Seemingly by necessity, Los Angeles is a city shaped by self-invention and innovation. Los Angeles in the mind is one thing: palm trees, sunshine, sparkling pools, the open road, Hollywood, the good life. But the reality of Los Angeles is another thing entirely. The paradisaical vision of the city quickly fades away when one comes to realize that L.A. in its natural state is uninhabitable. It is sadistically placed next to the largest body of water in the world, one whose salt content makes it useless for drinking or irrigation. In such a dry environment, life cannot be supported without constant human intervention, the goal always being to match the city’s platonic ideal as the American Garden of Eden with its functional reality. The implications of this phenomenon have defined Los Angeles from its earliest days. The dissimilitude of Los Angeles in theory and in actuality has continually served as the catalyst for the city’s growth and development, particularly in first half of the twentieth-century as expanding industry and population called for a reexamination, and eventual reinvention, of the identity of the city and those who call it home. The residential architecture which came about following World War II can be seen as a microcosm for L.A.’s dual identity; a set of practical realities must be considered and confronted in order to arrive at the transcendent paradise. The single-family home was able to facilitate this transcendence from the cave to the world of forms. Starting in 1945, the Case Study House Program sought to project a new, postwar domesticity through the lens of the Los Angeles single-family home. What began as a building program designed to respond to the problem of postwar housing ended up setting the tone for California modernism in architecture and beyond by creating an ultimate model of modern, urban life to which all could aspire.
In thinking about the context in which the Case Study houses were built, it is important to begin with the physical environment. According to architectural critic Reyner Banham, the geography of Los Angeles is divided into four distinct ecological types: beaches, foothills, vast plains, and freeways. How Angelenos relate to these environments dictates how they construct their lives in the city. The diverse geographical landscape of Los Angeles imbues the city with symbolism. It is a land of endless possibilities, the last frontier where dreamers go to chase the sunset over the ocean waves. Yet as a locale it is sprawling, disjointed, and aimless. As such, Los Angeles is either a dreamland or a wasteland, though when left to its own devices it tends towards a wasteland. Contemporary Los Angeles is an ecological miracle. With no local source of fresh water, there is a constant need to bring water into the city for it to be a city at all. It makes sense, then, that in such a parched region Los Angeles was built on water; that is, the sourcing and distribution of water. This requires an entire system of infrastructure and everything that comes with it. Railroads and highways were built, and in 1913 the Los Angeles Aqueduct was completed, all of which made the transportation of water from one place to another possible. The development of the Port of Los Angeles in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries made use of the area’s natural harbor and the one water resource that was available: the Pacific Ocean.
With the seeds of infrastructure in place and the land watered, industry quickly grew. In the early part of the twentieth-century Los Angeles became a major hub for the oil, aviation, shipping, and movie industries. Since the 1920s Los Angeles had been the aviation capital of the United States. At its height of production, the area was host to more than twenty-five airplane and aviation motor manufacturing plants. This single industry employed more workers than all other factories in the Los Angeles area combined. World War II and Los Angeles’s role in the war effort, producing not only aircrafts but tires and steel as well, only escalated the city’s industrial production and exportation of manufactured goods. As the economic landscape shifted from a state of depression during the 1930s to this wartime boom thousands of people came to Los Angeles for work. It is estimated that the city received nearly 60,000 new residents a year in the 1940s, not including those who were returning home from the war. By 1930 Los Angeles had already become the fifth largest city in the United States, but the influx in population during and immediately following the war was unprecedented. A city which had grown organically from a series of subdivided Spanish and then Mexican ranches by means of the necessary development of systems of transportation and infrastructure, was on the verge of becoming a thoroughly modern city. Unfortunately for the city of Los Angeles, its natural evolution could not keep up with the demands of the metropolis it was swiftly becoming.
As early as the 1920s the city of Los Angeles was already anticipating the expansion and reorganization needed to accommodate its growing industry and increasing population. In 1922 G. Gordon Whitnall, an urban planner and then secretary to the City Planning Commission, proclaimed that Los Angeles had the potential to become the model American city. Unlike older American cities, which by the twentieth-century were riddled with poor or outdated planning and design decisions, Los Angeles was a clean slate which could be centrally-planned for modern urban living. What defined modernity in Los Angeles was mobility. “The language of design, architecture, and urbanism in Los Angeles is the language of movement.” In 1941 the Parkway Plan for the County of Los Angeles was devised to make ease of mobility the fulcrum of the city’s urban planning. The plan begins by stating that “the most pressing problem confronting the City of Los Angeles today is transportation” and goes on to outline the implementation of a metropolitan freeway system spanning the entire Los Angeles region.
