Neutra’s Experimental or Corona Avenue School, built in Los Angeles in 1935, derives from the ‘Ring Plan School’, part of his Rush City Reformed proposition for a city of the future. The concept was first published in his Neues Bauen in der Welt: Amerika (1930), and appeared as one of the principal works in the famous 1932 Museum of Modern Art show of international architecture, for which this model was made—and then exhaustively published—here first and best presented in Die Form 15 April 1932. Drawings made to illustrate the imaginary scheme were later repurposed to present the real one, in a rare instance of an architectural hypothesis becoming a reality.

Cover image courtesy of John Crosse. Read his extensive posts on Richard Neutra here: https://socalarchhistory.blogspot.com/search?q=neutra.

Casabella published a major survey of Neutra’s work in January 1935. It must have been prepared quite a long time before, since Anna Maria Mazzucchelli’s essay introduces it by saying that it was meant to supply an essential figure missing from the famous V Triennale in 1933. The famous DM drawing there now illustrating the ring plan school from which the Corona Avenue school derives. This suggests the drawing might have been done to illustrate the 1932 model of ring plan school and carried over to Corona, perhaps as Neutra expanded the ring plan school idea following the 1932 MoMA show, for which the model was made. Mazzucchelli does a lovely job placing Neutra as the critical figure reconciling Wright and his discourse with the ground and Gropius and his abstract celebration of plane and vault. Quite exciting to see it there in this context of Rush City Reformed and of the highly intellectualised Casabella group taking a stand.