Location: Los Angeles, California, USA
Architect: Pierre Koenig
Completed: 1959
13 Photographs
Los Angeles is an enigma. I have only really seen parts of it, despite driving up and down, across the bridges and back along the overpasses. I’ve seen downtown, Chinatown, the river, the ports, and endless highways, but a city on that scale takes years to understand. You have to start small and expand out from little pockets before you can start to stitch those parts together to get any real kind of picture.
As a visitor, one thing which is both hard to ignore and distinctly familiar is the climate. Coastal California inhabits a unique climatic region, which is found in a few pockets on this planet, the Mediterranean being one, and our home, Tarndanya (the Adelaide Plains) being another. Even in the middle of winter, you get these clear blue-sky days which are the deepest azure, like something out of a comic book or a Matisse.
Sometimes you get lucky with a building visit and you experience it at the perfect moment, or time of day, and you really understand what the building is all about. This was one of those days. A crisp mid-winter afternoon with a typically clear Angelenos sky, dimming into a spectacular sunset. If you are going to visit a west facing house, perched in the Hollywood Hills, it is the time to do it.
I had always admired the Case Study Houses, a series of post-war experimental houses designed to take advantage of modern material technologies and to provide a vision of the future of individual (and later multiple) houses. There is a bunch scattered around the area, and we saw a few that day, but this was the first and the only one in LA that we were able to explore completely, inside, and out. It was in conversation with my old boss Kerry Hill that I first came to know the Case Study houses, and it shares a similarity with the Tugendhat House, the Barcelona Pavilion, and other of Mies works, and I can see it in Kerry’s work and likewise perhaps echoes in my own.
Just like this house, there is lots to love about a city like Los Angeles and maybe also for some, a lot to hate, but they are definitely both marvels to behold from a distance as they twinkle in the dusk.
HWLK
