Uncommon Ground: Architecture, Technology and Topology (review)

Coming to the United States from Europe in the 1920s, Richard Neutra found substantial commissions in Los Angeles in the 1940s and 1950s that let his ideas flower into full form. This architect concentrated most of all on the horizontals—platforms, floors and ceilings—as if walls were merely a minor impediment and inconvenience to mobile Angelenos. Perhaps it is because the impact of Neutra and his style has been so great, its influence so widespread, that it can be difficult today to fully appreciate the excellence and even gently innovative qualities of his work. His airy, open, glassed-in houses were bathed in California light, within and outside, and were consummately elegant twentieth-century machines for living. Elsewhere in the Golden State, suburban builders like Eichler and Doegler, to give two San Francisco-area examples, carried forth the aesthetic of open plans, large windows and flat slabs into neighborhoods of middle-and working-class houses.

In Uncommon Ground: Architecture, Technology and Topology, author David Leatherbarrow makes use of issues of materiality for a philosophical probing of the fundamentals of architecture. This is a fairly sophisticated book, and one that presupposes an architectural literacy, at least undergraduate courses in the scope of Wester n architecture and tenets of modernism. Leatherbarrow contrasts Neutra's work with the sun-drenched work of Greek architect Aris Konstantinidis and in a few instances to that of Anonin Raymond in Japan. It is the interplay of forces with topography, of both natural and social elements, that engages the author the most in examining these architects' works.

Admittedly this reviewer comes to architecture from two directions of contemporary dematerialization and rematerialization: virtual space and community murals. My own two postmodern concerns—painted, figurative murals and electronic space—were never explored by the high modernist Neutra. The architecture of information and imagery within computer-generated environments suggests dimensionality through various graphic design strategies. The relationship of the elements—walls, ceiling, ornament—to murals painted upon a building's surfaces is tied to urban politics of the past quarter-century, but certainly is not flourishing in the parts of Los Angeles where Neutra had his commissions. None of Neutra's works are mural-friendly by design, though they easily could be; they could even be adapted to contrast their glassed-in environments with videowalls and digital projection displays instead of plaster. Even easel paintings within a Neutra house seem as if they should be limited to well-behaved nonrepresentational rectangles or perhaps biomorphic shaped canvases.

If my cyberspace and sociocontextual concerns may be paramount to architectures of this century, that's no excuse not to study mid-twentieth-century masters. This handsome book is rewarding to read, to leaf through and gaze enviously upon its sparse yet luxurious homes, and to ponder the issues that tie Neutra's time and accomplishments to our own.