Los Angeles Case-Study Houses: When Shelter Was an Art Form

The show of Case-Study Houses opening at the Museum of Contemporary Art on Oct. 17 is a blueprint of a long-past age of faith.

The show revivifies Arts and Architecture magazine’s program to build model houses that would light the way between historic and modern styles, under the direction of the late John O. Entenza, editor and publisher. The purpose was to furnish critically needed housing for the returning soldiers and for the thousands of war workers who had flocked to Los Angeles--and stayed. What was available at the end of the war was hastily constructed housing and the run-down houses of the ‘10s and ‘20s.

In the late-19th Century, Los Angeles had become a vacation spot. Visitors put up single-wall housing, open to the studs, often with no plumbing and without indoor cooking arrangements.

Compared with San Francisco, Los Angeles was more of a throwaway city, perhaps because San Francisco was a presidio where boats--to and from China, and from around the Horn--called in. Los Angeles was a pueblo with little wood and few basic materials, most of which were sent down by coastal boats from San Francisco. The fact that San Francisco was more sophisticated and looked to the East and Europe for its style may account for the listing of Arts and Architecture in English bibliographies as based in San Francisco. Perhaps it was hard for the English, even in the ‘60s, to believe that anything as urbane as A&A; could come out of rough-and-ready Los Angeles.

By the 1910s and ‘20s Los Angeles was a more permanent place to live and steady population growth begat colonies of single-family cottages dotted over the raw land. New settlers built in styles prevalent in the regions from which they had come. The most popular material was wood, originally in short supply in the Los Angeles Basin. This was mud country. Pueblo building was in adobe; wood had to be imported from San Bernardino or shipped down from San Francisco and was used only in beams, windows and door frames.

Construction almost stopped in the ‘30s during the Great Depression. Then, during World War II, there was a great deal of building for defense facilities but materials and square footage were limited for civilians. Meanwhile, toward the end of the Depression new ideas about the American house had been evolving. When building as a handcraft was seen to be dead as a dodo, technology was courted. To produce with less material and less hands was the goal. Architects R.M. Schindler and Richard Neutra had models of houses which, if not high-tech, were at least in part repeatable. By the end of the Depression and the beginning of the war, most students in architectural schools had at least one attempt at low-cost housing on their boards.

The scene was being set for a new approach to housing. Los Angeles was attracting architects with ideas.

There was one publication in the area, California Arts & Architecture, devoted more to decoration than to architecture. But the magazine was failing. When it came up for sale, Entenza, the guest editor for several issues, bought it.

He soon took California off the title, restricted it to modern design and gave it an international focus.

Arts and Architecture did more to put Los Angeles on the cultural map than any other artifact. Architects in many countries later testified to the influence it had on them as students. One was Cesar Pelli, who said A&A; was the magazine that most students in Argentina waited for. After the war, when I was in Japan, an architect and critic told me that as a defeated nation, the thing that gave Japanese architects the faith to go on was Arts and Architecture. And it was known in Europe for the good modern architecture it showed. As a layman, Entenza had unerring taste.

The magazine was the rallying point for design in Los Angeles. The Depression years and the war years had given architects little to do and many had left the profession for allied fields.

As the war was winding down, A&A; decided to sponsor a group of case-study houses and put them on display. The goal was to acquaint the potential small homeowner with the modern style. Even before the war, model houses were being shown. They were usually in borrowed styles and sprang up around the city, running the gamut from the cottage with wood scallops around the window to the stucco chalet. With the same floor plan, one could have a ranch style, New England saltbox, French Provincial, Spanish Colonial or you-name-it pasted on the same framing. Cars lined up to see them. But one designed by Neutra was built of new exterior plywood. At the end of the showing it was bought by Stella Gramer, the law partner of Entenza’s father, and she moved it to Westwood.

The Case Study program gave architects free rein to experiment with plans, form and materials for two-bedroom houses that were self-sufficient, requiring no maid or gardeners. The war had brought about a major social change; when large numbers of women went into defense work, there was a dearth of servants. So the house and gardens had to be designed to take care of themselves.

Entenza asked a few architects he respected if they had clients in need of small houses. If the designers would put their projects on display for a month, equipped and furnished, manufacturers would provide top-of-the-line products at the price of their cheaper lines.

Many architects Entenza would have included had no such clients. The younger postwar architects were usually the ones who had clients that fitted the program. Case Study Houses were to be built and sold for occupancy. Inflation at the end of the war prevented building some of the houses; other were delayed. A shortage of materials, frozen during wartime or in short supply for civilians, persisted even after the end of the war.

The first house to be shown was J.R. Davidson’s, which had a roof truss, allowing for a long span and few interior walls. Although there were no halls in the house, the circulation pattern was clearly defined. Many Case-Study exteriors did not show the exploration inside. Architects were as interested in the unbuilt as in the built; the house by Ralph Rapson had a “road” down the center of the floor plan and all the rooms opened on to it. The road was the social area. An unbuilt design by Whitney Smith was entered through a garden lath house.

The program was successful--so successful that it was extended and young postwar architects were favored.

The studies took a new turn in 1949; the framing was steel, as in the Charles and Ray Eames house and the Rafael Soriano houses. Further explorations in steel were designed by Craig Ellwood and Pierre Koenig.

Several changes in the larger housing picture were drawn from the A&A; case studies, including bringing the outdoors indoors with planting and sliding glass doors. The three Case-Study Houses built on one parcel in La Jolla, designed by Edward A. Killingsworth, taught land-use lessons. So did a new approach to grouping houses in the San Fernando Valley, an unbuilt project for Eichler Homes designed by the late A. Quincy Jones, with homes below grade and the earth turned up into grassy berms.

When John Entenza moved to Chicago to direct the Graham Foundation, he sold the magazine to David Travers, who carried the case studies into apartment design. But by the 1960s housing had become an industry. Commercial builders were incorporating ideas from case studies into enormous housing tracts; the experiment had served its purpose.