Low-Cost Homes: The Case Study Legacy

Ground is scheduled to be broken and construction finally is to begin next month on an innovatively designed 40-unit affordable housing complex at the northwest corner of Franklin and La Brea avenues in Hollywood.

The complex, proposed more than two years ago, was to be completed this fall to serve as an extension of sorts to the exhibit at the Temporary Contemporary Museum downtown, entitled “Blueprint for Modern Living.”

The exhibit, which runs through Feb. 18, explores and celebrates the Case Study Houses, a heralded program that in the wake of World War II sponsored the development of select prototypes to illustrate how modern design might meet the need of both affordable and attractive housing. The socially motivated program is considered by many Los Angeles architecture’s finest hour.

Featured in the exhibit is the striking construction of two of the 36 prototypes, each furnished and decorated with a 1950’s flair; a structural mock-up of a third; displays of drawings, models and photographs of most of the houses that were built; a clutter of design objects encrusted with nostalgia, and a collection of television sets featuring a blur of videotaped interviews with the original architects and others associated with the program.

While the exhibit is indeed engaging as both history and kitsch, an evocative stroll back through time, there is something about it having been mounted for temporary display in a museum that makes it appear unduly precious. You can look at it and discuss it, but you can’t touch it and experience it as it was designed to be.

From my perspective, the proper museum for architecture is the city itself, with the exhibits being the actual buildings where people live, work, shop and play. It is not something to be placed under glass or on a pedestal.

This view is very much in the spirit of the original Case Study Houses program as conceived by the late John Entenza. It was Entenza’s stated hope that the program, as sponsored by Art and Architecture magazine (of which he was the founder and editor), “be of practical assistance to the average American in search of a home in which he could afford to live.”

Entenza added, in an article he wrote in the magazine in 1945 outlining the program, that “it becomes the obligation of all of 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 building of a house.”

That is why the Hollywood housing project sponsored by the Museum of Contemporary Art and subsidized by the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency takes on such special importance.

It is in the project’s development that the legacy of the Case Study Houses will be tested and, hopefully, celebrated.

And that is why it is unfortunate that the project had to be delayed by so much professional posturing and back scratching by the exhibit’s organizers. They attempted to arrogate the program’s mantle of innovation for their self-aggrandizement.

Not helping either was the failure in the conception of the demonstration to adequately address legitimate community concerns and open the design and development process. Fewer self-congratulating luncheons at the museum downtown and more attempts to reach out to the community through a planning workshop or two would have been helpful.

Still, the emerging design of the Hollywood project by Adele Naude Santos promises to reflect the intent of the Case Study Houses program. Composed of 10 modestly scaled fourplexes focused on a series of courtyards, it is a welcome departure from the rash of bulky apartments buildings that have risen in the area recently.

Hopefully, the project will serve as an example that affordable housing also can be attractive housing. It was with this in mind that the project was courageously supported by Councilman Michael Woo, despite vociferous local protests.

“People still think that low-cost housing means the tenements and housing projects of the past,” Woo commented recently. “This Case Study program will show them the low-cost housing of the future: housing that is well-designed, well-maintained and well-integrated into the neighborhood.”

In an essay included in a catalogue accompanying the exhibit, Dolores Hayden of the UCLA Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning writes that despite the original Case Study Houses program’s social intent, most of the aspirations of the architects involved “revolved around aesthetics--they wanted to be stylistically avant-garde.” The result was that they concentrated on the use of modern materials fashioned into stark, functional designs.

Hayden goes on to contend in her refreshing analysis that to be avant-garde now, “designers need to display social imagination where the original Case Study architects wavered, as well as to be more savvy about labor costs, marketing, banking and zoning.”

I would add to that list that the need for architects and clients to be more sensitive to community and contextual issues.

If the spirit of the Case Study Houses is to rise again, the emphasis will not be the explorations of form and materials, but on environmental and design analysis, and the development of a more user- oriented, accessible architecture.