Housing as Art: the Modern Way : ‘Blueprints’ traces two decades of Southern California home design at Temporary Contemporary

An architectural exhibition opening Tuesday at the Museum of Contemporary Art is by all odds the most impressive and ambitious project of its kind ever seen in these parts. We’ve seen art exhibitions that involved whole automobiles or galleries stuffed with giant redwoods--we’ve never seen one that involves 2 1/2 entire houses.

Installed in MOCA’s big Temporary Contemporary satellite exhibition space in Little Tokyo until Feb. 18 and titled “Blueprints for Modern Living,” the show traces the growth and legacy of a historic two-decade design project fueled by the old Arts and Architecture magazine and known as the Case Study Houses project.

Following World War II, the magazine’s editor, John Entenza, launched a scheme to allow architects working in Southern California to design exemplary modern houses, using fresh approaches to producing affordable middle-class dwellings. Of 36 plans, some turned out quite pricey, and many of the more advanced designs were never built for lack of clients. All the same, the innovations introduced were historically influential, made another Southern California contribution to world architecture and proved the pudding of significant architects, among them Richard Neutra, Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen and Craig Ellwood.

Conceptually, the exhibition is quite a can of worms touching on philosophical and social issues as well as things artistic. The 250-page catalogue published jointly by MOCA and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press includes nine essays by architectural historians Esther McCoy and Reyner Banham, among others, and probes the subject from more angles than a pool shark’s cue. One essay examines the project’s precedents in European prototypes like the 1927 Weissenhof development in Stuttgart and the 1930 Werkbund exhibition in Vienna. Another reviews the history of Arts and Architecture and its role as a magnetic hub for local intellectuals. It adds up to a real education for anybody still under the illusion that Los Angeles only houses airheads and playboys.

The actual show--curated by Elizabeth Smith and designed by Craig Hodgetts--is good fun. I saw it about three-quarters finished at a preview last week. It is serious fun, but fun.

For one thing, there is a good dollop of nostalgia. Ah, the ‘40s and ‘50s. We’d won the war and the future was ours. Let’s buy a house and make babies. The entrance ramp is lined with artifacts including everything from a Jeep to vintage TV sets with the tube on top, to pastel floor fans that look like the snouts of fighter planes.

Everything was going to be Futuristic, which meant looking like an airplane. Studebakers looked like airplanes. Fashion even produced a female archetype that looked like a large bomber. As a matter of fact, Charles Eames got the idea of using plywood inventively when he did mock-up airplane parts with it during the war.

It is also piquant to see whole houses indoors. Take Ralph Rapson’s place, pretty much the first thing one encounters at the TC. It is, like the others, a full-size simulation built by a theatrical set company. Rapson’s is from an unbuilt 1945 design and characterizes the funkier sort of Case Study House with its use of downscale materials like Masonite.

The postwar years were a time of reintegration. On a global scale, that played as internationalism. People actually believed in the United Nations. On the domestic front, it took the form of Togetherness and Good Design plus crucially shuffling together Outdoors and Indoors.

Rapson’s house does this with a vengeance. Despite their apparent industrial-age simplicity, these houses have eclectic international sources from California Craftsman to Japanese vernacular and German modernism a la Mies van der Rohe. And talk about Togetherness. The only room in this house that provides complete privacy is the john. Basically it’s all one room with dinky bedrooms that screen off behind accordion doors. The outdoors garden comes right through glass walls and meanders through the house under a (missing) screen-glass skylight. The indoors strolls out onto the terrace. Furnishings have that feel of ‘50s liberal cosmopolitanism mixing Kidney-form Mod with African and Southwestern. Today it looks quaint, vaguely vulgar, and likably energetic.

Of course at the TC there’s a nice giddiness in visiting these houses, because when you go outdoors you’re still indoors.

But now the cat is out of the bag. Yes, Louise, the Case Study Houses were the source of the dreaded California Glass Box, which was so scorned in certain circles that one of Ellwood’s Miesian designs was turned into a classic kitsch Greek atrium even before the advent of Post-Modernism.

It goes without saying that commercial builders found in these houses an inspiration for bad, antiseptic dingbats. When an architectural style includes a lot of guck, it’s easier to fake. Case Study-style houses depended on lean, mean proportioning for aesthetic quality, as witness the two upscale examples re-created here.

Even unfinished, the life-size model of a Hollywood Hills house by Pierre Koenig has the weightless elegance of a whippet. It reminds us that, at best, this architecture combines the pure and the sensuous, the visionary and the romantic. The house embraces a city view in a long “L” shape, which the exhibition will try to approximate with a massive black screen wall dotted with television sets. Marshall McLuhan lives.

A large corner devoted to about half of the Charles and Ray Eames house and their furnishings will certainly reassert the combination of restraint, suave relaxation and muffled wit that made their house the most influential of the projects.

There is much more to this exhibition. It looks far more expensive than its $600,000 budget. Architecture buffs can study models and plans by Julius Ralph Davidson, Edward Killingsworth, Whitney Smith, Rodney Walker, Raphael Soriano and the rest. Art lovers can contemplate the room where artists and designers in the Entenza circle are shown. It’s a funny mix including such disparate talents as the ceramicists Otto and Gertrude Nazler, painter John McLauglin and sculptor Ruth Asawa. A connoisseur can give himself a minor snit sorting out what is art and what is design. It all represents the ideals of a period that thought you could put it all together. At best, that idea can enrich the commonplace. At worst, it can penalize excellence until it becomes, as they said back then, Artsy-Craftsy.

The Case Study Project limped forward into the ‘60s, but its sensibility was so rooted in the previous two decades that the exhibition seems in some ways a period piece. Its minimalist style is out of fashion and in the real world fewer and fewer people are able to afford homes--much less architect-designed houses.

As if conscious of this and wishing to emphasize the Populist aspects of Entenza’s vision, MOCA capped this whole thing off with something of a Case Study Project of its own. Working with the Community Redevelopment Agency, it sponsored an architectural competition for a multiple-dwelling, low-cost housing project. The winner was Philadelphia architect Adele Santos, whose model is on view along with the other entries. Santos’ project will be constructed by a private developer on land donated by the CRA near La Brea and Franklin avenues.

When the Case Study exhibition was first announced, it sounded dry, parochial and academic. It turns out to be an admirable business.

* RELATED STORY

Leon Whiteson examines designs from the innovative “Case Study House” program that had a major impact on home designs in postwar Los Angeles and the world. Real Estate section.