Case Study Houses

The show of Case-Study Houses opening at the Museum of Contemporary Art on Oct. 17 is a blueprint of a long-past age of faith. The show revivifies Arts and Architecture magazine's program to build model houses that would light the way between historic and modern styles, under the direction of the late John O. Entenza, editor and publisher.

Shortly before 7 a.m., Beverley Thorne stepped out of his home in Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii. A roll of drawings under his arm, the 85-year-old was off to meet the contractor on one of his new projects: a rectory under construction at Christ Church Episcopal in nearby Kealakekua. A few weeks later, Thorne flew with his fiancée to Oakland, where on a precipitous slope he is constructing the Millennium house, a 4,000-square-foot octagonal epic scheduled to be completed next year after more than a decade of planning and tweaking.

Edward Killingsworth, one of the last Case Study House architects, whose elegant, precise designs for small residences and luxury hotels made him one of the leading Southern California modernists of his era, died of natural causes July 6 at his Long Beach home. He was 86.

Kemper Nomland Jr., a Los Angeles architect who teamed with his father early in his career to design and build one of the homes in the landmark post-World War II Case Study House program, has died. he was 90. Nomland died Friday of natural causes at an assisted living home in Long Beach, said his daughter, Erika Nomland Cilengir. A Los Angeles native who was a conscientious objector during World War II, Nomland joined with his father to form Nomland & Nomland after the war. During their partnership, the Nomlands designed numerous projects; chief among them was Case Study House No. 10 in Pasadena.

Here is a list of the 24 Case Study Houses that were built and the architects who built them. Many of the architects who designed Case Study Houses are dead, including some of the more famous, such as Richard Neutra, Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen, Quincy Jones and Raphael Soriano. A dozen are still living, and several are still in practice, including Pierre Koenig in Brentwood and Ed Killingsworth in Long Beach.

The house that Zoltan E. Pali designed for Sean and Hsiu-Yen Brosmith is tailored both to the needs of their young family and the spectacular site overlooking the San Fernando Valley. It's also a Modernist classic that recalls the simplicity and clarity of the Case Study houses, which created a new blueprint for indoor-outdoor living in the postwar decades. Sliding glass doors, shaded by an overhanging roof, open the 5,100-square-foot house to the pool.

* Pierre Koenig: Case Study Houses #21 and #22 and Peter Alexander: The Miramar Project (Craig Krull Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., B-3, Santa Monica, [310] 828-6410). Architectural drawings and models by Koenig, including "Rendering of Case Study House #22" (1958), above; paintings by Alexander. Ends June 29.

CRAIG and Bruce Walker live 20 miles apart but awake each morning in nearly identical new hilltop homes, post-and-beam structures with open floor plans and walls of glass. To them, the twin houses are a homage to their late father, Rodney Walker, and to the first family home he built 60 years ago.

A multimedia exhibit, "Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses (1945-1966)," will be sponsored by the Museum of Contemporary Art at the Temporary Contemporary, 152 N. Central Ave., Oct. 17-Feb. 18. It will feature: --A film series, 10 short films, including the world premiere of a film by Eames Demetrios, grandson of Charles Eames, "901: After 45 Years of Working," filmed at the Eames' former studio at 901 Venice Ave. in Venice.

Ground is scheduled to be broken and construction finally is to begin next month on an innovatively designed 40-unit affordable housing complex at the northwest corner of Franklin and La Brea avenues in Hollywood. The complex, proposed more than two years ago, was to be completed this fall to serve as an extension of sorts to the exhibit at the Temporary Contemporary Museum downtown, entitled "Blueprint for Modern Living." The exhibit, which runs through Feb.

"Visual Acoustics" is nominally about the life and career of landmark Southern California architectural photographer Julius Shulman, but it's more about the buildings he photographed than it is about him. Which is probably the way he'd like it. Not that Shulman, who died in July at age 98, was any kind of shrinking violet. Quite the contrary. As revealed in this respectful documentary by Eric Bricker, Shulman could be cantankerous and never hesitated to speak his mind. When actress Kelly Lynch tells him "You are a rock star," he takes it all in stride.