Why was Los Angeles in need of a highway system in the 1940s? What does the answer to this question imply about Los Angeles as a developing metropolis? The underlying impetus for the Parkway Plan and subsequent redevelopment plans was more than just the need for a viable transportation system, it was the developing phenomenon of urban sprawl. Although American cities had not been bombed during the war like their European and Asian counterparts, urbanism still seemed to be a victim of World War II. In an ironic contrast to the efforts made by the Department of City Planning and the newly-created Office of Zoning Administration, during the war and in the decade that followed, Los Angeles underwent a process of de-urbanization. It was economically necessary to remain close to the city’s urban core for jobs, shopping, and entertainment, but Angelenos were moving to the suburbs and outer reaches of the city in increasing numbers. This was an urban environment unlike any other. A freeway system was necessary to circulate the population by car through the city from their homes to where they needed to go, but, more significantly, to create the separation between public and private, commercial and residential space that Angelenos wanted. In the eyes of its residents, Los Angeles was a great urban/suburban utopia, characterized by both the practical amenities of a modern metropolis and the two-car garage. To have the best of both worlds, these spheres were conceptually intertwined by necessity but kept physically separate.
The biggest issue facing Los Angeles in the 1940s, then, was not transportation, it was housing. The problem of housing seemed to encompass nearly all the other problems in the city in the postwar period. Not only was there the issue of population growth and urban sprawl, there was the trouble of transforming an incredibly efficient wartime economy to a peacetime economy. Additionally, the question of architecture and design, a topic left mostly untouched since the economic crash of 1929, was begging for an answer. Enter John Entenza. In 1938 Entenza bought Arts & Architecture magazine, which at the time he acquired it was still called California Arts & Architecture. By 1940 he would assume responsibilities as editor, publisher, and writer. Entenza had no formal training in architecture, yet with an extensive knowledge of modernism and a clear, forward-thinking vision, he remodeled the magazine’s point of view. What had once been a magazine dedicated to an eclectic, regional California style was instead transformed into a magazine dedicated to modern architecture and design with an internationally-resonant voice. More than just a platform for the display of modernism in general, Arts & Architecture put Los Angeles on the world architectural stage. The magazine served as a mode of exporting California, and Los Angeles more specifically, to the rest of the world. In doing so, it created a new ideal form. Was the city that was described and printed in the pages of Arts & Architecture an accurate depiction of Los Angeles? That remained to be seen. Nonetheless, it was the modern Los Angeles that everyone aspired to.
The new platonic model of Los Angeles as the modern total of all social and material forces was born in 1945. Its form: the single-family home. In the January 1945 issue of Arts & Architecture Entenza announced the inauguration of the Case Study House Program. “We are, within the limits of uncontrollable factors, proposing to begin immediately the study, planning, actual design and construction of eight houses, each to fulfill the specifications of a special living problem in the Southern California area.” The ‘problem’ here described by Entenza had a very clear solution: a two-bedroom, two-bathroom single-family home designed for a middle class family of four. In its initial form, the Case Study House Program called upon eight architects to confront the housing problem in postwar Los Angeles: J.R. Davidson, Richard Neutra, Sumner Spaulding, Eero Saarinen, Charles Eames, William Wurster, Ralph Rapson, and Raphael Soriano. In many ways the architects were given a great deal of freedom to come up with a design that they individually saw as the best solution to these problems, or so it seemed. In the end they were all aiming at the same platonic, material solution.
This was inherent in the structure of the Case Study House Program. It followed its own restrictive scientific method. On the surface it appeared to be designed as a system of trial and error which encouraged unlimited experimentation in the search for the greatest possible postwar housing model. In reality, there were additional parameters built in, hidden within the friendly and encouraging language of Entenza’s announcement, that narrowed the possibilities of the architect’s designs. Most obviously, the single-family home is simply not the path of least resistance towards solving the problem of postwar housing. If the need is to house the most people in the most efficient manner, then the easiest solution is mass housing. This was the route taken by cities like Berlin in the wake of World War II. Berlin posed a building program not unlike the Case Study House Program which aimed to fuse the objectives of modernist architecture with the urgent housing crisis. The Internationale Bauausstellung, or Interbau, competition resulted in the rebuilding in the 1950s of the Hansaviertel, or Hansa Quarter, of West Berlin, an area almost completely destroyed during the war, as a modernist housing project. The competition employed some of the biggest names in European modern architecture: Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Max Taut, and Oscar Niemeyer among them. Although similar to the Case Study Program, the homes created by the designers of the Interbau took on the form of multi-storeyed apartment complexes. Gropius’s building alone was comprised of sixty-four three-bedroom units and two penthouses spread across nine stories, and this was just one of the many such buildings planned and constructed under the Interbau.
