Arts & Architecture: The Case Study House Program | Artbound | Season 15, Episode 3 | PBS SoCal

Arts and Architecture was a magazine from the early 1940s to the late 60s, edited by John Intensa. And the Case Study House program was the most essential part of Arts and Architecture magazine. The Case Study House program was a series of experimental modern house prototypes. It succeeded in producing some of the key works of 20th century residential architecture, a handful of which we consider iconic today. This program was made possible in part by a grant from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Everyone has a different idea of what a home is. A home provides shelter. It provides a place to cook food. A home is an area that you can live well in and you can entertain well. It's about the comfort of knowing that people you love are near you, with you. Home is where you can walk in the front door and say, this is me. If the home makes the people feel good, then you have a nice home. It's where you feel rooted, where you can be calm and serene. And I think when it's well designed, it takes it to the next level. Architecture affects your life in a positive way. I can tell you firsthand that living here definitely makes me happy. Architects really like to say that architecture is a social art. And it is a social art because it's for people. This was really an idea that became very strong in the years after the war. A pent-up demand for housing developed during that time. And many architects and people like John Intenza, the editor of Arts and Architecture magazine, were interested in these issues and began to think about what they could do. It really was the sort of combination of a lot of really, really interesting minds being very aware of what was happening. And John Intenza, who saw that he could actually provide the perfect platform. The Case Study House Program was a series of experimental modern house prototypes envisioned to provide new alternatives to post-war housing that would be improvements upon what was previously available to the typical American family. It was not just an architecture that was being promoted, it was a lifestyle. There's something about these houses that just enlivens the spirit. It's more than just a house. It has really the history, which is interesting. You look nowadays to modern houses, you see some of the elements that have been tried out here 60 years ago. These houses definitely blur the lines between it's a place where you live and it's your house, but it's also a piece of art. It's arts and architecture for a reason that it did bring these two things together. You look around at these spaces and these houses and they're beautiful. They're also this idea that living with art, it's a much better everyday experience. Southern California has a fairly long history of architecture that can be described as proto-modern. It is the location of some of the key works of early modern architecture in the United States. Many of the architects who came to California from other places, from the East Coast, the Midwest, from Europe, were really profoundly impacted by the climate here. They realized that it was possible to build architecture that really took advantage of the outdoors in a way that was quite unprecedented. Many of them, the ones who had come from Europe especially, were trained in and conversant with international style modernism. There were various architects who wrote different manifestos and what they thought the modern house should be. The biggest thing was that it had to be a historic, it had to be an architecture or a language of its time, embracing the advantages of industrialism. And methods of production, so just the growing in size of a pane of glass led to great advancements in modern architecture. Also at the beginning of the 20th century, there is this awakening of people being much more conscious about health and healthy living and healthy building. This of course was realized in the work of architects like Richard Neutra with the design of his Lovell Help House, which was very much about an extreme ideal of helpful living. That was actually the first steel and glass house here in California. Dr. Lovell was a fan of indoor-outdoor living. Even his bedrooms were open porches. Dr. Philip Lovell was a health promotion kind of doctor and celebrated the fact that he had finished this house and figured out how to make this a teachable moment for the public. Before the owners occupied it, they had the public come through for a couple of weeks. Thousands of people came and that was to show you how to live healthier and a better life. It was definitely a period in terms of architects and designers were coming here to collaborate with other people that were also like, let's come up with new ideas about how to do design or housing people. And so it was like a melting pot in terms of different skill sets, different interests, different backgrounds all coming together. There was a sense of promise in California. At one time it was considered a beacon for a brighter way of life. California, the land of sunshine and swimming pools and sleek geometry carved out below its mountains. Someone like John Antenza who came from a more traditional upbringing found a really different way of life in California. Antenza was an extremely interesting person who had a broad range of knowledge and he had dabbled in a number of different things before he ended up becoming the editor for Arts and Architecture. He came from a family of means. So finding a regular job or making a living in a conventional way was not at all