ABSTRACT
As the former home and office of Austrian architect Richard Neutra, the Neutra VDL Studio and Residences in Los Angeles is known as a modernist icon, which obscures its history as a site of constant revision. Neutra designed an earlier house on the site in 1932—a more contained and opaque volume typical of his early career—but when a fire destroyed it in 1963, he and his son Dion rebuilt the structure as a more open and experimental space. They adjusted the envelope of the building, giving indoor space over to exterior patios and terraces. Rather than a rectangular building standing on a landscape, the building became a tug-of-war between interior rooms and large exterior volumes that cut away at the core of the house as they move from the ground level up to the roof. In the years after Richard and his wife Dione passed away, the buildings became both a house museum and a modernist ruin, until the current directors Sarah Lorenzen and David Hartwell galvanized fundraising and manpower for a restoration. The extensive repairs and replacements, including new paint, carpets, curtains, lights, furniture, etc., produced another transformation of the site, which Lorenzen herself acknowledges as an artificial approximation of a past moment. What makes the site unique from other house museums, however, is that Lorenzen commissions annual site-specific projects that continue to change the perception and experience of the buildings. Projects are chosen that challenge the conventions of a house museum—thwarting expectations of authenticity by resisting the simulacrum of Richard Neutra’s living space or of a particular moment of architectural history. These projects call attention to and continue the perpetual transformation of the architecture (Figure 20.1).
