Inverting Neutra by Bryony Roberts at the VDL House, LA

Bryony Roberts' 'Inverting Neutra' installation turns Richard Neutra's VDL House into a giant sculpture.

(Image credit: Jaime Kowal)

last updated 27 October 2022

Up on the roof of the VDL house - architect Richard Neutra's experiment in modernist living built in 1932 - almost amber, late-afternoon Los Angeles sunlight glints off a reflecting pool and a breeze disturbs an array of pale blue satin cords. Entitled 'Inverting Neutra', Bryony Roberts' installation is on view until 7 September in the historic home restored by Cal Poly Pomona. True to the title, the blue strings unsettle the rationality of Neutra's glass and steel architecture and turn the logic of the mid-century residence on its head.

At the VDL, Neutra (and later his son Dion) used panes of glass, mirrors, and reflecting pools to constantly blur the distinction between inside and outside. Inverting Neutra exists exactly where there is the most spatial confusion and at first the installation is difficult to perceive. It reveals itself slowly on each floor - an abstracted specter haunting in the daytime.

Roberts, who trained both as an artist and an architect, subverted Neutra's spatial tricks; she filled in void spaces throughout the house with satin cords mounted in precise grids on aluminum frames. 'I'm interested in the idea of interlocking new and old architecture,' Roberts explains. 'There's potential to create new forms from this kind of codependency.'

Inverting Neutra questions the precise boundaries between historic and contemporary architecture. 'Modernism is an untested ground for preservation,' she continues. 'When you look at older, pre-modern structures, the building is treated as a facade on which history has been written. What is interesting about modernism is the architectural achievement is spatial, not simply about maintaining the surface.'

Her installation carefully attaches to the landmarked house - which last played host to site-specific installations by artist Xavier Veilhan - but refuses reverence. 'I had a lot of problems growing up in the austerity of a modern environment,' says Roberts, who came of age in a home designed by A. Quincy Jones, another quintessential mid-century architect. 'Purity is not something that I'm interested in'.

ADDRESS

Neutra VDL Studio and Residences
2300 Silver Lake Blvd,
Los Angeles, CA 90039

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Mimi Zeiger is a Los Angeles-based critic, editor, and curator, holding a Master of Architecture degree from SCI-Arc and a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Cornell University. She was co-curator of the U.S. Pavilion for the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, and she has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Architectural Review, Metropolis, and Architect. Mimi is the 2015 recipient of the Bradford Williams Medal for excellence in writing about landscape architecture. She has also authored New Museums, Tiny Houses, Micro Green: Tiny Houses in Nature, and Tiny Houses in the City. In 1997, Zeiger founded loud paper, an influential zine and digital publication dedicated to increasing the volume of architectural discourse. She is visiting faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and teaches in the Media Design Practices MFA program at Art Center College of Design. She was co-president of the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design and taught at the School of Visual Art, Art Center, Parsons New School of Design, and the California College of the Arts (CCA).