Neutra VDL Studio and Residences

Here you can move through three chapters of Richard Neutra’s domestic architecture without leaving the original Silver Lake site: the 1932 glass house, the 1940 Garden House and the rebuilt 1964 VDL II. It is the only place where those three major periods of his work survive together in situ, which gives a tour an unusually clear sense of how his thinking changed over time.

Guided public architectural tours take visitors through the Main House, the Garden House and up to the 1964 penthouse solarium. The contrast is the pleasure: the earlier glass house, the Garden House, then the two-storey post-fire rebuild with its rooftop room above the city. Around them, balcony gardens, roof planting and water features show Neutra’s “nature-near” ideas in built form rather than as theory.

The Neutra VDL Studio and Residences was designated a National Historic Landmark on December 23, 2016. Dione Neutra bequeathed the house to the Cal Poly Pomona Foundation/College of Environmental Design in 1990, and it is now stewarded and operated by Cal Poly Pomona, with architecture students and trained volunteers helping lead the experience.