Getty buys Koenig archives

In 2005, the Getty Research Institute purchased the vast archives of Los Angeles photographer Julius Shulman, noted for his documentation of California’s classic Modernist architecture.

Now the institute has acquired the archive of one of those celebrated architects, Pierre Koenig (1925-2004), whose sleek glass-and-steel structures are featured in some of Shulman’s most famous photos.

Perhaps the best-known of those images is a picture of Koenig’s 1960 Case Study House #22, for many a symbol of living the California dream, with its cantilevered living room seeming to float over the Hollywood Hills.

“Indeed, that photo made this house incredibly famous, but at the same time, without a good house, Julius would not have been able to make the photo,” said Wim de Wit, the research institute’s curator of architectural collections.

De Wit said the institute is cataloguing the materials and expects to make the archive accessible to the public within a year and a half.

The archive of more than 3,000 objects -- photos, drawings, slides, documents and a handful of models -- includes a scale model of Case Study House #22, created years after the house was built for a museum exhibition.

The materials also include Koenig’s drawings for the Chemehuevi project, his proposal for the construction of affordable housing on the Chemehuevi Indian reservation near Lake Havasu in San Bernardino County.

The new acquisition, said De Wit, is “the direct result of acquiring the Julius Shulman archive. “When the family heard we had that archive, they came to talk to us.

“The photos in the Pierre Koenig archive are the vintage ones, printed in the 1960s,” he said. “In the Shulman archives, some of those are no longer there -- when we acquired the archives, they had already been sold, and new prints had been made that are dozens of years old but not the first prints. So the archives complement each other nicely.”

De Wit noted that, although Koenig never became a household name like other architects who worked extensively in Southern California, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, R.M. Schindler and Richard Neutra, his 1958 Case Study House #21 on Wonderland Park Drive in the Hollywood Hills recently sold for $3.1 million.

“That shows that this kind of post-World War II modern architecture is popular with those who know architecture, even though it never caught on with the general public,” De Wit said.

The curator added that the San Francisco-born Koenig, a graduate of and longtime architecture professor at USC, was so devoted to teaching that he usually worked on one project or perhaps two at a time, so he did virtually all his drawings himself rather than farming them out to associates.

“These are definitely his drawings,” De Wit said.

Koenig’s widow, writer Gloria Koenig, said that until the archive was acquired by the Getty, the materials were housed in the Koenigs’ home in Brentwood, also designed by the architect.

“We’d been approached by other places, and of course we wanted to keep it in Southern California,” she said. “Once it’s catalogued, it’s going to be the best possible place for scholars to see and learn about the work.”

diane.haithman@latimes.com