Spanish-style architecture was as hot as a tamale in 1928 Los Angeles. With its red-tile roofs and arched windows, the style satisfied the romantic vision newcomers expected of Southern California homes.
So imagine the shock of neighbors and critics alike when, in that same year, a stark steel-and-glass spaceship of a house went up virtually overnight in the Hollywood Hills.
The Lovell House, which resembled Cubist sculpture, had interlocking flat roofs, long, unadorned bands of glass and massive cantilevered balconies. Its all-steel skeleton, the first in an American home, had been prefabricated and fitted together in only a week.
No one had ever seen anything like it. "Moon architecture," one visitor called it. Academics and critics labeled the house's architecture "International Style."
The house, designed by Viennese-born architect Richard Neutra (pronounced "Noy-tra"), has been called by some critics the most important modern house in Los Angeles history.
With this single, bold stroke, Neutra put Los Angeles on the architectural map and began a brilliant career that flourished until his death in 1970.
For 50-some years, American children have studied in schools built to emulate Neutra's 1935 Corona Avenue School in Bell. Families have worshiped in churches that duplicate the glass cathedral of his 1962 Garden Grove Community Church for the Rev. Robert Schuller. And people all over America have become familiar with homes and public buildings that bear the architect's distinctive design imprint.
Neutra, who invented the sliding glass patio door, would have been 100 years old on Wednesday . The nearly yearlong celebration greeting his 100th birthday anniversary includes local symposiums at schools of architecture, house tours, gallery exhibits, and even the renaming of a street. Mayor Tom Bradley will proclaim Wednesday as Richard Neutra Day.
From Santa Barbara to Palos Verdes, Neutra built 142 houses, 8 apartments, 37 commercial buildings and 16 schools. The Lovell House and the Jardinette Apartments in Hollywood are City of Los Angeles Historical Cultural Landmarks.
Neutra's clients included the County of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Unified School District, film director Josef von Sternberg, "Mutiny on the Bounty" producer Albert Lewin, Teledyne founder Henry Singleton and department store scion Edgar Kaufmann, who had previously commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece home, Fallingwater, in Pennsylvania.
