About the VDL Research House

Thirty Years: A Paen to Richard Neutra at the First VDL Open House of the 21st Century

Presented at the VDL Research House in Los Angeles on the 30th anniversary of Richard Neutra's death, April 16, 2000

I'm Dion Neutra, the executive architect for the site in which you are today. I'm wearing several hats today. I'm the architect son of the couple whose shrine we see before us today lying under the text, "Creators of this place united by the idea that man's survival depends on his design." My name is on that plaque too, because I spent nearly three years of my life in the creation of what you see today.

I also wear the hat of executive consultant to the Institute, co-sponsor of this event, and from which this text comes: The Institute for Survival Through Design. For those of you who are interested in the activities of this non-profit, founded in the early 1960s by friends of Neutra, check out our Web site at www.neutra.org.

Most of all, I'm the second born and Neutra family representative of the man who started it all, and who passed from us on this very date, exactly 30 years ago in Germany. I wanted to pause for a moment on this day, and share with you some feelings I have about the state of our art.

Dear Dad; it's been thirty years to the DAY since that Germanic voice announced me on the phone; "Your father, Richard Neutra, is DEAD!" I have a shapshot of you taken by our collaborator just 15 minutes before your death; you looked vital and great! You were in the midst of photographing two of our houses in Wupperthal, Germany on Thursday, April 16, 1970, a scant week after your 78th birthday and a week before the celebration of the first Earth Day for which you had so long yearned.

And so came to an end a relationship that had at that point lasted 44 years, my whole life in fact. It ended almost in a vacuum; the phone call said you were gone; you already were so far away; it was hard to grasp; Mom told me not to fly over to be with her; she'd manage it all just fine; it's still hard for me 30 years later.

It was not always easy; in fact most of the time it was about what YOU needed, Dad, but it was never dull, I'll say that. It was like literally hitching my wagon to a shooting star; here today and gone too soon.

I was thinking, you were just about my age now, when in the early morning hours of March 21, 1963 my 37-year-old self received another phone call. This time it was from my ex-first wife, who woke me to say, "Your folks' house is on fire; you'd best get down there!"

When you and Mom returned from one of your many trips a week later, there was nothing but a burned-out hulk with melted steel sash and glass. By then we had been told the shell was unsafe and would have to be demolished down to the slab, which had acted to preserve most of the drawing archive, which was in the basement below.

How would I feel today, if my home of 30-odd years had been utterly destroyed with so many of my life's achievement awards and memorabilia; could I even THINK of what I might do next? I remember Mom saying, "It's a sign from a higher power; now at last we can retire!" Looking at the pile of drawing rolls and junk that had been salvaged from the flames, my Dad said, "Just throw it all in the trash; it's all over now."

To make a three-year story short, after much reflection and hiring an insurance advocate, we did decide to rebuild against many odds. I presided over the research, plan preparation, and construction; even got remarried on the roof in the framing stage; and my parents lived very happily in this house for another four years after its completion in 1966, although they traveled much in those years.

My Mom continued to live on here in great contentment for yet another 20 years after you left us, Dad. She in fact fashioned a whole new career for herself, concertizing annually in the seminar area and writing her memoirs of you, which she called 'Promise and Fulfillment,' of which we have a few copies left on the Web site bookstore. I'm hoping we will commemorate the 10-year anniversary of the time of her death here at another occasion like this, in September of this year.

Now it's a generation later. You never experienced fax, the computer, the Internet age, CAD, e-mail, or electronic word processing for that matter. The message of Survival Through Design keeps resonating for me more and more. Even yet the promise of that book remains to be realized. We have the only copies available. I have ideas about how, but lack of funding has prevented us from pursuing them so far. Like so many Institute projects, someday someone else will stumble upon the solutions I envision if we are unable to act soon.

I remember how many times we figured out how to squeeze extra words into the empty spaces at the ends of the manual IBM Selectric typed paragraphs because you found it hard not to fill those voids. Think what you could do today, where entire paragraphs can be shifted from one place to another! The way the Internet has raised the possibility for a real one-world community boggles the mind; you would have loved to experience all this!

The one thing I'm glad you haven't had to witness is the degradation and loss of our work that has occurred since you left us. Too many have been torn down to make room for mansions. Many of our original clients have sold or left their homes for whatever reason. New owners too often prefer to exercise their own egos as 'what Neutra would have wanted' instead of coming to me, who would know for sure. Some of my best times recently have been to preside over the updating of our projects to the needs of new owners and their programs.

What's ironic, Dad, is that at the same time our work is disappearing, the recognition of its worth is INCREASING! In the past three years, there have been at least 40 major articles and countless exhibitions proclaiming the importance of the work.

One of the most tragic examples is your favorite governmental commission of all, the Lincoln Memorial at Gettysburg, which you often referred to as 'The Shrine of the Nation.' There, the conservator of our built environment, the National Park Service, who originally commissioned the work and told us where to site the building, has suddenly had a change of policy. They suddenly feel they sited the building in the wrong place! Now they have decided to destroy our building in favor of building a commercial mall several miles away. This disrupts the balance of business in the town, and of course, creates a fakery as regards the history of Ziegler's Grove, which has been host to our building for now nearly 40 years.

For nearly three years, I have been conducting what started as a one-man crusade against this policy, which has been joined by others now, and we continue to fight against increasing odds against the ultimate destruction of this work. I feel that in time we will prevail, but if this is what it takes to preserve even one example of modernist work, it speaks volumes about our lack of national policy about preservation. For more about this, people can write letters of support via our Web site, a kind of yellow pages ad in this brave new world.

This evening we commemorate your traumatic final day, by hopefully starting a new life for the building that has meant so much to both of us and our families in our lifetimes. After many years of benign neglect, we now hope to find ways to raise significant monies to restore this site and garden, which for three years has been known as City Cultural Monument #640. Furthermore, we figure we must raise an additional two million dollars to create an endowment sufficient to support a full-time director here, who can organize the docent program that it will take to hold this building open to the public during regular hours, as we had visualized when we first determined to give this property to Cal Poly Pomona.

Let us today dedicate ourselves and all those present to this lofty goal; to be achieved in this new century, which shall see the rebirth of the Research House in its restored edition.

To paraphrase another famous American, "The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it will hopefully never forget what you and I did here."

Dad, I love you, I respect you, and I feel your presence among us tonight. May you take comfort in the knowledge that your life's works are more and more respected around this globe. Like Van Gogh's brother Theo, I'm glad you have me and this Institute to try to save something of the original pieces for future generations.

Dion Neutra is principal of Richard and Dion Neutra, Architects and Associates, the Los Angeles firm founded by Richard Neutra in the early 1920s. He has continued the practice since the death of his father in 1970. He can be reached at 2440 Neutra Place, Los Angeles, CA 90039-3141; phone/fax (323) 666-1806, e-mail dion@neutra.org.

Top