In the dappled afternoon sunshine of the VDL House’s backyard in Silver Lake, senior Archinect Editor Orhan Ayyuce sat down with Enrique Norten, winner of this year’s Richard J. Neutra Award for Professional Excellence, to talk about modernism’s legacy and evolution since the mid-20th century. The Award, issued by California State Polytechnic University’s Department of Architecture, is awarded to architects that fulfill Richard Neutra’s ideal of creating new environments for living, and often encourage interdisciplinary collaborations within the profession. Norten was in town for the award ceremony tonight at Cal Poly Pomona.

Norten’s Mexico City and New York-based firm, TEN Arquitectos, has completed over fifty projects worldwide in its 28-year span, for a variety of architectural programs that are often large enough to operate at an urban scale. The firm’s works include Guadalajara’s Guggenheim Museum, a branch of the New York Public Library, the redesign of Rutgers University College Avenue campus, and the CENTRO University campus in Mexico City. As described by Sarah Lorenzen, chair of Cal Poly Pomona’s Department of Architecture: “What I most admire about Norten's work is how skillfully it mediates between the universal expression of globalization and the idiosyncratic character of a specific place or group."

Ayyuce’s conversation with Norten began in deference to Neutra’s contribution to the state of architecture today, and the inescapable legacy of modernism worldwide – especially in cities like Los Angeles, Mexico City and New York. While much has changed since the mid-century’s enactment of modernist ideals, “our formal vocabulary is still a modern vocabulary,” Norten said. Architects today are revising modernism's attitudes towards the built environment to become more socially, economically, and politically aware, so that the profession may participate in more “holistic” ways within the community.

Referring to an irony of modernist idealism brought up by Ayyuce, that too often its most-lauded architectural examples are only accessible to the affluent, Norten responded optimistically, believing that the new millennium’s ongoing revolution in communication technologies will allow architects to forge more inclusive approaches to a modernist agenda.

In the end, it all came back to the setting of Neutra’s VDL House. Referring to Los Angeles as a “teenaged” city during modernism’s onset, Norten marveled at how the city allowed Neutra (among others) to help cultivate an entirely new architectural vocabulary – one that provided “an aesthetic experience… like enjoying a real piece of art.”

Check back soon for the complete interview with Enrique Norten on Archinect.