Chapter 2 of 10
Neutra House/Van Der Leeuw Research House, Silverlake, Los Angeles, 1933. Living Room
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.