Vintage Neutra

By CATHY CURTIS

Feb. 18, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

COSTA MESA —

In the early 1950s, when noted emigre architect Richard Neutra met with trustees and faculty of fledgling Orange Coast College, he may have struck them as a visitor from another planet.

From his Einstein-like shock of hair to his grandiloquent pronouncements, uttered in a thick Viennese accent, Neutra had little in common with the crew-cut, gee-whiz world of postwar suburbia.

His partner, Robert Alexander--who master-planned the campus in the late ‘40s and designed the first few buildings--once recalled Neutra’s bafflement at the athletic department’s requirements.

Football? Pompom girls? Cheerleaders? What primitive rites were these?

Nonetheless, Neutra’s son, Dion, who sat in on some of the presentations to college trustees, remembers the atmosphere at the college as “supportive” and “responsive.”

Architectural photographer Julius Shulman, whose images of the architect’s Orange County projects are on view at the college art gallery, agrees that the working arrangements appeared harmonious. “Neutra was sympathetic all his life to educational buildings.”

But Shulman, whose elegant photographs of cutting-edge buildings in Southern California were published widely and helped launch their architects’ international reputations, saw something else at work.

“The sad thing was that, unfortunately, many of the

faculty and administrators were not familiar with contemporary architecture of the kind he expounded,” Shulman says.

“As a result, controversial elements crept into the design. . . . Neutra’s vocabulary did not embrace the mood or the needs of the educators. He spoke a different language.”

In broad terms, Neutra envisioned a cluster of unpretentious, low-lying buildings where students could study in sunlit rooms or enclosed patios, gather informally in tranquil open spaces and circulate under covered outdoor walkways.

A stroll around the campus shows this vision largely intact (later buildings were designed by the Blurock Partnership, now TBP Architecture, in Newport Beach). But problems ranging from maintenance to misunderstandings of student needs have required large and small changes during the past 40-odd years.

Neutra, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1923 and died in 1970, was among a handful of leading architects--including Rudolph Schindler, Raphael Soriano and Pierre Koenig--who adapted the modernist language of such giants as Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier to define a new kind of space.

The Southern California climate allowed Neutra to merge indoor and outdoor realms with free-flowing spaces defined by ample expanses of glass and sensitive landscaping, including water elements.

Lovell House, a pioneering steel-and-glass Hollywood Hills home built in 1929, made his early reputation as a designer of clean-lined, steel-framed structures intimately linked to their natural environments. (It served as Pierce Patchett’s deluxe digs in last year’s noir thriller “L.A. Confidential.”)

Before teaming up with Cornell-educated Alexander in 1949--Neutra’s partner until 1958--he had designed numerous homes and several schools, as far afield as Puerto Rico.

Orange Coast, a two-year college founded in 1948 and designed to serve 12,000 students, offered an education directly linked to the needs of local employers. The business education building, for example, was outfitted with a “merchandising lab” and a “practice show window.”

“Neutra was the hot architect for schools at the time,” says fine arts dean Edward R. Baker. “But there was a major recession in 1948, and everyone was poor. The school district never had enough money to do it right.”

Indeed, Thomas S. Hines, professor of architecture at UCLA, dismisses the Orange Coast buildings as “competent, though unspectacular” in his 1982 book, “Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture.”

Dion Neutra, who serves as executive consultant for Survival Through Design, a nonprofit group dedicated to the Neutra legacy, disagrees.

“Given the period and the program and the budget constraints we operated under,” he says, the campus was “an inspired result.”

Shulman also believes that Neutra’s planning and intentions were of a high order. But as with all “fundamentalist” architects--Shulman’s term for designers who won’t bend their principles to accommodate clients--Neutra was known for giving grand assurances and then replacing clients’ wishes with his own.

Perhaps the most eye-catching campus building by Neutra and Alexander is the 1,200-seat Speech Art Center. Now known as the Robert B. Moore Theatre, it appears in Shulman’s photograph as a voluminous arc rising serenely against the night sky.

Neutra envisioned the center as an all-purpose gathering place for town and gown, easily configured to accommodate pageants or intimate plays, orchestra performances or lectures.

Twin revolving stages would facilitate scene changes. Huge motor-driven doors opening to an outdoor amphitheater would extend the stage as far as the eye could see.

Side stages also would open into outer yards, where--in Neutra’s Old World view--”a few props, a plant container or a bleak tree may suggest the palace garden of Don Giovanni or [ancient Macedonian battleground] Philippi.”

It’s impossible to know how Neutra’s listeners received this unlikely vision. Perhaps they mentally substituted the enchanted village in “Brigadoon,” a recent Broadway hit.

But in a recessionary climate, Neutra had to rein in his wilder flights of fancy. (Dion Neutra recalls the budget as “something like $500,000.”)

The architectural firm’s literature from the time proudly points to the “extreme economy” achieved by omitting the grid (the open framework anchoring pulleys that raise and lower scenery) and by designing “an open but protected foyer.”

It was actually an outdoor walkway lined with panels of translucent glass.

An awkward compromise between a classroom and an auditorium, it never fulfilled Neutra’s airy promises and suffered, some observers say, from his lack of experience in theater design.

The turntables, which had operational problems, conked out early on. Sight lines from many seats were nonexistent. Acoustics were poor. And there was no fly loft on which to haul scenery up and down.

