and the typical narrative that is given to describe
modernism changed in the 1950’s.
The Modernist architect’s totalitarian control of their design lost ground to consumer
culture, products and the work of industrial designers. Where to put the television became
important questions in design. Using the Reyner Banham, a critic who was enamored with
the idiosyncrasies of California and the culture that Neutra produced much of his work,
said this shifting from complete design to one of multiple influences “changed the rules of
the game.” In this way, architects had to become “master selectors” carefully curating their
designed environments—what he called: “design by choice.”2 In the first chapter, Lavin
makes a case for placing Neutra outside of modernism in what she explains is something
altogether different—the contemporary. Using Banham, again, she claims that when one
approaches Neutra’s contemporary houses they do so from an a-‐historical perspective.
These spaces remain current because the user can, in a sense, remake the scene in their
context. So then the architect and thusly “the historian ‘no longer attempts to impersonate
1 Sylvia Lavin, “History by Choice,” in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 5-‐7. 2 Reyner Banham, “Design by Choice,” in Banham, Design by Choice, ed. Penny Sparke (New York: Rizzoli, 1981), 97-‐108.
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all the characters in the drama of history…but becomes the producer of the play.” 3 This,
Lavin argues, is history by choice.
The author makes note of the deliberate and comprehensive study of Neutra produced
by Thomas S. Hines and claims that her own study does not “…claim to be a comprehensive
study of Neutra.”4 Throughout Lavin’s study it is apparent that she is making a case for a
more ‘complete’ view of Neutra that indeed does place him among the so-‐called leaders of
Modernism—Le Corbusier, Mies, Gropius—but in her defining of history by choice she
claims that not only are the current views of the architect not, in fact, deficient and that she
will not attempt to produce a portrait of the man. In later chapters, where Lavin
exhaustively links Neutra to Freud, Reich, and the psychoanalytic culture of the 1950’s, a
portrait of the ‘unknown’ or ‘forgotten’ Neutra does emerge. In conceding that the work
produced by Hines was comprehensive and leaving the gaps not explained in her own
study to him in some ways is paradoxical. The study puts existing historiography and
architectural history under question and, in the case of Neutra, says that it has reduced his
role and potential impacts of studying his work. At the same time, Lavin leaves a great deal
of Neutra to that system and relies on it to explain the rest of his story. It would seem that
comprehensive study would serve Lavin if a goal is to illustrate the works of an architect
whose theories and methodologies have been lost.
3 Sylvia Lavin, “History by Choice,” in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 7. 4 Sylvia Lavin, “History by Choice,” in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 8-‐9.
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Some of Neutra’s work has been published post mortem features the input of his son
and design partner, Dion.5 Where Richard Neutra himself could not sum up his legacy, his
son, Dion, certainly would have wanted his father’s true interests to be apparent in books
that are summative to his career. Also, Dione, his wife, is known to be very forthcoming
with information and access to Neutra’s writings and correspondence. This has lead to, as
William Marlin states, a complete and honest study of Richard Neutra in Hines’s
comprehensive study of Neutra.6
Reducing Neutra
Reducing Neutra herself by selecting the limited works and not telling a comprehensive
story of his practice. Lavin’s history by choice methodology limits Neutra in different ways
than the historiography of architecture had done previously. Lavin says at the beginning of
her study: “I have attempted to explore the possible effects on the history of architecture of
a particular Neutra, the Neutra who survived environmental design, a Neutra whom I have
selectively organized into a ‘history by choice.’” Neutra is again reduced to an architect
primarily, or only, concerned with affective spaces that harness material energies, etc. By
selecting particular examples that illustrate this proposed new view of Neutra, the study
only briefly mentions earlier and later works that perhaps were exploring quite different
ends. For example, the Lovell Health house is totted as being indicative of the International
Style and was included in Hitchcock and Johnson’s MOMA exhibition.7 This. Perhaps
formative, example does not show the hallmarks of the works selected by Lavin and does
5 Dion Neutra, foreword to Richard Neutra: Building with Nature, by Richard Joseph Neutra (New York: Universe Books, 1971), 7-‐8. 6 William Marlin, introduction to Nature Near: Late Essays of Richard Neutra, by Richard Joseph Neutra (Santa Barbara: CAPRA press, 1989), xix. 7 Sylvia Lavin, “Reappropriating Neutra,” in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 10-‐13.
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not necessarily illustrate his interest in psychoanalysis. She claims that the Lovell House
has been used to place Neutra among the functional and rationalist characters of
Modernism that is blind to his idiosyncrasies.
The study makes little or no mention of Neutra’s thinking about the International style.
