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As a follow up to my post last Friday about the possibilities of a more fine-grained, modest, and small-scaled architecture for Los Angeles, this week I have extended and revised an obituary that I wrote for the architect Pierre Koenig in April of 2004.1
On Friday, I’ll turn to the work of the late Peter Corrigan, an Australian architect whose “Cities of Hope,” varied and often incongruous suburban churches and fire stations, oddly iconic small home additions and single-family homes, schools, university buildings, galleries, and many designs for theater and opera were described by Daniel Libeskind as “…a deepening cultural program. Not Edenic…free of the stifling Wednesday routine and the permanent 31st of the month.”2
Pierre Koenig, Reconsidered
“Eventually, everything connects - people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key to quality per se.”
― Charles Eames
61 years ago, Julius Shulman produced an extraordinary series of photographs of Case Study House #22 (The Stahl House, 1960, above Sunset Boulevard) by Los Angeles architect Pierre Koenig, then only 34 years old.
The images, day and night views of the house floating above L.A., are now iconic and have come to be widely identified, along with A Bigger Splash by painter David Hockney, with LA’s make-believe, sybaritic splendor.
They depict the city in its postwar, Camelot, pre-Vietnam, pre-Civil Rights Act, Atomic Age heyday. The architecture is crisp, machined, perfect. The settings are dreamlike. West Coast Jazz. The figures who populate the photos are immaculately staged, young, well-clothed, and poised. They seem unreal. The key shot, down Fairfax and across LA’s gridded and overlit field of streets, looks out towards Baldwin Hills and Inglewood beyond.
Agonizingly, these are images of privilege and an unexamined whiteness, without exception.
Revisited in 2021 and viewed from a new vantage point, there is an impossible élan and promise in those photographs, but there is also something quite sad about them. As a pandemic still rages, the planet overheats, and we struggle as a culture to find common ground, Shulman’s staged studies and Koenig’s masterful Case Study projects seem now inconceivably, tragically abstract. They strike one as utterly divorced from the realities of Los Angeles then and now—its pollution, tangled traffic, and quotidian housing, its yet damningly unresolved social, economic, and racial inequities.
But, ironically, what is passed over in the glossy Angeleno magazine advertorials, in the tortured fashion-porn Case Study House photoshoots, and the endlessly recycled, stock-in-trade real estate brochures about LA’s mid-century houses, is that his ideas and ideals, removed from how the houses have been promoted, may still help us to address this city’s pressing problems.
Contrary to the images that emerged from Shulman's darkroom, Koenig's primary ambition was initially to invent cheap, deft, easy to erect, and effective housing solutions for ordinary people.
His private practice, established in 1952, realized some 50 modernist steel and glass buildings, each an examination of efficiency and frugality. Modernism, in Koenig's estimation, was a belief system and not an aesthetic imperative. "Modern is a way of life, not a style," he said in an interview in the Los Angeles Times in May 2002.
Koenig’s early houses, such as the Edward Lamel House, featured here, are essays in unpretentiousness and mark certain respect for the laborers and clients who often hand-dug and hand-built his designs.3
As modernism faded, Koenig stubbornly refused to become Post Modern or Dead Tech or Decon or New Urbanist or whatever else was current. In doing so, he lost clients and commissions. While many of his Case Study colleagues passed away, shuttered their offices, or retired to Italy in the 1970s, Koenig continued to work and practice, living long enough to see a renewed interest in his principles. By 2003 he was producing about one house every 20 months—about the same pace he kept in the mid-1950s.
His own second home and office in Brentwood (1985), for instance, is an array of slender white-painted steel I-Beams and six-inch square steel columns. Situated on a narrow 40’ wide lot, its footprint is a modest 1980 square feet, literally one half the size of its nearby, newer 80s Spanish Mission Revival neighbors. The steel-frame was erected in a day. The simple stepped white box exemplifies Koenig’s ability to extract generous, layered spaces from the tightest sites by developing precise, compact plans.
The 30’ high (and 15’ x 30’ in plan) triple-height atrium-living area was acoustically tweaked and fine-tuned multiple times to avoid reverberation, allowing Koenig and Gloria Kaufman, his wife, to listen clearly to their 6,000 vinyl record collection throughout the house from one source only. The house is thoroughly insulated and so well naturally ventilated that no mechanical air handling system was added, a testament to his ongoing interest in mastering building science.
Big Ideas for Small Lots
While it may be the case that for a few decades, Koenig's genuine optimism and ingenuity were cast adrift, lost in the ocean of oversized and environmentally wasteful monstrosities that passed for housing across Southern California, and his ideas were dismissed by academic architects more concerned with throwing out the “former cult of simplicity”4 than with the quality of architecture’s “connections” (per Eames above), it seems to me that there is another way to reevaluate Koenig today.
As Los Angeles struggles to come to grips with its pressing new realities: soul-crushing homelessness, very little affordable workforce housing, delayed transit infrastructure projects, and limited space for redevelopment, I would argue that Koenig’s primary ambition, to make high quality, affordable architecture available to ordinary people, may yet find a new audience in a new century, in a new format.
What the shape of this new LA architecture to come will look like, how it will be made, and how the city will have to transform politically to accommodate it, will be the subject of a follow up to last week’s post, 'Think Small, Los Angeles and the problem of scale, revisited.’
Coda
There is another famous photograph that Shulman produced of Koenig's work in 1960. It is unusual because it is an interior view of Case Study House #21, the Bailey Residence in Wonderland Park, and it does not refer to the city or a spectacular view. The architect himself appears in the background, turned out in a fine dark suit with a matching tie and crisp white shirt. He is leaning on a cabinet made by his friend musician Gerald McCabe (of McCabe’s Guitar Shop on Pico, now-shuttered), his back half turned towards Shulman. His head is cocked away from the camera, and he is smiling, ever so slightly.
Pierre Koenig died of leukemia on Sunday, April 4, 2004, in his Brentwood home. He was 78.
The Architects Newspaper, No. 7, 4.20.2004.
Daniel Libeskind, “An Observation, Peter Corrigan’s Wilderness,” in Cities of Hope Remembered, Australian Architecture by Edmond and Corrigan 1962-2012. Conrad Hamann; with Leon van Schaik, Vivian Mitsogianni & Winsome Callister; edited by Fleur Watson; designed by Chase & Gallery & Peter Corrigan; photography by John Gollings. Thames & Hudson Australia, 2012.
Today a single story 1200 square foot ADU (Accessory Dwelling Unit) costs anywhere between $200,000.00 and $300,000.00 to build on a flat rear lot site in greater LA. By comparison, Koenig’s Edward Lamel House, a neat 1200 square foot house notched into a small hill in Glendale, was handbuilt in 1953 for $12,000.00. Factoring for inflation that is equivalent in purchasing power to about $117,000.00 today-- meaning that the entire house, if built today, including its covered carport and extensive site work, would only cost $97.50 per square foot. Given how unaffordable new homes are today, this number seems cruel by comparison. It reveals why homeownership for middle and lower-income Los Angelenos is a near impossibility along with exorbitant land values.
Robert Venturi in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.