of interest to him nor was it necessary. His mother was from a mining dynasty. His father was an attorney. He was somebody that had deep thoughts about a lot of different aspects of society and he was interested in a lot of different cultural phenomena. I guess you'd say he was a polymath, somebody that was interested in a lot of different things and wanted to share his excitement with other people. Esther McCoy, the architectural historian, described Antenza once as a man with a polished mind and polished shoes. He was really interested in modernism and modern architecture and he had commissioned a house for himself in 1937 by the architect Harwell Hamilton Harris that he lived in for a while. And all of this time he was becoming friendly with and educating himself about what else was going on in Los Angeles. He subsequently got a job at California Arts and Architecture Magazine, which was a sort of skinnier magazine. It was not focused on modernism. And it was intended to a very general readership. It was more like a house and garden variety magazine and it treated a number of different architectural styles and topics that would be of interest to homemakers and homeowners. It was really a domestic magazine for people that were interested in houses. Antenza purchased it in 1938 and then over the next couple of years started to transform it into a vehicle for spreading information about modernism. When Antenza took it on, he really began to promote modern architecture and he brought in a lot more about the arts, whether it was furniture, pottery, contemporary theater, contemporary music. He was interested in all those things. All things modern were of interest to John Antenza. He did away with California in the title. He called it just Arts and Architecture. He wanted it to be much more international in its outlook. Did not want this to be just about California. And he transformed it visually. He invited some of the most avant-garde young graphic designers to design covers for the magazine. It was really important for Antenza to be able to immediately communicate the sense of extreme commitment to modernism. You see that especially in the designs of Ray Eames. The magazine had this editorial board which included people like Charles and Ray Eames. Charles and Ray Eames were people who changed the world but in ways that people still don't always appreciate. They did hundreds of different chair designs. They're still in production. They did some of the first music videos ever. They made a film called Powers of Ten. And that's basically what Google Earth is except for you can do it everywhere. For Charles and Ray, the purpose of design was to make a difference in a way. So Charles and Ray were very intimately part of the whole experience of Arts and Architecture magazine until like the late 40s. Charles was on the editorial board. Ray designed many beautiful covers. Both of them contributed articles. It was where some of the first articles about Eames' furniture appeared. Charles said Antenza is a really amazing guy. He's one of the few people really fighting for the cause out here. And the cause in this sense was sort of the larger idea of what design architecture can be. It was a community of people who were passionate about these new ideas. And Arts and Architecture magazine became a lifeline to a bright future. John Antenza was also very socially and politically progressive. And you see a really wide range of topics addressed from this very progressive, socially expansive point of view. During the Depression years, there was not a lot of building being done. Things were expensive. There became a lack of affordable housing. And then of course, once World War II began, everything was diverted toward assisting the war effort. So a pent-up demand for housing developed. And many architects and people like John Antenza began to think about what they could do in the aftermath of World War II. During the war years, Antenza wrote a number of opinion pieces in Arts and Architecture magazine about this. There were texts about prefabrication. There were writings about what was the post-war house. What would that mean? What would it mean to live differently? Or what could it mean to live differently in the years after World War II? In America, people started saying, well, what are we going to do when all these GIs come back? And how are we going to house them? This whole relationship went from a world where nobody could really afford to build to four years later, millions of GIs are coming back. That's a pretty short time for such a radical transition. There was this understanding that there was a housing shortage that was going to happen. And Arts and Architecture, actually, in 1943, they did a competition for post-war housing. There were very prominent architects who collaborated or submitted projects for this 1943 competition. It was important for Antenza to have a pragmatic approach to these paper projects, in a way, and to give people an actual setting and forum to put their ideas forward. I think in that respect, he was very American, in that he envisioned an actual practical application of ideas that were being talked about during the late Depression and wartime years. There were a number of European precedents for the idea of building demonstration houses and showing them to the public or to potential builders. And such was the case with the Wiesenhof-Siedlung in Stuttgart, Germany, in the 1920s, which consisted of a number of houses or hausing. And the Wiesenhof-Siedlung brought together designs by a number of architects who were now well-known, but