Recently, I went to Los Angeles and one of the pre-planned visits (besides the Porsche Experience Center and the Petersen Museum) was the Stahl house.
The Stahl house was part of the Case Study Houses program and has been on the cover of many magazines. It’s a glass-wall house with an incredible view of Los Angeles.
To be honest, I did not know much about the case study houses, so here what Wikipedia says about it:
“The Case Study Houses were experiments in American residential architecture sponsored by Arts & Architecture magazine, which commissioned major architects of the day, including Richard Neutra, Raphael Soriano, Craig Ellwood, Charles and Ray Eames, Pierre Koenig, Eero Saarinen, A. Quincy Jones, Edward Killingsworth, and Ralph Rapson to design and build inexpensive and efficient model homes for the United States residential housing boom caused by the end of World War II and the return of millions of soldiers.
The program ran intermittently from 1945 until 1966. The first six houses were built by 1948 and attracted more than 350,000 visitors. While not all thirty six designs were built, most of those that were constructed were built in Los Angeles, and one was built in San Rafael, Northern California and one in Phoenix, Arizona. Of the unbuilt houses #19 was to have been built in Atherton, in the San Francisco Bay Area, while #27 was to have been built on the east coast, in Smoke Rise, New Jersey.”
As I understand it, the idea was to build houses that people could buy the drawings to build a copy for themselves. I don’t think any of the houses were duplicated.
To visit:
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- Book your visit here (I highly recommend the evening tour): http://stahlhouse.com
- PDF copy of the book about the Stahl house: ArtandArchitecture