He was in fact once a proponent of it saying that it “started out with strong mechanistic
tendencies, inherited from an era of cocksure materialism,” but was critical of later
Modernism’s divorce from its original ideologies. Neutra called this an, “indulging in
mechanistic metaphors that oversimplify the issue of life.”8
The other view of Neutra is the regionalist. Attuned to both client and climate, the
regionalist Neutra “softened the edges of an overly aggressive modernity”.9 Citing
Hitchcock, who claims that Neutra took notes from Frank Lloyd Wright without going
beyond the aesthetics of European Modernism that the role of Neutra, according to Lavin,
was seen as a minor figure because a major figure would have transgressed these
limitations. Historiography has made Neutra banal according to Lavin because it has
limited him and argued that his work utilized basic modernist rhetoric and elements. While
she claims earlier that it is not her attempt to create a new portrait of Neutra, Lavin claims
less that ten pages later that “…an approach to Neutra less determined by Hitchcock’s
categories and by the need to prove that Neutra should in fact be a major figure, and one
informed instead by the strategies of history by choice, does not begin with Neutra’s
precocious use of a domestic steel frame or his indebtedness to Wright but rather with the
8 William Marlin, introduction to Nature Near: Late Essays of Richard Neutra, by Richard Joseph Neutra (Santa Barbara: CAPRA press, 1989), xviv-‐xv. 9 Sylvia Lavin, “Reappropriating Neutra,” in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 13-‐14.
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fact that Neutra was a prolific writer and a determined architectural theorist.”10 The
relationship between Wright and Neutra is limited to associations made through
theoretical arguments in Lavin’s study. The fact is that Neutra considered Wright a major
source of inspiration and worked for him at Taliesin. Neutra even named his first son Frank
Lloyd after his mentor.11
Lavin mentions Neutra’s past and associations with the International Style.12 What
seems to be missing is in those examples are the reasons why affect was not a primary
concern in those designs. What were his theoretical interests in those structures?
Lavin mentions that Benevolo claims that Neutra is not a theoretician and counters this
point by vigorously asserting that he wrote countless articles and a wealth of books. Again,
in what seems an attempt to assert Neutra as a major figure among other architects of the
time, Lavin compares Neutra to Mies and Schindler who notably wrote very little in terms
of architectural theory. Theory, it seems for Lavin, is the hallmark or should be the
hallmark of a leader in Modernism. The idiosyncrasies often left out in the traditional view
of Richard Neutra Lavin claims are reveled through his many writings, many of which are
not exclusively architectural. She claims that the exclusion of Neutra from the theoreticians
of modernism has lead to the limited view of him and his work and has also lead to the
divorce of Neutra from his true design interests—affective architecture and
psychoanalysis.13
10 Sylvia Lavin, “Reappropriating Neutra,” in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 14. 11 Manfred Sack, Richard Neutra (Zurich: Artemis Verlags AG, 1992), 24. 12 Sylvia Lavin, “The Emphatic House,” in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 24. 13 Sylvia Lavin, “Reappropriating Neutra,” in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 16.
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Lavin not only speaks to the misrepresentation of Neutra but to the “deflection of
psychoanalysis by architectural modernism in general.”14 This deflection has lead to the
many misreading’s of Neutra according to Lavin’s study. Psychoanalysis and discussions of
Neutra’s practice are not altogether separate discourses, but his interest in psychoanalysis
is inferred as a result of the work, not a driving design intention.
In order to establish Neutra as an architect determined to create affective architecture,
Lavin discusses in the chapter Reappropriating Neutra the psychoanalytic culture that she
claims he practiced in and contributed to directly. Claiming that the psychoanalytic culture
of the 1950’s was built on the already psychologized view of ‘space’ as the primary
impetuous for architecture. The creation of architecture was the acting on instinct of basic
human special sensibilities.15 She goes on to say that the discourse of the time was
expressly psychological—environmental psychology, behavioralism, neuropsychiatry—
and psychoanalytic material infiltrated modernist discourse on architecture. Lavin uses
block excerpts from Banham, Gideon, and Zevi to illustrate this discourse within the
historiography of architecture, even if, she would ague, historiography does not outright
admit it.
Sack, Cousins, Marlin, Hines, Gideon and many others have written about Richard
Neutra. According to Sylvia Lavin their accounts do not result in an honest or complete
understanding of the man. Her study results in what is largely a simplistic view that seems
to situate his work in an esoteric and limited subset of design intentions. Conversely, the
writing or compellations of many historiographers seem to highlight that complexity was 14 Sylvia Lavin, “Reappropriating Neutra,” in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 16. 15 Sylvia Lavin, “Reappropriating Neutra: The Space for Resistance,” in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 19.
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an idiosyncrasy of Richard Neutra in a time where architecture was reduced to its basic
elements. Neutra’s practice was many things and perhaps the acclaim that is deserved for
his provocative writings and pleasing designs has not been apportioned.
