Thoroughly Beguiled by Modernist House

If there is one image that captures both the spirit of 20th-century design and the promise of a modern Los Angeles, it is a photograph of Carlotta Stahl’s living room.

The picture depicts two young women relaxing in a steel and glass box, seemingly suspended over the twinkling lights of a sprawling Los Angeles that stretches to the horizon and beyond.

For generations of architects, Julius Shulman’s photograph symbolizes a historic moment: the brief period when a handful of adventurous home designers tapped both their imaginations and post-World War II industrialism to try to build mass housing.

So it was no surprise that a field trip to Stahl’s house was picked Saturday to be part of the finale to a five-day National Trust for Historic Preservation conference that drew 2,500 historians and conservationists to Los Angeles.

Two busloads of convention visitors--a sellout--traveled to a Hollywood Hills neighborhood above the Sunset Strip to hear architect Pierre Koenig explain how and why he came to design for Stahl and her husband, Buck, what is now considered an icon of modernism.

First, though, the visitors wanted to savor their own moment with the image unfolding before them on the clear autumn afternoon.

“I just did my Julius Shulman knock-off photo,” laughed Oakland resident Roberta Deering, a member of the California Preservation Foundation, as she snapped a picture.

“We’re all doing it,” replied Meredith Arms-Bzdak, an architectural historian from Princeton, N.J., taking aim with her own camera.

Koenig, now 75 and a USC architecture professor who lives in Brentwood, watched in amusement. The reaction to the house is always the same.

It was different in 1959--when his goal was simply to design an inexpensive house that was easy to build, was efficient to live in and would be emblematic of the outdoors-oriented good life in Los Angeles.

It was Case Study House No. 22, part of an architecture magazine’s experiment in using modern home design for mass housing.

Drawing on steel-prefabrication and arc-welding techniques perfected during the war, Koenig and others envisioned flat-roofed, steel-I-beam-framed structures with ceiling-to-floor windows as a solution to the postwar housing shortage.

“All the steel went up in one day. It eliminated site labor,” Koenig told the 40 conference visitors who crowded into Stahl’s famous living room.

“We were so naive and innocent back then. We were just struggling to solve a problem--to build an economical living space.”

Although other architects borrowed from the open floor-plan design and the use of sliding doors and windows, the steel-and-glass house failed to take off commercially. Shulman’s photo turned it into an architectural legend, however.

Numerous movies, television commercials and magazine advertising layouts have featured the home.

“It’s fun. We meet a lot of people, living here,” Carlotta Stahl explained to Marci Riskin, a Santa Fe, N.M., architect, as the two chatted in her airy kitchen. “Sunrises and sunsets are beautiful. So are rainstorms--although if there’s lightning, I sit in the middle of the living room. I don’t get near any steel.”

The house is perfect for Los Angeles, said Colin Kelley, a historic rehabilitation specialist from Pennsylvania. He said he’ll never have to rehabilitate this kind of house.

“There’s obviously nothing like this in Pittsburgh,” he said.