Richard Neutra: Spatial Theory and Practice

Abstract

While Richard Neutra is conventionally celebrated as the archetypal Modernist architect, his designs were only superficially indebted to the tenets of European Functionalism and the aesthetic values of the International Style. He was instead profoundly influenced by scientific theories that sought to measure and predict the way the human body would react to space and form. These theories led him to design buildings in such a way as to choreograph people’s emotional and physical responses through a process called ‘visual excitation’. For Neutra, visual excitation is triggered by controlling the way people see, move through and comprehend space.