Richard Neutra

Richard Neutra (1892-1970) was an Austrian-American architect, born in Vienna. He studied at the Vienna University of Technology and attended Adolf Loos's private architecture school, then worked in Erich Mendelsohn's office in Berlin. He moved to the United States in 1923, worked briefly for Frank Lloyd Wright and settled in Los Angeles, where he collaborated with another Viennese emigrant, Rudolph Schindler.

The Lovell Health House in Los Angeles (1929) has a steel frame, sprayed concrete walls and long bands of windows. Neutra built his own home and office, the VDL Research House in Silver Lake, in 1932 and rebuilt it after a fire in the 1960s. The Kaufmann Desert House in Palm Springs (1946), built for Edgar Kaufmann, the client of Fallingwater, has a pinwheel plan of wings with sliding glass walls that open onto terraces and a pool.

His houses use thin flat roofs with long overhangs, reflecting pools and floor-to-ceiling glass to connect rooms with gardens. In Survival Through Design (1954) he argued that buildings should be planned around human biology and the senses. Time magazine put him on its cover in 1949, and the American Institute of Architects awarded him its Gold Medal in 1977, after his death.