The Case Study Houses, of which 26 were built, emerged from an abiding concern with small homes for small urban lots. Nearly every issue of Arts & Architecture contains titles like "Winners Second Annual Small House Competition," "Small Contemporary House," "A Tract of Small Modern Houses," and "The Small House and the City Plot."
Entenza and his architect pals -- William Wurster, Craig Ellwood, Pierre Koenig, Raphael Soriano, A. Quincy Jones -- shared an obsession with finding a way to build inexpensive yet liberating homes. In his April 1949 essay, "Consider the Family," Josef Van Der Kar summarized the problem. "The small house with its many amenities both aesthetic and practical," he wrote, "is too often, in actuality, a juxtaposition of toys and stumbling people. . . . For the average person the hiring of a modern architect and the building of a modern home is too often a snare and a delusion of the slick magazines. For them, the architect becomes a swami of space well beyond their practical reach."
Echoing through these words were the stomping feet of 16 million returning veterans marching out of the cities straight to Levittown. Suborned by Veterans Administration loans and the newly conceived mortgage interest deduction -- the neutron bombs that killed American cities -- the migration to suburbia had a price, which some call the Geography of Nowhere. Arts & Architecture was a prescient force aligned against this mass-produced culture of dingbats, flattop malls and thruways. As the country drifted into the deadening alikeness of the Truman-Eisenhower years, Entenza and his obscure magazine, with a circulation of no more than 10,000, fought to express the conviction that, for less than $10 per square foot, art and architecture could stir the soul.
The magazine attacked on two indivisible fronts, intellectual and aesthetic. Entenza's monthly "Notes in Passing" were not-so-quiet sermons against war and greed and blind obeisance to the powers that be. In February 1950, he confessed: "One has considerable difficulty in deciding between the destructive horrors of the hydrogen bomb and the implications inherent in the development of the new computing machines which in their electronic fury are reputed to be well on their way to taking over most of the basic functions of civilized living. It is ironic that we are at last faced with the necessity of considering Man himself as being obsolete in the face of triumphs of his own technology. It is possible that the whole dilemma boils down to our own seeming inability to effectively develop a sense of proportion and a proper assessment of the values of life itself."
