Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture: A Biography and History

Oxford University Press, 1982. First Edition . Cloth. Fine/Near Fine. A crip, clean Fine copy in Near Fine price-clipped dust jacket protected by a mylar cover. Inscribed by the author on the title page. 356 pp., profusely illustrated, appendices, building list, endnotes and index. Richard Neutra's work, his life experience, and his search for modern architecture coincided neatly with the lifespan of the modern movement. He experienced the buoyant struggles of the movement's early years, the heady triumph of its mid-century ascendancy, and the critique it faced in the 1960s and 1970s. His reputation enjoyed a resurgence that was hard to predict when Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture was first published over twenty years ago. In his seminal critical biography of this modernist master, Thomas S. Hines explores the efforts of Neutra and his modernist contemporaries to find the forms that would be most expressive of the twentieth century. In researching this classic of architectural scholarship, Hines enjoyed unparalleled access to the Neutra archives. Its collection of outstanding black-and-white photography includes a remarkable cache of photographs taken by Julius Shulman-the undisputed master of twentieth-century architectural photography-whose work is beautifully featured here. "This study, part biography, part architectural analysis, is a modern masterpiece of architectural history. The prose is lucid and sometimes elegant-very much like the work of Richard Neutra which it so brilliantly examines." - Peter Gay