at that time were young and experimental, and presented ways of housing that were based on the incorporation of industrial prefabricated processes. All of this was meant to showcase a better way to live. Arts and Architecture magazine editor John Antenza, and a lot of interesting architects and designers affiliated with it, said, well, what if we asked smart architects to design structures with a hypothetical client in mind, but design it in as universal a way as possible? Because most opinion, both profound and lightheaded, in terms of post-war housing is nothing but speculation in the form of talk and reams of paper. It occurs to us that it might be a good idea to get down to cases and at least make a beginning in the gathering of the mass of material that must eventually result in what we know as house post-war. House post-war. Agreeing that the whole matter is surrounded by conditions over which few of us have any control. Certainly we can develop a point of view and do some organized thinking which might come to a practical end. It is with that in mind that we now announce the project we have called the Case Study House Program. The Case Study House Program. The house must be capable of duplication and in no sense be an individual performance. Every consideration will be given to new materials and new techniques in house construction. All eight houses will be open to the public for a period of six to eight weeks, and thereafter an attempt will be made to secure and report to see how successfully the job has been done. We hope it will be understood and accepted as a sincere attempt not merely to preview but to assist in giving some direction to the creative thinking in housing being done by good architects and good manufacturers whose joint objective is good housing. Good housing. In January 1945 when that was published, the war was still going on, hadn't ended yet, and nobody knew how soon anything would get back to normal and what would normal be. So I think it was right for Antenza to acknowledge that and signal that the results couldn't be entirely predicted, but he was going to do what he could to map out a situation that could conceivably result in some kind of improvement and innovative thinking and approaches. When John Antenza launched the Case Study House Program, he invited eight architects to each take on a different Case Study House problem and to problem solve toward a solution. He gave each architect a number and each architect said about beginning their project. In the pages of the magazine, he reported on the status of a new case study design and his idea was to chronicle each design as it evolved, as it was eventually built. Every month they published a new or two new projects and there were some incredibly interesting, really out there proposals. I mean, Rolf Rapson's Greenbelt House is this really beautiful idea of a house that was built around a large garden and there's a fantastic rendering of the father coming home by helicopter and so he's looking down on his house. Or the project that Whitney Smith did where he proposed a covered outdoor space in the centre as the living room with these sort of pavilions docked onto that which would contain bedrooms. I mean, this is such an interesting concept in particular for a house in this climate. A kind of futuristic thinking was part of what some of the early case study architects had in mind. Some of them were so visionary that they never actually found clients to undertake even a version. Some of the first eight houses were not built. Because of all of the uncertainties in the immediate aftermath of World War II, things lagged and there was quite a delay in getting many of these or any of these projects off the ground. There were shortages of building materials. There were delays in the availability of construction materials. That's why the numbering system got off because they thought it would be just one house a year. But you see, they'd plan a house and then the owner would decide that, you know, with rising costs not to go ahead. So that didn't work, just numbering by the year. In most cases, though, the house wouldn't be finished in time and so it would have to be renumbered or it would throw the numbering system out. The early houses in the program were of a wide variety. Each architect desired to use materials that were new or developed through industrial processes. But it was really difficult to achieve. For instance, steel was very difficult to come by. So many of the architects ended up using wood for their designs and they ended up using a somewhat more traditional or conventional sort of post and beam framing system or a panel system, just because it was simpler and more pragmatic. Case study house number 18 was originally designed by Rodney Walker. Rodney was the bohemian of the group. He was the most independent. Interestingly, three of his houses were actually part of the case study program. I think the reason for that is that he was really utilizing materials that were the most cost-effective and he was concerned with building the property really from the ground up. So he would grade the site, he would design the house, and he would oversee building it as well. And that resulted in efficiencies which I think were attracted to Intensa. This house, its exterior is done and scored plywood, a very interesting and unique material for the time period. These houses have their own personalities because they were each built for a specific period, for a specific person, or for a demonstration such as this. Each work of architecture to live in it today requires certain