The Los Angeles in your head is a Neutra house. You’ve seen many of them in movies, and some of them in many movies. Some of those are now gone, alas, as is the architect and preservationist who also designed, or helped design, many of the buildings that bear his surname. Dion Neutra died last week, at 93 years of work more than of age. Here is a Google search for his obituary, which brings up a great many entries.
Dion was a good man and a good friend. Here he is in our Santa Barbara back yard a few years ago:
If you read Dion’s obituaries (of which the longest and best is the LA Times’), you’ll learn much about his life, work and legacy. But I know some things that don’t quite make it through those channels, so I’ll fill in a couple of those details.
One is that Dion was a peripatetic correspondent, mostly by email, especially via his White Light newsletter, which he sent out on a schedule that rounded to always. “White Light” meant healing energy, which was directed by Dion and his readers toward friends who might need some. There were many other topics in their midst (he could hold forth at great length on you-name-it), but health was perhaps the biggest one. Over the last few months, Dion’s letter increasingly reported on his own decline (which seemed radically at odds with his high lifelong energy level, which was invested in a great deal of golf, among other physical activities), but always also about what others were up to. The last words of his last letter, on October 24, were “Lots of love to everybody. Bye!”
The other is that Dion was eager to jump on the Internet, starting in the last millennium. I know this because I was the guy he asked for help putting up his first website. Which I did, at Neutra.org: a domain name I also helped him acquire. Here is the first capture of it, by the Internet Archive, 21 years and 1 day ago. I remember arguing with Dion about making the whole site a constant appeal to save one Neutra building or another, but that turned out to be his main work, from that point onward. He failed in some efforts, but succeeded in others. Thanks to that work, Neutra architecture and all it stands for live on.
Lots of love to you and what you’ve done for us all, old friend.
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