In order to establish the special and social concerns that contributed to the
development of Neutra’s psyche. In the Emphatic House, she describes the conflicting views
of mental life in his childhood home—turn of the century Vienna. The Fool’s tower, a
panopticon-‐style asylum, was at once separate from the everyday lives of the Viennese and
interlaced with it. Central to the city the cries of patients were an everyday occurrence.
Lavin contrasts the constrictive panopticon Fool’s Tower with the garden campus of Otto
Wagner’s Steinhof, a project contemporary to the time Neutra was growing up. Richard
Neutra was a student of Otto Wagner and the Steinhof project may be a part of the
developing architectural influences and theoretical developments of his practice. With the
links between Neutra and Freud, Vienna and psychologized space Lavin sets her argument
for Neutra’s interests.16
Confinement is a major fear, particularly in a psychological environment. In eliminating
this fear with transparent architecture the patients become open themselves. Is this an
implied technique or a metaphor for Richard Neutra’s designs? Is the Fool’s Tower
analogous to Modernism (prescriptive, controlled) and Steinhof to a Neutra home
(controlled freedom)? An anecdote used in the study to
Did Neutra homes take the image of Modernism, the intention of the window plane,
interior/exterior relationship and reorganize it?
16 Sylvia Lavin, “The Emphatic House: The Culture of Psychoanalysis,” in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 25-‐29.
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It is clear, through this study, that Richard Neutra and Sigmund Freud knew each other.
Lavin discusses personal links between the two men, for instance, Neutra’s consulting
Freud regarding his mentally disabled son, visiting Berggasse 19, as a way to show
reverence for Freud’s expertise. Interestingly, she mentions that Neutra, suffering from
bouts of depression, decided that instead of consulting with confidant and ‘leader’ of
psychoanalysis he chose self-‐treatment.17
Neutra was interested in psychological concerns and that is made clear, laid out in his
many writings.18 Perhaps, he was or should be seen as a major figure in modernism, if
major and minor figures should exist. Not for, as Sylvia Lavin would argue, being a master
theoretician-‐architect whose designs satisfied his clients’ psychological needs. He was
perhaps instead a trailblazer who rethought the prescriptive and totalizing view of the
architect in modernism like Mies and Le Corbusier. Instead he was an architect that
listened, like a therapist, invests his clients in the process of designing and building their
home, and developed emotional attachments not only with the clients but the clients with
the designed spaces. Lavin seems to ascribe to this notion saying, “Neutra understood his
buildings, and particularly his houses, as vehicles of emphatic connection between himself
and his clients.” Again, further trying to establish the psychological architectural role of
object to user: “One measure of this development is the increasing eroticization of the
relation between people and houses generally and between clients and architects
specifically.”19
17 Sylvia Lavin, “The Emphatic House: The Culture of Psychoanalysis,” Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 28-‐30. 18 Richard Neutra, Survival Through Design (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), et all. 19 Sylvia Lavin, “The Emphatic House: In and Out Feeling,” Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 38-‐39.
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Lavin lays out a clear approach to understanding the way that Richard Neutra went
about creating affective environments, using the methodology of a therapist. In Neutra’s
The Individual Counts, it seems that this is a misappropriation of the process he went
through with his clients. His process was not as a therapist exactly rather to approach the
problem in that way, which is to say critically.20
Neutra’s homes represented a new dynamic between client, architect and post war
house. Lavin uses this new relationship to place Neutra in a therapist’s role. His designs
could be so well received b his patrons because, as Lavin cites Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd:
A Study of the Changing American Character, that “with the architects; encouragement and
help, it is possible that people are becoming willing to have a house fit them. This requires
that they find out who they are.”21 Lavin, in laying out the methodology of project selection
in History by Choice, concedes that projects that do not share the typical Neutra elements
were left out of the study. Was Neutra really designing a house that allowed the clients to
be more themselves, as Reisman might argue, or did they simply ‘buy in’ to the Neutra way
of life? In her study, Lavin discusses the monetary transactions associated with the
therapeutic process. 22 Describing the way that Constance Perkins, who had a relatively low
budget, selected Neutra because she: “wanted a signature “Neutra” house. She wanted a
recognizable aesthetic that she identified with Neutra, and used this aesthetic rather than
professional or financial considerations to choose him over other architects. Most
importantly [Lavin says], she believed she had spent her money wisely, for she thought that
20 Richard Neutra, Richard Neutra: Building with Nature, (New York: Universe Books, 1971), 9-‐15. 21 David Reisman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), 364. 22 Sylvia Lavin, “Birth Trauma,” Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 47-‐69.
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in commissioning a Neutra house she had found the means ‘for making [her] life so
happy.’”23 Including these kinds of anecdotes and quotations opens up Lavin’s argument to
some scrutiny. There appears to be a self-‐fulfilling prophecy that Constance Perkins was
involved in. She wanted to be happy in her Neutra house and through transferring or
projecting those feelings into the space she was.