compromises. And it's a small house. In the case study house program, the model is the single-family house. The single-family house in its own little garden. There were a number of different client scenarios that were proposed by the architects and they were all different. Most of the houses did end up being one-offs for the particular clients and for particular sites where they were built. The Charles and Ray Eames house is an interesting example. In the case of Charles and Ray, the hypothetical client was a working couple with grown children because our mother was already away at college and so that's who they were designing for. It described them, but there are other people on the planet who are working couples who have grown children. Intensa purchased a plot of land in Pacific Palisades on a bluff overlooking the ocean. John Intensa's idea was to purchase this bluff so that multiple case study houses could be built here. So it would serve as an incubator. Intensa decided it was crazy to do this whole program and not get a house for himself and that's where case study house number nine came from. Their original plan for this house was to build a bridge house that was kind of conventionally spectacular, emphasize the access to the view and really make a statement. And then they realized they were doing what architects very often do, which is to find a beautiful site and destroy it with the building. Charles and Ray decided that they really thought what was important was to look at the idea of a structure, to think about how you could use materials that were off the shelf that didn't need to be really adapted to build their home. And we're sitting in an example that was really the first one to really be thinking that way. They used this existing system that was commonly used in industrial buildings. In the design, they'd use all off the shelf available stock parts, including exposed steel decking and factory sash windows, things that were commonplace in the building of a factory, but were quite foreign to the building of residential architecture. Through the skillful way in which the components were combined to enclose the greatest amount of space possible, yielding a double height pavilion-like structure, they were able to have the armature for an environment in which they could live and work seamlessly. For them, life and work all kind of blended into one. So their idea was to have living quarters and then a studio space in close proximity. An important concept for Charles and Ray was this idea of designing the best for the most for the least. And that's a really great quote because it really applies obviously to their furniture. But Charles and Ray also felt this house was a continuation of that idea. The statement, the best for the most for the least is a really wonderful example of how the case study architects were thinking at that time. But the early years of the program were a bit of a struggle in that respect. And it wasn't really until the Charles and Ray Eames house that the true promise of the program began to be realized. When the earliest houses were built, Intenso felt that if people weren't able to actually see and experience these homes, they wouldn't know all the benefits that come along with living in a modern house. Apparently, there were more than 300,000 people that toured some of the early case study houses when they were opened up. And they were only open on weekends for a limited period of time. In the late 40s, in a six-month period, 368,000. I mean, I think the population of LA was like a million at that time. That's not an elitist experience. Intenso was very savvy in how he set about promoting the case study houses in the pages of the magazine. He chose not just to feature the designs by each architect, but he also really wanted to make a full-blown case for all aspects of modernism. Interspersed between the various essays on numerous topics were a number of advertisements. The advertisements in arts and architecture are really striking to look at because they cover a broad range of products. What's great about having a case study house is there's no guesswork because everything's documented. Who supplied the steel doors? Who supplied the light fixtures? Who supplied the tiles? Because everyone that supplied the materials wanted credit in the magazine, so it's cool to find out who made anything in this house. In connection with the case study house program, there were a number of furnishings, fixtures, building materials, all kinds of elements that could be included in the interior of a home or as part of its construction. The kitchens of these houses, for instance, were to be fitted with the most up-to-date objects and appliances that would be labor-saving for the inhabitants, that would really help people on the path to a new way of living in the post-war era, which has also sometimes been talked about as the era of the servantless house. And this was all made possible in part through the way the houses were designed to be sort of more open in plan, to be more simple, and to have these kinds of features and fittings and products and objects that made living in the houses easier. When I moved in, the oven was like a 70s, 80s oven, and because of arts and architecture, I was able to find out exactly the model of the oven, and we had it refurbished, and I put it in. Once that oven went in the kitchen, I was like, oh, so much better. If you were restoring a Ferrari from the 50s, would you go and put new modern 22-inch wheels on it? Like, it would look ridiculous. Part of Intenza's approach with the Case Study House program