The ‘Case Study Houses’ are a part of American architectural history like the famous writing on the Hollywood hills. The architects who designed this unique series of experimental houses have become world renowned: Charles Eames, Eero Saarinen, Richard Neutra and Pierre Koenig, to name but a few. Their buildings epitomise the essence of the ‘American dream’: the belief in advancement and industrial pre-fabrication and also in steel and glass (apparently) still abounds and because of this, the buildings are expertly embedded in nature. In 1945, John Entenza, publisher of the architecture magazine Arts & Architecture invited eight architects, who were native to California or who had migrated there, to build the first eight houses on the American West Coast. The scheme for fast-selling houses developed later: 28 Case Study Houses were planned up to 1966, but only 20 of these ever
materialised.
A few years ago the authors Ethel Buisson and Thomas Billard prepared to update the history of the Case Study Houses to the present time. They visited the houses which were still in existence, took photographs of them and spoke to their current occupants. In addition, they searched for plans and photographs in old editions of Arts & Architecture, which they could then compare with their new photos. In their text, they integrated the past and present, architectural documentation and reports in an amusing way. At least as enlightening as the buildings themselves is the description of the building of the housing and the excitement that the Case Study Houses caused in Arts & Architecture and other media at the time. In the end, the chapters were supplemented with short digressions into American architecture and contemporary history of the 1940–1960s.
Despite the documentary-style photographs, it is always the architecture and not the established preferences of the inhabitants that take centre stage. The Presence of the Case Study Houses is not a book on architecture in the traditional sense, but a report on a present-day expedition to an architectural era, which would otherwise have been considered as obsolete. The book is split into three equal parts: it depicts wonderful, light-filled architecture, portrays an architectural generation and its ideals, and documents how architecture and the media influenced each other in the past.