Case Study House #22 designed by Pierre Koenig in 1959-60, the Stahl House cantilevers out impossibly across the sprawl of Los Angeles – and secures its place in the history books as the shining, defining exemplar of American domestic architecture of the mid-20th century. (Shutterstock)
If you haven’t heard of the Case Study House Program, you certainly know what it looks like. One of the most distinctive architectural initiatives of the twentieth century – and unmistakably American – the CSH project was formulated in 1945 and ran for 21 years. In this its anniversary year, Storied explores how some of the most iconic residential homes in the USA first took shape 80 years ago.
World War II has just ended, and a man named John Entenza is sitting behind a typewriter in a Los Angeles office, with the sun no doubt slanting through the window blinds. Let’s put him in a short-sleeved white shirt, and a bow tie perhaps, because he’s the editor of the monthly magazine Arts & Architecture. The Case Study House (CSH) Program is wholly Entenza’s idea. Which is to invite prominent architects to express their vision of how people might live in this new age, now that Armageddon has been avoided.
Page 37 of the January 1945 issue leads with the word “ANNOUNCEMENT” and proceeds over 19 declaratory paragraphs of alternate black and brown text to lay out the manifesto. “Eight nationally known architects… have been commissioned to take a plot of God’s green earth and create ‘good’ living conditions for eight American families.” As long as they lived in Southern California, that is. The magazine would act as client and publish a design each issue for the following eight months. No notion then of a project lasting 21 years.
On the ground in Altadena, Los Angeles, new-look interiors were as central to the CSH program as steel beams were to the new structural forms. By 1958, the Bass House (above) was not alone in majoring on low-profile Scandinavian-inflected furnishings from the major studios of the day. The rust-colored lounger isn’t quite a Harry Bertoia Bird Chair but would probably like to be. (© Taschen)
Entenza was looking for homes that fulfilled two criteria. First, they should be “capable of duplication and in no sense be an individual ‘performance’”. Second, they should exploit the new industrial materials and mass production technologies lately developed to drive wartime efficiencies. At this moment of global renewal in 1945, the vision was to suggest how man “will want to be housed in the future”. Entenza’s program was never prescriptive, even if between the lines the manifesto calls for a democratization via affordability and practicality.
The manifesto declared: "Eight nationally known architects... have been commissioned to take a plot of God’s green earth and create ‘good’ living conditions for eight American families." As long as they lived in Southern California, that is.
The first CSH design was published in the February 1945 issue of Arts & Architecture. It wasn’t built, that didn’t matter. Indeed seven of the 28 published CSH proposals remained unbuilt, especially in the first three years of the program, either because the architect was working on a drawing board of pure imagination or because take-up by actual clients (at least those with nostalgia hang-ups) was slow in this brave new world.
But in December 1949 the magazine gave that world a Christmas gift. Ray and Charles Eames – the husband-and-wife duo whose name is now synonymous with mid-century design (is there anyone left out there who doesn’t own an Eames recliner, the leather and bent plywood chair and footstool combo modeled on a baseball mitt?) – were commissioned by Entenza to design and build a home for themselves.
The double-height modular cuboid Eames House, with Mondrianesque colour panels, seems almost Bauhaus in its rigidity. Inside the open-plan interior though, space flows effortlessly round partitions and low-profile seating areas. Visitors nervous of minimalism needn’t have worried – the place was a veritable clutter of the two designers’ curios and collectibles. CSH #8 still sits surrounded by eucalyptus trees near the ocean in Pacific Palisades, 20 miles west of L.A. and is a National Historic Landmark that pilgrims visit today. (At time of writing, 17 January 2025, 10 days after the devastating wildfires in the area, the Eames House remains intact.)
The Eames House in Pacific Palisades (the original Case Study House from 1949, now the Eames Foundation) differs from most on the CSH program by having double-height ceilings. Understandable for Charles and Ray Eames, architects and designers used to studios – despite their building a separate studio on the plot on the property. You can almost hear the chirping cicadas of California in this picture. (Shutterstock Editorial)
The Eames House itself is architecturally a relatively quiet affair. A decade later, in 1960, along came architect Pierre Koenig with CSH #22 and created what is basically a sound stage blaring jazz riffs in the Hollywood Hills. A local graphic designer, Buck Stahl, had bought the vertiginous land for $13,000 six years previously and failed to find an architect with a head for heights.