A housing project such as that designed for the Hansaviertel was not even considered in Los Angeles under the Case Study Program. Although they had their similarities, the Case Study Program was not intended to be a program like the Interbau. The Case Study Houses were in search of more than just a pragmatic solution to the need for housing. “Los Angeles provided the context, personnel, design tradition, and, most importantly, the occasion and energy for the Case Study House Program.” When closely scrutinized, the Case Study House Program and its resulting structures could only be a product of Los Angeles. As a statement, this seems almost too obvious. However, the assumption that the solution to postwar housing in America was a Los Angeles solution is the key to understanding the Case Study Program for what it was. Los Angeles provided the platonic model for modern, urban life in the United States. This was Entenza’s supposition from the beginning of his tenure as editor of Arts & Architecture. “…This great editor and publisher played the typical Hollywood role of promoter and designer of a modern environment, while Charles [Eames] designed the set.” Entenza’s objective with Case Study House Program was very much tied to the creation and promotion of a desirable product. It was not just a practical means to an end. The single-family home is an object to be possessed.
As a possession, the single-family home is also totally separate from the public sphere. The Case Study Houses, in all aspects of their planning and execution, are private ventures. Here we see another contrast to the Interbau program in Berlin. Unlike the Hansaviertel building program, the Case Study Houses were not government-funded in any way. Instead they were subject to the conditions of American consumer capitalism. Not only were the Case Study Houses private homes designed by architects commissioned not by the government but by a private magazine, they were directly entwined with private industry. “[The architects] will be free to choose or reject, on a merit basis, the products of national manufacturers offering either old or new materials considered best by each architect in his attempt to create contemporary dwelling units.” This was all in an effort to aid in the transition from a wartime, government-subsidized industrial economy to a private, consumer-capitalist economy in the postwar period.
“The efforts of the military industry [found] new sources for economic and structural development within the postwar reorganization of civil society.” The transition from a wartime to a peacetime economy in the United States can be explained by the economic and social shift in focus from the aircraft to the automobile. As I have already discussed, airplane manufacturing was the dominant industry in the Los Angeles area from the 1920s through the end of World War II. During these years the airplane served as a metaphor for efficiency in design; a beautiful machine, at once functional and aesthetic. In Los Angeles specifically, the airplane helped inspire the streamline moderne style of the 1930s. Its impact could be felt in everything from commercial and residential architecture to furniture and appliance design. The airplane also represented the wartime economic situation. Aircrtafts were not produced for individual consumption. It was not until after the war that private, commercial aviation became a major part of American, and particularly Los Angeles, culture. Rather, during the war the airplane was a symbol of the war effort and, by extension, of the call to group action in the public sphere. This attitude permeated American society more generally. The military-industrial economy which brought the United States out of the Great Depression existed for the American people, not the American person. The manufactured products of industry brought prestige and power to America, not Americans. Industry at this time was not directly tied to consumption.
This all changed in 1945. As soon as the war ended an economic transition began. There was no longer need for the war machines American factories were putting out. However, to sustain the booming economy the war had created, it was essential to maintain the energy of the war effort as well as the new technologies it has created. In a 1946 speech to aircraft workers, R. Buckminster Fuller recognized that the real strength of the airplane industry during wartime was the industrial momentum it had built up as a necessity of defense. It was his belief that this momentum could, and must, continue on, even in times of non-necessity. A fallout of the military-industrial economy had the potential to turn into another depression if no new outlet for its efficiency of production was fostered. In regard to the economy, the urgent need for housing proved to be the answer to America’s prayers. “I think our house is going to have an important part in helping us to keep on upward instead of downward in historical degree of technical advantage that was developed during World War II.” The technologies and materials developed and used by the military could be easily translated to myriad new uses within a consumer economy, setting America on a course of economic growth that within decades would establish it as the world’s greatest industrial power.
