Raymond Richard Neutra 4 years old, Poughkeepsie, Nova York
Foto divulgação [Acervo Raymond Richard Neutra]

In the winter of 1943, when I was four, my mother took me on a train ride through the snowy landscape from Bennington College to Poughkeepsie, New York. She enrolled me there for a few months in the Hill and Hollow boarding school. Then she left to join my father in Puerto Rico. She told me later that my father needed her more than I did.

Puerto Rico, then, was implanted as a place, early in my consciousness. On the one hand were the glowing stories that she and my father told on their return. They were excited by lush bamboo thickets, tree frogs that piped “coqui!” in the night, a nearby little island where monkeys were studied and vanilla plants that my mother helped to pollinate at Holger Fog’s plant nursery where they had lived. On the other hand that Puerto Rican paradise was linked in my child’s mind to the bare grey brown trunks and twigs of the snowy deciduous forest near the school that winter, and the lights of cars on a highway whose headlights cast their beams on the ceiling of a hospital where I had been taken by the school for treatment of a tooth abscess. As each car approached down below on the highway I wondered if it might contain my mother coming to get me, but it did not.

Pilot school in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico. Arquiteto Richard Neutra, 1940/1950
Foto divulgação [Acervo Raymond Richard Neutra]

The family story that I had heard growing up was recorded as part of a UCLA oral history taken by a young Laurence Weschler in 1978 (To Tell the Truth: Dione Neutra Copywrite Regents of U of California 1983). In my mother’s recollection my father had received an exploratory letter of invitation directly by former Secretary of Agriculture Rex Tugwell, the appointed Governor of Puerto Rico. Would he be interested in being a design consultant for schools, health centers and hospitals in Puerto Rico? My father made an exploratory visit in November of 1943 returning with my mother in December/ January 1943/44 and then at least once more after that. On page 279 of the Weschler interview she says:”He had to hire forty people to help him design these hospitals...” This was all done during vacation breaks from Bennington College where he was then teaching during the economic down time of World War II. Due to office politics among the onscene architects, the story went, no further work in Puerto Rico materialized. To my knowledge he was never invited back to Puerto Rico. However at least one of the innovative schools was actually built in Rio Piedras, now a suburb of San Juan. My father used a hazy snap shot of it as well as plans and perspective drawings to illustrate talks that he gave during a State Department-sponsored tour of South America including Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Peru late in 1946 and also in a book in Portuguese and English published in Brazil in 1948 entitled “Architecture of Social Concern.”

The book demonstrated his ideas about tropical architecture for health centers, hospitals and an education in which children were not regimented in nailed-down rows of desks in multi-storied buildings. Instead, education would spill out into adjacent gardens. This was made possible by having one wall of the class room be made up of a swiveling garage door that could open up and serve as an overhanging shade device.

This increased instructional space at little cost and was meant to facilitate a less hierarchical John Dewey style “learn by doing” education. My older brother Dion Who had started to help in the office was a high school student back in Los Angeles living under the supervision of my grandparents when all of this was happening. Recently, sixty years later he visited Puerto Rico and was taken to this same school building whose garage doors had been removed and closed in with concrete blocks and stucco.

Pegy Bahaus, Barbara Lamprecht, Maribel Ortiz e Andres Mignucci, trip to Puerto Rico, March 2010
Foto divulgação [Acervo Raymond Richard Neutra]

A student thesis done some years ago by Eliza Munoz Storer wrote about how the traditional culture of authority, combined with the need to prepare young Puerto Ricans for a regimented factory occupation led to the closing of this and subsequent school designs. However, emails with Dion’s contacts and with those of architectural historian Barbara Lamprecht suggested that, tucked away in remote Puerto Rican mountain towns, one could find surviving examples of reinforced concrete schools and rural health centers and perhaps even a regional hospital that were very close to my father’s original conceptual designs.

Tropical beach in Puerto Rico
Foto divulgação [Acervo Raymond Richard Neutra]

Since we had to pass through Puerto Rico coming and going to a March 2010 sailing vacation in the British Virgin Islands, I decided to organize a hunt for these rumored facilities. Barbara Lamprecht joined my wife Peggy Bauhaus and me on this hunt. Our local guides were the husband wife architectural team of Andres Mignucci and Maribel Ortiz. This was my first time on the island that had figured so early and emotionally in my mind. Parts of our voyage of discovery confirmed the imagination of my childhood: Lush jungle mountains, and tropical beaches( see above). The “coqui” frogs sang like birds all night.

