BLUEPRINTS FOR MODERN LIVING
HISTORY AND LEGACY OF THE CASE STUDY HOUSES
Elizabeth A. T. Smith [Editor]
Cambridge: MIT Press, copublished with The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1998. First MIT Press paperback edition. Oblong quarto. Photo illustrated wrappers. 256 pp. 384 photographs, drawings, plans, and scale models. Book design by Lorraine Wild. Interior unmarked and clean. Out of print. Uncoated wrappers slightly dust spotted and a small scrap to front panel [see scan], but a very good copy.
9.75 x 12 softcover book with 256 pages and 384 photographs, drawings, plans, and scale models. Includes essays by Esther McCoy, Thomas S. Hines, Helen Searing, Kevin Starr, Elizabeth A. T. Smith, Thomas Hine, Reyner Banham, and Dolores Hayden. In addition to the eight main essays, the book, which was based on a 1989-1990 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, contains entries by the exhibition curator, Elizabeth A. T. Smith, and research assistant Amelia Jones on the thirty-six Case Study projects, documentation of six projects commissioned by MOCA, biographies of the thirty architects involved in the program, and a wealth of photographs, drawings, plans, and scale models.
Includes work by all the architects associated with the CSH program, as well as Alvin Lustig, Ray Eames, R. Buckminster Fuller, Margaret de Patta, John Follis, Rex Goode, Bernard Rosenthal, Jan de Swart, Hendrik Van Keppel, Taylor Green, Greta Magnusson Grossman, Gertrud and Otto Natzler, John McLaughlin, Peter Krasnow, Claire Falkenstein, Ruth Asawa, Herbert Matter, Konrad Wachsmann and Walter GRopius, Marcel Breuer, Gregory Ain, Kem Weber, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and pretty much everybody else.
The CSH program consisted of thirty-six experimental prototypes designed, and the majority built, between 1945 and 1966. The architects and the magazine shared a commitment to experimenting with materials and techniques, rationalizing plan and construction and integrating house, furnishings, and landscape into a coherent whole. Yet a number of the essayists in this book suggest that what made the houses distinctive and influential was not so much their International-Style modernism, but how that style was domesticated and scaled to the single-family home - and how it forecast what is now called the California lifestyle. Entries documenting each of the Case Study projects and many previously unpublished photographs by such well-known photographers as Julius Shulman and Marvin Rand are included.
The legacy of the Case Study House program is then addressed by six contemporary architects who were commissioned by The Museum of Contemporary Art to execute new designs for a decidedly different present. The book includes drawings, plans, and photographs of projects by Itsuko Hasegawa, Craig Hodgetts, Toyo Ito Robert Mangurian, Eric Owen Moss, and Adele Naudé Santos, along with their statements about the work.
Southern California's Case Study houses constitute an essential chapter in the history of modern architecture in America. This book documents Arts & Architecture magazine's sponsorship of some of the most important architects of the region and the generation - Thornton M. Abell, Conrad Buff III, Calvin C. Straub, Donald C. Hensman, Charles Eames, Eero Saarinen, J. R. Davidson, A. Quincy Jones, Frederick E. Emmons, Don R. Knorr, Edward A. Killingsworth, Jules Brady, Waugh Smith, Pierre Koenig, Kemper Nomland, Kemper Nomland Jr., Richard Neutra, Ralph Rapson, Raphael S. Soriano, Whitney R. Smith, Sumner Spaulding, John Rex, Rodney Walker, William Wilson Wurster, Theodore C. Bernardi, and Craig Ellwood - reflecting an unprecedented commitment to reinventing the house as a way of redefining living.
The program's chief motivating force was Arts & Architecture editor John Entenza, a champion of modernism who had all the right connections to attract some of architecture's greatest talents. Highly experimental, the program generated houses that were designed to re-define the modern home, and thus had a pronounced influence on architecture - American and international - both during the program's existence and even to this day.
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.