The greatest example of this transition was the proliferation of glass and steel, which came to be associated not with bombers and barracks but with modern architecture. There was precedent for glass and steel construction long before the postwar economic transition. The International Style, outlined by Philip Johnson and Russell Hitchcock in 1932 as the introduction to the catalog of a Museum of Modern Art exhibition of the same name, was characterized in part by its use of steel-framing and glass panels. In Europe in the 1920s and 30s, architects like Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier were all working in what came to be known as the International Style, bringing the modernist idiom to both commercial and residential architecture. In Southern California, steel-framed architecture was particularly resonant. It was seismically stable, allowed one to build on nearly any terrain, and was a contemporary, industrial response to the area’s lack of timber as a resource. Richard Neutra’s Lovell Health House built between 1927 and 1929 set the tone for steel-framed, prefabricated domestic architecture in Los Angeles. In addition, the widespread use of glass made use of Southern California’s abundance of natural light.
Neutra drew the comparison between houses built using prefabricated materials and the factory production of automobiles. First, they are both made using the same basic materials. Factory-made glass and steel form the structure of the prefabricated parts of both the automobile and the modern house. Second, both are an aestheticization of the precision and innovation of modern technology. Third, they are commodities representative of the optimism and individualism of postwar Americans. In contrast to the wartime symbol of the airplane, the postwar years were represented by the automobile. The proliferation of the automobile in American life was only possible in a consumer economy such as the one which developed out of the ashes of the wartime economy. The automobile, unlike the airplane, is a commodity. It can be purchased, but, furthermore, it can be possessed. In this way it is the seed of aspirations. It stimulates desire. Interestingly, these desires are not unique, nor are they a reflection of oneself as an individual. Rather, they create a false sense of individualism. The automobile and its associated concepts of freedom, consumption, movement, and progress represent the American mid-century ideal.
More specifically, the automobile came to represent Los Angeles. It is no accident that Reyner Banham is guided through the city by a talking car in the iconic 1972 BBC documentary Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles. The automobile is Los Angeles. It is therefore useless to talk about life in Los Angeles without talking about the automobile. Because of the way the city is designed, it is nearly impossible to live there without a car. Spread out across nearly five-hundred square miles and lacking a viable public transportation system, Los Angeles makes it a near necessity that residents spend a significant amount of time in their cars. Their lives are lived in the seat of their Chevys at fifty miles per hour. The automobile is a privately-owned commodity in which one’s private life is played out, but it essentially tied to public space, and, as such, it is inherently visible. It exists not only to be independently possessed but to be publicly exhibited. The automobile is a perfect metaphor for the relationship between public and private space in Los Angeles. This relationship between automobile and freeway echoes that of the single-family home and the city of Los Angeles in which it is situated: a private commodity on public view.
In a symbolic sense, the Case Study Houses seem to aspire to be the automobile. Better yet, they aspire to replace the automobile as the platonic form representing the ideal of the postwar period to which all else aspires. Like the automobile, the Case Study Houses on the whole are objects meant to be exhibited and possessed, but, moreover, they define a new ‘type’ of mid-century American living. From its earliest inception, the Case Study House Program was designed as an exhibition. In Entenza’s initial announcement of the Program in Arts & Architecture, he makes it very clear that the purpose of the program is not that of a competition. Architectural historian and member of the editorial board of Arts & Architecture Esther McCoy has described it as a forum for architects to showcase their work within the context of contemporary materials and furnishings. It is important to keep in mind that the Case Study Houses, in addition to being constructed in real space, were always intended to be showcased on the pages of Arts & Architecture. “Beginning with the February issue of the magazine and for eight months or longer thereafter, each house will make its appearance with the comments of the architect – his reason for his solution and his specific materials to be used.” The fact that they were conceived to be photographed here becomes significant. The houses themselves were designed to be on display, positioned to entice the reader into desiring not only the houses themselves but the lives lived within them. Simultaneously, the Program was structured so as to keep the reader wanting more. Like a serial television show, the monthly issues of the magazine featured the design of each architect one-by-one. With every subsequent issue this strengthened the appeal of the the platonic Case Study House by presenting a new iteration of the idiom with every new edition. Once completed, the houses were open to the public. People were invited to merge their realities with the exhibited dream.