The psychoanalytic culture that Neutra operated in was predominantly in southern
California. Lavin shows the evolution of psychoanalysis from treating shell shock to the
“suburban proposition” of the 1950’s. Claiming that offices of psychoanalysis were often in
suburban homes and Hollywood popularized the image of the psychoanalyst through
characters on television, furthering the pervasive psychoanalytic culture of the time.24
If Neutra is all the things that Lavin aims to place him as through this study, is that
enough to make him more than a minor figure in modernism? Is his architecture too
specific, individual and even esoteric to place him among the leaders of the style?
If Neutra is an underdog in Modernist historiography, Lavin seems to lay out the
psychoanalysts that informed his work as having suffered from the same fates.
Additionally, she claims that another common misreading of Neutra is that he
misunderstands Freud. Rather, she claims that Neutra knows his and others’ theories well
and can look beyond, synthesize and make contrasting arguments based on how they relate
to architecture.25
23 Sylvia Lavin, “The Therapeutics of Pleasure: Hot House,” Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 69. 24 Sylvia Lavin, “The Emphatic House: The Culture of Psychoanalysis,” Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 31. 25 Sylvia Lavin, “Birth Trauma: The Therapeutic Situation,” in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 52.
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This study claims that Constance Perkins was unusually involved in the creation of her
house. The house, Lavin and Neutra claim was projected as being full of romance. Lavin
asserts that a sort of love triangle between “architect, client and post-‐war house”
developed.26
In the Perkins house transparency creates ambient effects rather than educational ones
seen in mainstream Modernism. It is not about truth in architecture but about a very
specific designed container. Perkins herself makes claims related to ordering systems and
sensory reactions.
In Neutra’s essay Intricacies of Sensory Experience, he speaks about sensory experience
and architecture in biological terms. He relates each biological sense to an architectural
response that is tied to both design decision and building systems. His writing shows a
depth of decision-‐making that seems missing in Lavin’s description of his practice. It allows
for less speculative thinking in regard to how affective environments might be created.
Rather, his texts show how affects and experiences of the senses can result in different
quality of life for clients. 27
The study itself begins with the most explicit link of architecture and design with
psychology—empathy. Using a long quote from Neutra’s own writing, Lavin creates a clear
link between Neutra’s interests in psychoanalysis as it relates to architecture. P34 Lavin
shows this link by stating, “Empathy was the primary theoretical concept in aesthetics and
art history used to link the perceiving subject to the object of perception.” P35 Lavin goes
on to parallel examples of Neutra’s work and the writings and concepts of Freudian 26 Sylvia Lavin, Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 42. 27 Richard Neutra, Nature Near: Late Essays of Richard Neutra (Santa Barbara: CAPRA Press, 1989), 100-‐112.
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psychoanalysts. Curiously, Lavin calls these writings from Freudian circles “on their very
fringes” of those circles.28 Are these studies and theories truly psychoanalytic concerns and
was Neutra explicitly using the texts selected by Lavin to inform his design developments?
The example that is most founded by this methodology is the parallel between Neutra’s
work on the Chuey house and the work of the Freudian-‐defunct Wilhelm Reich. Aside from
sharing clients and physical materials, Neutra and Reich’s linked intentions are linked with
broad strokes. Conversely, Lavin claims that Neutra’s historiographical image was drawn in
similar limiting strokes.
Otto Rank, described as an “important contributor to the culture of psychoanalysis in
America in which Neutra and his clients were immersed”, is used to again illustrate the
connection between Neutra and specifically psychological interests. For example, Lavin
claims that they knew each other in Vienna and their common histories show that they and
their theories were “made for each other.”29 These statements and associations are
deliberate way to link Neutra to the psychoanalysis. In showing clear and deliberate links
she aims to make the study simple and legible but this over-‐simplification seems to limit
Neutra in the way that Lavin claims architectural historiography has.
Rank’s The Trauma of Birth serves as a direct link between Neutra and explicitly
psychoanalytic concerns. The house, for Neutra, was a sort of mediating device for the birth
trauma. It is not a replacement or recreation of the womb but a way to survive
28 Sylvia Lavin, “Reappropriating Neutra: The Space of Resistance,” in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 22. 29 Sylvia Lavin, “Birth Trauma: The Therapeutic Situation,” in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 50-‐54.
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independently from it.30 Writings on the Birth Trauma are another way that Lavin shows a
textual and theoretical link between Neutra and psychoanalysis. Later, Lavin uses an
anecdote from Betty Rourke, a client used to reassert the link between Neutra and Rank.
She describes the new way of living, and the selling of the family’s antiques as “Liberation”.
