Rost Architects Interview Series: Barbara Lamprecht

In January 2021 we had the privilege to speak with renowned author and architectural historian Barbara Lamprecht. Barbara specializes in modern architecture history and historic preservation. She has written multiple books, published countless essays, given lectures and appeared on several notable architectural documentaries including Neutra - Survival Through Design and Visual Acoustics. Her most notable books include Neutra - Complete Works, Neutra - Basic Art Series, and Richard Neutra: Furniture: The Body and Senses. Barbara also contributes to Dwell Magazine, The Architectural Review, Architectural Record and Fine Homebuilding.

Although her expertise covers a wide array of topics around Mid Century Modernism, our talk was focused on the life and career of Richard Neutra, renowned mid century modern architect. Barbara is one of the most reliable and notable historians on his topic and she was able to give us a backstage pass to the life and work Neutra.

If you are interested in Mid Century Modern architecture or Richard Neutra, this is a must watch conversation. The interview transcript is also available below if you prefer to read the interview. We hope you enjoy.

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Video Transcript - Rost Architects Interview with Barbara Lamprecht on Richard Neutra

*Please note that the video transcription was taken directly from the audio in the interview, there may be errors or omissions inconsistent with the original discussion.

Mitchell Rocheleau - Rost Architects    00:00

Today I had the privilege of speaking with Barbara Lamb. She's an architectural scholar and historian. She's written three books on modernist architect, Richard Neutra, she earned her master's degree from Cal Poly Pomona, and did her doctorate at the University of Liverpool. She's given countless lectures and been a part of several films about famous mid-century modern architect, Richard Neutra, which is what our conversation is about today. I hope you guys enjoy.

Mitchell Rocheleau - Rost Architects    00:43

So Barbara thanks for joining us today. I want to just start off and get a description of yourself. Can tell us a little bit about your work and your career.

Barbara Lamprecht    01:01

Well, thanks Mitchell and all ROST, I'm looking forward to talking to you. I combine architectural history and project rehabilitation primarily for Neutra buildings, and Neutra properties. I began my career as a journalist and reporter covering primarily designed community developments. I went back to school, got a Master's, and practiced architecture for a while mainly affordable housing. And then I found that I didn't like being in front of a CAD machine all the time. I like job sites and I wanted to combine architecture with writing. It became obvious that architectural history and evaluations would be a better way to go.

In the late 90s, Taschen the German publisher approached me, really out of the blue and on the apparently on the recommendation of Julia Suleman, the architectural photographer. Benedict Taschen asked me to write what was going to be a basic art series, a little book on Richard Neutra and at a birthday party for Julia showman at John Lautner’s chemosphere, the flying saucer house, in Los Angeles, Benedict, past me, and he said, oh, by the way, we decided to make it a complete works which drew me into terror, because I'm an independent scholar. I would think that you'd have an army of graduate students to help you but basically, that turned into 24, seven, for the next two and a half years of research. I spent countless hours at UCLA special archives in the basement, and became kind of a mole there. That led to two more books and kind of a specialty and understanding Neutra and then I decided to go back to school again and get a PhD. And I did that at the University of Liverpool, and I had a special dispensation to write 50,000 words over the 70,000 word limit. So my life, sometimes I'm on job sites, and sometimes I'm in archives, and sometimes I'm writing and reading and, sometimes I'm thinking about finishes or structural connections. So it varies a lot.

Mitchell Rocheleau - Rost Architects    04:10

Interesting thank you. I believe you made several appearances on documentaries too such as Visual Acoustics.

Barbara Lamprecht    04:17

I think it was on Visual Acoustics for about 11 seconds. But I played a much more of a prominent role in the recent documentary by PJ Letovsky called Neutra Survival Through Design and that's a major documentary about his work.

Mitchell Rocheleau - Rost Architects    04:40

That has not come out yet, correct?

Barbara Lamprecht    04:44

I think PJ is still looking for a distributor. I mean, it's premiered in several places, and its several festivals. I think that people can make private arrangements or arrangements with him to film it, but I don't think it's formally out. It's definitely worthy of PBS and anything like that. There are many extraordinary voices on that documentary, certainly not mine alone and extraordinary houses. And it's Europe and America.

Mitchell Rocheleau - Rost Architects    05:20

I made several attempts to try to watch it, but they've all been unsuccessful. So I'd love to try to figure out a way to make it happen.

Barbara Lamprecht    05:27

If we can get you and PJ together somehow.

Mitchell Rocheleau - Rost Architects    05:31

That sounds great. Well, good. So can you give a general introduction to Richard Neutra’s life and work?

