← New Books Network
New Books Network
Edward Dimendberg ed., "Richard Neutra and the Making of the Lovell Health House, 1925–35" (Getty Research Institute, 2025)
00:32:12
Loading summary
Transcript39 lines
- [00:01]
Commercial Announcer 1
New year Same extra value meals at McDonald's.
- [00:04]
Edward Dimminburg
So now get two snack wraps plus fries and a medium soft drink for.
- [00:09]
Commercial Announcer 2
Just $8 for a limited time only.
- [00:11]
Edward Dimminburg
Prices and participation may vary.
- [00:12]
Commercial Announcer 2
Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska and California.
- [00:14]
Paul Lerner
And for delivery, Kraft Mac and Cheese is better than 90s hip hop. We'll remind you of your childhood without making you feel incredibly old.
- [00:24]
Commercial Announcer 2
Kraft Mac and Cheese.
- [00:25]
Paul Lerner
Best thing ever.
- [00:30]
Marshall Po
Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest, hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:37]
Paul Lerner
Hello everybody and welcome back to New Books Network. I'm your host, Paul Lerner, and I'm delighted to introduce today's guest, Edward Diminberg. Edward Dimminburg is Professor of the Humanities at the University of California at Irvine. He's a productive and innovative scholar whose work can be situated between architecture, media studies, film and German and European studies. His books include Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity, which appeared with Harvard University Press in 2004 and the 2013 Deloska Video and Renfro Architecture after Images, published by Chicago in 2013. He first came to my attention years ago as one of the co editors of the Weimar Republic Sourcebook, an indispensable compendium of primary sources on German life, culture, politics and gender in the Weimar period. And he's gone on to edit other fascinating volumes including the Moving Film, Television, Architecture, Visual Art, and the Modern from 2019 and Cinema and Siegfried Kakauer, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Dorno in 2011, and most recently of the critical edition of Anton Wagner's the Development, Life and Structure of the city of of 2 million in Southern California. His newest book, which we're here to talk about today, is Richard Neutra and the Making of the Lovell Heath House, 1925-1935, which was published by the Getty Research institute in late 2025. The book will be of great interest to scholars of architecture, historians of Los Angeles and students of Central European immigration to Southern California in the 20th century. Ed Dimminburg introduces the book, and he's also written a substantive essay that frames Neutra between the American context and German artistic and intellectual currents in the interwar years. The book also includes a chronology of Neutra's life and work by noted Neutra scholar Thomas Heinz, as well as a detailed account of the house's construction by architecture historian Nicholas Alsberg and an afterward by Crosby Doe, a specialist in historic preservation in the area. The book features stunning photographs of the house from 2021 by Grant Mudford, and it's richly illustrated with period images, making a stunning ensemble. A must read for admirers of Neutra, modernism and interwar architecture and culture. Welcome, Ed. It's a pleasure to have you here.
- [04:00]
Edward Dimminburg
Thank you, Paul. It's wonderful to be with you.
- [04:02]
Paul Lerner
Great. So, before we really dive into the book itself, I wondered if you could share with us a little bit about your biography, your past, and specifically how you became interested in the cluster of research agendas that have marked your career so far.
- [04:16]
Edward Dimminburg
I've always been interested in architecture. Even as a teenager I went out and looked at buildings and read about it and I studied it a bit in, in college, so that was always an interest. And I became interested in film and I became interested in German studies, especially the Weimar period and German critical theory. And in some ways, all of those concerns came together in my first book that you mentioned on film noir, and I had already begun to explore them in the Weimar Republic sourcebook that I co edited with with Anton Case and Martin J. So I've been a German studies scholar really throughout my career. I mean, I consider myself also to be an intellectual and cultural historian who works on images of the built environment. So some people look at my career and they look at my CV and they don't see a unity they won. You know why? I've jumped around from, from one project to another for, for me, my career has been continuous I've pursued my interests from the very beginning and I've done so by, by working on different topics, ones that I believe can, can, can, can, can bring my interests together. And that's certainly the case with this most recent book on the. The level Health House.
