Dione Neutra 1901-1990

Richard's wife Dione Niedermann Neutra was born in Munich, Germany, but grew up in Zurich with her German mother, her Swiss father, and her three sisters.

Her father was an electrical engineer and serious amateur pianist.

Music was central to the family's social life. Dione was an accomplished cellist, pianist, and lieder and oratorio singer.

She met her future husband near Zurich when she was eighteen and he was a twenty-seven-year-old veteran of the Austro-Hungarian army. They married four years later.

In 1924 she and the couple's oldest son Frank followed Richard to the United States.

Dione was deeply involved with Neutra's career, serving as his executive assistant and publicist as well as raising their three sons and maintaining her musical talents as an amateur performer at the many social functions she hosted in the Neutra compound.

After Richard's death in 1970 she continued to live at this place hosting musical and political events and inviting visiting artists for extended stays. For information about two of these young artists, Maria Nordman and Titus Leber who were at the beginning of their careers at the time. Titus, in cooperation with Dion and Dione made a short documentary on the place as it looked in the early 1980's.Click here to see it.

She died here in 1990 having bequeathed the place to the Cal Poly Pomona Foundation and College of Environmental Design.

Her ashes and those of Richard Neutra were scattered in the patio garden of the Neutra compound.

UCLA conducted an extensive oral history with her in 1983. It can be found here.