Rank used language that she uses to describe the life of liberation without past
encumbrances in why his was initially interest in the birth trauma. Further her argument
that the lens through which he is commonly viewed is limiting.
This liberating spirit was again inferred in an anecdote involving Neutra going to a
home he designed that had new owners. These new owners did not know that the large
expanses of glass actually opened. Opening the house was also seen as a performative act of
freedom.
Lavin speaks about Rank in way that sound like she is referring to Neutra, showing their
common psychological intents as they relate to creative endeavors; specifically, showing
the “active emotional bond” between patient and analyst. This creative relationship is akin
to the relationship Neutra had to his clients that is consistently referred to throughout the
study.31
To cope with the birth trauma an openness and containment must be achieved. Just as
Betty Rourke spoke in parallel terms to Rank’s notion of the birth trauma her house
addresses these design intents. Claiming that free space, of traditional modernism, speaks
to the contradiction the birth trauma raises, Neutra’s work specifically addresses these
notions. P59 For instance, in the Rourke house, deep overhangs and operable window walls 30 Sylvia Lavin, “Birth Trauma: The Therapeutic Situation,” in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 55. 31 Sylvia Lavin, “Birth Trauma: The Therapeutic Situation,” in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 50-‐53.
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blur the boundary of interior spaces. At once the space is contained and endless. A typical
feature of Neutra’s houses is the enclosed bedroom spaces. The design of these spaces is
linked, in the text, to Neutra’s neurosis about abandonment and his longing for the
communal family bed. According to Lavin, the bedroom spaces reflect this need for security
in their size and containment by thickened storage walls.32
The notion of space and the birth trauma is explained through the way that Neutra
creates connections between interior and exterior spaces. By continuing heating and
cooling zones that extend into the verandas and terraces, ambient atmospheric zones are
created. Additionally, the ‘Neutra’ destabilized corner with its spider-‐legs is illustrative of
the mediating space of the birth canal, according to the study. Lavin follows the
development of this architectural device of openness and containment and claims that in
later Neutra houses the houses became more contrastingly open or closed. 33Perhaps this
was a response to the scar left by Interment camps in California during WWII.
Psychologized architecture, like the projects Neutra grew up with in Vienna, went
through a major shift from that time to the psychoanalytic culture of the 1950’s. The
treatments were imposed on patients in the Vienna of his youth and patients outwardly
resisted them, while patients of the mid century welcomed treatments, perhaps
unconsciously resisting them, according to Lavin.34
Pleasure and Neutra’s architecture, in this study, are expressly linked to the work of
Wilhelm Reich. Reich developed the Orgone box, layered with natural and man made
32 Sylvia Lavin, “Birth Trauma: Transparency and Transference,” in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 59-‐62. 33 Sylvia Lavin, “Birth Trauma: Transparency and Transference,” in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 62-‐64. 34 Sylvia Lavin, “Birth Trauma: Transparency and Transference,” in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 65.
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materials, which was intended to imbibe the user of the device with their energies,
resulting in, among other things, better sex and health. Visually, Reich’s Orgone box and
Neutra’s Chuey house are compared on facing pages. The Chuey house case study is an
interesting link between the psychoanalytics of Reich and the architectural practice of
Neutra because the clients ascribed to the services of both men. They were interested in
libinal energies and hoped that their home would increase their creative energies.
Additionally, the house’s design was related to Josephine Chuey’s desire to have a child.
While she never had a child, Lavin asserts that it was a “repository of her desire to be
productive.”35 With their home framed in this way, was it not already beginning the
transference of meanings to their home? Again, here lies the trouble with this study and
assertions that Neutra actually created an affective architecture by will of his role as a
therapist, of sorts.
The Therapeutics of Pleasure: The Orgone Box compares Le Corbusier’s “house as a
machine for living”-‐mantra to what she asserts is Neutra’s “house as Orgone box”
methods.36 She claims he does so by implementing his most notable design feature, the
corner. The corner allows Neutra to create “bodily and spatial traffic between inside and
out.” She also addresses Neutra’s use of stone and wood, a choice that often draws him
criticism when viewed from the International Style Modernist lens. She claims that these
35 Sylvia Lavin, “The Therapeutics of Pleasure: The Orgone Box,” in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 75-‐79. 36 Sylvia Lavin, “The Therapeutics of Pleasure: The Orgone Box,” in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 80.
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materials were not included as an effort to “soften” modernism but as a technique to
harness their material energies in the home atmosphere—as in an Orgone box.37
She also discusses at length the mediation and atmospheric conditions of in/out but
does not address his attentiveness to landscape design specifically. He worked as a
landscaper with designer, Gustav Ammann, in Zurich.38 Nature, both human and ecological,
are integral parts of Neutra’s practice. ‘Nature’ is barely discussed in Lavin’s study beyond
the mention that it exists just outside the dwelling. In his late writings, where he is trying to
clarify his legacy, Neutra
Lavin makes initial claims that mood was finally addressed by the contemporary
architecture of Neutra in the 1950s.39 Much later in the study she speaks to the pursuit of
happiness as it relates to the culture of the mid century and before. Claiming that the
pursuit of happiness was previously addressed through communion with God and in the
1950s through psychoanalysis Lavin brings to question ‘mood’ and religious architecture.
