Architecture as experiment
Introduction
The Case Study Houses were experiments in residential architecture in North America sponsored by Arts & Architecture magazine,[1] who paid the best architects of the day, including Richard Neutra, Raphael Soriano, Craig Ellwood, Charles and Ray Eames, Pierre Koenig "Pierre Koenig (architect)") and Eero Saarinen, to design and build cheap and efficient model houses. The initiative was part of the great growth in demand for residential homes in the United States caused by the end of World War II and the return of millions of soldiers. The Eames CSH #8 was assembled manually in just three days.
Program Background
The Case Study House program was not an isolated phenomenon, but rather an evolutionary step in the history of architecture in general. There is precedent for the program in Europe and in the context of the California modern movement.
Among the European precedents is the Stuttgart Weissenhofsiedlung of 1927, an urbanization designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, where architects such as J. J. P. Oud, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Mart Stam, and Mies himself contributed innovative projects with technology for the construction of simple homes and which were a reference in residential construction between the wars.[2] The exhibition of houses from 1931 at the Berlin Building Exposition in which architects such as Mies van der Rohe, Lilly Reich, and Marcel Breuer participated.
In the United States, in Chicago, in the years 1933-34, at the exhibition called 'A Century of Progress International Exposition' the 'House of Tomorrow' by architect George Fred Keck was presented. At the 1939 New York International Fair, fifteen housing prototypes were presented in the 'Town of Tomorrow' pavilion.
By the time of the creation of the Case Study House program in 1945, Los Angeles had become the nucleus of the modern architecture movement in California. There was precedent for Frank Lloyd Wright's bold designs in late 1910s Los Angeles. European émigré architects such as R. M. Schindler and Richard Neutra built modern-style single-family homes beginning in the 1920s. Schindler built the 'Chase House' in 1922, the 'Lovell Beach House' in 1926, and the 'Lovell Health House' in 1927-28. Schindler, especially, focused his efforts on the design of prototypes of simple homes, which were known, in the 1930s, as . In all of them there was a prefabricated core of services that was expanded to produce different plant configurations, with a contained cost.