JP: The Modern Architectural Revolution, Richard Neutra. Carefully groomed and soft-spoken Richard Neutra, sitting with his wife Diane, was every bit the true Viennese transplanted to Los Angeles. His modern house in a tropical setting was an example of the international style which he introduced to Southern California. With his concrete, glass, and metal panels assembled from an architect's supply house catalogue, his home is characteristic of the residences which established his international reputation. Neutra's 1955 conversation was laced with psychological and biological references, reflecting the intellectual climate of Vienna of his youth. He held the conviction that well-designed environment should have a beneficial impact on the human occupant. This physical and psychological concern influenced all his work. But most importantly, his school buildings, with movable glass walls opening onto open-air patios, taking advantage of the warm California climate. Both his houses and schools had an important and widespread influence in Southern California and beyond. What would you consider the three great buildings in modern architecture? RN: I would be very, very fast to answer that there are no such three buildings. That this question is more along the lines of the question of Herodotus, which are the seven world wonders or something like this. At that time, you see, there were really such monumental productions or performances which were characteristic for a whole age or a series of ages preceding his. Our modern civilisation, take, for instance, my own work. If you would ask me, which are your most important, I would answer in the same sense. I think that my whole oeuvre, my whole production over a lifetime, is probably the most characteristic for me and probably the best feather in my cap rather than this or that building. The zigzagging through life is making many careers discountable. I do not think that our civilisation should be characterised by one or the other production because it is an age of mass performance and I wouldn't say that every wonder is an eleven day wonder, but I think that the most interesting part of a step is that it leads to the next step and it succeeds a previous step. The succession or the sequence or the logic of development or evolution is more characteristic for technical and our total development and that holds also true for architecture.

JP: What technical development promises to make the greatest changes in the way buildings are built and designed? RN: Well I have of course no doubt that the most precious of all materials in the whole bunch is the human material which has been studied as an object, recommended as a object of study by many philosophers for the last ten thousand years. Probably before this thing went into writing, this recommendation already held true and people have been interested in human beings. On the other hand, while this looks so grey of age, this recommendation, it is extremely green and new if you consider the thousands of papers published in very systematic scientific journals relating the observations and the laboratory work and the experimentation, which distinguishes our time much more than that of Aristotle. I don't want to smear Aristotle here by any means, but I think that we have made some progress in recognising what makes organisms tick. We know very much more about organic life and we know very much more about human organisms in particular, so that this is perhaps the most novel development to be considered if we speak of housing life, and after all architecture always does so. Even if you have a power station in which you are producing millions of kilowatts but only five people are working, the five people are the deciding factor, how to design that station and the switchboard on which they have to handle a cooperative effort because it's so huge. Now I think that therefore the study of human responses and all the sensorial endowment of a human organism and then what goes on in the central area, how this is being stereognostically composed and works together, is the great novelty of our time. It is very often in conflict with technical developments which have their own law and their own sequence sometimes, or very often in collision with a lot of other technical developments, so that you are continuously embarrassed by the fracasso produced by different trains of technical progress. The common denominator, the factor which will help us to find principles of regulating all this into a real order, is evidently what can human beings take, what is the biologically bearable, what is the biologically wholesome. We never will overcome that. This is absolutely what we don't want to overcome. We want to further, but it may have been overlooked and is surely overlooked by many individual inventor who is just a monomaniac. Every inventor is a monomaniac. That is his good right to be. He is just technically involved in his particular thing and he goes through with it. He would for instance insist on inventing an automobile like Henry Ford and embarrass the whole world with this gift. We are now very much embarrassed, you know, about the automobile. Not only in Manhattan, but also on the island of Guam, where thirty thousand South Sea Islanders all of a sudden find themselves, each family with three cars and even roads to go up to a distance of twenty five miles, but no place where to park them and possibly do their shopping. You can see from this that Henry Ford left us, as I say, bewildered. The most up-to-date Ford cars are sometimes driven into picturesque fairytale garages with drooping ridges on shingle roof. So you see that the human mind is so compartmental and so flexible that you can have a modern car and drive it to an old-fashioned garage and think that's a wonderful fit.