Barbara Lamprecht    05:51

Richard Neutra was born in Vienna in 1892, to a fairly well off Jewish family in the Jewish Quarter in Vienna and he was immediately both an artist and an engineer. As a youth, he went to the Technical University in Vienna at the heart of Vienna. And in about 1912, was introduced to Rudolph Schindler, and Adolph Loos, almost at the same time, Rudolph Schindler was five years older than then Neutra and was also attending the same Technical University. And, but Shindo learn in a slightly different way he attended out of Wagner's last master class at the Fine Arts Academy. So he had a different kind of training slightly than Neutra but we would have Schindler, who's another important Southern California, modernist, and Neutra. Were both introduced through Otto Wagner to Frank Lloyd Wright's very famous voxel portfolios that have been published in Germany in 1910 and both of them became quite close friends, because they both being geniuses recognize the import of what Frank Lloyd Wright was doing views out of the diagonal, a new relationship to nature, a new relationship to materials, banks have windows, deep overhangs and a different approach to ornamentation, which was based on nature and manipulated nature, much like Louis Sullivan, who was of course, Frank Lloyd Wright's employer in Chicago, both of them also learned about architecture and building under out of Los Angeles. He is the jeremiad who wrote the famous essay ornament and crime that also was published in about 1910, various iterations. And Los was probably the most vehement spokesman for going back to basics, removing ornamentation, he had sayings, like the house needs to be done on the outside the society out there was so filled with hypocrisy, where an umbrella had to be carved into the shape of a lion were nothing was basic, nothing was Frank mean, what out of most admired was English saddles, and men's underwear, because he thought that they were plainly functional and straightforward and back to basics. And so loss' idea of what's called round plan or space plan, where he would create a dwelling in which ceiling height and room relationships dictated hierarchy. So living room, for example, would be taller than a secondary space and so, this because Los was a very intuitive master of how perception and human behavior are intertwined. There's been several essays and many, many books written on out of loss and that that degree of intuition, but he taught architecture by walking around Vienna and kind of haranguing his students. So both Schindler and Neutra were desperate to leave Europe. Schindler left in 1914 about a week or so before the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated. And later on called anybody who stayed in Europe and the architecture stayed in Europe, a slave to order.

Barbara Lamprecht    10:20

Because after World War One, a lot of people, a lot of the architectural community, I think, craved a new sense of order, because all order had been exploded and Europe was incredibly poor, was the old place and Neutra deeply wanted to escape from that. And so he emigrated to New York and in 1923, his only goal was to get to Chicago. And he went to Chicago and you started, you worked. First for a skyscraper firm called Holabird and Roche he was dressing number 218 designing toilets, and as we all do, at some point, or toilet surrounds. And then he just he met Frank Lloyd Wright, at Louis Sullivan's funeral. And that was in April 1924. And nitrile always seems to be at the right place at the right time in history. And that was another fortuitous move that he made. He went to tele-Essen in spring, spring green Wisconsin rights, East Coast studio and his only studio at the time, and worked for right between late November and February of, so November 1924 and he left in February 1925 with the bride Gianni. And the although he admired so much about right, he was appalled because right was working with masonry and concrete and these textile block ideas. And Neutra thought the technologies of the future and of the present of the 20th century are steel and glass. They're not what we build the pyramids with. This is ridiculous. Neither did he agree with natural rights, what he considered overwrought ornamentation. So, the two masters are one established one emerging, parted ways, like so many other people parted ways with right, if, if they were quite talented, they'd became competitors rather than protégées. So Neutra came out and landed he and Diona and a baby arrived on Rudolph Schindler's, you know, brand new radical poured in place concrete, or tilt up, I'm sorry, tilt up concrete house in Los Angeles on Kings Road in 19. In 19, early 1925 Schindler’s work is all I think underrated often. He's still not as well-known as Neutra, perhaps. But that so the Neutra stayed with the Schindler’s on different parts of this pin wheel configured house for the next five years. And Noida and Schindler did design some projects together, including the 1929, Jordan and apartments, which are in Los Angeles, which is workforce housing that has been in existence since 1929. And that long last is being restored and rehabilitated. Again, to be actually the hope is for it to be 43 units of affordable housing, 44 other units of affordable housing, which will be spectacular. So that's basically how Neutra started and how he came to the states California called him.

Mitchell Rocheleau - Rost Architects    14:35

Then when he settled in California, we see him produce some of his more notable projects such as the Lovell Heath House, Kauffman desert house, Tremaine etc.

Barbara Lamprecht    14:43

Yes the Lovell Heath House was built in 1929. The house was built for Philip Lovell who started life out back in New Jersey and moved out here to do the Hollywood thing and completely changed his identity. He wanted an Arien name and Arian identity and became a nutritionist, but was never trained as an traditionalist but became renowned for his column called care and feeding of the body, and his ideas about sunbathing, raw foods, organic living, that propelled a lot of the design moves in the Lovell Health House and by contrast to other modernist icons, the loss of La by Lucio the Bauhaus by Gropius, the local health house shot off into a Kenyan, like a bird. And so it became much more radical than other exemplars of modernism that were exhibited in the world famous seminal 1932 Museum of Modern Art Show. So the level house because it was all steel framing, it was all based on the commercial techniques that Neutra had learned back in Chicago when he dove into every Foundation, knew every bolt hole, you know, could recite the speed of an Otis Elevator, od Nauseum. And he became the GC, the general contractor for the level health house, because nobody else would do it.

Mitchell Rocheleau - Rost Architects    16:46

Well, good. That's I think that's a nice introduction to his work and career path. I want to dive into the next topic which is Neutra’s definition of Luxury. I think it's safe to say that his definition of Luxury is quite different than what many people would perceive luxury as today.

