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Donald Curtis 24 Cite Spring 1990 Citeations ed version of her introduction to the 1977 This touches directly on the ambiguous, reissue of the 1962 monograph Case equivocal nature of the Case Study Study Houses 1945-1962. It provides an Houses program. It failed to provide an overview of the origin of the program, its alternative model for mass housing but vicissitudes, and the architects, designs, succeeded as architectural production of and buildings that it involved. Banham a high order. The essays in this catalogue contrasts the orientations and altitudes of were to have provided the historical the most influential Case Study architects context in which this paradox developed, (Eames. Soriano, Ellwood, and Koenig) but too much evidence is either lacking or with those of the Team X generation in not entirely relevant. Basic data are not Great Britain and the long-term influence presented. One has no clear idea of the of the Californians, culminating in Renzo mechanics of the program and how they Piano's Meni! Collection museum. changed over lime. Similar efforts thai successfully brought innovative modern Thomas S. Hincs and Elizabeth A. T. design to the middle-class housing market Smith provide the most satisfactory his- are not examined, despite the fact thai torical essays. Mines outlines the modern such builders as Joseph Eichler did deliver antecedents to the Case Study Houses, entire communities of modern houses those houses built in the 1920s. 1930s, within the institutional system. And and 1940s in Los Angeles and surround- Eichler and his architects, Jones & ing communities by Schindler, Neulra. Emmons, were responsible for a Case Harris, Ain, and Soriano, emphasizing Study project. especially Neulra's role as pioneer, i nunc*) M<K'A anil (alil^trnia IVilyiet-hnic, Ptwiiimu promoter, and mentor (Neulra and his one- The architectural-historical context of the Rear patio. Case Study House no. 18, Craig Ellwood, architect, 1956-58. lime pupil Soriano both designed Case Case Study period is neglected. Even the Study houses). Miss Smith provides an obvious describing the three basic illuminating account of the vanguard chronological and stylistic phases of the cultural milieu of Los Angeles in the program (California modem, ihe Case 1940s and 1950s, which Enten/.a cham- Study style, and neoformalism) - is only pioned through Arts & Architecture. alluded to, never made explicit. Parallels A Long Good-bye that might relate the Los Angeles scene lo Kevin Starr's essay on the urban develop- that of other centers of architectural Blueprints for Modern Living: History ment of Los Angeles in the 1930s and activity in ihe U.S. are not drawn I lor and Legacy of the Case Study Houses 1940s is not merely unsatisfactory, it is instance, that Entenza used Arts & Archi- Los Angeles: The Museum of Contempo- irresponsible. His fatuous rhetorical style tecture and the Case Study program to rary Art and Cambridge: The MIT Press, fails to conceal the poverty of his research promote architects he admired much as 1989,256 pp.. illtts., $50 and his lack of interpretive insight. Starr Philip Johnson used - a n d still uses - the STUCCO-PLASTER diverges from his rap long enough to Museum of Modem An to do so). The Reviewed by Stephen Fox suggesi thai the evolution of the aircraft essays display little curiosity about Ameri- RESTORATION industry in southern California in the can architects who produced modern Blueprints for Modern Living is the 1940s exercised a persuasive fascination houses comparable in aims and techniques catalogue of an exhibition on the Case on a number of the Case Study architects. lo the Case Study houses outside Los FINELY CRAFTED Study Houses, a program invented by But he fails to pursue this notion and Angeles (such Tcxans as John York of John Entenza while he was publisher and instead lapses back into hype, leaving his Harlingen and Milton Ryan of San ARCHITECTURAL editor of the Los Angeles magazine Arts crucial subject virtually unaddressed. Antonio among them, to say nothing of CAST STONE & Architecture. In 1945 Entcnza an- the Phoenix architect Alfred N. Beadle, nounced that Arts & Architecture would Three other essays - by Helen Searing who was himself a Case Study architect). sponsor the construction of nine houses on demonstration dwellings of modern Such omissions make the Case Study SANTA FE FIREPLACES designed for medium-income families. design. Thomas Hine on post-World War houses seem more isolated and excep- His desire was to promote modern archi- II mass housing in the United Slates, and tional than they were, without clarifying SMOOTH or FLUTED tecture to prospective buyers and builders Dolores Hayden on what might be what it was that indeed made them PILASTERS of new houses in southern California. described as the ideology of the Case distinct. One has little sense that the Case Although only five of the original nine Study Houses program - strive to put into Study houses were continuous with the MOTIFS were built, Entenza's concept was so place essential pans of the program's work of their respective architects, which also was extensively covered in Arts & BASES and CAPITALS appealing thai the Case Study Houses historical context. Yet none succeeds program was perpetuated. Eventually 36 entirely. Searing and Hine both lend to Architecture. ARCHES projects were announced, of which 26 address the Case Study Houses obliquely. houses and one apartment complex were The program is not at the center of cither Despite the commendable ambition with KEYSTONES built. The last project was completed in discussion and thus seems peripheral to which the subject was approached, the 1966. four years after Entenza sold the the "contexts" in which each situates it. essays in Blueprints for Modem Living CONSULTING SERVICES magazine. Several of the houses attracted Hayden's, the most provocative of the serve more as points of departure for the international attention, especially the essays, challenges the program's assump- CHIMNEY C A P S formulation of critical questions than a re- house of Ray and Charles Eames (number lions and lluis those of must ol the earij pository of authoritative interpretations. 8, of 1949) and six steel-framed houses WINDOW SILLS houses: its middle-class bias, its retarded The catalogue is an important document, that were not part of the original program, conception of domestic life, its rigid however, beautifully laid out and pro- TABLETS C O L U M N S built between 1950 and I960 to the aesthetic prescriptiveness. and its misun- duced under the guidance of Cite's former designs of Raphael Soriano, Craig Ell- derstanding ol institutionalized housing designer, Lorraine Wild. Under Elizabeth REPRODUCTIONS wood, and Pierre Koenig. These houses production for the middle-class market. A. T. Smith's curatorial direction, it conferred upon the entire program a kind She does not, however, encompass recent, recovers an important episode in the de- PLASTER S T U C C O of mythical status that kept the memory more general critical considerations of this velopment of modern architecture in the of the Case Study Houses alive and com- period. Jackson Lears. in particular, CORNICES United States, although one that awaits pelled the retrieval and reassessment that describes the devil's pact under which grounding in its historical situation. • this publication documents. A survey of PATCHING modern culture nourished in the United the catalogue's eight essays indicates that States during the Cold War period, its ACCENT WALLS the efforts of many of the essayists to re- critical tendencies diverted from social construct a historical context within which issues to questions of technique, style, and I Jackson Lears, "A Mailer of Taste: Corporate UNIQUE H O O D S to interpret and evaluate the program are taste, thus rendering ii acceptable to elite Cultural Hegemony in a Mass-Consumplton problematic, because of confusion over patronage.1 The narrow conception of Society," In Lary Mays. ed.. Recasting America: Culture ami Politics in the Age of Cold War what constitutes the historical context. sue ial obligation embodied in the Case (Chicago: University ol'Chicago Press. 1989). DONALD Study Houses program distanced the pp. 38-57. program from the concerns of Neutra and Esther McCoy and Reyner Banham con- Ain among the earlier generation of Los CURTIS tributed essays that are as much personal Angeles modernists. Technique and. by memoir as historical analysis. Scholarly the laic 1950s, unabashed formalism (713) 477-6118 obligations are not ignored, but it is the subsumed the modest social aspirations "I was there" tone that animates both with which the program was begun. essays. Miss McCoy's piece is an expand- Cite Spring lolHI 25 Peter Brown, Double Vision Henry Beaird Stadium, View, High Plains/Plain Views Texas, 1 9 8 9 . Parish Gallery 12 January-18 February 1990 Reviewed by Lynn M. Herbert In 1986. John Brinckerhoff Jackson came to Rice as the second Craig Francis Cullinan Visiting Professor. A cultural geographer. Jackson lectured on the history of the vernacular house: while at Rice he met Peter Brown, a photographer with similar interests. The two men decided to collaborate on a book project: Jackson would supply the words. Brown would supply the photographs. As often happens with collaborative efforts, the friendship grew along wih the project. to additional topics. The collaborative neighborhood that emerged at ihe middle book, titled A Sense of Place, a Sense of Another Little Piece of the 19th century as the preferred That summer Brown visited Jackson at his Tinw. is due to be published in the spring residential district of the city's newly rich home in New Mexico. Brown had been of 1 991, This exhibition was a preview of of the South mercantile elite and retains a large number photographing in Arizona.
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