Homes That Captured the Dream : Innovative Case Study Program Redefined Residential Architecture in Postwar L.A.

It all seemed so excitingly simple in postwar America. The prosperity of the 1940s and ‘50s made the American dream--every family cozy and happy in its own home--seem more attainable than ever before.

More than any other U.S. city, Los Angeles was buoyant upon a tide of optimism. The war had transformed it from a big, sleepy town of orange groves and the Hollywood movie studios into an industrialized city bursting with energy and fresh talent in a wide range of endeavor.

“Los Angeles was a wonderful place to be in the 1950s,” said designer Craig Ellwood. “The city was wide open, eager for experiment. The feeling that, finally, we were going to get the chance to create a truly honest architecture was like wine in the air.”

In this heady atmosphere, Ellwood, along with a group of talented Los Angeles architects and designers, including Charles and Ray Eames, Richard Neutra, Raphael Soriano, Pierre Koenig, Whitney Smith, Quincy Jones, Ed Killingsworth and Ralph Rapson, plus Michigan’s Eero Saarinen, set out to redefine the character of the American home.

The series of innovative houses they designed in a program titled “Case Study House” had a major impact on domestic architecture on the West Coast, across the United States and around the world.

A multimedia exhibit commemorating the houses, “Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses (1945-1966),” will open Tuesday at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Temporary Contemporary, 152 N. Central Ave. It runs to Feb. 18.

The 36 Case Study houses designed between 1945 and 1962, 24 of which were built, embodied the architects’ vision of a typical single-family home that was aesthetically avant-garde, yet thoroughly practical and affordable.

The Case Study program developed several major innovations that later became standard in popular house design. Among them were:

--The open-plan house with a minimum of internal walls to allow the interior to be flexible and seem spacious.

--The integration of indoor and outdoor living through the use of sliding glass screens.

--The reversal of the traditional home plan by relocating the living rooms at the rear of the house, away from the street.

--The emphasis on exposing a building’s structural frame, particularly where houses were constructed of steel, persists in contemporary architecture around the world.

Case Study architects believed that a house that directly expressed the way it was constructed, that was open in plan and filled with light and sunshine, that was put together with standardized components to be mass produced as cheaply as the family car, would set the stage for new chapter in the American dream.

Some of these designers became world famous, including Neutra, Eames and Saarinen. Others, including Ellwood, Killingsworth, Quincy Jones, Koenig and Soriano, were widely recognized as leading innovators of postwar American modern architecture. Several fell away into obscurity in the 1960s and ‘70s.

The Case Study program was the brainchild of John Entenza, the visionary editor of the Los Angeles-based Arts & Architecture magazine.

An intellectual with an arts degree from the University of Virginia and a generous inheritance to spend upon his missionary fervor, Entenza sensed the changes that World War II would generate in U.S. society and foresaw the tremendous technological advances the wartime industries would foster.

As early as 1943, Entenza sponsored a competition: “Designs for Postwar Living.” In an editorial on this competition Entenza looked forward to a new breed of American worker who would be “better trained, more technically aware,” and who would “demand simple, direct and honest efficiency in the material aspects of the means by which he lives.”

Two years later, when launching the Case Study House program in Arts & Architecture, Entenza declared:

“What man has learned about himself in the last five years will express itself in the way in which he will want to be housed in the future. . . . It becomes the obligation of all those who serve and profit through man’s wish to live well to take the mysteries and black magic out of the hard facts that go into the building of a house.”

Enlightened Clients

The program depended on Entenza’s skills in putting together talented architects and enlightened clients. He was the client for one Case Study house, designed by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen on a 5-acre parcel he purchased in Pacific Palisades. Eames built a Case Study house and studio for himself on the same parcel and it stands today as one of the prime icons of modern residential design in the United States.

A third house sharing the same acreage was designed by Richard Neutra, who welcomed the opportunity offered by the program’s emphasis on standardization to engage in “the constant study of one subject” and so not be “haunted by the anxiety for originality, the fear of staying too long with one idea. . . .”

