Design: Moonlight in the Bathroom

However modest in scale, Richard Neutra 's houses soared

When Architect Richard Neutra was designing a house for Alan and Janet Glenn in Stamford, Conn., he took them out late one evening to the site. "And this is where your bathroom will be," he said. "When the moon is out, it will shine through the skylight, so you won't have to switch on the light and disturb each other."

Neutra, the Vienna-born American architect who died twelve years ago at the age of 78, insisted on involving his clients in planning their houses. He would ask husband and wife to give him separate lists of their special wishes and problems.

"It's the architect's job to keep the divorce rate down," he would say. Neutra did not always succeed at that. But as shown in a stunning exhibition that opened last week at New York City's Museum of Modern Art, "The Architecture of Richard Neutra: From International Style to California Modern," he did succeed in creating designs that combine delightful livability with uncompromising modernity. Neutra, in fact, was one of the foremost leaders of the 20th century architectural revolution.

The model, drawings and photographs at MOMA of Neutra's famous Lovell House, built between 1927 and 1929 in the arid Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles, still quicken the viewer's heartbeat. There had been nothing like it before, nor was there to be anything like it during that decade, not even in avant-garde Europe, where Mies van der Robe's pristinely trend-setting steel-and-glass Tugendhat House in Brno, Czechoslovakia, was completed a year later.

Owner Philip Lovell was a health columnist, an exponent of water cures, open-air sleeping and vegetarianism. Neutra, more enthusiastically than scientifically, designed for him what he called a Health House. It consists of a steel frame, somewhat like a huge bird cage, daringly jutting out of a steep slope. Without sacrificing its airy appearance, the frame is enclosed in a dynamic pattern formed by window bands, metal panels sprayed with a coating of stucco and cantilevered balconies. The entrance to the house is at the top of the hill on the level of the living rooms and sleeping porches, which soar out over the valley. From there the house sort of tumbles past the library, guest rooms and such, down to the swimming pool. With its openness, silver-gray metal trim, geometric furniture and automobile headlights used as wall lights, the house was a triumph of new design and engineering.

The Lovell House was the authoritative overture, as it were, to a dramatic series of residences. All exploited the theme of light-filled space and pleasing simplicity with, as Neutra put it, "soul-refreshing" variations. His style and convictions were strong enough to adapt themselves to the residents, the climates and particularly the landscapes of his projects. The Nesbitt House in Los Angeles (1942), for instance, has a decidedly rustic ambience. The vigorous textures of rough brick and redwood board and batten predominate. The hard, angular lines of the Kaufmann House in Palm Springs (1946) deliberately contrast with nature. The spindly steel columns, fragile-looking window walls and beams that poke freely into the air are a reinterpretation of classic Japanese architecture.