ABSTRACT
As the former home and office of Austrian architect Richard Neutra, the Neutra VDL Studio and Residences in Los Angeles is known as a modernist icon, which obscures its history as a site of constant revision. Neutra designed an earlier house on the site in 1932, a more contained and opaque volume typical of his early career. Inverting Neutra mines revision as a form of architectural agency. Architecture is currently taught and practiced as a profession for inventing new objects. Revision complicates the notion of single, identifiable authorship. Conceptual art practices often provide more useful precedents for revision and successive authorship than architecture. This chapter explores how new design can begin with another architect's work and produce an intimate intertwining that complicates both new and old authorship. Inverting Neutra appropriates three key elements of the existing house: the dramatic, exterior patios, the grid of the stair railings, and the material of aluminum.