As the program got under way, Entenza sought designs for publication in Arts & Architecture, and solicited patrons who would be willing to build the radically modern homes.

Often clients appeared spontaneously, drawn by the publicity given the Case Study designs in Entenza’s influential magazine, read by aficionados of modern architecture all around the world.

Ellwood recalls the heady feeling when, as a young man of 26, he was invited to design a Case Study house.

“The Arts & Architecture offices on Wilshire Boulevard were jammed with designers from all over the world,” he said. “We really felt we were at the heart of things, and John was the heart of the heart.”

Pierre Koenig, designer of the dramatic 1959 home perched on a precipice in the Hollywood Hills (reproduced in a full scale mock-up at MOCA), said that the Case Study houses were “a product of love.”

Said Koenig:

“You had to love architecture to put in the long hours and hard sweat to not only invent a new design vocabulary but convince reluctant contractors and conservative lending institutions, who distrusted modern architecture and feared its poor resale value, to go along.”

Ralph Rapson’s 1945 design for a prototype 1,800-square-foot “Greenbelt” house incorporated a number of new ideas that influenced residential architecture at every level over the next decades.

The open plan for the Greenbelt house--which was never built until it was constructed in the the MOCA show--was focused inward on a patio garden to engender a sense of privacy on a typical suburban lot.

The light, flat roof floated above walls of glass and plywood that gave a feeling of spaciousness. The only solid partitions in the house enclosed the bathrooms; all the other walls could be folded back out of sight, to allow views out into the landscape.

“It seems fundamental to bring nature within the house,” Rapson wrote in Arts & Architecture. “For once, the complete integration of outside and inside will have been accomplished.”

Case Study House No. 25, designed for furniture store owner Edward Frank by Killingsworth, Brady & Smith in 1962 in the Naples area of Long Beach, was the most urban home in the program.

Standing on a narrow lot in a built-up section of this unique water-oriented neighborhood, the Frank house fronts onto the Rivo Alto Canal that curves past its front door.

The main entry on the canal side is shielded by a big blank wall. A series of concrete stepping stones crosses a shallow pool to a 17-foot-high front door. The stepping stones both connect the house to the canal-side sidewalk yet distance it from public view, and the tall door offers a hint of the spacious elegance of the hidden interior.

The two-story house behind the wall is planned around an internal courtyard that is an outdoor extension of the large open-plan living and dining room, through floor-to-ceiling sliding glass walls. All the main rooms of the house look into the courtyard, including the second-floor bedrooms.

Still Discreetly Elegant

A pergola of closely spaced slats casts a dazzling grid of shadows over the court, changing patterns as the sun moves across the sky.

Now owned by Ron and Karen Van Wert, the house is as simple, private and discreetly elegant as the day it was built.

Looking back on the Case Study houses, it is clear that the program’s emphasis on the single-family home transformed by technological innovation is no longer relevant to today’s needs.

The era of the ever-expanding suburb, taken as gospel in the 1950s, is over. American cities have run out of spare land for the expansion needed to provide free-standing homes on separate lots for their swollen populations.

The construction industry has resisted the kind of mass-produced standardization Case Study designers hoped would make houses cheaper to build.

In fact, the construction process today, despite widespread on-site mechanization and a certain amount of prefabrication, essentially continues the tedious assemblage of a multitude of materials that goes all the way back to the pyramids.

The Case Study architects thought they could reinvent the world. In fact, the world has reinvented architecture.

Looking back upon those halcyon Case Study days, Ellwood, who retired from architecture in the mid-1970s to live in Tuscany and paint, draws a sharp contrast between then and now. “Every time I come back to L.A. it’s a culture shock for me,” he said. “I see more homeless people. I see more stress. I see more traffic. I see more ugly buildings.”

Current architecture has no ethic and no purpose, Ellwood feels. “Designers lack vision. They no longer have any clear view of what to offer people. Architecture has became an arm of the fashion industry, changing its skylines every year. It lacks the moral force, the urge to create a better world for everyone that made the 1950s so exciting.”

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