- [05:46]
Paul Lerner
Great. I certainly see that coherence coming at your work from my perspective and I share many of your interests. So I've been reading you for quite a few years and I wonder if you could talk about this book specifically and how this project came together.
- [06:03]
Edward Dimminburg
This project came together really through the initiative of Crosby Doe. His name may be familiar to people in Los Angeles interested in modern architecture. And LA has one of the most remarkable institutions I know of in the field of modern architecture, and that is the opened house. On any given weekend it's possible to visit modernist houses, including those by well known architects such as Neutra and Schindler and Gregory Ain. And they're put on the market and they're opened up and any member of the public can go and visit them. One of the people who pioneered this innovation is Crosby Doe as a realtor, but that really encompasses only a part of his versatility. He publishes books, he's been involved in conservation of modern architecture, and he's very picky about his clients and to whom he will sell a significant modern building because these are buildings that are delicate, they require maintenance, in many cases they require conservation. And Crosby understands himself as a steward, so he was actually involved in the sale of the Lovell Health House. And as he was working on it, he approached my friend Nicholas Olsberg and asked whether Nicholas would edit a book that would cover the early history of the house, a source book, so to speak. And Nicholas brought me onto the project and I bec. Became progressively more involved and ended up editing it as well as writing a short introduction and my essay.
- [08:00]
Paul Lerner
Great. So I think people who are familiar with architecture in Los Angeles are likely to know quite a great deal about Neutra, but maybe not all listeners do. So I wondered if we could begin by introducing Neutra and telling us a little bit about the life and career that's documented here in this book and then specifically his path toward taking over this, taking on this project of designing this house.
- [08:26]
Edward Dimminburg
Richard Neutra is considered to be together with his on and off again friend Rudolf Schindler. You know, one of the most significant European modern architects to work in the United States, to immigrate to the United States. You know, unlike many German and Austrian architects who emigrated during the 1930s because of the coming to power of Hitler and the Nazi dictatorship. Both Schindler and Neutra came to the United states in the 1920s to pursue professional opportunities. Both of them were strongly under the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright, who at that point was arguably the most important modern architect anywhere. And they ended up settling in Los Angeles. You know, they were both involved working with Wright, you know, particularly Schindler, who did a lot of work, you know, largely uncredited on the, the Hollyhock House and who was also involved with the design of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Nnoitra got started a little later. I should also mention the two men and their families lived together for some years in the early 1920s, the mid-1920s in the house that Schindler designed that still exists, that is available for visit on Kings Road. The Schindler House. And the story of their friendship and their relationship is really quite extraordinary. They began as close friends. They later became estranged. Professional rivalry, you know, the question of receiving credit for particular projects, particularly the competition entry they submitted for the, the League of Nations. And for many years they were estranged. They simply did not speak to each other. And the, the, the, the, the, the final chapter of this friendship, and this has really gone down in architectural history, is that toward the end of their lives and were taken to hospital and they ended up sharing a room with each other. So at the very end of their lives they reconciled and recognized the extraordinary common history they had shared. They had very different approaches to architecture. Neutra was clearly within the orbit of the international style. His buildings were rational. His buildings are very much were influenced by Le Corbusier. They were machine like. They involved the employment of mass produced parts. We'll talk about this a little later in the construction of the Lovell Health House. And Neutra was, I think we can fairly say obsessive about construction, obsessive about planning. Every single detail of one of his buildings he planned and worked out in advance. And he was on construction side making certain that his ideas and designs were implemented. Schindler was the complete opposite. Schindler was an improviser. Schindler would get on the construction site and say, no, you know, I don't really like this design. Let's do something else. There would be some, you know, material, maybe some, some wood on the site that had been abandoned and was about to be thrown away. He was, this is really great. Let's incorporate this into the design. He had a, he had a very different understanding of the design. And his houses look very different. They're less rational. They're less like machines. In many ways, they're cozier. Some people claim even that they're more human. I'm not sure I would go along with that argument, but in the work of both Neutra and Schindler, we can find one of the places where European modern architecture enters the United States. There are other architects we can cite, but it's certainly the place where European modern architecture enters California and Los Angeles in particular.
