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EAMES HOUSE HABS CA-2903 (Case Study House 8) HABS CA-2903 203 Chautauqua Boulevard Los Angeles Los Angeles County California WRITTEN HISTORICAL AND DESCRIPTIVE DATA REDUCED COPIES OF MEASURED DRAWINGS FIELD RECORDS HISTORIC AMERICAN BUILDINGS SURVEY National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior 1849 C Street NW Washington, DC 20240-0001 EAMES HOUSE HABS No. CA-2903 (Page 1) HISTORIC AMERICAN BUILDINGS SURVEY EAMES HOUSE (CASE STUDY HOUSE 8) HABS NO. CA-2903 Location: 203 Chautauqua Boulevard Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, California The Eames House (Case Study House 8) is the mid-twentieth-century residence and studio of designers Charles (1907–1978) and Ray Eames (1912–1988), and part of the Case Study House program promoted by Arts & Architecture magazine. The house is the focus of an irregularly shaped 1.4-acre property that occupies a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Pacific Palisades, California. The property is bounded to the west by the Corona del Mar road corridor, to the north and east by other residential properties, and to the south by the bluff and Chautauqua Boulevard. The house is reached via a paved driveway that is entered from Chautauqua Boulevard. Three other residential properties that include structures also built for the Case Study House program share this driveway. Universal Transverse Mercator Coordinates: Zone 11 Easting 0359702 Northing 3766513 Present Owner: Charles and Ray Eames House Preservation Foundation, Inc. 203 Chautauqua Boulevard Pacific Palisades, California Present Occupant: Charles and Ray Eames House Preservation Foundation, Inc. Present Use: Museum and foundation offices Significance: The Eames House is significant as an exemplary and influential example of post- World War II modern architecture and for its association with the lives of notable designers and residents Charles and Ray Eames. The Eameses were prolific artists who played a formative role in design and popular culture during the mid- twentieth century. Perhaps best known for their molded plywood chairs and other furniture, they also worked in experimental and educational film production, graphic and industrial design, and architecture. The Eames House is one of the best-known examples of American postwar modern residential design. It embodied the objectives of the Case Study House program, which sought to explore how the products of industrial mass production could be applied to postwar housing, and would prove highly influential in residential design during the 1950s. At the same time, the house was a remarkably personal structure. With the large, two-story living room as its focal point, the residence was a showcase of the Eameses’ tastes and design priorities. EAMES HOUSE HABS No. CA-2903 (Page 2) Their collection of vernacular art and craft objects contrasted with the setting of a high modern interior marked by a sparse austerity. The house served as a promotional tool for their practice, a public representation of their personalities, a setting for their films, and a backdrop for photo shoots featuring their furniture, toys, and other designs. The subject of innumerable magazine profiles, the house and studio provided a home base for the couple’s myriad talents and interests. The house has won numerous accolades since its construction. In 1977, the American Institute of Architects bestowed upon the house its Twenty-Five Year Award. The AIA Southern California Chapter listed three factors contributing to their nomination of the house for this award: its status as the most beautiful and least altered of the Case Study houses; its integration of landscape features, such as the meadow site overlooking Santa Monica Canyon and the Pacific Ocean into the site design; and its combination of industrial assembly with a rich variety of interior spaces and collection of objects. In the mid-1940s, Charles and Ray Eames purchased a grassy lot on a bluff in Pacific Palisades from the editor of Arts & Architecture magazine, John Entenza. The house they planned to build was to be part of an initiative promoted by the magazine to encourage the development of well-designed, low-cost housing prototypes. The Case Study House program, as it was known, would result in the construction of twenty-six examples of modern residential architecture designed by renowned architects such as Richard Neutra, Pierre Koenig, and Raphael Soriano, among others, between the mid-1940s and the early 1960s. An initial design for the Eames House, developed in 1945 as a collaboration of Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen, featured a steel-framed rectangular box cantilevered perpendicularly across the site. The plan was later reworked so that the residence, a smaller detached studio, and an open paved court were aligned on a concrete pad set into the hillside, beside a concrete retaining wall, rather than extending from it. Rotating the structure parallel to the lot preserved much of the