Case Study Houses: The Complete CSH Program 1945–1966 (First Edition)

SMITH, Elizabeth A. T. (ed.; photography & epilogue Julius Shulman; ed. Peter Goessel). Case Study Houses: The Complete CSH Program 1945–1966. Köln: Taschen GmbH, 2002.

Oblong Folio (32 × 41 cm). Illustrated boards with colour photographic endpapers. Clear vinyl lettered dust wrapper. 440 pp. Profusely illustrated in colour and black and white throughout, with photographs, architectural drawings, floor plans, and sketches. Text in English, French, and German. First edition, first printing. Publishers shipping box retained.

Between 1945 and 1966, Arts & Architecture magazine ran one of the most ambitious architectural programmes in American history. Its editor, John Entenza — a passionate advocate for modernism who had assembled around him an extraordinary network of architects, designers, and artists — commissioned a series of prototype houses intended to demonstrate that modern design could be both architecturally serious and practically affordable in the postwar building boom. The programme, concentrated in the Los Angeles area, was called the Case Study House Program, and it produced thirty-six experimental homes that collectively constitute the most coherent body of postwar residential modernism ever realised in a single city.

The architects Entenza recruited were the most significant of their generation: Richard Neutra, whose Case Study House #20 of 1948 extended the principles of his celebrated Kaufmann Desert House into the suburban lot; Charles and Ray Eames, whose Case Study House #8 of 1949 — the Eames House in Pacific Palisades, built largely from off-the-shelf industrial components — remains the most visited private house in California; Eero Saarinen; Craig Ellwood; Pierre Koenig, whose Case Study House #22, the Stahl House, was perched over the Hollywood Hills with a view across the entire Los Angeles basin; and Thornton Abell, Rodney Walker, Whitney R. Smith, and others whose houses extended the programme's reach into a range of sites, budgets, and approaches.

The visual documentation of the programme was largely the work of Julius Shulman (1910–2009), the pre-eminent architectural photographer of the twentieth century, whose images of the Case Study Houses — and above all his 1960 photograph of the Stahl House, with two women in evening dress silhouetted in a glass corner against the night panorama of Los Angeles — are among the most reproduced architectural photographs ever made. Shulman's photographs do not merely record the houses; they construct an idea of California modernism — glamorous, optimistic, suspended between the domesticity of the living room and the sublime scale of the Pacific city below — that is inseparable from the programme's historical meaning. He contributes both photography and an epilogue to this volume.

The programme sought to make available plans for modern residences that could be easily and cheaply constructed during the postwar building boom, and its chief motivating force was Entenza, a champion of modernism who had all the right connections to attract some of architecture's greatest talents. The Taschen monograph, first published in 2002, remains the definitive single-volume survey of the complete programme: comprehensive in its documentary coverage, exceptional in its photographic reproduction, and designed at a scale commensurate with the ambition of its subject.

Near fine. Some very minor imperfections to vinyl dust wrapper; volume fine throughout. Publisher's shipping box retained.

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Catalogue Number: HH000622