L.A. Utopia: Pierre Koenig Finally Gets His Close-Up
L'Uomo Vogue, March 2007
One of the most famous images in the history of architecture was taken in 1960 by the photographer Julius Shulman. It’s a black and white photo of a house in the Hollywood Hills, hovering above the endless illuminated grid of the city of Los Angeles. The house, made of glass and steel, is cantilevered over the edge of a cliff. In the middle ground of the picture, two young women, elegantly dressed, are seated on modern sofas, somewhat aloof to the spectacular view. This image, reproduced on hundreds of thousands of post cards, and reprinted in countless publications, came to summarize the glamour of Modernism, as well a particular moment in the history of architecture and the history of the Los Angeles.
The house in Shulman’s photograph is Case Study House No. 22, also known as the Stahl House, built in 1960, at the dawn of a new and very optimistic age in American culture.
The Case Study Houses were a series of modest Modern homes, built mostly in California in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, by such icons of Modernism as Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen, and Richard Neutra. Mostly two bedroom, open-plan pavilions, the homes were designed as blueprints for economical Modern living in post-World War II America—a time when a new generation, symbolized by John F. Kennedy’s political ascent, was coming into its own. Modernism was a component of what many in America saw as a new age of limitless possibility.
The Case Study program, announced in January 1945, was the brainchild of John Entenza, the visionary publisher of the California-based magazine, Arts & Architecture. Entenza’s initiative was aimed at an audience of young Californians--many of them returning World War II veterans--ready to embrace a brave new world of Modernism after the relentlessly gray years of the war and the depression which preceded it.
Entenza was acting as a salesman for a Utopian dream. If actual examples of Modernism could be built, he believed, the unsophisticated taste of the masses could be upgraded. Uncultivated architects and contractors, who were aiming low (see the uninspired tracts of Levittown on Long Island, from the same period), would be compelled to raise their standards.
Arts & Architecture gave a mandate for Case Study homes to be less labor intensive to build than the wood-framed homes of the past, and Entenza encouraged the architects to experiment with new materials, such as steel and glass, which were little used in homebuilding up until then.
The Case Study Program became world-renown almost immediately, and, from a PR standpoint, it was a huge success.
The program catapulted a few young architects to fame, including Pierre Koenig, the architect of Case Study House No. 22, who was age 34 when the house was completed.
Case Study House No. 22—made iconic by Shulman’s photo--was the drop-dead glamour child of Entenza’s program. The house became so famous—a kind of glass and steel pin-up-- that it overshadowed almost all of the other projects in the Case Study Program, including Koenig’s previous Case Study House, No. 21 (1959), also known as the Bailey House, which Koenig, and many others, considered to be his masterpiece, and a superior work of design.
While the Bailey House is the better of the two buildings, it has been relatively ignored over the decades, because it is less photogenic than the Stahl House, which has been used for many TV commercials and print ads. (The Stahls, who still live in the house, have earned a great deal of money from renting the house to photo shoots which require a backdrop of California modernity.)
They Bailey House’s steel frame is a triumph of less is more refinement--a series of interlocked pavilions surrounded by pools of water. The house is almost Asian in its simplicity; slightly less glamorous, and much less vertiginously sited than Case Study House 22. Number 21 is the quintessential universal house that John Entezna sought to promote in Arts & Architecture; cheap to build and mass-producible. Numbers 21 and 22--Bailey and Stahl--became two rival children of the architect’s: the Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine of experimental dwellings. The glamorous Stahl House, with its gravity-defining cantilever, is much more site-specific, and, therefore, less reproducible, and less in keeping Entenza’s Case Study mandate. Nonetheless, it became one of the most famous buildings of it day. The Bailey House, so well-respected, will never be as beautiful on the surface.
This rivalry persists to this day, even after Koenig’s death, at age 78, in 2004. In December of last year, the Bailey House was put up for auction, and a dramatic new chapter was written in the story of these two houses.
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The Bailey House, which was restored under Koenig’s supervision in 2000, sold under the gavel for a stunning $3,185,600. (It is 1,320-square-feet, and cost $30,000 to build in 1959.) This was the second-highest sale of a Modern house at auction. Only Mies van der Rohe's iconic Farnsworth House, outside of Chicago—considered one of the greatest buildings in history of architecture--commanded more, selling for $8 million to the National Trust for Historic Preservation at a 2001 Sotheby’s auction.
The auction of Case Study House No. 21 brought high drama on the bidding floor at the Wright auction house in Chicago.
Richard Wright, owner of Wright auctions, called the bids. The packed showroom eagerly watched as international clients competed for the house. Opening below the estimate, the bidding jockeyed back and forth, with one client unexpectedly jumping bids, and another offering incremental increases. Shulman’s photos of the house were projected in the background. Finally, a man from London, bidding over the telephone, conceded to the floor bidder, who won the house.
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