Fortress El Moro, Puerto Rico
Foto divulgação [Acervo Raymond Richard Neutra]

The 16th century fortress El Moro was there as promised, here with a statue commemorating the clever bishop who staged the kind of parade one has, when plague is in the city, to successfully scare off some Dutch invaders. But there were surprises. I had not expected the riot of color on the 19th century houses. Andres said there was little control exerted by external authorities on the color combinations of adjacent buildings. I liked the delightful combination of traditional paving and curb stone traffic coloration, too.

Foto divulgação [Acervo Raymond Richard Neutra]

Colorful paint on the facades of houses Puerto Rican 19th century
Foto divulgação [Acervo Raymond Richard Neutra]

Andres took us to a number of parks, some of which he himself had re-designed. This is one dedicated to Munoz Rivera, poet and father of Governor Luis Munoz Marin. Below is a park he renewed in the town of Isabela with a statue of the poet Manuel Maria Corchado y Juarbe.

Square with the statue of the poet Munoz Rivera, father of Puerto Rican Governor Luis Munoz Marin
Foto divulgação [Acervo Raymond Richard Neutra]

The parks often seemed to commemorate such Puerto Rican men and women of culture. There was a whole gaggle of them lining each side of this plaza in San German.

Statue of the poet Manuel Maria Corchado y Juarbe, plaza in the city of Isabela
Foto divulgação [Acervo Raymond Richard Neutra]

My friend and host epidemiologist and historian Dr. Jose Rigau told me that contrary to its name “Rich Port” the island had been primarily a strategic military outpost for the Spaniards and had none of the Baroque splendors of Mexico City or Cuzco. Nonetheless I sensed a strong drive of those who control the contents of such parks to assert a cultural identify despite or perhaps because of being the neglected step-child of two empires, the Spanish and the American. Andres said that culturally it was an island surrounded by mirrors; that is, with a tendency to be inward looking.

City of Ponce, Puerto Rico
Foto divulgação [Acervo Raymond Richard Neutra]

After driving round the western half of the island we found ourselves after dark in Ponce and I invited everyone to dinner if Andres could suggest a place. A cell phone conversation with a friend led us to the restaurant “Las Tias”. “But there will be a radio program transmission,” Andres said. What did this mean? We found ourselves in a high-ceilinged 19th century portico with our backs to a similarly high-ceilinged room whose shutters were flung open to allow a floor to ceiling door to link its space to the portico in which we sat. Inside was an oval table where the eight diners all held microphones. Part of the group, seen here, was a guitarist who now and again accompanied an elderly lady singer in lugubrious Love songs that Andres classified as pertaining to a genre he called “corta venas” (vein cutting). Between the songs were lively political debates about the fate of a political party that had recently lost the mayoral election in Ponce. Andres said that the owner of las Tias had this salon on a weekly basis and transmitted it on one of the commercial radio stations throughout the island to a large and interested audience. Andres said that 85% of Puerto Ricans vote in their elections, and politics is a constant topic of interest and conversation. After dinner I approached the owner and told her how comforting it was that somewhere in the world people could still enjoy a spirited and civil argument, sprinkling them with music to boot!

Interior of the restaurant Las Tias in Ponce
Foto divulgação [Acervo Raymond Richard Neutra]

What surprised me about our day’s adventure was that I had not expected to detect such a vibrant and unique indigenous culture after more than a century of being in the orbit of the United States. I was surprised by how many people, educated and not educated, still were uncomfortable in speaking English and how Spanish bureaucratic and cultural patterns persisted on the island. I also had not come prepared to appreciate the strength of the 19th century historical tradition of Puerto Rico, that tradition which had developed in the waning days of the Spanish empire. Andres told us that his Corsican ancestors came as part of a wave of immigration encouraged by the Spaniards early in the 19th century. This resulted in a thriving coffee agriculture which supplied even the Pope with coffee. This all collapsed when the United States failed to provide the same trade protections against cheap Brazilian coffee that the Spaniards had provided. But the American-educated leaders in various sectors in Puerto Rico today can trace their roots back to the elites of the pre American era. Andres’ grandfather signed the Puerto Rican constitution in the late 1940’s and was mayor of his town and an ally of Munoz Marin.