Barbara Lamprecht    17:19

Thanks for raising that, Mitchell. I'll introduce it by talking about the Sheats Goldstein House which is not designed by Neutra, but is designed by John Lautner, a protégée of Frank Lloyd Wright, a wonderful architect. And if you visit the master bedroom at the sheets Goldstein house, you'll see that the lavatory where the sink is, is entirely made of glass. And you can see you can see water is the most extraordinary sink and faucet I have ever seen in my life. And for Neutra however, luxury could be defined through common material, common garden materials, like tempered Masonite, and like for mica like other very commonly obtained materials. For him luxury was, are there sensible and gracious and effective ways of creating an access that would look out to nature? Have you afforded clear axes or have you afforded surprises, but in ways that are sensible, not shocks to the system? I mean, he used to say one of his favorite sayings was an architect can be your lowbrow henchmen and blow up a marriage, any marriage by piling up daily irritations unsuspected, right? So in psychology, we talk about affordances. And like any architect would know, right away, I mean, affordances are just how many opportunities to create in a dwelling, to afford your life to make your life richer than you anticipated by looking at your needs, and by addressing you as a primal, generic, universal human being. And then also, those eccentricities, those idiosyncratic things, those personal histories that create you as an individual apart from that generic, critically important, basic human being, you know, so he would, he had what were called client interrogations, in which his suburban clients, typically a husband and wife, were asked to create diaries and give me a diary of your day. And there would be all these questions he would ask and that was based in part based on his experience with a brother and a grand uncle, who was a physician, his brother introduced, the nitrile family and the Sigmund Freud family in Vienna were close friends. Erin's Freud segments, son, and Neutra were very close friends. So Neutra had a background in treating architecture as applied medicine. And being a good doctor, one would interview the patient, right. So that became the client interrogation and then once he got those that information back from the client, he would take out a thick oil, red pencil, and start marking up and underlying or commenting on those letters that he received, then those were transformed into another document in which those concerns and those needs were translated into section plan and elevation. Is that resolution going to be addressed in section? Maybe an auto flows, hierarchical thing? Is it going to be addressed in elevation, path of travel? Or is it going to be addressed in plan and so I think this method was rather extraordinary. Neutra also encouraged his project architects to, to always have and dress men dress, though, were very few dress women, drag people, he would always instruct them to keep a photograph of the client on the boards, while they were drafting, that they kept in mind that these were real people real needs, and not to forget and to drown themselves in, you know, making a crisp corner at a line or line weight, right?

Mitchell Rocheleau - Rost Architects    22:47

It's really his, I feel like that's a repeating theme with Neutra his kind of desire to take and rationalize the design process. But then also try to systematize and rationalize people's physiological experiences as they're walking through buildings too

Barbara Lamprecht    23:06

Absolutely and that had to do with where the light was, where daylight was, for example, at the 1937 Strathmore apartments, which is certainly not unique. That's in Westwood near UCLA and that's eight apartments that are built on a very steep hillside, it's very international style, early Neutra and each one of the entrances, your visual access is temporarily and temporarily blocked by a pony wall that contains storage, but he deflected your view, to the diagonal, where there will be a long bank of windows meeting another corner Bank of Windows. So even in these very small apartments, there was an opportunity to feel expansive physiologically, as you mentioned Mitchell to flow out beyond the building footprint into nature by exploiting the potential of the diagonal that he had cleaned and harvested from Frank Lloyd Wright.

Mitchell Rocheleau - Rost Architects    24:30

Yeah, that's really interesting. That's a nice transition into the next topic that I wanted to talk with you about, which is his study or belief in the primitive human being and the concept of the horizon and how primitive humans arose on the savanna and we have this strong connection to horizontality and how he took that concept and tried to integrate it into his architecture to reinforce a stronger, more intuitive human connection to a building. Can you talk about that a bit?

Barbara Lamprecht    25:10

So that a building or a home, he used to call it a soul anchorage or he would call it a constellation, some people call it an environment. So you dissolved the traditional definition of a house maybe. And, yes, he was exposed to ideas about the savanna in a, based on Raymond, a scientist called Raymond darks worked on the savanna hypothesis called the savanna hypothesis. And so we come down from the trees, and we came down from the trees on the savannas of East Africa. And we are neural, our bodies and our minds; our brains were created simultaneously and together on the savanna. And so, we're almost physiologically part of the savanna is his conclusion and what does that mean? It means that we early on, imprinted deep in us in our DNA, almost his views of the horizon line views of copses of trees, bodies of water of moving clouds. And so our eyes, for example, if there are a Savanna of grasses, and we're, we, our eyes are structured in ways that we can apprehend an overall outline of a form very quickly, like, if it's a predator, for example, who's moving stealthily through those grasses, then our eyes and our brain, and our eyes are basically only extensions of our brain, right? They can then fill in the gaps and fill in the details of the form and our bodies, you know if you have an erect posture, your all you have to do is kind of be upright, and your eyes are directed to the horizon line. Now, Frank Lloyd Wright would call the horizon line, the line of domesticity right now, so he had more of a social association with the Horace horizontality. And so did the early European modernists, right? They were posting the verticality of Victorian architecture, or Gothic architecture, but for Noitra, it was an ideology of biology that was informing his emphasis on the horizontal. But we are so we're intimately connected with our environment, or we need to be if we're not, then Neutra argues, we're not our architecture our environment is, is compromising our full extent of realizing our very humanity, that a poorly built design diminishes that potential.

Mitchell Rocheleau - Rost Architects    28:45

Got it, and didn't, not to digress to another architect, but I feel like John Lautner, I've read something that John Lautner had a similar approach to Neutra except having to do with the cave. And that was, I think, they essay had something and I can't remember the name of it, but it has something to do with relating the sheets Goldstein house to something of a cave, where it's kind of dug into the side of a hill and the, you know, primitive human feels comfort, because their back is protected, in some ways, and they it is still associated with the horizon and that they have a view out towards, you know, their surroundings, but they're protected at the back. So, I find that interesting that there's a lot of these, many of these architects are going back to primitive, primitive human instincts and habitats and trying to incorporate into that into their modern architecture.

