Stahl House (Case Study House #22) / November 2, 2020 by hugo keene

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

Villa Tugendhat - Brno, Czech Republic - Architect: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich - Completed: 1930

12 Photographs

My habit of returning from European ice hockey tournaments via unconventional routes found me stalking up a snow-covered Czech hill one brisk March morning brandishing a sheepish grin and a printed ticket. I hadn’t seen many images of the Villa Tugendhat before but felt I knew it having recently read the fictionalised story of the house in Simon Mawer’s book The Glass Room. The book itself was famously disliked by the descendants of the Tugendahts, but it brought to my attention one of the late European buildings of one of the great modernist masters. I’d seen a number of Mies’ buildings in North America a few years before, but this felt like something different, smaller, less machine-like, no less refined, but in a different way. I was excited.

I really love the moments on an architectural adventure, just before a house or building comes into view, when you know it’s coming. I can clearly see the steep street in my mind, a tall building masking the view as I approached, before the wide side garden opens up, revealing a beautiful white house, settled in the snow, looking out across a rolling town also blanketed in snow. A perfectly white, beautifully clear and simple work of remarkable clarity, deeply modernist, inside and out.

I liked this house much more than I expected. It is opulence at its most austere, managing a kind of warmth that surprised me. The sun-filled rooms and plant-filled glasshouse certainly contribute to this, but it’s definitely more than that. The clean white of the material palette is balanced by the richness of the materials used in the detail; the rosewood, the travertine, the onyx, and the bronze.

The construction nerd in me was delighted at how technically brilliant and innovative the house was for its time, utilising window heaters to eliminate condensation, as well as 4 gigantic 3.1m x 4.8m windows which mechanically dropped into the floor to open the whole front of the living spaces to the garden.

Remarkable.

HWLK