ARCHITECTURE : Neutra’s Radical, Free-Form Style First Took Shape in Hollywood

In 1949, when architect Richard Neutra appeared on the cover of Time magazine, the editors asked, “What Will the Neighbors Think?” They were referring to the free-flowing, horizontal spaces emerging out of Neutra’s Silver Lake studio. This was radical architecture. It was without ornament, made out of industrial materials, and bold in its sculptural openness. Areas flowed from inside to outside, and glass made the artificially lush landscape of California seem to float into the very heart of each of the architect’s buildings.

It had taken Neutra years to gain the renown to be able to design with such freedom. (The centenary of his birth this year is being commemorated with lectures, exhibitions and the renaming of a street in Silver Lake in his honor.)

The roots of his free-form style started back in 1927, when he designed his first building in Los Angeles. At that time, it was called the Jardinette Apartments and was meant as a prototype for garden apartment buildings that would transform Hollywood into a range of man-made mountains hung with terraced gardens. If it appears rather solid and monolithic to us today, it is only because Neutra was just beginning to realize the freedom our climate and American building practices gave him.

Neutra had arrived in Los Angeles from Vienna only two years before to work for Frank Lloyd Wright. Once here, he started a partnership with fellow Wright alumnus Rudolf Schindler and several other architects, called the Architectural Group for Industry and Commerce (AGIC). The members of this experimental practice felt that architecture should be an integral part of the technological transformation of Los Angeles into a modern metropolis.

One of their first commissions came from developer J.H. Miller, who envisioned erecting modern, efficient apartment buildings to serve the emerging movie colony of Hollywood. AGIC was to design the prototype for a site at Marathon Street and Manhattan Place.

Neutra created a four-story concrete-block building. Its main bulk runs east-west along the back of the site, while two short wings come out to the north edge to shelter a shallow courtyard. Balconies open up the ends of the structure, making the building look as if it is dissolving into the western skies.

Neutra underscored this sense of openness with corner windows at the end of bands of metal casements. Where there is no glass, stucco bands emphasize the horizontal rhythm of the floors. Against this stack of flowing spaces, the eastern corners are left as bare towers of concrete. The most easterly of these two anchors was originally painted a dark color and rises above the building to shelter part of a rooftop garden. Everything about the building speaks of condensed, efficient forms whose edges dissolve into the landscape.

Today, the Jardinette is somewhat neglected and forlorn. It stands alone amid bungalows and apartment buildings. Over the years, the heaviness of its forms has asserted itself over the crispness of the lines that show up in early photographs of the building. You can sense that even if it was brand new, however, it would have a certain monumentality relieved only by the zigzagging layers applied to its simple shapes. It is a more European, solid building than Neutra would produce only a few years later.

Neutra never got to build more of these garden apartments because the owner went bankrupt during construction, but the building was published as far afield as Germany and Russia. It was the first experiment in a career that made him the foremost salesman of California modernism. One can only hope that someday soon the Jardinette, inhabited by mere mortals who enjoy efficiency and sunlight, will be restored to its original abstract splendor.