My experience, everything within me, is against an abstract approach to land and nature and for the profound assets rooted in each site…The ancients thought those vital assets spirits.”Do you plan to build a small house? A large house? A mansion in the desert? A perch on a mountain? A big housing project? A building of any kind? Or are you, perforce, just a dreamer? Then you will find this book—the first published in the United States on the work of Richard Neutra—a delightful and practical guide, even to your dreams.In it one of the world’s leading architects states principles that can be applied to a multitude of building conditions, cites illuminating examples of his ingenious solutions to land-and-house problems, and shows countless ways in which the “profound assets rooted and buried in each site” can be awakened to “startling values of design, truly assured of duration, growth, and never-ending life.”With the originality, felicity and authority that characterize his architecture, this brilliant and profoundly practical architect distills from his knowledge and long experience a wise and witty guide to the first essential of home building: the relation of the design to the land from which the house would appear to grow.For three decades Neutra’s houses, large and small, have enhanced the landscape and enclosed in “measureless content” the householders of many places and climes. Though most of the examples presented with the aid of Julius Shulman’s fine photography, are generously surrounded by Nature, some of those which seem least “citified” stand in the midst of cities. They show the immense value of Nature used as a screen. Again, most of the buildings are designed with the modern air of precision. They show how man’s work can act as Nature’s foil.