was to invite manufacturers to have their designs publicized in exchange for what was called a merit-specified arrangement, so that their products would be used in the houses in exchange for a discounted rate, which would make the houses more economical to be constructed and built. When it came to the Case Study House program, my parents didn't know anything about it, so when it was presented to them, and Pierre said, I can get you into this, and you're going to have some cost benefits to it, my dad was all ears. They struggled to get this place built. If it wasn't for the Case Study program, I don't know if they would have been able to do it, because the steel was all donated at cost. If you had to pay full price, I don't know if they could have got it done. My parents bought this lot with a $100 bill and a handshake. They would come up here on weekends and work on the lot, get it graded, because my parents couldn't afford to hire people to do that. My dad shorted up by visiting construction sites all around Los Angeles in his convertible, and he would load up concrete blocks in his car and drive them up to the house, and then he spent probably two and a half, almost three years, laying that concrete all around the perimeter. But it ended up giving him more buildable space by doing so. He basically said that, I want to be able to stand in the living room and look at my view with only turning my head. I don't want anything obstructing it. I don't want walls. I want glass. They ended up having three different architects come up. Some of the architects that came up were building with wood still. So they're looking at that going, you cannot build in wood and put this size glass in the house. It won't work. We can't build it. Wood will never support it. They were kind of feeling down. It's like, no one wants to build this. This is our dream house. We want to raise our family here. So my mom was looking through the Herald-Examiner, and she came across an article on Pierre Koenig, where he was building with steel and glass. And so they contacted Pierre, and Pierre came up, and he was just a young guy, but he was so gung-ho. He was a renegade, just like my father. And he came up here and said, we could do this. The next step was to get funding to build the house, and they kept getting turned down because no one wanted to finance anything up here in the hills. Thought it was too dangerous. The engineering technology that we have today wasn't around then. They were using technology built for flatland versus hillsides. It cropped up a few problems, pools sliding down hills, mountains giving way. So Pierre decided that, I'm going to see if I can find somebody. And sure enough, he found a bank called Broadway Federal Savings and Loan. It's a Black-owned bank. And they're the only ones that said, yes, I'll fund it. What was so interesting is that at the time, the HOAs up here said that people of color can't live up here. But here's a bank that's Black-owned, willing to fund a white couple's dream house. I just find that amazing. The architect, Paul Williams, is actually on the board. And I think that he had something to do with the funding on that. The house, from start to finish, took a year. The framing of all the steel went up in a single day with three guys, I think. Structurally, it's held up the test of time pretty well. Companies like Bethlehem Steel and Glass Company, they all got ads in Arts and Architecture magazine. So the companies benefited. Pierre blurred the lines of indoor-outdoor living. The house is 2,300 square feet, but when you consider the courtyard, the pool area, which is an extension of the house, it becomes a much bigger place. The ability to be inside-outside at the same time is amazing. To be able to open a sliding door and have the inside and the outside right there, it just blends at that point. And I just love that. All of these houses were incredibly sexy. It was not just an architecture that was being promoted. It was a lifestyle. And it had to do with being in Southern California. It's always nice weather. You have a swimming pool. And they were photographed, most of them by Julius Schulman, in a way that was all about people wanted to live like that. And Schulman was very much part of the whole apparatus of kind of promoting the case study program and making this known to the rest of the world. And he, unlike many other photographers, always insisted on having people in the photographs. He wanted to show the houses as environments that were lived in and give people an idea of how they were used. And it was a way to also bring scale to the photographs. Before they opened the house to the touring that had to be done through the case study house program, Julius Schulman came up to start taking pictures of the house. All the photos you see of the house were all taken in one day and one night. I had been setting up the camera inside the living room. I walked outside, just curious to see what the house looked like. The girls were sitting in there. I suddenly saw this composition. So I ran to the house and said, let's go bring the camera out here quickly. We got a much better composition. My assistant set the lights, replaced them with flashbulbs. Then I called to them, you'll be sitting in the dark, so keep talking if you want to. I let all the flashbulbs go off at one time. That's it. I mean, that's like a masterpiece image. Julius made the house famous. He once said, I didn't capture a real estate shot. I captured a mood, a moment, a feeling. And I think that's why it's so impactful because it spurs on people's imaginations. It was