Barbara Lamprecht    29:44

Well, if you look at you know, the work of the 18th century rationalist was Jay. I mean, he is the cover of his book, the primitive hut is, you know, kind of a tree-house on the ground. You know, so a lot of these rationalists are looking for other ways to define and express for making that aren't driven by classical precepts.

Mitchell Rocheleau - Rost Architects    30:17

That's a good segue into the next topic, which was your Eden article you had sent me, which discussed Neutra’s interest and in landscape design. You know, it's, it's fairly obvious for anybody looking at some of his most prominent works, that he's conscious of what's happening in the landscape. He's obviously designing the landscape and he is extremely conscious about the connection between the building and the landscape. So can you touch on how Neutra, got introduced into landscape and his landscape designs in his projects?

Barbara Lamprecht    31:12

Well, there are two primary influences that inspired Neutra. One was the great physiological psychologist named Bill Hungwen who introduced in nature to these ideas of the mind body connection and the impact of how you could quantify the effect of the environment on a human being that ability to quantify an impact to affect the senses was like gold to a genius like Neutra, you know, nobody else no other architect was reading want, right? Principles of physiological psychology you try to read it. It's about 500 pages of even as protégées complained that it was too difficult to read. But, but the other primary influence was a Zurich horticulturalist called Gustaf Arman. So, after the war Neutra was recuperating in Switzerland with malaria, he looked like out of dukkha he was gaunt, and, and scrawny, and he could not find work as an architect. There was no work I mean, that was one of the other reasons why he wanted to go to America. But he found work as a garden assistant basically working in a nursery for Gustaf Aman. Now, I shouldn't think this is not kind of the kind of person you'd find leading, you know, heading up the, you know, an Armstrong garden center or something like that. Goes stuff and turned out to be he bridged that amazing gap between garden design for the aristocracy, and the profession of landscape architecture of the late 19th century. He was not only a horticulturalist; he was connected to a lot of leading Landscape Architecture movements in Germany and Austria, in England, as well as in Switzerland. Gustav Aman is not considered, you know, one of Switzerland's greatest figures in the history of landscape architecture. But Noida started out by making plywood models of topography. And, you know, putting hundreds of plantings and boxes, and for planting and learning about other people at very progressive ideas about the integration of landscape architecture, into architecture through the garden apartments of Ebenezer Howard, through looking at the Frankfurt drawings by Aaron's May, so it was fertile, and it was literally fertile with ideas and imagination and what was clear was that post World War One, there had to be great design that was for every man with a capital E right. And that that had to do again with what is luxury; luxury should not be just for people who can afford it. But it should be by the work for workforce for everyone and so that included open spaces, access to nature and so Gustaf Armand, in his books, like blue and garden, which came out in the 50s, he they talk about the need for the extension of a wall that continues to delineate space beyond the house, right that you continue that access, and that depth becomes a melding between house and the environment. There is no break per se there's a gradation in spaces there's into interstitial spaces and other early modernists and landscape architecture. Someone else who was quite influential was liberal may gay, and he would argue that you had to have what they called I can't remember this that the other part of the German but I think someone like Trump, Bogart, Laufen, but it means when you create a pathway, watch how people behave, and then create your pathway based on what where they're going, you know, don't set for the a walkway and then say, well, you have to walk that way because I'm the architect and I set that down. And that's it made sense to me. And I needed to it needed to harmonize with my overall design concept. He'd say, no, see where the paths are. See where the grass has been trodden. And so Neutra grew up understanding plants and horticulture. So this great first project was not a work of architecture. It was a forest cemetery, 30 kilometers southwest of Berlin, and very proud, feudal city of looking valda and that was a very progressive cemetery because the Catholics and the Lutherans were used to having their own cemeteries, right, the religions could make, or churches could make quite a bit of money by selling plots, but you had to be a Catholic or Lutheran to get in. Well, Neutra and others, the city decided that they would have a secular cemetery. Well, this raised all kinds of protests, actually. So it's very interesting that a humble, you know, a very serene environment, like a forest cemetery, could precipitate so much opposition, but it did. And so what you find in this forest cemetery is when you enter it, there's a very long axis for the characters drawn in the coffins. But then there's this diagonal offshoots into clearings that are sudden moments of light and dappled light on clearings, and then there's the darkness of the forest. So, you have diagonal views, but you also are stabilized and anchored by this long axis and the headstones are scattered throughout the cemetery in the most idyllic and gentle manner imaginable. It's truly, truly worth a visit.