I was also surprised to realize that the sequence of events that resulted in my father’s assignment in Puerto Rico and the role he was to play once he arrived there, was not as clear as the story that I grew up with. According to Eliza Munoz Storer’s thesis, in 1942 Tugwell and Puerto Rican Senate President Luis Munoz Marin cooperated to create a Committee on Design of Post War Public Works with $1.3 million for design and $2.1 million for acquiring land. (for this information, she relied on Rexford Tugwell, “The Puerto Rican Experience 1975”, p 266)

A team of architects, engineers and hired draftsmen were to prepare standard designs for schools, health clinics and hospitals as well as housing for staff. The idea was that as soon as the war was over there would be a major push to provide this infrastructure particularly in the rural part of the country that was the political base of Munoz Marin. Eliza says that architect Henry Klumb was the director of the division of design of the committee and quotes from his archive the following justification for my father’s being chosen as consultant.

"The reason the he (Neutra) has been called to this island is not merely his international reputation as a planner and architect, but his specific appraisal of the potentials and needs of a particular country for which he designs homes, schools hospitals, communities etc. He was not born in California as little as in the Caribbean, but his work on the west coast has made that region noted for suitable design for living. He has not grown up in Texas but his design for a housing project, Avion Village, near Dallas is considered the most Texan project in Texas." (Box 3, Correspondence, Subseries Projects, cartapacio 3.5 in Klumb Archives U of Puerto Rico)

Who was Henry Klumb? Wikipedia has him arriving in Puerto Rico from Los Angeles at the end of February 1944. Born in 1905 he was thirteen years younger than my father. He had graduated in 1926 from the Staatliche Bauschule in Cologne and had worked with Frank Lloyd Wright from 1929-1933 during the initiation of Wright’s Fellowship program and the initiation of Taliesin West which he helped design. Andres said that He left Wright when he was found to be moonlighting to support his family. He and Stephen Arneson, another apprentice, left at the same time. Klumb worked with Louis Kahn for a while designing low cost housing and was involved with the design of one of Tugwell’s new towns in New Jersey; then in 1941 moved to the planning department of Los Angeles. He would have to have been familiar with my father’s work and heard him discussed at Taliesin and may even have sought him out when he arrived in Los Angeles. It would have been surprising if he had not, because my father was chairman of the California State office of Planning in the late 1930ʻs and early 1940’s. The two of them would have shared the influence of the Deutsche Werkbund and of Wright, so they ought to have been philosophically compatible. Judging by the present-tense wording of the above quotation, it might have been in Klumb’s files but written prior to his arrival by someone else,or he might have it as an agreeing validation of a choice made by someone else before Klumb was hired.

Eleanor Roosevelt Housing, San Juan, Puerto Rico. Architect Ramirez Arrellano, 1937
Foto divulgação [Acervo Raymond Richard Neutra]

How had Tugwell heard about my father? I remember that my father had met Eleanor Roosevelt, and indeed on page 281 of the Weschler history my mother says that they shook her hand as part of a reception line of 500 people in Puerto Rico. Neither Weschler nor Thomas Hines reference other meetings with Eleanor, but I have a vague memory of my mother mentioning a personal meeting in Washington. This much is sure, my father was a consultant to the National Youth Administration founded with Eleanor Roosevelt’s urging in 1935 to provide Occupational training to unemployed youth. She would have been aware of his innovative training centers in Sacramento and San Luis Obispo, this and his prefabricated community at Avion Village, mentioned above and other publications had positioned him as a leading innovator. Andres pointed out that Tugwell was close to Eleanor and that Eleanor had visited Puerto Rico with Tugwell in 1932 and came back convinced that it should benefit from the New Deal. In 1937 Puerto Rican architect Ramirez de Arrellano designed a federally funded streamlined moderne reinforced concrete housing project in San Juan named after Eleanor Roosevelt. Andres took us to visit it.

If my father was on Eleanor’s radar screen because of Avion Village and his consultancy with the National Youth Administration, he would have been on Rex Tugwell’s radar screen as well. Elisa Munoz Storer says that Gropius, Eliel Saarinen and Eero Saarinen had also been asked as consultants but they had declined. Andres thought that both Tugwell and Munoz Marin saw the modern esthetic and the modern commitment to program as emblematic of their modernizing political program. The involvement of a first class architect in their project would attract favorable press and political support for it. Indeed Andres and Barbara found a letter from my father to Munoz Marin c/o of the rector of the University of Puerto Rico which referred to a dinner with Marin at the rector’s house and conversations my father had subsequently had in New York with several popular magazines touting the Puerto Rican program. The famous architect was reassuring his client that his access to the press was redounding to the credit of Munoz Marin’s projects.

