Editor’s Note: In June, The Creative Architect: Inside the Great Midcentury Personality Study, by Pierluigi Serraino, will be published by Monacelli Press. The book is based on psychological tests conducted by the University of California, Berkeley, in 1958–59 to try to determine what promotes creativity in architects. RECORD presents excerpts of three case studies of the leading architects of the day—Eero Saarinen, Philip Johnson, and Richard Neutra—along with the author’s summary of the goals, methodology, and findings of this unusual, almost-forgotten investigation. Go back to the main article.
That Richard Neutra was exceptionally driven to self-affirmation is part and parcel of the mythology he created around himself. The interview and creativity measurements provide an insight into that drive. Neutra’s interviewer, Sarnoff Mednick, wrote “One can understand a significantly large portion of Neutra’s behavior and attitudes by knowing two things: he must have people love him and be thoroughly devoted to him. Anything less than this is extremely disquieting. Second, to simply say that he has a high need for achievement would tend to be misleading. That statement is too mild. There is no room for question regarding his ability to solve any problem that might interest him. Not only must he be able to solve them all, but he must solve them better than anyone else. He almost literally thinks of himself as a superman.”
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