Koenig’s design for the Stahl House was full-on structural risk. The thing cantilevers impossibly out over the sprawl of L.A., articulating the CSH vocabulary of steel beams, massive glazing panels and open-plan interiors set around the obligatory pool. Extraordinarily photogenic, with Julius Shulman behind the lens documenting much of the CSH Program, the Stahl House continues to backdrop a multitude of fashion shoots, movies, music videos and SoCal TV shows. It’s also a visitable Historic-Cultural Landmark.
The Stahl House is the ultimate in transparency – and the model of inside/outside living. The fireplace separates living and dining zones. The kitchen sits to the left beyond, with private quarters on an L-shape to the entrance. What does this say about society opening up in 1960? (Peter Thomas/Unsplash)
What makes Case Study homes noteworthy is of course the sudden departure from traditional housing, plus the sweep of new construction techniques that ushered in fresh concepts of the possible. But mainly it’s the signal the program transmitted about the light and air of American post-war positivism. Californian sunshine helped – design always emanates from place. It’s inconceivable that the CSH project could have originated elsewhere. One of its central architectural motifs is the life-expanding inter-changeability of indoor/outdoor living made possible not just by technically efficient sliding glass walls but by the warm SoCal weather.
While Entenza’s project stayed rooted around L.A., a separate satellite initiative began evolving 110 miles east in the desert enclave of Palm Springs. Here the CSH aesthetic touchpoints were replicated by architects like Richard Neutra and Donald Wexler – but in a way that more overtly involved a dialogue between manmade buildings and their natural surroundings. With the San Jacinto mountains shimmering beyond, here was modernist architecture taunting the arid desert by implanting air-conditioned constructs within the searing heat and proving man’s invincible powers of colonization yet again.
Often built on more expansive plots than their L.A. CSH counterparts, many modernist residences in Palm Springs also pushed the creative experiment farther after the Case Study House project ended in 1966.
Architect William Krisel’s butterfly roof design was brought to life by the Alexander Construction Company, a local family business that built Palm Springs homes for, among others, Joan Collins, Harold Robbins, Marilyn Monroe and Dinah Shore. Such homes became known as “Alexanders” and still command premium prices today. (Eric Chiel Modernism Week 2025)
The program was nominally an exercise in housebuilding. But what drove it was American positivism at the time – the notion that everything was possible under the sun, under a renewed American sense of self.
John Entenza’s program was bold. At one of history’s turning points, it called for a radical rethink on how our homes could newly enhance the way we live. Yet despite the manifesto’s ambition for “duplication” and low-cost repeatable designs, what eventually materialized on privately owned plots over those two decades was something more akin to a streamlined dreamscape – as much an embodiment of the American Dream, and also the commercial realities it came with, as an open-top Cadillac’s fins glinting in the sun. Some critics point to the singularity of the properties built and the absence of any cohesive civic plan. Well, the program was singular in its intent. And architects have egos, don’t they?
The CSH program remains an inspiration today for devotees of mid-century culture. It speaks of an allegedly simpler epoch and the comfort that evokes for us today. We’d do well though to guard against the anesthesia of aesthetics and remember that Entenza was looking to change the model of thinking. The program was nominally an exercise in housebuilding. But what drove it was a belief in American positivism at the time – the notion that everything was possible under the shiny sun, under a renewed post-war American sense of self.
Bookending with the view from the Stahl House. Don’t ask, it’s not for sale. (© Taschen)
If you’re given to drooling over mid-century architecture and interiors, you probably already know about Modernism Week in Palm Springs. Established in 2006, the program offers home tours, walking tours, bus tours and, with a certain inevitability, much talk of the martini-soaked heyday of Frank Sinatra and his fellow Rat Pack neighbors. Dates: 13-23 February 2025.
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