Mitchell Rocheleau - Rost Architects    38:47

Perfect. We're jumping around a little bit, but I want to touch on the topic of Neutra and Schulman. You know, it's often been said that Schulman's photograph the Kauffman house can be equally attributed, along with the actual architecture to the success and notoriety of Neutra. I would like to hear your perspective on that

Barbara Lamprecht    39:11

Schulman was happened to be on a night road job site. In March of 1936 and Schulman had no idea what to do with his life. He'd bounced around, dropped in and out of college, really didn't have a clue what he wanted to do. And but he had this brownie camera in his chest pocket, and he took some pictures. And somehow those pictures I think there was he was with a friend who had was a sister associated with Nigel and his office, but somehow the pictures got to Neutra and Archer liked them and so He asked him to do some more photographs for him of buildings. And so that's how the career started. And in fact, Julius Shulman, almost, he asked me, he wanted to see a draft of my book, because he had been the person who recommended me to write the big complete works and he said, well, this doesn't have, you know, I don't like this, this doesn't have enough personal material in it. This is supposed to be titled, how a world famous architect and a world famous photographer got together and change the world. And I said, well, Julius, you know, we already have a biography written by the great Thomas Hines on Neutra. We don't really need a biography and you just had your own autobiography just published. My idea was always this argument between Schindler and Neutra, around dinner tables, or your Schindler person or your nurture person. And I thought, from 30,000 feet up, what difference does it make and what are their ideas? I mean, what does it mean to be a Schindler person or Neutra person? So Julius finally calmed down a little bit, but I remember on some book tours, he would always have a black sharpie fine point. And at the time, I was using some other fine point or whatever and he leaned over to me and he said, you should be you know, you should be using this kind of pen and I would say, kind of, you know, in a kind of liberal, bright, glib, kind of way. Well, everybody's got their own feelings about what they like to use me. No, you should be using this pen. There's no discussion. And sure enough, after he died, his daughter sent me a six pack of fine point pens, one of which had been open and I refuse to treat it like it was hallowed ground, I promptly used them all. But that's not your topic, your topic.

Mitchell Rocheleau - Rost Architects    42:26

That's a good story that I appreciate it,

Barbara Lamprecht    42:27

The impact of the, you know, how they meshed or did not together. If you look at Shulman's images of Noitra, dwellings, particularly, it's almost as though he comes in angle and hits the glass, and then bounces out again, at the same oblique angle. There's a very, there's a, there's a hardness to show them and images, often in my opinion. And they shoot, you know, they hit the building, and then they shoot out again to the horizon or to the landscape beyond. So there's always a VISTA approach, it's I mean, the beautiful photographs, for sure, he and Neutra would argue about what kinds of human touches should be Neutra is very typical architect, you know, he wanted to banish unless they were very much post humans from the environment. And joy is one of the much more informal approach was showing people and Neutra because he had this deep belief in have in that that humans had to be embedded into Neutra near nature, intermediate in nature distant, he would bring along like oftentimes branches right to create, to frame that image Dr. Julius crazy but if you look at other kinds of other photographers like Marvin Ranch, for example, or Ezra Stoller, or contemporaneously, the work of luck, house studios are very popular for a photography studio in the 30s. Like the interior of the global health house, there's a there's a richer black to the luck house there's a sense of mystery, and this wonderful rich kind of almost, it's as though CPL was flooding through the black Julius's gray scale is much different. It's a much different black; it's a much different gray. It's very, very, it's a very different experience. So, yeah, the famous Calvin photograph, where Julius had Mrs. Calvin lying along the poolside. Exactly, so that her body would obliterate the pool light, but aluminate her from behind. So you've got this voluptuous shadow, you know, outlined in in light. And I remember saying to my German publisher, so and I had written something like, no, Julius took step several steps and turned around and shot the photograph and Peter Gussto said, Julius hates the word shot, do not use any language having to do shooting with taking a photo.

Mitchell Rocheleau - Rost Architects    46:14

It's funny, the, you know, the power that the architectural photograph has, especially to an architect. You know, for that time, that's, you know, that was often the way that somebody else the rest of the world, or the only way that they would experience the building is through a photograph, the amount of people that could experience the building, you know, physically is far fewer than the amount of people that are going to experience the building to the photograph. So, I can understand from an architectural point of view, know what you're trying to control that photograph as much as possible.

Barbara Lamprecht    46:53

Yeah, absolutely

Mitchell Rocheleau - Rost Architects    46:54

A very kind of… you want to control it. So, I understand that.

Barbara Lamprecht    46:59

Well, I think we, as architects understand that an inch matters, that the time of day like, you know, like that quote, of Neutra before, I mean, if, you know, if you take something as humble as a 48 inch distance between countertops in the kitchen, well, if you start to shrink that, then you're constantly saying to somebody, excuse me, I don't mean to excuse me. And so, you're setting up one of the very daily irritations that nature is describing, you know, if you don't make things seamlessly functional and ergonomically available, you know, but an architect invariably has to convince a client, you know, and be persuasive on, you know, this will affect your life positively. You know, and, and it's amazing to me, the collaborative nature between client and architect. I mean, letter after letter after letter after detail after detail. You know, just because Neutra was a great architect didn't mean that they weren't wrestling, and negotiating and navigating all the time, all the time. And, you know, it's always interesting to me, when I hear kind of caricatures of Neutra saying, well, you would control everything like and he controlled a lot. I mean, you know, why would somebody go to somebody like Neutra if they didn't want a particular kind of way of living right, wasn't so much, looking a certain way. It was a way of living that Neutra promised,

Mitchell Rocheleau - Rost Architects    48:57

Can we transition into, this is a subject that I'm particularly interested in, but any we touched on briefly at the beginning, but no, it was time at talent tell yes and I'm kind of fascinated at those five, six months, whatever it is that he spent in the studio, human DNA. You know, with right, I know, at the particular time, it was a rough time in Wright's career, he had very little work, but can you kind of shed some light on you know, that experience that Neutra may have had there?

