Case Study Houses: The Complete CSH Program 1945-1966. . - Reviews: Editorial Input - book review

Architectural Review, The, April, 2003 by Barbara Lamprecht

By Elizabeth A. T. Smith. Cologne: Taschen. 2002. [pounds sterling]100

John Entenza, founder of the Los Angeles-based Case Study House Program under his internationally influential Arts & Architecture magazine, was not English, but could have played a peculiar stereotype in the canon. Untanned and unfit, his default dark suit and tailored white shirt draped a tall, soft frame. His dry wit was more nuanced than US custom allowed; he was disinclined to suffer fools, in his case the inertia of American stick building culture. In any case, the magazine's influence was renowned in Europe and South America. It has been argued that in Britain, the 'High-Tech' style is in part the result of strong links to the Eames and to Entenza through figures such as structural engineer Frank Newby, architects John Winter and Peter and Alison Smithson and Ian McCallum (once executive editor of AR), all keenly receptive to the pared-down clarity, steel-and-glass aesthetic and hands-on curiosity of CSH architects. Perhaps the timing was perfect.

The seed was already here: coke smelting was invented in 1709, fuelling the Industrial Revolution; the iron-and-glass 1851 Crystal Palace enjoys matriarchal status in the Modernist pantheon; houses are smaller anyway. But on the other side of the ocean, what difference did the famous programme for experimental building, dwelling and thinking make? Despite continued efforts and stories on storage container/'pre-fab Modernist' housing featured in the New York Times or the live/work! mixed-use preached from the pages of Dwell and Metropolis, among other popular magazines, the single-family US house has grown from 1000 ft2 in 1950 to 2324 ft2 in 2002, Most residential framing uses details indistinguishable from those in 100-year-old carpenters' pattern books.

Case Study Houses: The Complete CSH Program 1945-1966 by Elizabeth A. T. Smith, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, is the third in Taschen's special jumbo series, 300 x 400 x 50mm. It is a good companion to the dense, compact Blueprints for Modern Living (MIT, 1999, 230 x 300 x 15mm), also edited by Smith, which contains gems of essays by authors such as the late Esther McCoy and Reyner Banham, both intimates of the people and of the programme. In contrast to the smaller book, however, the large book (with its helpful plastic cover) lushly renders each project in colour and in gorgeous black, sepia and white. Each project is illuminated through photographs (mainly by Julius Shulman, foremost documentarian of the period), sketches and the occasional working drawing. Each entry also includes contemporary excerpts from the pertinent Arts & Architecture issue, with a small inset of the cover. (These covers alone are strokes of graphic genius; their inclusion sharpens the magazine's lively d ialogue between two and three dimensions and between text and image.)

But this book's aim is not to provide cultural context or criticism but to provide generous access to images and let them do the talking. It is a kind of reading that invites poring over the visual to ponder spatial and material decisions. While the taut translucent modules of Craig Ell-wood and Pierre Koenig may be instantly familiar, their cool interiors enhanced by flawless Audrey-Hepburn types, the unbuilt work of Ralph Rapson delights. His sketches ask rest-less, exuberant questions; his unbuilt 1945 CSH#4, with its painted canvas walls, looks like a Glenn Murcutt house whose walls are pulled apart to slip in a greenbelt garden. Rapson's human figures have the kind of carefree dementia found in the underground comic work of R. Crumb, with slump-breasted suburban matrons wearing shades indoors or skinny punkers with hair rollers, improbably pulling carrots in the garden as a commuter helicopter whirls above. Then there is the subversive gravitas of Whitney R. Smith, seen in his use of glass amid strong, e arthy materials la nineteenth-century H. H. Richardson, in CSH#5, also unbuilt and also from 1945. At first glance the work looks sober enough, but watch. Like Mies van der Rohe's sombre 'Brick Country House' of 1923, Smith pulls walls apart to elongate space. Here, four free-standing volumes -- of adobe on a steel frame -- are only connected by a roofed garden, brick floors flowing freely in and out. Conventional doors and halls are eliminated. Every relationship, every function, down to the position of the bathtub vis-a-vis the lavatory and garden privacy, is reconsidered.

Given the programme's goals, it would have been helpful (if not an impossible task) to include the proposed or actual cost of the house, its square footage, and a wall section for each project. Addresses of built projects and a handy map are included, though the cursory index inexplicably uses first names to begin an entry.

Entenza chose his own men and, as Julius Shulman writes tartly in the epilogue, the editor did not include Rudolf Schindler (presumably because any CSH house must 'be capable of duplication and in no sense be an individual performance', (as Entenza wrote in his 1945 programme introduction). Also not included were Gregory Ain, who really did accomplish low-cost radical housing in Los Angeles, or Harwell Hamilton Harris, apparently doomed because he pitched his roofs even though he designed a superb house for Entenza. Harris and Ain, as did many of the CSH architects, went on to become influential architectural educators.