This notion of exhibition heavily influenced the architects’ designs. Many of the houses took on the appearance of pavilions. They often featured an open plan and an extensive use of glass. This served as a perfect setting in which to display the new prefabricated plywood, plastic, and fiberglass furnishings being produced in this period. Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House #22, or the Stahl House, of 1958, one of the later Case Studies, is as much an expression of self as it is a negation. Its position in the Hollywood Hills imbues it with a two hundred and forty degree panorama overlooking the Los Angeles basin. The building’s steel frame and overhanging roof appear merely as outlines directing the viewer’s gaze through the glass structure and out to the vista beyond. In terms of design, there is a strong correlation between the Stahl House and Mies van der Rohe’s German pavilion at the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition. The Barcelona Pavilion, as the structure came to be called, used glass, steel, and marble to accentuate space rather than objects. The roof extends beyond steel pylons, inviting the visitor in through open doorways while the shape of the structure seems to be the inverse to that of the pool. Like the Barcelona Pavilion, Koenig’s Stahl House is a glass box outline in steel meant not to contain but to exhibit space.
The Stahl House seems to replicate this sensibility towards exhibiting both indoor and outdoor space. The feeling of unity between indoor and outdoor space was not a particularly novel design trope in Los Angeles. The region’s mild climate had always encouraged indoor/outdoor living, and this was seen in the vernacular architecture of Southern California. The Spanish Colonial Revival style, popular in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries, featured walled courtyards, covered verandas, and porches incorporated the outdoor space into the living space. Penetrability and a full use of the space is thus created by the architectural forms. In Spanish Colonial Revival houses as well as the Case Study Houses, this emphasizes not only the building but the experience of living in such a building, something which was marketed to readers of Arts & Architecture.
The notion of the Case Study Houses being conceptualized and constructed with exhibition in mind carries over into their existence as possessable objects. Arts & Architecture devised the Program in the form of a massive advertisement for the physical houses themselves as well as the lifestyle which comes with them. In the past, modernism had been difficult to cast as compatible with a consumer society. The avant-garde, particularly in Europe, had always existed outside of conventional society. It was a critique of the society itself. This all changed in the postwar period. Modernism could now be repackaged as something adopted by a wider audience. Overall postwar America’s acceptance of modernism was growing. The clients of modern architecture were usually younger, middle-class professionals. This demographic tended to be more receptive to new ideas in architecture and design because they were often progressively-minded in their own fields. In regard to the Case Study Houses, the consumer provided the purpose, the industry provided the materials, and the architect stood in the middle to mediate the two with form.
Richard Neutra was particularly conscious of the domestic experience as a possession. He noted that the American postwar economy emphasized mass production, interchangeability, and the assembly line; all of this led to dramatic increases not only in production but in advertising and consumption as well. In this context individual identity began to be largely founded upon the acquisition of commercial goods. Owning a single-family home defined the identity of the mid-century American family. More simply, it can be said that it is the home itself, as both space and form, which molds this identity. Neutra made it a point to reiterate the notion of possession in the designs of his buildings. Possession for him was not just a physical concept. The immaterial experience associated with buildings, including the experience of space as an abstract concept, was always considered. It was Neutra’s belief that one’s psychological health was affected by one’s environment. Large, open spaces, he asserted, improved physical and psychological well-being. In an ideal world, all homes would be situated on individual, isolated properties set within the natural world, yet even he was aware this was ultimately an unattainable vision. Most homeowners, particularly in cities like Los Angeles, did not have access to such extensive space. Nonetheless, he strove in his architectural designs to provide a sense of openness which might simulate the feeling of vast space, even for small houses.
Space must be possessed before it can be consumed. Neutra made use of optical illusions in order to extend the perception of space. In his several Case Study designs, expanse was alluded to through the use of continuous lines leading the eye from within the house to the outdoor spaces and further to the environment at large. This gave the effect of the house extending beyond its enclosed space to include what lay outside of its walls. Oftentimes a structural beam continuing seamlessly from indoor to outdoor space would appear to be shooting off into the distance. This created a false sense of distance and scale. Not only did the house seem larger, what lay beyond the house seemed closer. The two spaces, that of the home and its surroundings, had the illusion of being in contact with one another. Large panoramic windows also facilitated the interaction between indoor and outdoor spaces. The use of transparent glass necessarily destroys the distinction between seemingly disparate spaces. Someone standing within the house can direct her gaze beyond the confines of walls which surround. By virtue of her own visual perception she exists in a near infinite space defined not by what she can touch but by what she can see.
