He studied under Max Fabiani and Karl Mayreder at the Vienna University of Technology (1910–18) and also attended the private architecture school of Adolf Loos.

[citation needed] In June 1914, Neutra's studies were interrupted when he was ordered to Trebinje, where he served as a lieutenant in the artillery until the end of World War I. Dione Neutra recalled her husband Richard's hatred of the retribution against the Serbs in an interview conducted in 1978 after his death: "He talked about the people he met [i.e. in Trebinje] … how his commander was a sadist, who was able to play out his sadistic tendencies….

In 1921, he served briefly as city architect in the German town of Luckenwalde, and later in the same year he joined the office of Erich Mendelsohn in Berlin.

Neutra contributed to the firm's competition entry for a new commercial center for Haifa, Palestine (1922), and to the Zehlendorf housing project in Berlin (1923).

They had three sons, Frank L (1924–2008), Dion (1926–2019), who became an architect and his father's partner, and Raymond Richard Neutra (1939–), a physician and environmental epidemiologist.

Schindler and Neutra would go on to collaborate on an entry for the League of Nations Competition (1926–27); in the same year, they formed a firm with the planner Carol Aronovici (1881–1957), called the Architectural Group for Industry and Commerce (AGIC).

[10] In California, he became celebrated for rigorously geometric but airy structures that epitomized a West Coast version of mid-century modern residential design.

His clients included Edgar J. Kaufmann, (who had commissioned Wright to design Fallingwater, in Pennsylvania), Galka Scheyer, and Walter Conrad Arensberg.

In the early 1930s, Neutra's Los Angeles practice trained several young architects who went on to independent success, including Gregory Ain, Harwell Hamilton Harris, and Raphael Soriano.

In 1949 Neutra formed a partnership with Robert E. Alexander that lasted until 1958, which finally gave him the opportunity to design larger commercial and institutional buildings.

Neutra's appointment was part of an ambitious program of architectural commissions to renowned architects, which included embassies by Walter Gropius in Athens, Edward Durrell Stone in New Delhi, Marcel Breuer in The Hague, Josep Lluis Sert in Baghdad, and Eero Saarinen in London.

[15] Neutra's early watercolors and drawings, most of them of places he traveled (particularly his trips to the Balkans in WWI) and portrait sketches, showed influence from artists such as Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele etc.

[20] Neutra's 14,000 sq ft (1,300 m2) "Windshield" house built on Fishers Island, New York, for John Nicholas Brown II burned down on New Year's Eve 1973 and was not rebuilt.