- [13:03]
Paul Lerner
As I read that in the book about Schindler's methods, I thought that this must have been incredibly frustrating for people who had hired him for clients for construction firms as he's switching things. There's so many moving parts involved in these major construction projects, and it must have been, you know, budgets must have soared and it must have been very irritating to work with him, even though he was, of course, a brilliant architect. So let's take our story now to the house itself and Philip Lovell Is this the character? I never really knew anything about, but it seems that he was a kind of naturopath, an advocate for vegetarianism, natural foods. I wonder if you could introduce him a bit and talk about how he and Neutra's paths came together.
- [13:55]
Commercial Announcer 1
This episode is brought to you by FX's the Beauty Official Podcast Join host Evan Ross Katz on the Official podcast for FX's hottest new series the Beauty, taking you behind the scenes with its amazing stars as they discuss the show's most jaw dropping moments. Featuring Evan Peters, Anthony Ramos, Jeremy Pope, Ashton Kutcher, Rebecca Hall, Bella Hadid, Meghan Trainor, Isabella Rossellini Jessica Alexander and Ari Grace. Search FX Is the Beauty Wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [14:25]
Commercial Announcer 2
The world moves fast. Your workday even faster. Pitching products, drafting reports, analyzing data. Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI assistant for work built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other Microsoft 365 apps you use, helping you quickly write, analyze, create and summarize so you can cut through clutter and clear a path to your best work. Learn more@Microsoft.com M365 copilot this is pro linebacker TJ Watt and I'm back with YPB by Abercrombie for another activewear drop. My second co design collection has new shorts and tanks that keep up with all my in season workouts. And their new Restore collection is a game changer off the field too, because even pro athletes like me need rest days. Shop YPB by Abercrombie in the app, online and in stores because your personal best is greater than anything.
- [15:25]
Edward Dimminburg
Rainer Banham famously once wrote that Los Angeles is the city of second chances. And I think this is a nice description of how Lovell came to Los Angeles. He came to Los Angeles and reinvented himself as a naturopath doctor. He had no formal medical training. And he came here in the 1920s at the moment when the city was really thriving. There was an oil boom, there was a real estate boom. The movie industry was of course, by this point going full throttle. And Lovell was able to plug into the culture of health, the culture of well being that I think has really been a part of Los Angeles culture since the modern city as we would recognize it today began to take shape at the end of the 19th century, particularly after the railroad line extended to Los Angeles. So Lovell attained quite a bit of fame, quite a bit of acclaim. He had a column he ran maybe even more often than every week in the Los Angeles Times about lifestyle, healthy l, vegetarianism. He first commissioned Neutra to design a gym clinic health center in downtown Los Angeles. Sadly, that no longer exists. And later he commissioned him to design his house in the Hollywood Hills, the Lovell Health House that does exist today and survives.
- [17:06]
Paul Lerner
So he somehow the Chandler family and the LA Times are involved in the actual purchase of the land for this house. Am I correct?
- [17:18]
Edward Dimminburg
I think so. I mean, that sounds plausible to me. I don't remember, but I mean, it's fully possible. Lovell, quite strangely for someone today we would without hesitation call the quack. I mean, this is really someone who spoke about health matters with absolutely no training or what we would today call professional competence. But he was able to hobnob, you know, with the highest echelons of society. So it's fully plausible that the Chandlers were involved in financing the land. You know, which we also have to remember at that moment was Dirk Cheap. It was in the Hollywood Hills and the terrain was so rough that at one point cars and trucks could not actually move building materials onto the site. So the construction team employed animals, mules to move the building parts onto the site. So it was a very rough and wild part of la.