Barbara Lamprecht    49:33

Well, when they arrived, they arrived to people who had come to work for right from all over the world. And, in fact, they met an old friend of theirs from Germany, Coleman Mosers son, and he brought them down to the basement in tally Essen. And there were the only wrote that there were hundreds of soggy Vox mood portfolios rotting, because and the explanation was that Wright didn't want anybody copying his work. So if he didn't distribute the versatile portfolio, not that many people would know what he was doing and what, what individual gifts and talents he had to offer. But it was a very rich experience. I mean, it, anyone who came to work at Spring green was permanently affected and Neutra he was at draft table, you know, huge stone, old stone wall that was part of the spring green interior, that the attitude about bringing the outdoors in or the indoors out. But he's had in front of a couple from Japan, husband and wife, who are both architects and who went on to become very famous architects and modernists in Japan, and the two chairs. And there are many photographs of these, this wonderful band of people on these musical evenings. And at the main fireplace at Tolleson have all these different people from all these different walks of life, enjoying what was absolutely mandatory, these musical evenings and of course, the only header cello and but Neutra found himself detailing the very slender rebar for these textile blocks at Sugarloaf Mountain, which some people believe is one of the predecessors to the Guggenheim, this kind of

Mitchell Rocheleau - Rost Architects    51:59

It’s kind of circular or cylindrical form

Barbara Lamprecht    52:01

And here again, I mean, this is where Neutra and Frank Lloyd Wright parted ways. I mean this whole idea of, of these, making sure that the rebar was, you know, this very spindly rebar at the time, right? This is really, as Albert Kahn and his brother were reinvestigating reinforced concrete, the rebar and these textile blocks, and it just he really felt that this was not the direction that he wanted to go in.

Mitchell Rocheleau - Rost Architects    52:41

So, Barbara, I think that's a lot of stuff we just covered, do you want to try to move into anything else that you want to talk about specifically?

Barbara Lamprecht    52:51

Well, there is the idea of Neutra book, survival through design, and which came out in 1954. That's a group of 47 essays. And Neutra argues that the mind body connection that we are, there's, there's a continuum between outdoors and our innermost cells, that we are a continuum, that the mind and body are completely connected, not even connected, but integrated. And that architects pay we have to pay more attention to all the senses tactility olfactory oral, that these are, you know, he compares in survival. You know the difference between touching real marble and touching for mica that's made to look like marble, you know, what's the difference and he's so he's getting into this I this into materiality because, biologically, you know, he's saying, you know, if you can feel marble, your hand actually knows that there's no fissures or cracks, we can actually use our hands to identify that which is possibly more hygienic. You know, it's a he's trying to awake our languishing appreciation for the rest of our senses and just concentrating on vision, you know, so, again, is he's not he's lauded for these cool sleek forms and his ability to perform, making right, but his ideology is biology and that we have to up end, the idea that form follows function for him. One of the most important chapters in the book, I think, is where he basically throws down a gauntlet to Louis Sullivan and says no, function follows form. If we don't create healthy forms for people, you can't function that, well, you won't be as productive. You know, happiness might be here or there, but you won't be as engaged in your environment as you could be. And then his one of his chapters is all about. For example, if even the MDT flies, and the male MDT fly, he attracts a mate, by creating the single white balloon, it looks like a balloon that is much larger than the insect. And it's filled with other smaller insects that he's killed. And this, the bigger the balloon says, cracks me up, the bigger the balloon, the bigger chance he has of getting a mate. And, and about, I guess, 700 species of epidemia fly, figured out that, hey, all you need to attract the main is the balloon, like why bother to go out to all the work of killing the little insects, you know, so they just have an empty offering. But Neutra point is without these kinds of forms, you cannot, you, life can't continue. And then he has another chapter on identifying beauty. I mean, beauty can be identified because in our brains, and our hardwiring, our genetic ancestry teaches us that life, there's something about a flower that's in bloom that is beautiful to us, because it spells survival; it spells life, as far as nourishment and growth and a good environment. Now we may have evolved intellectually to appreciate the beauty of a dead tree. But that is a different kind of appreciation for form that comes from a kind of a different place than appreciating a living tree. So this idea of forms does matter in architecture, not because they look good, but because they act well, they act well.

Mitchell Rocheleau - Rost Architects    57:58

One of the points that I think you brought up in he did a symposium, I think it was in 2017. About Neutra and you talked about the physiological experience of a human walking through a space and how Neutra tried to take a person and make them present in that kind of current, you know, make them present within the architecture and I thought that was not only interesting for, you know, an architectural design strategy, but also really pertinent to a kind of cultural fad that's happening right now with meditation and presence. Those are pretty, hot topics. And, you know, here he is doing it back in the 30s and 40s, which is, it's pretty, it's interesting.

