Richard Neutra, Corona Avenue School

Carrying a portfolio under his arm Richard Neutra left the studio and walked the few steps to the living quarters of their house in Silver Lake Boulevard. Even after three years it still seemed a novelty to do so, and he never ceased to feel waves of gratitude to the Dutchman Dr C H van der Leeuw who had turned up, unbidden, and offered him a loan of $3,000 to build his own house after discovering that he and his wife, Dione, were living in a rented bungalow. He had been pleased with his idea of naming it the VDL Research House: work and living interwoven. Houses should have particular names.

He expected to find Dione sitting at her piano about to sing – Schubert or Bach, he guessed. She was. He wanted to get her opinion on a drawing of the school that he was working on, and had decided to interrupt her. But first, by way of an opening, he asked Dione where their boys were. Characteristically, Dion had apparently had the idea of digging a cave in the hillside and Frank had been happy to go along with it; so that is what they were doing. Frank’s tantrum that morning had been fierce and long, but she had worked with him on his speech for a while, and he had calmed down. Richard knew that she always had at the back of her mind Anna Freud’s pronouncement on Frank after they had consulted her in Vienna several years ago. It would be a heavy burden, she told them, to keep Frank at home and when he reached puberty it might become impossible. She had just received a letter from Anna that was encouraging: ‘He must have made great progress in his speech as I notice from your description. The new symptoms, which you describe, are all compulsion symptoms.’ Thank God he wasn’t in an institution.

Talking about their children was a default conversation for Richard and Dione; designing a school where children could flourish seemed the most worthwhile of projects. Knowledge of his two sons – so different from one another – was a strand of thought that sometimes informed his planning on this project. Could Frank overcome his problems in a school like this? Maybe not, maths was his best subject. Dion, he was sure, would be happy. He laid the drawing out on the table and as he did so mused on how the gloominess of his school in Vienna had depressed him; how the regimented lines of desks had felt like a prison, how the light fell on to their heads from high windows that didn’t allow you to see out; how the hard playground had held no joys. Which reminded him – what a relief to know that Dion could be out in the fresh air making a cave. In contrast, he remembered his childhood den: a desperate attempt to create a warm refuge under the piano in their freezing cold apartment on Taborgasse.

Dione left the piano and stood beside Richard. She countered this train of thought with a reminiscence of her own. Did he remember how intrigued they had both been by Leah Lovell’s progressive ideas on education? What a stroke of luck (or should it be described as fate?) that while working with Frank Lloyd Wright and Rudolph Schindler on buildings for the impossibly whimsical and contrary Aline Barnsdall nearby at Olive Hill he had come across Leah Lovell, who was running a small school there with Pauline Schindler. Richard agreed that the sequence of events that followed was exactly why he loved the atmosphere in Southern California. People were more mentally footloose than elsewhere and did not mind deviating opinions; it was where you could try something independent of hidebound habituation. They had made friends with Leah and her physically commanding husband Phillip. The Lovells commissioned Richard to build them a house: the Lovell Health House, one that would not only incorporate all the features necessary for Phillip’s naturopathy cause – kitchen for preparing vegetarian food, plenty of natural light and porches for sleeping in the open air, space for exercise and massage, a swimming pool and shallow wading pool - but also space needed for a progressive school that Leah planned to start for their three sons and some neighbourhood children. She had explained that she believed children should learn by doing, be able to work co-operatively in groups and that activities should be varied: woodworking, painting, pottery, acting in plays as well as books, and plenty of gymnastics and swimming. These were ideas that Richard was holding in his head as he worked on the school for Corona Avenue. He agreed with John Dewey: ‘Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself ’, a fact that he knew had been noted by the Los Angeles education authority who commissioned him.

They agreed the ’33 earthquake clearly could not be classed as ‘luck’ exactly, a terrible fate for the 120 fatalities. However, the destruction of so many old brick-built schools with their pillars and pediments (so derided by his former teacher Adolf Loos) meant an urgent need for new buildings and the commission for a new school was exciting. Now he was creating spaces for 250 children, not Leah’s 15 or so, two kindergarten and five elementary classrooms. Richard pointed out the best feature of his design: sliding floor-to-ceiling glass doors that meant the classroom could merge with the outside. Dione smiled and wondered what trees would grow fast and provide the best shade and if perhaps the hedging could be something with flowers or even fruit. It looked not like a forbidding school, but a welcoming house. It would be a success.

As he reluctantly wandered back to the draughting room Richard Neutra was struck with a difficult thought. Having created such a good blueprint for schools, would the teachers actually make use of all the opportunities that the architecture provided; would it advance the kind of co-operative learning-by-doing that it was intended to do, or would they stick with old pedagogic habits. He hoped Frank and Dion would be able to run free.

As so often, he marvelled at the bright Californian sunshine and longed to have the time to go up on to the roof deck and lie, lizard-like, in the sun, absorbing its heat and gazing out at Silver Lake. Children and plants, but adults too – we all thrive and grow with light and air, he told himself. He had started work at 4 in the morning; he could have slept. Impossible, he needed to get back to work

Bibliography

Richard Neutra, Promise and Fulfillment, 1919-1932. Selections from the Letters and Diaries of Richard and Dione Neutra. Compiled and Translated by Dione Neutra. Southern Illinois University Press, 1986

Thomas S. Hines, Richard Neutra & the Search for Modern Architecture, 1982

"House and Open-Air School in One", Author: Raymond Richard Neutra, Source: Southern California Quarterly, Summer 2020, Vol. 102, No. 2 (Summer 2020), pp. 143-157, Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Historical Society of Southern California

Richard Neutra’s Corona Avenue School, Drawing Matter 22 March 2023, A Project Scrapbook by Nicholas Olsberg, https://drawingmatter.org/richard-neutras-corona-avenue-school/

About the author

Philippa Lewis is a writer, photographer and picture editor. She is the author of Stories from Architecture; A Dictionary of Ornament (with Gillian Darley); Details, A Guide to House Design in Britain; Everything You Can Do in the Garden without Actually Gardening; Everyman’s Castle; and other books.