- [18:26]
Paul Lerner
I was going to ask you about that. Cognizant of the fact that we're around the one year anniversary of the fires in Altadena and Pacific palace pace aids. But just thinking about some of the architectural and construction challenges that part of the city must have posed at the time and still today. So it must have been really kind of an enormous, as you just mentioned, not being able to get the trucks up to the site. I think this construction must have really required a great deal of innovation and it must have taken much longer than an ordinary house, I think, would have. I think it just kind of, this is really an enormous and ambitious project. And I kind of wanted to just call that, call attention to that and put that in perspective for a minute. I'm also, you know, thinking about, about Lovell. It's hard not to let one's mind wander to today and to this sort of make America healthy again movement. And in some ways, you know, you mentioned that he could be called a quack. It seems like he is the, the antecedent, the precursor to these kind of influencers today who have no real medical training or knowledge, but tell us how to lead a healthier life. So how do these ideas about health and fitness, how are they embodied in the architecture of the house itself? And to what extent is Neutra, who I know brings his own background and in thinking about psychology and health, I'm kind of interested in the intersection of Levels I ideas and Neutra's ideas, and then in sort of how the house itself kind of embodies those notions about.
- [20:05]
Edward Dimminburg
Health and nature, the ideas of health and nature. As I mentioned before, I think we're always in the air in Los Angeles. Lovell was a believer in sunlight. Lovell was a believer in nude sunbathing. And he wanted Neutra to design a house for him that would provide the maximum amount of light, the maximum amount of exposure. There's a swimming pool in the house. He was a vegetarian. He asked Neutra to design a kitchen that would make it easy to cook vegetarian food and had all sorts of nifty built in gadgets for keeping food preserved and allowing for its preparation. So Neutra on his part was interested in psychoanalysis. He grew up, of course, in Vienna. One of his playmates was Sigmund Freud's son. And he was always interested in the relationship between mind and body. He was always interested in, well, being. I think this is one of the reasons his architecture resonates so strongly today. He had an idea that architecture should not simply be a container, but rather it should be an active collaborator in helping and encouraging wellness and what we today would call a healthy lifestyle.
- [21:39]
Paul Lerner
I guess you could see the two of them converging around sunlight, around the sort of glass, you know, the very open glass structure, which on some level could also be seen as a sort of metaphor for, I guess, Neutra's interest in psychoanalysis and in kind of keep bringing Exposing things to the light and the. Maybe a psychoanalytic sensibility from this repressive Viennese atmosphere that Freud had originally written in.
- [22:07]
Edward Dimminburg
But it seemed like himself. This is an interesting anecdote. Wrote an essay on nude sunbathing and almost certainly practiced it himself. So not only did he talk the talk, he walked the walk. And it also needs to be, of course, stressed that many of these ideas were prevalent in European modern architecture of the time. They were being explored by Le Corbusier. They were being explored by Alvar Aalto. They manifested themselves in the important sanatoria that were being built all over Europe in the 20s and 30s. I don't think in any sense that they were unique to Neutra. And he was certainly working in a vein. He was working in a mode that other architects were exploring contemporaneously.
- [23:01]
Paul Lerner
One of the things I like about the book is that it really locates this project at the intersection of European architectural movements and the culture of Los Angeles and the built environment and natural environment of Los Angeles. So give us a sense of where Neutra is coming from. You mentioned Le Corbusier a couple times. But in terms of the Bauhaus and other important movements in German art and architecture, how does Neutra fit into that interwar landscape?
- [23:33]
Edward Dimminburg
Neutra obtained his architectural training in Vienna. He studied under Otto Wagner, the most important modern Viennese architect, whose buildings, such as the Postal Savings bank in Vienna today, are icons of modern architecture. Widely studied and taught. He was also influenced by Adolf Low's. And both Wagner and Lowes stressed a type of building that was stripped of ornamentation, that had a very clear structure and that was highly functional and was designed in such a way that its parts would make clear the function that they served. And this is certainly a good description of how Neutra built. He was very conversant with the European architects of the 1920s. We think of today when we think of modern architecture. Walter Gropius published one of his sketches in the first Bauhaus book. So, you know, really from the early days of the Bauhaus, when it began to disseminate its ideas internationally through its publications. And we have to remember, architecture books communicate primarily through their images. One doesn't need to be able to read German to understand these illustrated architecture books. Architects pick up on the designs that are reproduced in the books, the photographs, the plans, the renderings, and so forth. So Neutra was very much on the radar screen of modern European architects in the 1920s. And he also worked in the early part of his career, really before he had established himself as an architect in la, as a journalist, as a critic. He was a correspondent for a number of important German architecture magazines, particularly Das Neue Frankfurt, that presented not just architecture, but art and lifestyle topics. And to me, what's fascinating about his career is the way in which he understood, really from the onset of it, that if he was going to get anywhere as an architect, he needed to be a self promoter, he needed to understand how to work the media, he needed to understand how to get his work published, and he needed to understand how to establish himself as a critical voice.
