#SHULMAN STAHL HOUSE PROFESSIONAL#

Well, Buck Stahl paid the outrageous sum (for the 1950s) of $13,500 for the land, and another $37,651 for the house and pool.

So how much does it cost to live in a modernist masterpiece? He was fascinated by the properties of steel, and he did idealistically motivated work-notably with the Chemehuevi indians when he taught at USC-but nothing ever brought him the fame and recognition of the magazine friendly pieces from early in his career. He built, and he taught, for most of his life. Whereas Mies and Johnson were drawing on an architecture that went back as far as ancient Greece, and they knew it, the Eameses breezily rejected the weight of tradition. The 3D model from Archilogic shows the strong shift in atmosphere between the photogenic public spaces and the rarely photographed bedrooms, which are clearly designed to offer a feeling of enclosure, and security, in spite of the steep drop only a short distance away.Īlthough on July 24, 2013, a half a century after completion, the Stahl House was listed in the National Register of Historic Places, finally affording it the recognition it deserved, there’s still a strange split between the postwar houses of figures like Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, and the case study houses of the Eameses, or Pierre Koenig. The schism between privacy and view could not be more extreme. From the street, there’s almost nothing visible. Paradoxically, for the most glamorous house in America, it’s all about family. Pierre Koenig rationalized Stahl’s original plans, but recently rediscovered photographs of the early models suggest that this is one of those cases where the client deserves credit as a co-designer.

#SHULMAN STAHL HOUSE PROFESSIONAL#

The site was believed to be too steep to build upon, so the owner, C H “Buck“ Stahl, a retired professional football player, heaped up the terraces supporting the structure more or less by hand, and made models of a curving, glass walled home over a year before finding an architect with the courage to take the commission.

The Stahl house itself was a classic American story, a house built as much by sheer force of will as from the application of contemporary technology. The Stahl House represents an alternative history, a custom built precision architecture that everyone wanted but few ended up getting. Wooden frames proved cheaper than steel, and required less skill to manage. Instead of using the best of postwar technology, the building industry used the booming market to cover America in suburban tract housing built by a deunionised and deskilled workforce. But the irony is that almost all of the case study houses were one-offs, modernist gems that were never replicated.

They were meant to be affordable, and replicable, houses for a confident democratic society. The official agenda of Entenza’s Case Study House program was to reimagine the typical family dwelling using postwar materials and technology. When printed in John Entenza’s influential Californian magazine Arts and Architecture, Shulman’s photographs worked like an intoxicant on a generation of post-war architects. Where other photographers took static descriptive images of entire houses, Shulman made film stills, frozen moments from places you wished you lived in.

Shulman’s genius was that he understood architectural photography first and foremost in terms of film, and not least Hollywood, the dream factory down the road. The architecture is not so much shown as hinted at by the geometric underside of the roof, and the city is brought closer by the careful double exposure and the reflected image of the ceiling lamp that appears like a double moon inside and outside the house. Shulman’s notorious photo is more subtle than it first appears. It was magazine genius: a vouyeristic image of two women in a glass lined room, suspended above the lights of Los Angeles, seen from outside the glass, the ambiguous perspective of either a guest leaving late, or an intruder arriving unannounced-whatever you wanted it to be. Shulman’s photograph of, or rather through, Stahl House made plate glass and steel girders, materials normally too industrial to be accepted by home owners, seem glamorous. Save this picture! Courtesy of Archilogic

Shulman stahl house