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Richard Neutra
Life and Shape
In
print again for the first time since 1962, the autobiography of this
legendary architect provides insights into the life of one of
modernism's most influential architects. With a new foreword by Dion
Neutra.
"Since he followed it all of his life, Richard
Neutra (1892-1970) must have relished the maxim of the Greek
philosopher Socrates: 'The unexamined life is not worth living.' In his
books, articles, lectures, correspondence, and even casual
conversations, Neutra constantly examined, not only his own life, but
the lives of others—present and past—and the human and natural
world they inhabited. Nowhere was this truer than in his autobiography Life and Shape first published in 1962, which now, after years of being out of print, has again happily come back to life.
As opposed to Survival Through Design (1954),
his superb collection of densely philosophical essays, Neutra took a
different tack in Life and Shape, following a lighter and more
deliberately relaxed approach. It was as if the usually serious and
intense Neutra was giving himself permission to reveal his richly
ironic sense of humor and to probe areas in his personal experience
which he had not examined as closely before. These included hitherto
unrecorded memories of his parents, siblings, and his childhood and
education in imperial Vienna, his numbing experiences as an Austrian
artillery officer in World War I, and the beginnings of his
architectural consciousness in his response to the work of Otto Wagner,
Adolf Loos, Erich Mendelsohn, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright.
As in the autobiographies of Sullivan and Wright, Life and Shape
concentrates on Neutra's earlier years, both in Europe and America.
While he naturally recounts his memories of such well-known commissions
as the Lovell Health House (1929), his own Van der Leeuv Research House
(1933) and the von Sternberg House (1935), he also muses on such less
famous buildings as the small, and now virtually forgotten, Mosk House
(1933). "Life and Shape" also confirms Neutra's obsession with the
passage of time and his firm resolution never to waste it.
Like Sullivan and Wright, Neutra eschewed writing a factual chronicle,
and—at the age of 70—composed instead a meditation on the aspects
of his life and work that seemed, in retrospect, to be the most
interesting and significant. He felt no need to try to "include
everything" but rather to present an honest recounting of his memory of
his life. In writing my own Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern
Architecture [Oxford University Press, 1982; Rizzoli Press, 2006], I
relied on Life and Shape when I wanted an account of Neutra's
experiences told in his own authentic voice. For future generations of
architects, historians, and readers, it is good to have it back." —Thomas S. Hines
UCLA Professor Emeritus of History and Architecture, author
of "Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture"
Available from Amazon (also in UK, Germany, France, Canada, and Japan)
Gad Granach
Where Is Home?
Stories from the Life of a German-Jewish Emigre
"Did you come here out of personal conviction or are you from Germany?" was the question German Jews were asked when they arrived in Palestine in 1933. Few came out of conviction. The majority of the sixty thousand German Jews who arrived in the then-British mandate came because they had no other option. Palestine was not the land of their dreams, but rather a place of asylum where one would have to start life anew. Doctors became bus drivers, lawyers raised chickens, and artists worked as waiters. For the young, however, immigration to Palestine was a great adventure, the beginning of a new life free from old conventions and, sometimes, the beginning as well of a life or death battle.
Gad Granach still went by Gerhard when he arrived at Haifa Harbor at the age of twenty-one. The son of a famous actor in Berlin and of a politically engaged mother, he was not one of those who came out of conviction. He made the best of it, whether working as a reserve policeman for the British, a construction worker in Tel Aviv, or a locomotive driver along the Dead Sea. He encountered a land of neither milk nor honey, and took part in five major wars and a number of smaller ones, wishing all the while that God would "choose" another people and leave the Jews in peace.
"A charismatic witness to the Berlin of the 1930s, Israel during its kibbutz years, and present-day Jerusalem."
—Hellmuth Karasek, Der Tagesspiegel
"A contemporary from whom one always desires another sentence." —Elke Schmitter, Die Zeit
"A Charlie Chaplin of the pen. This is how a book about Israel should be." —ZDF, Aspekte
"Filled with a wonderful, lively sense of humour"
—Der Spiegel magazine
"Granach is highly entertaining as well as thought provoking. A supreme raconteur." —Elke Schubert, Sueddeutsche Zeitung
"An absolute must-read!"
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