When Dion Neutra closed his father, modernist architect Richard Neutra's office in Silver Lake in the 90's, there was a kind of thrift sale of leftover items open to the public. I hurried to see the iconic space and found a few bibelots--a map that had once hung on the wall, a scrap of an unsigned drawing, and this radio.

I imagined it had once played the compositions of Neutra's fellow emigres to LA (Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Heifetz et al) from Europe, as he and his staff listened while they worked. Neutra had opened the studio, now on the National Register, preserved by Dion, in 1950. By then, many of his most iconic works had been built, but other landmark buildings were designed there.

The vintage radio still works, albeit badly, but I turn it on from time to time hoping to channel the creative energies that once surrounded it.

Richard Neutra, the Viennese architect who became the storied emigre to Los Angeles did not just design fab Palm Springs houses for the likes of Edgar Kaufman Jr (now on the market for 25 million), he also thought about the education of young children, and what suited them best. (When Neutra's LA office eventually closed, there was a tag sale. I hurried and bought two keepsakes: a map, and the office radio which I like to imagine Neutra tuning to Mozart)

Now that the subject of elementary schooling is writ large during the pandemic as distance learning is very challenging for the young'ns, Neutra's LA Corona Avenue School, here represented in an image by architectural photographer Julius Shulman in 1953, is more than prescient. It followed in the steps of open air schools in Germany, France and throughout Europe designed at first for tubercular and ill children, but then adopted as a healthy way of pedagogy. (see images in the thirties of the Ecole de Suresnes in France above)

In LA of course, the absence of cold weather eventually made these designs more ubiquitous but the large sliding glass doors which were also featured in Neutra's (and Eames et al) domestic architecture brought the outside in and were adopted in less temperate climates.

I look to the current generation of forward thinking architects to revisit some of these buildings and see if they can figure out how to keep children safe, while learning and socializing with their pals during these most challenging times.