Museum of the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, San Juan. Architect Henry Klumb, years 1940/1950
Foto divulgação [Acervo Raymond Richard Neutra]

According to a December 1943 letter from my mother to my grandmother that we found in the Cal Poly Pomona archives, Klumb’s Taliesin colleague Stephen Arneson was the one who was negotiating my father’s contract after several months of unexplained dithering. There is later correspondence at the Neutra archives at UCLA indicating design disagreements between Arneson, Klumb and my father. There should be at Cal Poly Pomona “Christmas Letters” from my mother describing the events of 1943 ,1944 and 1945. Copies of these were sent by my mother when she was still alive to architect Professor Jorge Rigau, but he could not locate them in time for my visit. They too talk about conflicts with Klumb and the local architects. My mother (Weschler p 281) said “..it was very, very difficult, because later on he had a new design director who didn’t want him there, he wanted to have a Puerto Rican and not a Yankee consultant. So they didn’t give him a car, he had no desk where he could sit down, but he just persevered, and Governor Tugwell was very helpful.” Eliza Munoz Storer quotes from a June 26th 1944 meeting minutes indicating that due to time pressure the completion of school designs would proceed without my father’s input. According to a note we found at Cal Poly my parent’s last visit was at the beginning of 1945. By the end of 1945 my father’s contract was not renewed. Soon Klumb and Arneson were on their own, with a furniture design and manufacturing business and later with Klumb’s private office from which he designed many of the buildings at the University of Puerto Rico from the late 1940s until the 1950s. We visited and photographed these.

Studies Center at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, San Juan. Architect Henry Klumb, years 1940/1950
Foto divulgação [Acervo Raymond Richard Neutra]

His Museum ( above) his student center (above) and women’s dormitory (to the right) show the work of a man with definite design ideas and individuality. It would be understandable if he would have chafed at simply following the ideas of my father, the consultant who was part time and who had exceeded the usual role of a consultant with his energetic interventions. If my mother was correct, in the interval between November 1943 and February 24th 1944 when Klumb arrived, my father had hired 40 architects and draftsmen and assigned them to prepare working drawings from preliminary designs he had done.

Housing for women at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, San Juan. Architect Henry Klumb, years 1940/1950
Foto divulgação [Acervo Raymond Richard Neutra]

Andres and his colleague at the Polytechnic University School of Architecture, Prof Jorge Rigau indicated that they knew of no one who was still alive who participated in the Committee. Some of the members, like Toro and Ferrer went on to distinguished modernist careers in Puerto Rico. Within a few years the committee was disbanded and private architects were asked to follow the prototypes developed under my father and Klumb.

Neither Andres nor Jorge could tell me how the committee’s day to day work was organized, for example whether several people were design architects with teams of draftsmen to prepare working drawings on particular projects. My father might have tried to focus on particular projects, hence the presence of preliminary designs and rather detailed working drawings in the Neutra archives at UCLA for a girl’s school in the rural outskirts of San German called Rosario. We visited there and found no trace of it.

How were the prototypes to be used? The structures were to be of reinforced concrete. Was the same contractor expected to go to each rural area and construct the same school and health center all over the island or were regional contractors used to build the same designs in several locations of their particular regions? How were contractors selected? How were they supervised? I was impressed by the quality of concrete form work in fairly humble residences along the rural roads throughout the island. Perhaps this program of school and health center building under central supervision propagated best practices throughout the island.

Given that this was the work of a government design committee, the calling out of particular architects as responsible for different projects would have been inappropriate. Indeed this anonymity would have conformed with ideas my father had expressed in a speech in Tokyo in 1930 when he stated that one should not know who designed buildings any more than one knew who had designed one’s car (Personal communication Atsuko Tanaka, Feb 2010). He would have then thought (but did not actually say) that cars and buildings were industrial products which, should be judged on how well they functioned. They should not be fashion objects like haute coutoure dresses, whose value came precisely from who had designed them regardless of how they looked or felt.

