Pierre Koenig; influential LA architect
Hyfler/Rosner
BYLINE: Nicolai Ouroussoff, LA Times Staff Writer
Many of his houses are here:
http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Case_Study_House_22.html
http://www.usc.edu/dept/architecture/slide/koenig/
http://www.wirtzgallery.com/exhibitions/2003/2003_06/shulman/full/js13.jpg
Pierre Koenig, whose sleek glass-and-steel houses became
emblems of the progressive values of Postwar suburbia, died
Sunday of leukemia at his home in Brentwood. He was 78.
As part of a group of architects that also included Charles
and Ray Eames, Raphael Soriano and Craig Ellwood, Koenig was
a key figure in a generation that helped make Los Angeles
one of the great laboratories of 20th century architecture.
Of these visionaries, Koenig seemed best able to capture the
hopes and anxieties of California's booming middle class.
His reputation in large part rests on the creation of two
houses -- Case Study House #21 and #22 -- that were
completed in 1959 and 1960 as part of an ambitious program
that sought to introduce the values of Modernist
architecture to suburbia. Clean abstract compositions, with
a powerful relationship to their natural context, they exist
as enduring emblems to Cold War America's faith in
technological progress and its transformative powers.
"Until the end of his life he remained an ardent believer in
industrial materials and prefabricated systems -- the idea
that life could be improved through architecture," said
Elizabeth Smith, who curated the 1989 Case Study show,
"Blueprints for Modern Living" at Los Angeles' Museum of
Contemporary Art.
The son of a salesman, Koenig was born in San Francisco. He
often recalled taking walks along the city's industrial
waterfront, where he became fascinated with the massive
steel cranes and merchant ships that were potent symbols of
American industrial prowess.
The family moved to Southern California in 1939. After
returning from a four-year tour in the Army during World War
II, Koenig enrolled at USC's school of architecture.
By then, architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, R.M.
Schindler and Richard Neutra had already built a number of
major architectural works that sought to adapt the Modernist
aesthetic to Southern California. These architects were
drawn by the city's vast open tracts of land, its distance
from the often oppressive conventions of traditional cities.
They helped create a climate of architectural
experimentation that was unrivaled anywhere else in the U.S.
at that time.
Koenig -- a precocious talent -- fit neatly into this
tradition. His first house was completed in 1950, while he
was still a student at USC, and is an expression of many of
the themes that would concern him throughout his career.
Built at a modest cost of $5,000, the house was a model of
industrial efficiency. Its L-shaped form was supported on
slender steel columns and capped by a corrugated metal roof.
Sliding doors opened onto a small private garden. Inside,
more sliding partitions separated living and sleeping areas.
Other projects, such as the 1953 Lamel House in Glendale and
the 1957 Burwash House in Tujunga, signaled Koenig's early
mastery of composition and form. Mostly designed of
affordable Industrial Age materials, they were a reflection
of Le Corbusier's famous dictum that houses were "machines
for living." The difference was Koenig's ability to root
such ideas in the particular ethos of suburban L.A., with
its trim lawns and whirring appliances. In Koenig's mind,
the ideal house would one day be mass-produced "just like a
car."
The breakthrough came a few years later, when Arts &
Architecture editor John Entenza tapped the emerging
architect for his Case Study House program. Nestled within
its canyon site in the Hollywood Hills, Case Study House #21
was conceived as an idealized blend of natural and man-made
landscapes. In an effort to dissolve the boundaries between
inside and out, Koenig surrounded the house's simple
geometric form with a series of reflecting pools. Large
windows and skylights flooded the interior with natural
light. The house's steel frame, meanwhile, gave it a
striking ephemeral beauty. In essence, the entire structure
was nothing more than a conceptual frame -- one that defined
an almost utopian relationship between man and nature.
By comparison, Case Study House #22, completed two years
later, was high drama -- one in which the entire city
becomes part of the architect's composition. Approached
along a winding street set high in the Hollywood Hills, the
house first appears as a blank concrete screen. From here,
the visitor steps out onto a concrete deck that overlooks a
swimming pool. Just beyond it, the house's living room --
enclosed in a glass-and steel-frame -- cantilevers out from
the edge of the hill toward the horizon.
The house was immortalized in a now famous image taken by
the architectural photographer Julius Shulman. In it, two
women, clad in immaculate white cocktail dresses, are
perched on the edge of their seats in the glass-enclosed
living room, their pose suggesting a kind of sanitized
suburban bliss. A night view of the city spreads out beneath
them, an endless grid of twinkling lights that perfectly
captures the infinite hopes of the postwar American dream.
The image helped establish Koenig as the poster boy of the
Case Study program. But it also served to cloud its
importance as a work of architecture. Set on axis with
L.A.'s urban grid, the house evokes a fragment of the
suburban landscape that has been somehow dislodged and is
floating free in space. The bedrooms are nestled close to
the street at the back of the space, setting up a delicious
tension between security and freedom. Only the shimmering
surface of the water, reflected on the vast expanses of
glass, evokes the deeper psychological realities that may or
may not lurk beneath the house's highly polished surfaces.
Perhaps no house, in fact, better sums up the mix of outward
confidence and psychic unease that defined Cold War America.
The design suggests a culture charging toward an unknown fut
ure. At the same time, its structural bravado reminds us of
the social instability that this leap implied.
"I think the slickness of the Shulman image makes people
forget that these were really experiments," said Sylvia
Lavin, chair of UCLA's department of architecture and urban
design. "It is important to remember the risks they took.
They were really trying to create a way of life that they
believed in. It was really a calling. With Koenig, part of
the evidence is that he stayed the course, even when it was
no longer fashionable."
Koenig, in fact, went on to complete a number of important,
mostly residential commissions during the 1960s. Among the
most unusual was the 1963 Iwata House in Monterey Park,
conceived as a series of stacked, rectangular forms whose
louvered facades open onto stunning mountain views.
But by the end of the decade, the architect's stripped down
Modernist aesthetic had largely fallen out of favor with an
architectural establishment that no longer believed in
Modernism's social promise. What is more, the architectural
values he championed relegated him to the fringes of a
profession that was increasingly caught up with mimicking
older, historic precedents. As such, most of Koenig's time
in his later years was spent teaching, first running a
design studio at USC, then as director of the school's
Natural Forces Laboratory, whose aim is to raise awareness
of structural and environmental issues in the profession.
The "Blueprints for Modern Living" show brought renewed
focus on the Case Study program, and Koenig's work enjoyed a
sudden revival. The show included a full-sized replica of
his famous Case Study House #22. And since then, the clean
lines and sensual undertones of such late Modernist works
have made them sought after status items among the city's
cultural and fashion elites.
Koenig is survived by his wife, Gloria; sons, Randall and
Jean Pierre; and two stepsons, Barry and Thomas Kaufman.
A memorial service will be held at 3 p.m. April 17 in the
courtyard of USC's school of architecture.
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Koenig's Case Study House #22 was
immortalized in this now-famous image, which helped
establish the architect as the poster boy of the Case Study
program. The Hollywood Hills home captures the Modernist
style. PHOTOGRAPHER: Julius Shulman PHOTO: PIERRE KOENIG: He
believed in using industrial materials to build homes and
thought that one day houses would be mass-produced just like
cars. PHOTOGRAPHER: Perry C. Riddle Los Angeles Times PHOTO:
(A1) PIERRE KOENIG DIES: The L.A. architect whose houses
became progressive symbols of postwar suburbia was 78. This
well-known photograph shows his Case Study House No. 22.
PHOTOGRAPHER: Julius Shulman