meadow that occupied the center of the site, as well as an existing row of eucalyptus trees.1 Construction on the house began in January 1949 and was completed by the end of the year. The structure featured a steel framework of 4-inch columns and 12- inch open web steel joists. Off-the-shelf industrial steel window and wall components were customized where necessary, assembled, and attached to the frame to enclose the space. Operable and fixed window frames (some glazed and 1 The developer and conservationist Abbot Kinney (1850–1920) was responsible for planting many eucalyptus in the area during the late nineteenth century, although it is not known whether the trees present on the Eames House site are associated with his efforts. With a fortune earned in the cigarette industry, Kinney had moved to California in the 1870s and became involved in a number of conservation and arboreal projects. As chairman of the State Forestry Bureau, he saw much potential in the Australian native eucalyptus tree and was responsible for planting thousands of seedlings throughout the region. Kinney is best known as the developer of Venice, California, as an Italian- themed community on the edge of Los Angeles. Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 80. See also: Jared Farmer, Trees in Paradise: A California History (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2013), 134–137. EAMES HOUSE HABS No. CA-2903 (Page 3) others filled with cement board), sliding glass doors, and large projecting stucco over Ferrobord panels (some with exposed cross ties and turnbuckles) formed an exterior that was rectilinear yet varied and playful. Today, the exterior facade of the house continues to feature a mix of translucent glass panels as well as opaque blocks of primary red, blue, black, white, and “earth,” as conceived by the Eameses. A gold leaf panel denotes the main dwelling doorway; a large red panel denotes the sliding door of the studio entrance; windows are surrounded by steel H-columns painted black. Exposed steel decking forms the second floor loft, ceiling/roof, and exterior cladding on the west elevation. On the inside, expanses of glass and sliding doors provide open views and easy access to the patios and the landscape beyond. The branches of overhanging eucalyptus trees filter and pattern the light thrown on interior walls and floors. PART I. HISTORICAL INFORMATION A. Physical History: 1. Date of construction: 1949 Initial construction of the Eames House was first reported in January 1949 in Arts & Architecture magazine. Subsequent issues over the course of the year charted the house’s development in textual descriptions and photographs. The February issue showed the finished concrete slab and the concrete retaining wall with the forms still in place. The following month, photos depicted the assembled steel columns and open web joists. A team of five laborers erected the steel structural system in one and one- half days. The April issue included a single image of the house with roof and floor decking complete, and the first of the projecting steel window units installed. According to the magazine, the roof was completed in three days by one laborer. The magazine’s December issue showed the house essentially complete and sparsely decorated. The owners moved in on December 24, 1949. 2. Architects: Charles Eames and Ray Eames; Consulting Architect: Kenneth Acker The first (1945) design for the site is attributed to Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen, with Edgardo Contini serving as a structural consultant. Eames and Saarinen had met and collaborated on a series of furniture projects around 1940, when Eames studied and then taught at Cranbrook Academy of Art outside Detroit, Michigan, under Saarinen’s father, Eliel. The 1945 project was to be one of two houses the pair designed for adjacent lots on a meadow owned by John Entenza in Pacific Palisades. These would become Case Study House 8 (the Eames House) and Case Study House 9 (the Entenza House) The original Eames House scheme, a rectilinear steel and glass “Bridge House” extending out over the meadow, was changed radically in 1948 before construction began.2 A revised design (apparently developed without Saarinen’s involvement) rotated the main structure 90 degrees to align it with the meadow, and set the lower floor of both structures partially into the western hillside. While this second design was 2 Multiple sources attribute the change to a trip to New York City by Charles Eames in 1947, during which he saw the similarity between his design and an earlier (1934) unbuilt design by Mies van der Rohe at the Museum of Modern Art. EAMES HOUSE HABS No. CA-2903 (Page 4) originally attributed to Charles Eames alone, more recent scholarship acknowledges the essential role Ray Eames played in developing the house for which she was co-client and co-occupant. Because neither was a licensed architect, they relied on Kenneth Acker to draft and sign construction drawings.

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