ARTS AND ARCHITECTURE
December 1949
John Entenza [Editor]
John Entenza [Editor]: ARTS AND ARCHITECTURE. Los Angeles: John D. Entenza, Volume 66, No. 12, December 1949. Slim quarto. Stapled printed wrappers. 54 pp. Illustrated text and articles. Classic photomontage cover by John Follis and Pefley.Wrappers lightly worn and soiled. Mailing label to rear panel. A very good copy.
9.75 x 12.75 vintage magazine with 54 pages of editorial content and advertisements from leading purveyors of West Coast mid-century modernism, circa 1949. Staff photography by Julius Shulman. In terms of decor, there is none of that Chippendale jive here-- every residential interior is decked out in full midcentury glory.
- Pond Farm Workshops: work by Trude Guermoprez, Victor Ries, Gordon Herr, Marguerite Wildenhain, Claire Falkenstein, Frans Wildenhain, Lucien Bloch, And Stephen Dimitroff.
- Case Study House 1950, Raphael Soriano
- Case Study House No. 8, 1949, Charles Eames. 14 pages and 55 photographs and plans. Also includes some images of Case Study Houses No. 9 by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen.
- Art
- Music
- Notes In Passing
- And more.
The Eames House, Case Study House #8, was one of 25 homes built as part of The Case Study House Program. The program came into being in the mid-1940s and continued through the early 1960s, largely through the efforts of John Entenza, publisher of Arts and Architecture magazine. The magazine announced that it would be the clients for a series of architect-design homes to be built and furnished using materials and techniques derived from the experiences of the second World War and best suited to express man's life in the modern world. Each home built would be for a real or hypothetical client taking into considerations their particular housing needs.
Charles and Ray proposed that the home they designed would be for a married couple who were basically apartment dwellers working in design and graphic arts, and who wanted a home that would make no demands for itself, but would, instead serve as a background for as Charles would say, "life in work" with nature as a "shock absorber."
The first plan of their home, known as the Bridge House, was designed by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen in 1945. Because it used off-the-shelf parts ordered from catalogues, and the war had caused a shortage in materials delivery, the steel did not arrive until late 1948. By then, Charles and Ray had "fallen in love with the meadow," in Ray's words, and felt that the site required a different solution.
Charles and Ray then posed themselves a new problem: How to build a house with maximized volume with the same elements and not destroy the meadow. Using the same off-the-shelf parts, but ordering one extra steel beam, Charles and Ray re-configured the House. It is this design which was built and remains today.
Charles and Ray moved into the House on Christmas Eve, 1949, and lived here for the rest of their lives. The interior, its objects and its collections remain very much the way they were in Charles and Ray's lifetimes. The house they created offered them a space where work, play, life, and nature co-existed.
The House has now become something of an iconographic structure visited by people from around the world. The charm and appeal of the House is perhaps best explained in the words of Case Study House founder, John Entenza, who felt that the Eames House "represented an attempt to state an idea rather than a fixed architectural pattern."
Editorial Associates for Arts and Architecture included Herbert Matter and Charles Eames. Julius Shulman was the staff photographer. The Editorial Advisory Board included William Wilson Wurster, Richard neutra, Isamu Noguchi, eero Saarinen, Gardner Dailey, Sumner Spaulding, Mario Corbett, Esther McCoy, John Funk, Gregory Ain, George Nelson, Gyorgy Kepes, marcel Breuer, Raphael Soriano, Ray Eames, Garret Eckbo, Edgar Kaufman, Jr. and others luminaries of the mid-century modern movement.
In 1938, John Entenza joined California Arts and Architecture magazine as editor. By 1943, Entenza and his art director Alvin Lustig had completely overhauled the magazine and renamed it Arts and Architecture. Arts and Architecture championed all that was new in the arts, with special emphasis on emerging modernist architecture in Southern California.
One of the pivotal figures in the growth of modernism in California, Entenza's most lasting contribution was his sponsorship of the Case Study Houses project, which featured the works of architects Thornton Abell, Conrad Buff, Calvin Straub, Donald Hensman, Charles Eames, Eero Saarinen, J. R. Davidson, A. Quincy Jones, Frederick Emmons, Don Knorr, Edward Killinsworth, Jules Brady, Waugh Smith, Pierre Koenig, Kemper Nomland, Kemper Nomland Jr., Richard Neutra, Ralph Rapson, Raphael Soriano, Whitney Smith, Sumner Spaulding, John Rex, Rodney Walker, William Wilson Wurster, Theodore Bernardi and Craig Ellwood. Arts and Architecture also ran articles and interviews on artists and designers such as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, George Nakashima, George Nelson and many other groundbreakers.