- [26:23]
Paul Lerner
Can you tell us a little bit about what the Lovells used the house for, what went on in there? I know they live there, but there are also schools, opportunities for children to play. So what was life like in that house?
- [26:39]
Edward Dimminburg
The house is on one level very paradoxical. It was an iconic example of the most advanced modern architectural design of its period. It was the first house in the United States that used a reinforced steel metal frame. The first metal frame house in this country. And one should also note, it was a metal frame house that preceded much better known ones in architectural history, such as the Tugenhout Villa by Mies van der Rohe or the Villa Savoy by. By Le Corbusier. So, you know, Neutra, I think, was an innovator to an extent that many people today don't recognize. And one of the projects of the book is to call attention to this fact. On the other hand, the house was also domestic, as you mentioned. There was the school, Lovell had a family. And, you know, this was not a house where people did not live in it, where it was a display object. This was a house that was used on a daily basis and occupied by a family. So, you know, there are these two interesting poles. The, you know, the, the object of advanced design and the, the house that fostered domesticity.
- [28:14]
Paul Lerner
And so what happened to the house after the family died and moved on?
- [28:20]
Edward Dimminburg
The house was sold at one point in the 1930s and owned by a series of owners, many of whom did not take care of it, some of whom altered it quite considerably from Neutra's original design. You know, happily, it has recently been restored quite meticulously and it is probably in as close to its original form today as one can imagine. Or is this possible? I mean, obviously a complete restoration is never possible because materials change. The glass and the windows that was used in 1929 is not manufactured today. You know, other building elements are not Available. But, you know, the restoration that was completed, I think, is as conscientious and meticulous as one might imagine.
- [29:22]
Paul Lerner
Is it open again now for visits? Because I know it was closed for some years after Covid.
- [29:28]
Edward Dimminburg
Unfortunately not. It was bought by a couple. And, you know, I have not been aware of any opportunities to visit it. I mean, I certainly would love to, and, I mean, I think it would be very exciting and important if members of the architectural community were granted access. But one also needs to understand that this is a private residence. It's not a museum. It's not a monument such as Falling Water, that's owned by the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust. This is a place where people actually live. So I can understand why some balance needs to be struck by the need to be able to live their private lives without architects and scholars constantly knocking on their door and traipsing through their living room. But I hope at one point it will become possible to visit it.
- [30:26]
Paul Lerner
That would be amazing. Great. So I wonder if we can kind of, thinking ahead, talk a little bit about new scholarly projects or other kinds of work that you have on the horizon or where your thoughts are these days.
- [30:40]
Edward Dimminburg
At the moment, I'm working on a book about documentary films on architecture. It's really an attempt to answer the question, what do moving images tell us about buildings that we can't learn from other media traditionally associated with their design, construction and analysis, plans, renderings, models? What do we get from films, from movement through a building that other visual representation doesn't provide? And it's also an attempt to construct a canon. There are a lot of architectural films that have been made. Frankly, most of them are awful. And one of the services I perform in the book is I've watched many of them, and I don't discuss the awful ones. And what I do is I try to call attention to the ones that I think are exemplary and worthy of praise and study and analysis, and that actually do tell us something about architecture we otherwise would not learn.
- [31:51]
Paul Lerner
But it's diplomatic of you to leave out the other ones, I suppose. Yes. Great. Well, I want to thank you so much for your time, and I really so enjoyed plunging into this book, and I hope that listeners will look for it. It's definitely a book that you want to own because of the incredible illustrat and the richness of the whole project. So, Ed, thank you so much, and it's been really a pleasure having you.
- [32:16]
Edward Dimminburg
Thank you, Paul.