06/29/2024
Advice from Julius Shulman at 98: “Never hurry. But never come to a halt.”
Shulman wonders why the architect, with whom he had fought early on but corresponded with in later years, was so tightly wound. “Neutra worked himself to death,” he says. “What did he have to worry about?” He thinks the famously exacting Neutra didn’t have the ability to take the approach to life that Shulman does: Never hurry, but never come to a halt. We sift through more letters and run across another from Neutra, dated March 18, 1969, a year before the architect would die of a heart attack while on a lecture tour in Germany. “I wish an old architect could keep going as long as a photographer,” Neutra writes, “but our dark rooms are darker than your dark rooms.”