Richard Neutra

Here's an unusual way to celebrate the centennial of the birth of a creative genius: Get a wrecking ball and demolish one of his creations; then, open a joyful exhibition to praise him. Odd, yes. But, it's precisely the sequence of events at UCLA in its effort to mark the life of Richard Neutra (1892-1970), the Viennese-born, Los Angeles-based architect who ranks among the greatest International Style designers of the 20th Century.

Dione Neutra is used to the world knocking on her front door. Her home on the eastern shore of the Silver Lake reservoir is a landmark of modernist design, a shrine to the international set and to her late husband, architect Richard Neutra, whose remains are buried in the backyard.

Lari Pittman and Roy Dowell are not starving artists. They reject the role of poet and painter in "La Boheme," the penniless creative types who suffer alone in a filthy studio. Theirs is more the sensibility of, say, James McNeil Whistler, whose effete personal aesthetic permeated every aspect of his life and art. A highly refined sense of taste is evident in the pair's fine-tuned home, as well as in Pittman's surreal paintings and Dowell's abstractions.

Events honoring architect Richard J. Neutra's 100th birthday are continuing at USC's Watt Hall with four remaining symposiums on Wednesday and Sept. 14, 21 and 28, held concurrently with the "Neutra Architecture--The View from the Inside," exhibit at the university's Helen Lindhurst galleries.

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.

A beaming Mike Resnick is standing outside the 1958 garden apartments that he bought in September -- eight units, in an unglamorous part of North Hollywood, purchased in what he describes as a state of extreme disrepair. "That's the beauty of L.A.!" he says. "That Richard Neutra, at the top of his game, would build an apartment complex in Los Angeles, in a neighborhood like this."

European actress Anna Sten and her husband, Eugene Frenke, had a whim in 1934 to hire Richard Neutra, once a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, to design a home for them in Santa Monica Canyon. Neutra, who was on his way to becoming one of the most influential modern architects, was designing houses at the time in what is known as the International Style. The Sten-Frenke residence, with its hallmark flat roof and glass walls, exemplifies the style.

History sometimes strokes its artists with one hand while clobbering them with the other. UCLA's innovative University Elementary School was designed by the pioneering Los Angeles modernist architect Richard Neutra. Not long ago, three of its classroom pavilions were knocked down to make space for a new building. Now that selfsame institution of higher folly presents an exhibition in his honor.

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.