That not-withstanding, my father wrote his 1948 book “Architecture of Social Concern” using his Puerto Rico conceptual drawings and programmatic proposals to share what he had learned and also to advertise what he was capable of doing to an American and a Latin American audience. There was brief acknowledgement in the introduction of Toro and P Richard along with a long list of collaborators like Gregory Ain from the pre Puerto Rico era. Neither Klumb nor Arneson are mentioned in that book or in the first Boesiger/Girsberger book. Included in Architecture of Social Concern are facsimiles of letters from Munoz Marin and Santiago Iglesias Jr., Acting Chairman of the Urbanization and Planning Board from early spring of 1945 expressing appreciation for what my father had accomplished and regret at his departure (p 119). Perhaps publishing these was a preemptive strike to counteract any negative rumors that might have come from Klumb or the Puerto Rican architects. They in turn probably felt that he had exaggerated his contribution and had not properly credited their work. For Munoz Marin, it was probably perfectly acceptable to have American and South American audiences think that the famous architect had influenced the design of innovative public facilities on his island. Klumb, despite the fact that he was never invited to teach at the University of Puerto Rico, seems to have been remembered fondly in Puerto Rico. In contrast, my father’s sojourn in Puerto Rico has only recently received favorable interest, two generations later.

Residence in Puerto Rico, 1950, where you can see the influences of the architects Richard Neutra and Henry Klumb
Foto divulgação [Acervo Raymond Richard Neutra]

What influence did my father’s designs have on health centers, schools , hospitals and residential design in Puerto Rico? Are there projects that follow my father’s design exactly? If they were not followed exactly was there some trace of influence? What criteria would one use to label a feature Neutra-like or not? One should carry out a thought experiment and ask what these projects would have looked like if he had never been involved and only Klumb had been the designer. What would they have looked like if my father’s contract had been renewed? Klumb had worked with Wright and was familiar with Gropius and Mies and Le Corbusier. I see similarities with Wright and LeCorbusier in his work. It is heavier than my father’s work and more sculptural but his work is philosophically compatible with my fathers.

Road to Morovis, Puerto Rico
Foto divulgação [Acervo Raymond Richard Neutra]

They share a strong commitment to program driven design, a Wrightian commitment to a continuity of indoor and outdoor spaces as well as an interest in resolving mechanical engineering problems. Klumb designed and built a factory to manufacture metal horizontal window louvers that seal tight against hurricane winds (to the right). We could see all of this when we were invited for a party by Maria Carmen Fullana whose residence (see above) had been designed in the 1950’s for Maria Carmen’s father who was a developer and had retained Klumb also for commercial projects. These similarities in philosophy are not surprising given whom they both admired and chose to apprentice with.

Elementary School Dr. Peter N. Ortiz, constructed according to the influence of the works of architect Richard Neutra
Acervo Raymond Richard Neutra [Acervo Raymond Richard Neutra]

If one was to be serious about this research one would go to the archives of the ministry of health and the ministry of education and obtain a list of facilities that they run throughout the island. One could determine their dates of construction and systematically review remaining plans and visit and photograph those that date from the 1940s. How many schools, health centers and hospitals were actually built? Of these what proportion meet certain criteria for “designed by” or “influenced by” Neutra? My guess is that, in the island there are some eighty-year-old former draughtsmen who transferred from the Committee for Design to the agency or agencies that oversaw the contracts for constructing these rural facilities. Reviewing the records for pensioners or former employees of these agencies would lead one to these survivors and they could tell how Munoz Marin implemented the plans of the committee and how the committee actually functioned. Our preliminary visit was instead governed by anecdotal reports that Neutra-like projects had been cited in certain small towns in the mountains.

On March 16, Peggy and I drove the narrow bamboo shaded winding roads to the little hill top town of Morovis where a Neutra-like school was said to be located. As we rounded the bend on highway 159 a mile or so before it meets highway 139/137 on the east side of Morovis my eye caught this little school building of the Dr Pedro N Ortiz elementary school. We pulled to a stop and went in.