A $1.6-million privately funded renovation, completed in 1994, removed the offending seats, enlarged the stage and improved the acoustics.

A projected second phase, which has not been funded, would add the fly loft; a third phase would enclose the lobby and remodel the ticket booth and restrooms.

Curves, otherwise rare in Neutra’s work, reappear in a smaller scale in the planetarium, part of the multiunit science building.

Covered walkways connected the other three structures in the complex. Along the southwest exposure, facing a large open area, Neutra erected angled brick walls as a shelter from wind and sun.

Similarly, the specially designed louvers on several buildings--long gone, because the supplier went out of business--regulated the flow of sunlight through the large panes of glass.

But no architectural solution for summer’s rays could match the impact of air-conditioning--which, of course, was nonexistent in 1950s classrooms.

The temperature remained a problem until the 1980s, when funding became available to replace aging heating units in the classrooms. For essentially the same price, says Jim McIlwain, vice president for administrative services, the supplier offered to throw in a cooling unit.

A central plant would have been more energy-efficient and easier to maintain, McIlwain says. But the heating deal was a take-it-or-leave-it proposition--a Faustian pact with the forces of Ugly.

Looming on the roofs of Neutra’s buildings, the bulky, roof-mounted units mar the simple geometry of his designs.

“That sort of addition is made without consulting architects,” Dion Neutra says, an acerbic note rising in his voice, “and no effort is made to screen [the units] or integrate them with the design. . . . Too many [Neutra] buildings have been destroyed or remodeled out of existence.”

Other changes, including the removal of lush plantings that softened the crisp lines of the buildings, also have removed some of the luster of Neutra’s original scheme.

The planetarium originally was bordered by a shallow pool, a feature Neutra employed in numerous projects (including the Garden Grove Community Church, now dwarfed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee’s Crystal Cathedral) to soften the transition between interior and exterior. It has been paved over.

McIlwain says that in his 33 years on campus, “I don’t remember ever seeing any water in that pool. It was just a few inches deep, 3 or 4, and it became a tripping hazard. People were throwing things in there. It wasn’t possible to keep it maintained.”

“Those water elements tend not to be preserved” in Neutra’s buildings, his son says sadly, “and I think it is a great shame. . . . It’s just too bad, because it’s a dry, hot area at certain times of the year. But it all takes commitment and maintenance and effort, and I’m not saying it’s easy.”

Shulman is more sanguine about the inevitability of change and its impact on buildings. “That’s the name of the game,” he says. “That’s what architecture is all about.”

At least the Orange Coast buildings are still in place. Several of Neutra’s other Southern California projects no longer exist, including a house he designed in 1936 for film director Josef von Sternberg and the late-’50s arts building at Cal State Northridge (damaged in the 1994 quake and razed last year).

The campus buildings Alexander designed independently from Neutra have met with a stern fate. The Technology Center, a squarish concrete block building that housed wood and metal shops, was one of the first permanent structures at Orange Coast.

Plagued by wood rot and toxic asbestos fibers, it was torn down 3 1/2 years ago and replaced with a gleaming vertical structure by Hill Partnership in Newport Beach.

Alexander’s Art Center--which includes the campus art gallery--is also doomed if a bond issue for higher education construction gets on the June (or November) ballot and passes.

The center would be leveled to make way for a $14.4-million complex by Los Angeles architect Steven Erlich.

Yet Neutra’s legacy at Orange Coast endures, in large and small ways.

Dion Neutra recalls how his father allowed students to create their own routes through the grass and then paved their tracks, rather than imposing a set system of pathways.

McIlwain admits to a soft spot for the way the Neutra-Alexander designs reflect the untroubled era of the early ‘50s.

“I like that retro feeling of the campus,” he says. “You just want to take your time machine and walk and enjoy the serenity. There was a simple elegance [in the buildings]. And it was so Californian.

“You can just imagine a balmy summer night right after sunset. The lights are on. Everything is shining with fresh paint. The plants and the flowers are blooming. I wish I could have seen that.”

* “Richard Neutra: His Architecture at Orange Coast College and in Orange County, California,” through Thursday, Orange Coast College Art Gallery, 2701 Fairview Road, Costa Mesa. Hours: 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Wednesday; 11 a.m.-3 p.m. and 7-8:30 p.m. Thursday. (714) 432-5039.

On March 1 (through March 31) the show moves to the Museum of Architecture, 34000 Via de Agua, San Juan Capistrano. Hours vary; call (714) 443-5288.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Neutra’s Campus Legacy

Working together or separately, architect Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander--his partner from 1949 to 1958--designed 20 buildings on the Orange Coast College campus. Low-slung roofs, covered outdoor walkways and simple, planar elements distinguished their work during this period. Most of the buildings were modified during the intervening years.

By Neutra and Alexander

1. Media Graphic building, 1952

2. Business Education buildings, 1953

3. Speech Art Center (now Robert B. Moore Theatre), 1954

4. Music Building, 1954

5. Science buildings (including Planetarium), 1956

By Alexander

6. Counseling and Admission buildings (originally the campus library), 1950

7. Art Center, 1964

* Technology Building, 1948 (demolished)

Note: Not all campus buildings are shown

Source: Orange Coast College