An element of Neutra’s belief in the possession of space was his emphasis on indoor/outdoor living. Having demolished the dichotomy of indoor versus outdoor space, he has created the mindset that all usable space can be possessed and exploited. His constructed depth cues were not simply for show; they necessitate action. Life is not only lived within the walls of the home. His Case Study House built in 1948 for Stuart Bailey and his family borrowed space from outdoors where indoor space was unavailable. The kitchen opens up onto the backyard which could be used for dining or other household tasks. It is as if the kitchen exists in multiple spaces, one indoor and one outdoor, both of which are part of the house as object and home as experience.
The legacy of the case Study House Program is far more than the thirty-seven single-family homes designed during the Program’s twenty year span; it was the creation of a new ideal model of postwar, urban living. The answer to the question of the postwar house is much greater than just a physical structure. In effect, it is metaphysical, a conceptual integration of all social, economic, and aesthetic factors of the day. In February of 1944, almost a full year before the initiation of the Case Study House Program, Arts & Architecture magazine posed the question What is a house? in graphic terms. The answer presented does not include four walls and a roof. The process of devising the ideal postwar house must begin and end with a consideration of the factors which form identity on both an individual and cultural scale; the single-family home in Los Angeles designed in the style of modernism is only the mediation between thesis and synthesis. The postwar house unable to be defined in a single building by a single architect. Instead, it is a complex, multi-scaled system which is less about an individual case and more about a replicable ‘type.’ “With the inauguration of the Case Study House Program… [Entenza] turned his journal into a propaganda tool of the California model disseminating his new ideas regarding a new style of life, promoting a ‘domesticity,’ which would rapidly cease to be experimental and rather become the concrete, immediate future.”
Works Cited
Banham, Reyner. Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1971. Print.
Buisson, Ethel, and Thomas Billard. The Presence of the Case Study Houses. Tran. Jasmine Benyamin. Basel: Birkhauser – Publishers for Architecture, 2004. Print.
“The Case Study House Program: Richard Neutra’s Baily House.” MidCentury Home Magazine. 19 June 2015Web. <http://www.midcenturyhome.com/case-study-houses-richard-neutra-bailey-house/Mi>.
“Development of the California Dream: 1941-1950.” History of Planning in Los Angeles. Web. <https://laplanninghistory.wordpress.com/1941-1950/>.
Entenza, John. “Announcement: The Case Study House Program.” Arts & Architecture. Jan 1945: 37. Print.
Fuller, R. Buckminster. “1946.” Designing a New Industry: A Composite Series of Talks by R. Buckminster Fuller, 1945-1946. Wichita: Fuller Research Institute, 1946. 38. Print.
Gropius, Walter, Ise Gropius, and International Exhibitions Foundation. Walter Gropius: Buildings, Plans, Projects 1906-1969. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1972. Print.
Hine, Thomas. “The Search for the Postwar House.” Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses. Ed. Elizabeth A. T. Smith. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989. 167. Print.
Hines, Thomas S. Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Print.
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, and Philip Johnson. The International Style. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1936. Print.
Insenstadt, Sandy. “Richard Neutra and the Psychology of Architectural Consumption.” Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture. Eds. Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Rejean Legault. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001. Print.
Jackson, Neil. “Metal-Frame Houses of the Modern Movement in Los Angeles: Part 1: Developing a Regional Tradition.” Architectural History. 32 (1989): 152. Print.
Los Angeles Department of City Planning. Master Plan of Parkways: A Parkway Plan for the City of Los Angeles and the Metropolitan Area. Los Angeles:, 1941. Print.
McCoy, Esther. “Arts & Architecture Case Study Houses.” Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses. Ed. Elizabeth A. T. Smith. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989. 15. Print.
Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles. Perf. Reyner Banham. BBC, 1972.
Starr, Kevin. “The Case Study House Program and the Impending Future: Some Regional Considerations.” Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses. Ed. Elizabeth A. T. Smith. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989. 131. Print.
—. Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Print.
Steele, James. “The Case Study House Programme: ‘the Style that nearly’ Revisited.” Los Angeles Architecture. London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1993. 55. Print.
Urban, Florian. “Recovering Essence through Demolition: The “Organic” City in Postwar West Berlin.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. 63.3 (2004): 354. Print.
NORA LANDES 