"The story of Richard Neutra's life is, in many ways, the story of modern architecture since Neutra experienced in his own lifetime the buoyant struggles of the movement's early years and the heady successes of its mid-century ascendancy. By interweaving Neutra's life with the history of modernism, this definitive study depicts architecture's struggle to find new meaning in the twentieth century." "Born in Vienna in 1892, Neutra moved to the United States in 1923 and quickly became, in the words of the 1932 Museum of the Modern Art catalogue, "the leading modern architect of the West Coast ... second only to Frank Lloyd Wright in international stature." His work was distinguished by the way it embraced nature, felicitously adapting the standard modernist elements - ribbon windows, flat roofs, built-in furniture, glass walls - to the California environment. The lightness and skeletal strength in his buildings reified the essence of the International Style.^

Neutra's favorite building materials were steel, stucco, concrete, wood, and glass, and his basic structure was the simple, timeless post and beam, with cantilevered roof slabs extending into space. As a follower of Wright and of the new architecture of Europe, Neutra bridged, perhaps better than any other modernist, the frequently polarized worlds of Taliesin and the Bauhaus. A lifelong student of the psychological, physiological, and ecological dimensions of architecture, Neutra's credo became the title of his most influential book, Survival Through Design." "Thomas Hines analyzes not only Neutra's contributions to modernism but also the architect's relationships with his mentors and contemporaries, including Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos, Erich Mendelsohn, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Rudolph Schindler, and Wright.^

He also explores Neutra's interaction with clients, among them Philip and Leah Lovell, who commissioned Neutra's famous steel-framed Health House, and film director Josef von Sternberg, for whom Neutra built a modern aluminum, moat-enclosed villa, later acquired by novelist Ayn Rand. It was a measure of Neutra's fame that Edgar Kaufmann, who had commissioned Wright's Fallingwater house of 1936, chose Neutra ten years later to design his desert house in Palm Springs."--Jacket.