When Ron Frank donated five boxes of mailers, photos and magazine ads to the Getty Research Institute's architecture and design collection in May, one might have wondered what a distinguished scholarly organization would want with marketing paraphernalia from a defunct furniture store. Once the box tops came off, the answer was clear. Showroom photos taken by the renowned Julius Shulman and Marvin Rand, a 1962 patent application for a convertible couch, examples of innovative graphic design from the 1940s to the 1970s, even original photographs by midcentury icon Charles Eames -- all reflected aspects of a landmark Long Beach store called Frank Bros.

Each Christmas they hung their homemade stockings from the crannies of the rock-faced fireplace in the living room. Summers found them diving off the flat roof into the pool for coins their grandfather threw into the deep end, or playing safari in the dense foliage of the hillside below their house, under the glass-enclosed room that cantilevered precipitously above them. For the Stahl children -- Bruce, Sharon and Mark -- who grew up roller skating on the concrete floors of Case Study House No.

How's your weekend looking? Can you set aside a couple of hours for a visit to a pair of deceptively modest-looking exhibitions downtown? The shows -- which are in walking distance of each other, one at REDCAT and the other at the Central Library -- offer very different takes on the urban and architectural history of Los Angeles. Each one closes Sunday. And each one is worth seeking out for the subtle intelligence it displays about the city's built landscapes and hardest-to-shake stereotypes.

THE Wright auction house, which occupies a two-story warehouse building just west of the Loop, specializes in 20th century furniture and decorative arts. The items up for bid Sunday afternoon in Wright's salesroom included a travertine cocktail table by Philip Johnson, a Mies van der Rohe daybed and some early pieces by the British designer Ron Arad. But squeezed in the middle of that collection was a bigger and decidedly more immovable object: Pierre Koenig's Case Study House No.

THOSE wonderful photos of Rodney Walker's Case Study House 16 ["Case Study, in Duplicate," June 8] reminded me of my Uncle Saul's house on Woodrow Wilson Drive in Studio City. The last time I saw that house was in the mid-1950s when I was about 7 or 8 years old. Before I read the article, I phoned my uncle and asked him if he knew of Rodney Walker. He proceeded to regale me with stories of his relationship with Walker, which started somewhere around 1949. At that time my uncle, Dr. Saul Birnbaum, was a young dentist recently out of the Marine Corps; not yet wealthy but with plenty of charm and ambition.

Tucked on a La Jolla cul de sac are three revolutionary San Diego houses. Twenty-seven years after they were built as part of the Case Study Houses program, the minimalist wood-and-glass homes known as the Triad Development seem like creative anomalies among their conservative Mt. Soledad neighbors. In photos taken shortly after their completion, the homes stand apart from the traditional wood-and-stucco, shingle-roofed bungalows that had been the norm.

Leon Whiteson's excellent article " 'House Machine' at Home on Southland Hillsides" (May 20) was a pleasure to read. As a private building inspector, it has been my good fortune to examine numerous residences designed by the architects cited in the piece. To me, these structures are museums unto themselves, for the most part standing distinct from the more mundane homes that surround them. One can find "clusters" of architecturally significant homes; there are several Case Study houses that survive on Moore Street in Mar Vista (one I inspected still has several original "moveable" walls, permitting the home to be reconfigured instantly)

CRAIG and Bruce Walker live 20 miles apart but awake each morning in nearly identical new hilltop homes, post-and-beam structures with open floor plans and walls of glass. To them, the twin houses are a homage to their late father, Rodney Walker, and to the first family home he built 60 years ago.

ONE morning three months ago, Italian architect Renzo Piano met with a handful of LACMA trustees in one of the museum's conference rooms. After a few minutes of small talk, Piano motioned the group over to a large table and picked up a stack of cards about 4 inches wide and 6 inches high. He began tossing them onto the tabletop, as if he were dealing blackjack. As the cards skidded to a stop, each revealed a picture of a building, an architect or a piece of furniture from the 1950s and '60s.