L.A. Utopia: Pierre Koenig Finally Gets His Close-Up
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The new owner was identified only as a female art collector from Japan. The seller was Mark Haddawi, a collector of mid-century Modern art, who bought the house in 2001 for about $1.5 million, and worked with Koenig to restore it.
The huge sum paid for Case Study House No. 21—far beyond what the local market price would have been for a small house on a 110-by-160-foot lot--represents a watershed moment in the history of Modern architecture. The house was traded not so much as a piece of real estate, but as a work of art which happened to be sitting a on small patch of valuable land. (Almost any other house would have been considered a “teardown.”) This is a new phenomenon in the architecture world, and a shift in the way people perceive iconic Modern buildings, and architecture itself. Over the past decade, scores of Los Angeles's Modern homes have been rescued from oblivion. Houses by Richard Neutra, John Lautner, Rudolf Schindler and others, have been restored by the likes of Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Ford and Vidal Sassoon, as well as many others outside of the Hollywood limelight.
“This tiny house, if your count it as a sculpture, is up there near the record for Modern art,” says Wright, who is one of the foremost purveyors of Modernism. “It was certainly the most dramatic auction of my life. The most expensive thing I have sold was a $630,000 Noguchi marble top table. That was a record for American design.”
"It is a very new thing, houses that are selling as works of art,” says Julius Schulman, now 96, and still working as a photographer. (It was Shulman who photogrpahed Case Study House No. 22 for the Wright catalogue, after having done the first photos of the house in 1959.) “It hasn't happened that many times before. Thirty years ago, no one wanted Modern houses in L.A. They were left to decay. Some of them were derelict; some of them were torn down. But it shows you the power of the iconography of these houses that Pierre did and other Modernists did. The Case Study Houses need to be preserved for all time, just like Michelangelo's David is preserved; just like Duchamp's sculptures are in museums. These houses are the equivalent of those things."
Gloria Koenig, an architectural historian and Pierre Koenig’s widow, agrees. "It seems to me that an auction was very fitting,” she said. “It presents architecture as art. The world's great paintings are sold that way, why not the world's great architecture? They're synonymous really, except that you can get inside the art of architecture and live in it."
I asked Gloria Koenig what her late husband would have thought of the sale. “I think he would have been pleased,” she said. “Pierre designed No. 21 using industrial prefabricated materials that could be replicated in the thousands, ‘like cars,’ as he used to say. Affordable housing for returning veterans--of which he was one--was a Utopian dream in the years following World War II. At the same time he created something beautiful, solving the underlying mathematical equation of the house in his own inimitable, inevitable style.”
*****
Seven years ago, I met with Pierre Koenig and Julius Shulman at Shulman’s Raphael Soriano-desinged house in the Hollywood Hills. (Soriano, a participant in the Case Study Program, had been Koenig’s teacher at the U.S.C. school of architecture.)
At the time of our meeting, a retrospective book of Shulman’s work, Julius Shulman: Architecture and Its Photography, had just been published by Taschen. The phone in Shulman’s studio was ringing off the hook with requests for his photographs. He was enjoying a career revival. Koenig’s career at the time was in the doldrums, and he was concentrating on teaching at U.S.C.
Shulman and Koenig’s friendship and collaboration spanned decades. I could sense a bit of resentment on Koenig’s part that Shulman’s book had come first. The Schulman photo of Case Study House No. 22 had long been a more famous icon of Modern than the house itself.
"There's something about Modern architecture that is sweeping across the world now,” Shulman told me at the time. “People are intrigued by the images they see in the new books that are being put out.” Since then, a monograph on Koenig’s work was published by Phaidon, and Taschen published a huge edition of the Case Study Houses. (In 1989, and exhibit at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, called “Blueprints for Modern Living,” brought much-deserved attention to Koenig’s work, which had been ignored in the 1970s and 1980s.) The groundswell of interest in Modernism was just beginning then. “These books on Modern architecture focus the public, and make them understand that, no matter where they go, a building that they may not notice is designed by an architect. Average people are—for the first time--beginning to comprehend that," Shulman said.
Koenig was a very unassuming, exacting man; something of a Utopian dreamer. Schulman is an ebullient force of nature. He still goes to his studio--a few feet from his house--every day, and is living to enjoy his fame and recognition as one of the great architectural photographers of the 20th century.
The day I visited Koenig and Shulman, Koenig took me to visit Case Study Houses No. 21, which he had just restored for Mark Haddawai. We walked though the tiny house, which is surrounded on all sides by pools of water. The sliding glass walls of the house effectively blur the boundries of outdoor and indoor—one of the goals of the Case Study Program. As we toured the house that day, it was as if nothing had changed since the photographs from 1959 that we had, only minutes before, been looking at in Shulman’s studio.
Soon after our visit to the house, Koenig won an Award of Excellence from the City of Los Angeles Historic Preservation council, as well as an award from the Los Angeles Conservancy for bringing the house back to its former glory.
Reyner Banham, the British architectural historian, and author of Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, called the Case Study House Program “The style that nearly….” Because, as James Steele and David Jenkins observe in their monograph, Pierre Koenig, “It was almost, but not ultimately quite able to provide a solution to the post-war housing question…mostly out of apathy and fear on the part of the mass of ordinary house-buying Americans.” The public would simply not take the bait.
Of Schulman’s classic photo of Case Study House No. 22, Steele and Jenkins observe, “[It] has continued to have…enduring resonance and iconic power. Taken on the eve of America’s involvement in Vietnam, it records the last glorious moments of American post-war hegemony and self-confidence and its unquestioned belief in the benefits of progress and technology.”
*****
Koenig was an idealist who designed his houses to be affordable dwellings for Everyman, not rarified works of art. Thus, there is some irony in the way that his work has survived the test of time. He would have preferred for his cheep-to-buld steel-framed houses to have been the prototype for a new standard in American design. Instead, they have become bespoke classics—like tiny domestic versions of Mies’s Seagram building, which dates from exactly the same era. The sale for No. 21 expemplfies this. The auctioneer, Richard Wright, told me that he would love to get No. 22 on his auction block.
Koenig’s two Modern classics are prized symbols of a more idealistic and optimistic golden age, which passed very quickly, and then gave on to a grim architectural period—one we may or may not be coming out of in this decade. Americans never really embraced Modernism in the end, which is part of the reason why the Oxford English Dictionary has had to recently include a new word in its pages: McMansion.
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