LIFE AND SHAPE
By
Famed architect Richard Neutra in these gamy, gabby pages offers an odd-ball of his intellectual and technical conditioning covering the last 70 years: as the youngest child of a happy Viennese marriage, a survivor of the Austro-Hungarian army during WWI, an immigrant to N.Y. and Chicago where he came to know Sullivan, Wright, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe et al., and finally as a figure of international interest and influence, a self-declaimed biorealist who developed the Californian open-air-and-glass style, the steel-skeletoned Health House, the Van der Leeuw home; for him the future belongs to the individual phenotype, the singly appearing specimen; but no individual is, he becomes; thus the planner-architect must recognize the organic landscape both outside and inside our skin and design in accordance with life-in-progress and the ""soul-satisfying spots"". A plethora of pithy, philosophical, even playful comments, along with a terminology all his own as duly rated above. A treat for specialists.