Word: neutra
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...MOMA exhibition, the first architecture show in the museum's new west wing, conveys Neutra's human appeal as well as his architectural brilliance. Created by Arthur Drexler, MOMA's director of the department of architecture and design, with Historian Thomas Mines, the exhibit is engagingly mounted in a Neutra-esque sequence of spaces, which vary in size to suit the displays and in the hues of their gray walls to suit their mood...
...Neutra's intellectual origins were the same as those of his more famous fellow revolutionaries, Walter Gropius, Mies and LeCorbusier. As a student in Vienna, he deplored the degeneracy of dwelling in an ornamented past and longed for the exaltation of a pure and machine-made future. His hero was Adolf Loos, the architect who declared ornament a crime. But, like the other modern pioneers, Neutra was most deeply impressed by the early work of Frank Lloyd Wright, which was published in Europe...
...When Neutra first met Wright in 1924, shortly after Neutra had come to the U.S. to work, "it was just like suddenly seeing the unicorn or some other fairy tale figure one has been searching for behind the rainbow," as Neutra recalled later. The unicorn offered Neutra a job at his Taliesin, Wis. workstead. The association did much to shape Neutra's style, although, as Drexler says in the exhibition catalogue, Neutra was both praised and blamed for cleaning up Wright's complications. While Mies and the others translated Wrightian picturesque into the language of abstract painting, Neutra...
...Neutra's importance to the modern movement may not yet be fully recognized. For one thing, he was never one of the boys. He emigrated more than a decade ahead of such refugees from Nazism as Gropius and Mies. He settled in California, which is a long way from Yale, Harvard, New York City and Chicago, where architectural history, if not always made, is almost always written. Perhaps to compensate, Neutra strove so stridently for more than his share of recognition that irritated critics may have given him less than he deserved...
...MOMA exhibition should turn a fresh light on Neutra's achievements. It may even do more: in the current identity crisis of our art and architecture, Neutra's buildings prove that the point, in the end, is not modern or postmodern. It is good architecture or bad . - By Wolf Von Eckardt