an amazing photo and it was sheer accident. The ironic thing is that photo never appeared in Arts and Architecture magazine. A lot of the other ones did, but that one did not. At the beginning, when the case study program was announced, it was all about building a very affordable house, building inexpensively, building a house that could be duplicated. In reality, that was pretty difficult to achieve. And most of the houses did end up being one-offs or singular examples for the particular clients and for particular sites where they were built. There's only one house that was duplicated. That's a J.R. Davidson house. Later, there were a few examples of multi-unit projects like the A. Quincy Jones. It was supposed to be, I think, 200 units or the Killingsworth Triad. Tony Amatea, the builder, who was a dear friend of John Atanzas, owned 80 lots on Mount Soledad. He asked John if he would be interested in doing a case study house in La Jolla. John said, absolutely. They sat outside in the dirt trying to decide which of the lots would work. And I know this is absolutely true because Tony told me this story more than once. They got blind drunk on really cheap red wine and they couldn't choose a lot, so they would do three, and that's how it became the Triad. It's a great house. It really is. Works well. Human engineering-wise, it's well put together. We can walk from one room to the other and have literally glass everywhere. And what we put outside is important. So it's not just the house. It's what's outside. The outside, inside working together. Joseph did a lot of entertaining. It would not be unusual for him to call me at three o'clock in the afternoon and tell me that he was bringing a half a dozen people home for dinner. We always had large Christmas open houses and his birthday celebrations were gigantic. The house is good for entertaining. It really, really is. Just open everything up and use the entire space. What John Antenza was doing with that magazine was extraordinary. I think it made an incredible difference with architecture and not even with architecture, but with the art of living. Each of the houses is slightly different. This house, house C, is the smallest. The one across the street is the largest. And I think in many ways, probably the more traditional in the way it's laid out. The one across the driveway, house B, I think would be difficult to live in the way that it's laid out. Many years ago, we agreed with each other that this one was the one that worked. The house C, I've always been sort of astonished that the house was not picked up by a developer, the plan, because it's such a simple plan and it works so well and it would work so well in the development. Antenza really did want all the houses to be replicable. He wanted to influence the building industry and he desired to see tracts of K-City houses instead of the conventionally built tracts that proliferated across the United States. Most of the houses from the program are in LA and this is the only one in Northern California. It was early 60s, this neighborhood didn't exist. People were moving outside of San Francisco, starting to commute into the city for work and this neighborhood was the product of that. My dad was a captain with TWA in the early pioneering days of the jet age and my mother was an air hostess and the two of them decided they wanted to move out to this area and then they heard about this house being built and they were very drawn to that. The idea of using steel was really intriguing to my father. I think my father and my mother both really appreciated what steel could do for a home and there was kind of a lot of talk about the future homes being steel and it was kind of a really magical time in history. Living in a house like this, it opened you up to a kind of a different way of thinking. It really helped me to understand the idea of not limiting yourself. What distinguishes this case study house was that they wanted to explore how you can build on a hill. California has a lot of hillsides. Builders don't really like it because it's very expensive to build foundation, excavation, etc. So the developers in partnership with Bethlehem Steel tried to show how you could use steel to build residential spaces. They used only a few foundations here along the hillside and then used prefabricated steel with a long span up to 28 feet. So they could really have this big open floor plan that we can see here now and this was the entire structure. So all the other things that you see like windows, doors, walls, partitions, they're not really structural. So you could reconfigure the house if needed. The architect Beverly Thorne, he was quite interested to try out different things. What you actually see that makes the floors and the roof is really a special construction. You have basically these two by fours put on edge that are spanning between our steel beams because you cannot have a normal plywood floor because 10 foot is too far for it. And we love them a lot. We have them in all of the rooms and gives a wonderful atmosphere that really contrasts very well with a relatively technical steel. I remember walking into the house and then after checking it out, standing here and saying like, I think this is the coolest house we've ever been to. You realize it's more than just a house. It has really the history, which is interesting that they really try to build something that could be modeled for other houses, other developments. And you see them now, if you look nowadays to modern houses, you see some of the elements that have been tried out here 60 years ago. We