Modernist Melding of Elements

Southern California edifices designed by Modernist architects Richard and son, Dion, Neutra are hot. Scenes from the movie “Anniversary Party” and parts of “L.A. Confidential” were filmed in Neutra-designed homes and the city of Los Angeles declared April 8 “Richard and Dion Neutra Day.”

Still, many of the buildings are in need of repair and some are even threatened with destruction.

An exhibition at Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, “The View From Inside--The Architecture of Richard and Dion Neutra,” calls attention to the firm’s designs--one as close as six blocks away at the Orange County Courthouse--as well as to ongoing issues of restoration.

Don Cribb, founder and co-president of the Santa Ana Council of Arts and Culture, was instrumental in bringing the show, which was organized by Dion Neutra, to Grand Central.

Cribb hopes to bolster efforts he began last year to restore the reflecting pools at the courthouse. He finds himself in the middle of a flap between the Board of Supervisors, who would like to explore landscaping the spot, and the Civic Center Commission, which wants to bring back the pools. The supervisors will decide in late summer or early fall.

“We’re making a negative statement about who we are by compromising the architecture,” Cribb said. “In Santa Ana, historic architecture is becoming more significant to our identity, character and heritage.”

Dion Neutra is also on a crusade to preserve his father’s and his firm’s legacy.

“These buildings are often treated as historic artifacts, like looking at Pompeii after it was destroyed,” said Dion Neutra, 75, whose Silverlake-based family firm also houses the Institute for Survival Through Design, an advocacy group.

For 30 years he collaborated with his late father on projects. The Neutra firm designed the Huntington Beach Library and Cultural Resource Center, and the Garden Grove Community Church. The senior Neutra died in 1970.

The current show is a scaled-down version of one first mounted at the Pacific Design Center in 1984. It marks the 75th anniversary of the Neutra family business.

Twenty-nine laminated panels of enlarged photographs and sketches survey 20 Neutra public and residential projects in Southern California as they have appeared from the 1920s to the present day. The Neutras designed 150 sites in Southern California, including two dozen since 1950 in Orange County, and 300 worldwide. A seven-minute short film also will be screened.

About one-third of the Southern California buildings have been destroyed or deleteriously remodeled.

“Naturally, it’s frustrating because you wonder why architects endure this ignominy at the whim of whoever owns the property,” Dion Neutra said.

But the tearing down of his buildings could not diminish Richard Neutra’s reputation. The architect came to the United States from Vienna in 1923 and quickly established himself as a pillar of Modernism--a period generally marked from the late 1940s through the 1960s. His contemporaries, influenced by the vision of Frank Lloyd Wright, included Rudolph Schindler, Raphael Soriano and Gregory Ain, and a younger generation: Craig Ellwood, Pierre Koenig, Gordon Drake and A. Quincy Jones.

At the heart of Neutra’s minimal designs was man’s relationship to nature. Neutra coined the term “biorealism,” a groundbreaking concept during its time that merged prefabricated building materials--steel frames and glass--with a natural aesthetic. Rooms were spacious and dynamic with skylights, fountains and pools. Neutra believed by connecting architecture with nature, a building’s inhabitants would be happier and more productive.

The marriage of the indoors and the outdoors fit the California climate and lifestyle.

“It was this concept that he introduced in Southern California that caught on when the region, starting in the 1920s, was a mecca for people seeking the good life through healthy living,” said architectural historian Ted Wells of the Museum of Architecture in San Juan Capistrano. “They were looking to architecture to solve social and psychological ills.”

Creating an urban oasis was a Neutra signature. Water elements--running fountains and shallow, shimmering pools--were used as landscape devices.

“The water element mirrors the idea that people, like water, are constantly in motion and changing,” Dion Neutra said. “We’re not about formalism which is what architecture seems to be viewed as today. We’re about humanism.”

Richard Neutra established his career designing small, innovative, single-family residences and later bolstered his reputation by landing major, public commissions of schools, churches and civic centers.

His classic Modernist buildings had simple, clean lines with flat, horizontal roofs, deep overhanging eaves, walls of glass and sliding doors.

The Lovell Health House built in 1929 in Los Angeles is one of his seminal works. “He took machine-made materials and put them together in compositions that created peaceful and calming environments. His work had a certain aloofness that is quite elegant today,” Wells said.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Cribb has organized a free, public panel in August at Grand Central to discuss how to include contemporary architecture in historic environments in Southern California.

Wells expects the panel will be well attended because of the recent interest in Modernism.

“It’s enjoyed such a great boost in the last decades that many architects today are building contemporary homes in that spare, stripped-down Modernist style,” he said.

* “The View From Inside--The Architecture of Richard and Dion Neutra,” Grand Central Art Center, 125 N. Broadway, Santa Ana. Hours: Tuesday-Sunday, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Free. Ends Aug. 15. (714) 567-7233.