I was struck (see below) by the strip windows whose top was flush with the ceiling, the Mondrian-like integration between the doors and the windows, and the detail seen in many Neutra buildings where the parapet wall shoots above the level of the overhang. I was also struck by the thin profile of the overhang and the parapet wall. We entered, explained our mission and received permission for the security guard to take us around the campus. We were told that the school dated from the 1940’s and that the principal’s office (above) had once been a health Center ( though it did not resemble any Neutra designs). Nor did the design of a larger meeting hall (right, above). Nonetheless, the idea of grouping a health center, a community center and school on one site was advocated strongly in “Architecture of Social Concern.” Another wing of the school (above left) which was the oldest on campus had a decidedly Neutra-like appearance.

On that day, and a few days later when we returned with Barbara and Andres, we were allowed to go inside the classroom and see how the windows on both sides of the room and flush against the ceiling, allowed light to bathe the ceiling and permitted cross ventilation of the warm rising air. An emotional moment came for me, when the guard told the children: “This man’s father designed this school for Munoz Marin” The children then burst spontaneously into applause. This primitive but elegantly designed school has served three generations of rural children. My father would have been touched as well.

As we drove further along the highway, a few days later, Andres told us that this window design would no longer meet Puerto Rican earthquake codes, because the concrete roof diaphragm could sheer away from its few contacts with beams and posts. The code now requires concrete sheer walls or beams over the windows tied into the cross beams and the roof.

Rural School, plan and section, Puerto Rico
Foto divulgação [NEUTRA, Richard. “Arquitetura social para países de clima quente”]

On March 16, Peggy and I passed through Ciales Fronton on Highway 146 and saw a Head Start center with some of the same features . As I was walking about, a middle aged man asked if he could help me. When I explained my quest He said that the school had been there his entire life and that his father told him that Munoz Marin had given the school to the community for $1.00.

When we passed through Utuado and then later Barceloneta on the coast near Arecibo we saw two story schools in the characteristic orange and yellow colors that displayed Neutra-like features. My guess is that there are many of these in rural areas, the first installments to campuses with later additions.

School Rio Piedras, San Juan, Committee on Design of Public Works, consulting architect Richard Neutra
Foto divulgação [Acervo Raymond Richard Neutra]

On March 21st, Andres and his family accompanied us to the school in Rio Piedras that I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, the one that had once sported the opening garage doors. The section rendering in “Architecture of Social Concern” (above) shows a shed roofed structure with ribs passing above the roof level holding up the ferro concrete roof diaphragm. A black board and concrete brick class room wall is shown along with the dark section of the garage door facing to the left and an overhang protecting the exit doors to the right. The 65 year old finished building is seen below in the Sabana Llana section of Rio Piedras near San Juan. It is at the corner of Highway 3 ( Avenida 65 de Infanteria) and Monte Carlo.

School in Puerto Rico, the influence of the architect Richard Neutra
Foto divulgação [Acervo Raymond Richard Neutra]

The finished building has somewhat heavier beams than the conceptual drawing. The side of the building that used to feature the opening garage doors has been closed in with cement blocks and stucco, not even a window graces these walls. Whereas the schools property used to extend to the street, it has now ceded its rights to a side walk and the sheltered area just outside the wall is a dead space closed off with a chain link fence.

Corona Avenue School, Los Angeles, California. Architect Richard Neutra, 1935
Foto divulgação [Acervo Raymond Richard Neutra]

Andres and Barbara discussed the possibility of restoring this historic school or building a replica near one of the University experimental schools, where teachers would have a commitment to use the indoor outdoor spaces for appropriate pedagogical purposes. In California where the 1935 Corona Avenue School had also been designed for indoor/outdoor teaching, Julius Shulman told me that the teachers giggled as this photo was staged (I was there poking my head above a desk) because the noise of adjacent simultaneous classes had driven the teachers back inside their rooms, leaving the innovative steel sliding doors closed except for this photo-shoot, taken in the 1950’s. But at the UCLA experimental school designed in 1957 by Neutra and Alexander, the indoor outdoor feature has found pedagogic use by the more autonomous and less bureaucratic teaching staff.

Health Centre, Puerto Rico, built after the publication of "social architecture in warm climates" by Richard Neutra
Foto divulgação [Acervo Raymond Richard Neutra]

Later that day we drove into the green hills above Fajardo past boys on horses and happy people picnicking by a river, to the little town of Paraiso where a tiny health center had been for many years.