Viollet le Duc wrote of the primal moment where the rose window of Notre Dame changed
him.40 If domestic architecture had not rendered mood before Neutra, was there mood in
religious architecture, particularly of the gothic?
Perhaps the divorce from the explicit citing of psychoanalytics in Modernist
architecture was because modernism was uncomfortable with the unconscious. That is to
say that it undermined the absolute and scientific image of modernism. The immateriality
37 Sylvia Lavin, “The Therapeutics of Pleasure: The Orgone Box,” in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 81. 38 Manfred Sack, Richard Neutra (Zurich: Artemis Verlags AG, 1992), 22-‐24. 39 Sylvia Lavin, Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 4. 40 Aron Vinegar, “Viollet le Duc and Restoration in the Future”, in Future Anterior Volume III, number 2 (University of Minnesota Press, 2006) 54-‐56.
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of psychoanalysis was perhaps too uncomfortable and counterintuitive of the Modernist
architectural mind.
Lavin’s choice to extensively establish a psychoanalytic culture underneath the
accepted discourse on Modernism seems to show that Richard Neutra was perhaps
intentionally cast in a supporting role because what he was doing was not understood or
congruous with international style Modernism. Therefore, his work and theory was a
danger to the clear and prescriptive image of modernism. In his own writing he drifts from
concepts of architecture, psychology, neurology and morality in the same breath.41 This
pseudo-‐scientific approach was contrary to the purely scientific and a-‐moral image of
modernism.
It takes 71 pages before the word libido is mentioned. The fifth chapter, Therapeutics of
Pleasure, begins by outlining the transactions that take place between object and user—
both in terms of the commissioner and the architect, and art and viewer. P69-‐71 Citing
Wolflin, Lavin describes the “vibration” between a properly shaped object in works of art
as “outer and inner Form [that] belong together, like man and woman. Both are oriented
toward each other. Only in their union does art appear.” Lavin admits that there is not a
curative result of these pleasures but uses it to address the issue of pleasure and the
created. This erotic dimension finally leads to the use of the term libido: “The rise of
functionalism and the neue Sachlichkeit in both architecture and historiography actively
41 Sylvia Lavin, “The Emphatic House: In and Out Feeling,” in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 35.
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suppressed the erotic dimension of this tradition, allowing the nineteenth century’s
prophylactic ambitions to re-‐emerge.”42
Speaking to Wolflin’s theory of pleasure transaction with artistic object, Lavin again
claims that a character associated with Neutra has been reduced by historiography.
According to Lavin, Gideon did use some of Wolflin’s theory, namely Zeitgeist, but not on
his ideas of aesthetic quality. She goes on to cite Gideon’s descriptions of a curative,
hygienic and cleansing architecture of Modernism. She describes at length the use of light
and the window my International Style modernists in contrast to Neutra. Where Neutra
used the window as a true aperture, one that opens and closes, linking the client to the
climate of the site, International Style Modernists used, “The control of light and air was, by
the 1920s, a kind of daily tonic to be taken at home that not only cleansed the body of its
nervous energy but ridded architectural discourse of its embodied and erotic dimension.”
Hygienic modernism of the international style may have been about health, but this study
aims to define Neutra’s modernist-‐contemporary as specifically intent on pleasure.43 Lavin
compares the reactions of Wolflin and Freud to beautiful objects and human impulses,
respectively. Linking the pleasure described by Wolflin to the libinal energies discussed by
Freud provides the space for Neutra to create his spaces in Lavin’s study. Referring back to
the ability of Neutra to synthesize together the desperate theories of many fields she
claims: “When these physiological, psychological, and environmental forces converged in
Neutra, energy transformed aesthetic pleasure into a form of therapy, and the domestic
setting gave way to the house of pleasure.” 42 Sylvia Lavin, “The Therapeutics of Pleasure: Hot House,” in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 70-‐71 43 Sylvia Lavin, “The Therapeutics of Pleasure: Hot House,” in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 71-‐73.
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The limited scope of Lavin’s study raises many questions. Lavin explains her
methodology for selecting the homes featured in the study. She explicitly states that she
chose houses at a range of budgets perhaps in an effort to show that he could create an
affective architecture at any scale. Additionally, she admits that other works that do not
specifically have the typical ‘Neutra’ elements—mitered glass corners, spider legs, flat
roofs, etc.—and are happening simultaneously, are not included in the study. This calls into
question the examples that were selected. If Neutra is to be touted as the therapist-‐
architect, should not all his work share that intentional thread? Or does this illustrate the
possibility that affective spaces were simply an experiment of his mid century domestic
architecture?
