experImenTaTIOn

Context experImenTaTIOn

By the time of the Case Study House program’s inception in 1945, Los Angeles had emerged as a vigorously experimental context for the residential architecture. Numerous modernist precedents existed in the starkly minimal work of Irving Gill, active in the early decades of the century in southern California, as well as in the bold experiments with materials and construction techniques of Franck Lloyd Wright in Los Angels beginning the late 1910’s.

Hugo Klauber House, Irving Gill (1908)

Sturges House, Franck Lloyd Wright (1939) 18

The house as a laboratory for experimentation with materials, construction, techniques and aesthetics has been a persistent theme throughout the history of modern architecture. And in Los Angeles the program is clearly part of a continuum of experimental residential design characterizing practice throughout the 20th century.

The Case Study House Program is a product of its time and place. The result of convergence of historical, economic, technological, social, and cultural factors in mid-century Los Angeles - which drew heavily upon the innovation landscape of California, and which, permitted an informal lifestyle in close proximity to nature and to its culture of invention and absence of oppresive strictures and traditions.