know it's not a house like any other one. As the program developed over time and architects were able to use industrially derived components such as steel, it became a challenge because there were not that many workmen trained in how to work with steel and developers found that it was cheaper to continue to build housing using conventional construction techniques, which primarily consisted of wood framing. And there was also the fact that many members of the public preferred conventionally appearing houses. This was a popular perception at the time. You know, you have to be careful with those people that live in houses with flat roofs. They're communists. So the liberal bent for these houses gave them a bad rap. The areas like Wonderland Park or Grey Green social housing did espouse liberal ideas, which have become to be completely accepted nowadays. But back in the 50s, it was taboo. I think also the large track builders having in-house designers became common after the 60s and 70s. And they went with the period revival revivals on the cheap. Unfortunately, there's too much of that. And it doesn't give you the life and the freedom that these houses do. And Tenza eventually decided to leave LA and take a job in Chicago as the head of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. And he decided that, you know, he wanted to shift gears at that point in his career. And he may have felt his job was done or he may have just felt tired about what was happening. He had put a lot of his own money into the magazine and he was able to keep it afloat for a long time. When he turned it over to David Travers, who continued the direction of the magazine and continued the program, it stayed quite the same. But it wasn't too much longer that the magazine lasted after Tenza left. I think that one has to make a little bit of distinction between what the case study house program said it wanted to do and what it actually did. Certainly some of the better known case study houses were beautifully crafted individual buildings. And they were not necessarily less expensive than other houses that were built at the time. But maybe even more important was the aesthetic agenda that was being pushed. It was about sort of introducing modernism to Southern California and also introducing Southern California design to the rest of the world. My very favorite statement by Esther McCoy about Arts and Architecture Magazine is when she described it as a magazine as flat as a tortilla and as sleek as a Bugatti without financial backing and minimal advertising. Became the greatest force in the dissemination of information about California. And I think that is a beautiful statement because that really does say it all about a slender magazine that had this outsized impact. Esther McCoy is an extremely important figure in the history of Los Angeles mid-century modern architecture. She worked for a while as a draftsman in the office of architect R.M. Schindler. She was also a very good writer and she began to become a kind of spokesperson for modernism. Esther McCoy really was the first to say, hey, remember there was a case study program. She ended up writing the first book on the case study houses. It was called Modern California Houses and it was the first publication that actually laid out the case study house program as a kind of concrete identity other than Arts and Architecture Magazine. I was really lucky. I had Esther McCoy as a mentor. It was always my dream to be involved in architectural publishing and journalism. So she said, well, you should revive Arts and Architecture and I'll introduce you to David Travers. I published a revival of Arts and Architecture Magazine from 1980 to 1985. Doing that was kind of a dream come true for me. David Travers, he hadn't published it in quite a while because it stopped in 1967. It had been like 12 years since he published it. He asked Esther and me to put together a guide to modern architecture in the United States and then she encouraged him to let me use the name Arts and Architecture. Putting the magazine together was a lot of fun. We did it as themed issues. The first one was about California. The second one was about Texas. We did one on landscape. We were looking at postmodern architecture in the 80s. It's really funny because when I was publishing Arts and Architecture, I had been a juror on the design for the San Juan Capistrano Library. The library had been built by the time that John Intenza moved to La Jolla and Esther and I took him to see it and he hated it because it was so different than modernism but that's what people were doing in the 80s. There were a lot of experiments going on. I mean, I'm sure that John didn't like Frank Gehry's work either. Anyway, we never made any money on it. I didn't know anything about business but it was fun while it lasted. In 1989, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles unveiled an exhibition about the Case Study House program. It was called Blueprints for Modern Living, History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses. This was about 20 years after the last of the Case Study Houses had been built. So in that intervening 20 years, a lot had changed. Architectural tastes had moved on. Modernism had been replaced by postmodernism. I was asked to be the curator of that exhibition and I had the ability to meet and talk with people like Esther McCoy, who was part of our advisory team for the project and crystallize ideas for how an exhibition could best communicate about these houses to the visiting public of our time. I think none of us had any idea that the