Urban school designed by architect Richard Neutra, during the period in which he was Consultant Design of the Committee on Public Works
Foto divulgação [Acervo Raymond Richard Neutra]

The age of this little health center was about right but it does not match any of the drawings in Architecture of Social Concern. The Neutra designs had a corner with a covered waiting patio, and in this building there is a subsequently added enclosure where the “Bienvenidos” sign is seen on the picture below. But the overhang would not have covered it. And the Neutra patio is at the high side of the sloping roof not at the lowest side. The tapering concrete beams appear in a contemporary snap shot of Neutra designed Puerto Rican schools on page 178 of Barbara Lamprecht’s big Taschen book. He never used such tapered concrete beams again but used tapered steel beams in his 1962 Drive in Church. Barbara Lamprecht said that architect Santiago Galo had seen my fathers “sign-off” on the drawings for this health center. So it may indeed be the remnant of a health center for which my father was the architect of record.

Health Centre, Puerto Rico, built after the publication of "social architecture in warm climates" by Richard Neutra
Foto divulgação [Acervo Raymond Richard Neutra]

I think it is true to say that not since his 1927 Jardinette apartments in Hollywood, had my father designed an entirely reinforced concrete building. The threat of hurricanes and earthquakes in Puerto Rico meant that reinforced concrete projects such as the Eleanor Roosevelt housing Project mentioned above was the norm for schools in Puerto Rico and was economically feasible because of the presence of limestone to make cement locally on the island. The projects documented in “Architecture of Social Concern” show him exploring this building technology. His preference for hovering lightness and the clear articulation of separate structural elements, even those linked by rebar inside the concrete can be seen in this proposal for an industrial arts instructional space. This is different from the cubistic esthetic of Le Corbusier who specialized in reinforced concrete or heavy rounded shapes of Wrights Guggenheim or Marin Civic Center.

Urban School, designed by Richard Neutra during the period in which he was a consultant on the Design Committee of Public Works
Foto divulgação [Acervo Raymond Richard Neutra]

Tremaine House, Montecito, California. Richard Neutra, 1948
Foto divulgação [Acervo Raymond Richard Neutra]

Four years later, in 1948 my father used the technology he had proposed in Puerto Rico for the fireproof Tremaine residence near Santa Barbara. I am not aware of any concrete structure anywhere prior to that time that resembled it or that expressed the rhythm of the ends of beams under the roof-line in this modernist undecorated way. My father used this technology only a few more times in Guam and in Havana. I am not sure what influence the widely published Tremaine house had on the post and beam wood and metal structures that came to characterize 1950’s California modern and its imitators around the world in temperate climates. If it did, this was a contribution to world architecture from Puerto Rican problems and my father’s solutions to them.

Holger Fog's Farm, Rio Piedras, San Juan, Puerto Rico
Foto divulgação [Acervo Raymond Richard Neutra]

We visited one other place in Rio Piedras that reverberated out from Puerto Rico to my father’s career in California. It was the gate to the hacienda and plant nursery that had once been Holger Fog’s. It can be found at the corner of Carrera 47 (Jose de Diego) and Calle Galleria. This is where my parents had rented a room recently vacated by the Fog’s just married daughter. Later it was bought by Henry Klumb and became his residence. On his death it was left to the University of Puerto Rico where it has languished behind this locked gate for lack of funds.

House in Silver Lake Boulevard, Los Angeles, California, architect Richard Neutra
Foto divulgação [Acervo Raymond Richard Neutra]

The friendship between my parents and Holger and his American wife (seen to the right with my parents in the garden), persisted until Holger’s death in Denmark when he was in his 90’s. He liked my parents and responded favorably when my father suggested that he invest in lots that were available on Silver Lake Blvd. and what is now Neutra Place in Los Angeles. When clients who wanted to build with my father showed up, my father would sell the land to themand send the proceeds to Holger in Denmark (see pp 279-280 in Weschler).

House in Silver Lake Boulevard, Los Angeles, California, architect Richard Neutra
Foto divulgação [Acervo Raymond Richard Neutra]

The housing cluster shown in the pictures to the right and below would never have been built if my father and mother had not left me behind in snowy Poughkeepsie and charmed Holger Fog and his wife by helping them fertilize the vanilla bean plants in far away Puerto Rico.

Holger Fog's "American wife", Richard and Dione Neutra
Foto divulgação [Acervo Raymond Richard Neutra]

about the author

Raymond Richard Neutra, son of Richard Neutra, is the Chief of the Division of Environmental and Occupational Disease Control (DEODC) of the California Department of Health Services(CDHS).