Barbara Lamprecht    58:47

Well, if I'm one of the things that I wrote about my dissertation was this idea of experience, versus form and if you look at there's a wonderful essay by the inaugural lecture actually to Leipzig University it was a very famous artists drawing and critical August Marksell. And he the essay is devoted; it's saying how architecture is different than fine art and because in the late 19th century, all the Victorians as Jay Borden crook has written about in this one of these wonderful book, The dilemma of style everybody's running by gnashing their teeth because they have these steel skeletons now, and they don't know how to put, you know, what should they put, they put classical detail should have a gothic so what should they do and they're blowing? They're blowing their heads off right with what should we do? And smart sound, who is not an architect you know, he comes from a very tradition, very different tradition of art history says, the point of architecture is the body moving and space. Experiencing architecture is that is, the creators of architecture are space. So, how do we experience space and especially how do we experience the body moving in space, and that involves time. So Neutra starts to think about Einstein, right? And this idea of space time and things being relative, and maybe not absolute and don't ask me really right now, like, how that all fits together? But, yeah, he's, throughout his work. He's talking about experience, you know, it's always ironic to me, because everybody looks at Neutra and they think how cool, then he's such a collectible, right? Everybody wants to collect except they're quite expensive these days. You know, but again, if we returned back to tempered Mason night, from Home Depot, and, and plot and rotary cut plywood, you know, not even vertically grain dug for, you know, not even heartwood, Redwood, humble materials that perform in ways that make you more fully human.

Mitchell Rocheleau - Rost Architects    1:01:56

Yeah, it seems like his touch design is much more similar to a director or a movie producer, where he's kind of, you know, thinking of himself, you know, within the timeline of a movie frame, and these individual moments of experience, as opposed to, you know, next year, just kind of a pure formal approach. Obviously, that's, that's not what he was thinking. But that metaphor is kind of interesting, huh?

Barbara Lamprecht    1:02:30

Well, today, we call this then an explosion of research into what we now call embodiment, or embodied cognition, because it's always our body moving in space and these ideas have really taken hold of, for example, ANFA, the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, which is based in San Diego, which you might want to think about investigating more. But there's a score of books now on There's a wonderful book called Way finding you know, how do we create landmarks? How do we tap into memory, what creates memory, and of course, memory and Way finding are fundamentally connected, right? She was interested, the author was interested in how Eskimos find our way over, you know, and wasteland wouldn't make any sense to a Westerner. And because there's all these little tiny a rock or how lichen is facing on one side, or you know that the role of a landmark to change space into place. You know, Neutra talk talks a lot about the genius loci of a place and the spirit of place the spirit of a site and now he's not talking literally about worshipping gods, but I think there's part of them that's not too far off from that. I mean, he would like Luca Boosie, his exposition building for the Paris show and exposition 1925, he would cut out an overhang for a tree or create a building or create if he's doing an L shaped building to create it around a tree that had great significance for that old ranching family in Bakersfield. You know, to respect the land, respect the earth, not and kind of, you know, green earth, yada, yada sustainable way, but a real you know, again, just recognizing that sacred aspect of it. I mean, there are so many books out now that speak to our body and space and how our body and space is involved in urban planning and, you know, object making to urban planning. And it's all the rage, but Neutra’s book was published in 1954. But he started writing about he started writing these 47 essays in the late 1930s. There are 78 scientists, that he just did the work of 78 scientists, and he's always looking at 18th century rationalist, who are much older back to the stoics and other people who are, who are saying, What if it's not the gods, that we should be thinking about? What if there's material basis, a rational, scientifically a quantifiable basis for doing what we're doing? And so people have accused Neutra of saying, well, you just want to find out, you know, what's the profile of stimuli to give yourself a good building? So it's very stimuli response Pavlovian and Neutra, he's not saying that, you know, he's saying, it's understanding science is a tool, right? It doesn't, it doesn't disabuse the architect of the responsibility of ingenuity and creativity and imagination, and, you know, having something different to offer. He's not arguing for a blueprint in the book, but at times, I think, to critique him, I think fairly, I mean, sometimes he sounds as though science, you know, must rule. And there's a very famous quote by Arthur Drexler, who was, I forget what his title was, but at the Museum of Modern Art, a very smart guy, God, just he taught me so much about noise during his little book on Neutra but he closes his essay on Nacho, but two things ‘sometimes it's possible to be an annoyed tree house and still want to come indoors’. Yeah, and so back to that Lautner cave, right, you're talking about, because, you know, the philosopher guest on martial art has written a lot about in the poetics of space, talks about the human need for attic, and the human need for cave, right and environmental psychologist will talk about our need for prospect and refuge, right, where we can look, you know, look out over possible made possible food possible, or predator and refuge. So, we need both parts of us.

Mitchell Rocheleau - Rost Architects    1:08:38

we'll go ahead and get so Barbara, if there's, let's say, four books on nature that you would recommend people to read, to kind of not only get the surface level under? Yeah, you can be biased. That's fair.

Barbara Lamprecht    1:08:54

Read books on Neutra, four books on Neutra, well, let's see ‘the architecture of Richard Neutra’. That's the book where Arthur Drexler has just got a wonderful essay and introduced me too, more profoundly to the Japanese connections between white rot and in Japan and that was really influential. And Harry margrave recent books, ‘the architects brain’, the architects brain is, is looking at creativity in architect but Harry margrave in part because I took Neutra's concept of bio realism, seriously, I mean, he'd only been kind of written about before. It's kind of this you know, canonical, good modernist write all about the style and, and, you know, so that book hit by hearing, Harry margrave is one of the best architectural historians ever. I mean, he edited and translated modern architecture by Otto Wagner that eventually Otto Wagner was this incredibly important. All right, talk about both arts on steroids. But Wagner began to understand that modern architecture had something to offer and something to say. And he basically lost his social standing in Vienna, and guide rather tragically and anyway, margrave, Harry margrave most recent book, I think, is ‘from object to experience’. So architecture has got to go from being an object and in space to an experience. So he writes extensively about that. And here, that would be another good book to read. I mean, if you've got 10 bucks, I think my little book on Neutra was published in 2004 is a good one, because that was intended to introduce people to Richard Neutra and I think that's pretty good.