Contradictions and Limitations
If Richard Neutra truly created an individualized architecture, based on the information
acquired through the diagnostic process Lavin lays out, then why are the houses so similar?
This is not to say that they are not different in many regards but using the same kit of parts
seems to negate a true sense of individualized treatment. Likewise, does this illuminate a
reason why Neutra may have been remarked in a supporting role in architectural
historiography? Was his practice too limited in scope to preclude him from being seen as a
‘leader’ of modernism?44
Throughout reading From Follows Libido, the reader is entertained by anecdotal
evidence of satisfaction and supposed affective effects of Neutra’s projects. The author
never seems to give a concrete definition of how those effects are rendered. Rather, many
possibilities are proposed such as the materiality of the spaces, the connection to the 44 Sylvia Lavin, “The Therapeutics of Pleasure,” in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 83.
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exterior and the integration of the climate of southern California. More often, claims are
made through excerpts from Neutra’s writing about affective architecture, in general.
“Design becomes a form of therapy when the psyche must be defended from the
unconscious effects of architecture. Affective rather than symbolic form, according to
Neutra, was the most useful architectural defense.”45
Neutra did not expressly speak about the neurosis that his homes addressed in the
publication of his work. He ensured that clients’ pictures and personal effects were
eliminated. Lavin claims that his houses were not intended to make portraits of individuals
or to make direct references to treatment at all. Was Neutra playing out his fantasy of
doctor-‐patient confidentiality by not including this information in the documentation of his
work? Or was the affective-‐ness not yet ascribed to the house? It seems odd that there
would not even be a mention of the intent of the house to, at the very least, improve the
mental life of the clients. Additionally, with the close client relationship Neutra developed,
it is unusual to scrub the home clean of what makes it truly ‘theirs’ in the consumer culture
of the 1950’s that he supposedly embraced.
The study often refers to anecdotes provided by clients that describe the way that living
in a ‘Neutra’ changed their lives. Surely, going from a house full of antiques, as in the
Rourke example, built before World War II to a Neutra home—with displaced corners and
glass walls—would be a significant lifestyle change.46 Is this not an act of transference,
filling the architectural object with meaning? Was the individualized affective intention
truly a part of the process and did not result in different results based on individual clients? 45 Sylvia Lavin, “The Emphatic House,” in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 32. 46 Sylvia Lavin, “Birth Trauma: Transparency and Transference,” in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 59.
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Or was the ‘Neutra’ kit of parts—materials, spider-‐legs, interior/exterior connections—
what changed the way the clients lived, generally?47
If the post-‐WWII work of Richard Neutra enhanced what he called “psycho-‐
physiological wholesomeness”. Eighty-‐six pages into the study Lavin finally addresses the
connection to his earlier work, most notably the famed Lovell house, that she claims
focused on the architectural organism as it relates to the human. Meaning, the steel frame
as a representation of “intestinal hygiene”.48
A sensory architecture was for Neutra was architecture closely linked to the psyche.
Wundt’s Principles of Physiological Psychology links the senses to the environment and to
architecture for Neutra.49 This was already a part of architectural writing in Locke and
Condillac. Lavin claims that scholars have overlooked the link between Neutra and Wundt
because of the dominance of Freud during that time in turn of the century Vienna. Here
Wundt seems cast as a lesser character as Neutra has in Lavin’s eyes.
Neutra was trying to modernize architecture through understanding the psyche while
his colleagues who have been assigned major roles were rationalizing program and
structure. Lavin lays out these comparisons in an attempt to show the complex theoretical
approach Neutra took to architecture. Again begging the question if historiography of
architecture’s hierarchical structure is flawed then why must Neutra be seen as a major
figure. Instead a clarification of his image in architectural historiography and interests
should be the goal of the study.
47 Sylvia Lavin, “Birth Trauma: Transparency and Transference,” in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 67. 48 Sylvia Lavin, “The Therapeutics of Pleasure: Window Treatment,” in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 86. 49 Daniel N. Robinson, “Wilhelm Wundt,” in Robinson, Toward a Science of Human Nature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
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Later, Lavin compares Le Corbusier to Neutra. Corbusier used the window as a
stabilizing element that embodied uniformity and could be controlled like a camera’s
lens.50 By contrast, Lavin describes Neutra’s openings not as screens to view modern life
but as orifices where the fluctuating activity of people can be encountered. These
statements are used to place Neutra’s work not as modern but as contemporary. Is it the
author’s intention to assert that Neutra was not a modernist at all? Is it to assert as
elsewhere in the study that he had not be given a ‘fair shake’? Or does it reveal that he was
working with a very particular set of interests that have rendered him in many categories
at once?
