Lecture by Dr. Raymond Neutra

“Cheap and Thin: Neutra and Frank Lloyd Wright”

Dr. Raymond Neutra joins us at the Museum of Ventura County on Thursday, October 10, 2019 from 6:30—8 p.m. for a lecture and discussion on his book, “Cheap and Thin: Neutra and Frank Lloyd Wright”. Admission is Free for Museum members, $5 for nonmembers.

A description of “Cheap and Thin: Neutra and Frank Lloyd Wright” reads as follows:

“While architectural historians tend to characterize the contribution of Richard Neutra’s work of the 1920s and 30’s as “bringing the International Style” to California, his work is better understood as a variant and further development of the pre-1910 stage of Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Prairie Houses.” Neutra discovered the 1910 Wasmuth Portfolio of Wright in the library of Vienna’s Technical University.  Like his older classmate Rudolf Schindler, he recognized the revolutionary implications of this architecture and adopted its basic strategies but with the intention of industrially assembling such structures as houses, apartment dwellings, schools and clinics for the economically most disadvantaged people. So, they were meant to be light and economical. The United States, with the example of Henry Ford was the place that this could be done.  At the time of the 1932 Museum of Modern Art Show of “International Style Architecture” put on by Hitchcock and Johnson, Wright was insulted by the inclusion of Neutra and wrote that his work was “Cheap and Thin.” Although he meant to be denigrating with this comment, he was on to something, since Neutra meant his work to be light and economical.  Dr Raymond Richard Neutra a physician and environmental epidemiologist will trace Wright’s influence on Dutch Modernists, on his father, and through his father’s erstwhile apprentices, Gregory Ain, Harwell Harris and Raphael Soriano on California mid-century modern architecture.”