A New Look, A Look Back

What strikes you first about Richard Neutra’s renderings, on view at the Couturier Gallery through Nov. 29, is how tame they seem. Neutra was an internationally acclaimed figure in his time, a star of architecture’s radical avant-garde. In 1932, he was one of a handful of architects chosen for the Museum of Modern Art’s landmark “International Style” show--the show that launched Modernism in America. Yet these drawings, mostly done from the late ‘20s through the ‘60s, seem conventional. One wonders what all the fuss was about.

One of the problems is that we get only a superficial look. Along with the renderings, Darrell Couturier, the gallery’s director, has included several well-known photographs by architectural photographer Julius Shulman. Also included are four furniture prototypes on loan from Neutra’s son, Dion. This gives us a quick snapshot of Neutra’s architectural oeuvre. But there is no way to dig deeper. There are no plans here, no detailed drawings that allow us to make sense out of the pictures on the walls.

But a more subtle problem is how much our point of view has changed since Neutra’s time. What once seemed threatening is now commonplace. After the early years of Modernist experimentation, cheapened versions spread across suburban developments and city centers. The movement was then trashed by Postmodernism’s pseudo-historians. Neutra’s brand of Modernism was particularly reviled by hack critics for its glass-and-steel aesthetic. But its current fate may be worse: Neutra’s complex vision has been reduced to a quaint caricature of utopianism; his houses are now chic collectibles for yuppie couples who want to add an artistic aura to their personas. We can no longer see clearly what he was getting at.

Neutra was not as talented as a draftsman as he was as an architect, and there is none of the boldness here that you see in, say, the drawings of Frank Lloyd Wright. But like Wright, Neutra was a shrewd marketer, and those skills are evident in the drawings. Most of the renderings were drawn for potential clients. This is Modernism marketed for the suburbs: low-slung houses, the ubiquitous motorcar, wrapped in neat suburban landscaping. Immense projects such as the 1970 design for the Louis Scheimer House dissolve into the surrounding gardens. Its long, flat roof is colored bright blue to mirror the swimming pools below. Its second story fades into the mountainous background. These are safe, ordered worlds.

That suburbanite dream is best expressed in a design for the Garden Grove Community Church, built in 1962. The church is seen from a bird’s-eye view, a simple rectangular box with a skeletal concrete tower rising behind. The landscape is flat. A low arcade encloses a garden on one side of the church, a parking lot runs up against its other side. Designed for a local evangelist who began his preaching in drive-in movie lots, Neutra’s church was a testament to car culture--its great glass walls opened up so that nuclear families could worship from the upholstered comfort of their Cadillacs.

That vision can be traced back to a long-standing faith in architecture’s power to heal. Sun, air, nature--all the elements of suburbia--were tools in the creation of a serene, healthy life. Neutra’s most famous masterwork, the 1927 Lovell Health House, was not just an aesthetic experiment but an entire idealized world in miniature. Its light, steel frame allowed for a remarkable degree of openness. Its clean lines, open-air porches and massive windows reflected Philip Lovell’s own theories about health and diet. It was architecture as physical and mental therapy.

Nor was all of Neutra’s work made for rich eccentrics. His more humble commissions used subtle visual tricks to expand the sense of space; his furniture was unusual for its flexibility. Neutra’s two prototype camel tables, built 10 years apart, are collapsible; they can be used as either a dining room table or coffee table. Like the houses, they are models of clean efficiency. It was all part of one neat package.

Shulman seemed to grasp this better than anyone. His photographs revel in this brave new world. They focus on sharp edges, the perfect lines of a flat roof, the crisp connections between glass and steel. The rare figures are as composed as the objects. All of this, of course, was done under Neutra’s gaze: The architect gave the photographer strict instructions on what he could and could not shoot. But the result was an image of an architecture with the clean precision of the machine.

It was just that missionary-esque zeal, that moral rigidity, that Robert Venturi famously attacked in 1966 in his book “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.” In post-Venturi America, utopia was dead. Modernism--especially Neutra’s International Style brand--was condemned as a form of aesthetic oppression. Its rigid geometry symbolized its inability to embrace the realities of life, its inevitable messiness.

Yet peer into these houses today and it is not their rigid sense of order that makes us uneasy. These images once suggested a perfectly ordered world, one where the curtains are drawn back to reveal children playing quietly on soft rugs, chaste couples sipping cocktails, where the curling smoke from a cigarette dissolves into a beautiful dreamscape. But we now know that behind these large plate-glass windows couples cheat, kids do drugs, and cigarettes can kill. In an age where the layers of privacy are constantly being stripped away, Neutra’s houses have become more like emblems of voyeurism.

Shulman’s photo of the Lovell House sums up that unease. Neutra’s masterwork sits grandly perched on the edge of its cliff-side site, a gleaming white concrete-and-glass cage. It is a heroic--even aloof--pose, as if the house is bracing against the world outside. But it is also secretive, its taut skin functions as a screen. What goes on here, you wonder? Is it good or evil? Is it surprising to anyone that, in the recent Hollywood film noir hit “L.A. Confidential,” the Lovell House was owned by a refined peddler of porn? The house’s slick, meticulous forms seem the perfect frame for that kind of power. Spanish revival just doesn’t have the necessary bite.

And that makes these houses--oddly--more unsettling today than they ever were before. It is that tension--between the perfect compositional order of the work and the imperfection of life--that is unbearable. Neutra’s glass walls open up to expose the dark side of our lives--they suggest the erotic, the broken, the psychologically impure. And nowhere is that more threatening than in the sanctuary of the suburban bedroom. Seen today, Neutra’s work suggests a perfection that is unreachable--it spells out the great divide between our hopes and our truths.

* Couturier Gallery, 166 N. La Brea, through Nov. 29, (213) 933-5557.