exhibition would end up becoming so impactful and contributing in the way that it did to a kind of renaissance of modernism that continues to grow and flower. I also find it to be extremely important that many of the buyers and owners of these houses now care for them and want to keep them restored in a way that is respectful of their architectural origins. To me, these homes are just as important as a Picasso painting or anything that's like a fine piece of art, and there's only so many of them. So many houses get destroyed. Someone buys a house and like, oh, we're going to put a modern kitchen in it or even a modern stove. There's so much beauty in the original things in these houses, and so if they all get remodeled, there's going to be no original examples of these homes anymore. Craig Elwood did three case study houses. One of them was remodeled and turned into a Spanish house, and the other one was remodeled and turned into a John Wolfe house like 15 years after it was built. So this is the only case study house by Craig Elwood that's still around. It needs to continue on. We were very, very lucky that the house only had one owner who understood the value of the house, so they took extremely good care of it. We want to follow in this stewardship and keep as much original as possible. So for instance, we restored a 1962 intercom that we can use to communicate between the different rooms in the building. This house really hasn't evolved too much, and the closer we can get it to day one when it was built, the better. We still got rabbit ears on the roof for a television. They're not used, but I think it's part of the house now. Maintaining any house is a job, especially when it's a house that was built using, in part, experimental materials. There's no way of being able to tell how long that material will last, how it will fail, how you could repair it, or whether you could repair it. And it's important because one of the things that delighted Charles and Ray were these textures, those surprises that Charles would refer to, the surprises of the reflections in the shadows. And I love that understanding that many visitors today arrive at when they visit this house, and they go, oh. What we want, we call the 250-year plan. We want in 250 years, when you come here, you can have this rich experience. Our mom used to say that this is three-dimensional source material at the Eames house, that people, whether they look in it or walk in it or whatever, they're learning. I actually will sit in on some tours just to catch people's expressions and emotions when they come through the door. And if you've never seen it before in person, then it does hit you pretty hard. And that's why my sister and I have been running these tours since 2009, because we want people to see it. It'd be a crime to close this place up. And that's the way we're kind of carrying on my mom's legacy. She was willing to open that door over there to anybody that was willing to knock on it. We need to promote modern architecture more. I think it's still a very great architecture that could be built today. And anyone interested to see it, we're always happy to share it. And I think that's part of the real lesson with what they were trying to do in the first place, was show us what housing and living could be like. But it's also the idea that we need to keep them so we still learn from them over time. And hopefully everyone continues to appreciate them, protect them, preserve them as time goes on. Architecture magazine should have a conscience. And one of the things that's really interesting about what Ntenza did with arts and architecture was talking about the way that people lived and the way that they should live. He was actually wanting to directly intervene and influence by doing the Case Study House program. And that was kind of radical. It would be radical today, quite honestly. I think the program, if you just look at on face value, it didn't hit all of its marks. But it's undeniable in terms of what this program was espousing to do and what it did in its lasting legacy. I think the Case Study program opened a lot of people's eyes of what can be done. I mean, a steel glass house perched high above the city, one corner levitating over nothing. It's an imaginary thing that it only can be done on a drawing. But here's a living full-sized house that people live in. We have enormous challenges that we need to address as a society. Architects typically are good at problem solving. So that's where when we look at the challenges that we face today, I mean, how do we provide affordable housing for an exploding population? How do we provide public transportation in a city that is drowning in car traffic? How do we think of building in an environmentally sensitive way? These are challenges where we as architects have very much to contribute. What the Case Study program and its legacy remind us of is there's no substitute for doing. So they did 25 buildings. They did design 10 more. And when you design them and put them out in the world, you learn things that you can't possibly learn from a rendering. We have to be patient and willing to try things that may not work because we'll find some things that will work and we may not learn those lessons until those things are up for a few years. The Case Study program was a commitment by a lot of people and we should celebrate that and do more of it. This program was made possible in part by a grant from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture. The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and the National Endowment for the Arts.