Mitchell Rocheleau - Rost Architects    1:11:45

I know that I have read your small book on electron is a great introduction. It goes through all the projects in kind of chronological order so it's nice to see…

Barbara Lamprecht    1:11:54

Only 22 projects, Mitchell in that little book

Mitchell Rocheleau - Rost Architects    1:11:58

Yeah, well, the most prominent ones that say,

Barbara Lamprecht    1:12:02

And there's another, oh, my goodness, yeah, that's it but it touches on so many different versions of that.

Mitchell Rocheleau - Rost Architects    1:12:08

Would you recommend anything from Thomas Hines? I know he's another UCLA professor.

Barbara Lamprecht    1:12:13

Forgive me, Richard Neutra, and The Search for Modern Architecture, Thomas Hines, I mean that's a wonderful biography. Thomas Hines had access to everything, and long hours with Diona Neutra. And I got to know her because I was given, I guess, one last thing that shows my own experience at the VDL house, because I was kind of plucked out of class in graduate school, and was asked if I wanted to work with Mrs. Neutra, on documenting the contents of the VDL house, a family house in Silver Lake. And I said, Sure, I really didn't know really too much about modernism but I thought my immediate assumptions were that it was dictatorial authority, you know, authoritarian, that made me throw away all my stuff and it was cold and hard. So, that's what I came in with and I assumed I had a word processor that I borrowed from Caltech and I loved this thing all over the house, depending on what I was doing. And so I'd be on the rooftop, terrace or some other room and all of a sudden, I understood that Neutra was this house was saying, if you want to be on your own, and quite quiet and contemplative, and work alone, I'm there for you. If you want to have a party, you know, kick butt have a lot of people over, I’m in, count me in I can do this. I want to do this. And part of that is in some of the Frank Lloyd Wright houses in, in Los Angeles, they are very the passive traveler, very dictatorial. At the VDL house, there are 17 doors, maybe more because there were people working and practicing different families were living there configurations were changing all the time, secretaries dress people, guests in the guesthouse, upstairs, downstairs everywhere. And so by creating these different paths of travel, it's like, it's like Creek creating like a figure ground kind of thing. So you could always take a different route, you could always be a different person, because you took a different route, your experience of the space was ever changing, because you're always reestablishing a path of travel throughout the day.

Mitchell Rocheleau - Rost Architects    1:15:18

Right, I had an interesting conversation with Raymond Neutra, about the VDL house and, he kind of related it back to, in some ways to what's happening right now in 2019, with the ADU laws, so bringing in accessory dwelling units, one primary accessory dwelling unit, one ADU, and in a lot of ways the VDL house has that. So it shows how a single family home can be served, serve multiple uses, how you can house multiple families, and it can be a live workspace, it can be flexible, and kind of the level of thought that Neutra had to put into that floor plan in order to facilitate all of those, you know, kind of occurrences during the day without necessarily forcing the two families to and to end the workers to interact every day, which is super interesting conversation. So, I related it back to how we have had many clients try to do the single family home and then capitalize on the ADU loss as well and, you know, it's making, not only the architectural design, more interesting, but it's also solving a larger societal and cultural issue that we have in California, right with the housing crisis, I think it's you know, kind of, you know, killing two birds with one stone in some sense.

Barbara Lamprecht    1:16:44

I'm just thinking if you can look at the plan for the 1951 reunion house, which is dealing with Neutra’s house, Neutra put the master bedroom at one end and he put the children's bedroom in the guest bedrooms at the other end of the house. It's a small; it's a modestly sized house. And then he created a bathroom in which if you started a plan for people can be using this relatively small bathroom simultaneously, and nobody's getting in each other's way. And I think it's rather a miracle. And in another barbell house, if you will, the client, the mother said, I don't want to be that far away from my children, you know, and other end of the house and he says we will install an intercom and you will thank me in the end yeah, and we did.

Mitchell Rocheleau - Rost Architects    1:17:45

That's funny. This was the own house?

Barbara Lamprecht    1:17:49

Well, this is actually the Corwin house and in western Connecticut,

Mitchell Rocheleau - Rost Architects    1:17:56

That the owner had designed?

Barbara Lamprecht    1:17:57

Well, no, I'm sorry. This anecdote I just shared with you that is the client woman at Betty Corwin from the Corwin house in western Connecticut. But it's also, I think it was it was basically established in that plan called the reunion house because we It was supposed to be the reunion, house title comes from grandparents, wanting the grandchildren to come, but not being overwhelmed.

Mitchell Rocheleau - Rost Architects    1:18:32

Right, I really appreciate you coming on and having the conversation and I think you divulged a wealth of information for not only me, but for our clients and people in our office, and hopefully everybody else watching so I really appreciate it.

Barbara Lamprecht    1:18:48

Oh, my pleasure, Mitchell. I think this is the very first time any architecture firm has approached me and if that's the kind of firm you are, your clients must be very fortunate.

Mitchell Rocheleau - Rost Architects    1:19:02

Good, I appreciate it. Thank you. So, thanks for listening to the discussion today. If you'd like to learn more, or if you'd like to contact us, please reach out to us at Rostarchitects.com