Mies’s use of the window plane, set above the level of the ground, and Le Corbusier’s
call for window walls are an important contrast to Neutra’s use of glazing. Neutra took the
large expanses of glass that were made possible after WWII and went beyond the picture
window of mid century tract homes, or the sealed separation of Mies and Le Corbusier, to
create a plane that barely exists. Neutra used deep eves and exterior lighting to reduce
surface glare and all but make the glass disappear. Lavin shows the paradigm shift of the
window stating, “The window wall no longer primarily frames a view as in Le Corbusier
nor delineates a classically conceived or geometrically precise space. Instead, Neutra’s
windows amorphously leak through the structure of the house—topological billowing’s of
a domestic membrane that create highly indeterminate and viscous environments.”51 The
intended “throbbing” of the spaces in a Neutra house constantly fluctuating between
solid/void, open/close, and interior/exterior is argued, by Lavin, to be architecture’s 50 Sylvia Lavin, “History by Choice,” in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 102. 51 Sylvia Lavin, “The Therapeutics of Pleasure: Window Treatment,” in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 83.
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culmination of psychological and modern architecture. This architecture, the architecture
of Richard Neutra, established an “engagement with the environment” and an
understanding of the human subject in “psychophysiological” terms.52
Neutra wrote about certain attentiveness to both the landscape and client, among other
things. The client is mention by Lavin but landscape not at all. The way he regards the
landscape reveals much about the therapeutic and pleasurable aspects of his architecture.
His practice was altogether rooted in psychology and nature.53
Conclusion
William Marlin, who compiled Neutra’s late essays after his death would agree that
Richard Neutra had been reduced by historiography. His agreement does not reduce
Neutra in the ways the Lavin’s study Form Follows Libido, tends to. He argues, using
Neutra’s writings, and not a reduced subset, that he was both theoretician and designer.
Additionally, Neutra’s ‘techniques’ or design tendencies are made clear by Marlin’s
exhibition of late essays. Where Lavin’s study seems to focus on superficial aesthetics and
materials Marlin’s book illuminates the “therapeutic quality of harmonious
surroundings.”54 Lavin’s Neutra is a designer concerned with only one aspect—the
psyche—reading Neutra’s essays reveals his interest in a sensory architecture that
responds to the physical, psychological, emotional, spiritual and health of humans.55
52 Sylvia Lavin, “The Therapeutics of Pleasure: Window Treatment,” in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 83-‐85. 53 Richard Neutra, “Biorealism in the Individual Case,” in Richard Neutra: Building with Nature (New York: Universe Books, 1971), 219-‐220. 54 Norman Cousins, foreword to Nature Near: Late Essays of Richard Neutra, by Richard Joseph Neutra (Santa Barbara: CAPRA press, 1989), viii. 55 William Marlin, introduction to Nature Near: Late Essays of Richard Neutra, by Richard Joseph Neutra (Santa Barbara: CAPRA press, 1989), xxiii.
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Psychological language is a part of Neutra’s writing about sensory architecture and he
did write specifically about psychological issues. However, reduction of his theories to
primarily psychological ones is flawed. Perhaps Sylvia Lavin’s reduction of Neutra stems
from her common interest in psychoanalysis and architecture. Her expertise as a Getty
Institute and American Psychoanalytic Association fellow, gives her a frame of reference to
tie her disciplines together. Where her study Form Follows Libido could be a useful link
between the disciplines, looking at a very specific subset of Neutra’s design intentions. It
instead broadly attributes his multi-‐faceted work to a limited set of theories. The tone of
the book is exultant of Neutra and deeply linked to the psychological and physical space in
which Lavin produced her study. Living in Southern California where Neutra practiced, she
is intrinsically linked to the architect. She notes in the acknowledgments that one of her
children goes to a Neutra designed school.56 Additionally, the chapter Birth Trauma was
finished when she gave birth to her first child. It is hard not to draw a parallel between the
relationship formed between architect and client in the first case study in the book, the
home for Constance Perkins, and the relationship that seems to have developed between
author and subject. Lavin describes the spell that Neutra seemed to have over his clients
and Constance Perkins, specifically, resulting from his being “so endowed with empathy.”57
Where Constance Perkins fell in love with the idea of Neutra, it seems that Sylvia Lavin has
done the same while composing her study of his psychoanalytic architecture.
56 Sylvia Lavin, acknowledgements in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in Psychoanalytic Culture, by Sylvia Lavin (Cambridge: MIT press, 2007), viii-‐ix. 57 Sylvia Lavin, Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 40.
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Bibliography
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William Marlin, introduction to Nature Near: Late Essays of Richard Neutra, by Richard
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