P I E R R E K O E N I G : 1 9 2 5 - 2 0 0 4 : L I V I N G W I T H S T E A L

IntroductionFew images of twentieth-century architec-

ture are more iconic than the nighttime view

of Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House # 22 set

on its eagle’s-nest site high above the lights

of Los Angeles. Yet neither the house, nor the

photograph which captured it,were in fact as

they appear. The house was unfinished and

full of plaster dust, the furniture, including

Koenig’s own. Architectural pottery, was bor-

rowed for the day, and the landscaping was

contrived, consisting of cut branches held by

clamps or by hand.The photograph was also

a construct, a seven-minute exposure to bring

out the citylights and the pop of a flash-bulb

to catch the two young women, one a UCLA

under-graduate and the other a senior at Pasa-

dena High School, poised in conversation in-

side; in fact, the city lights can actually be read

through their white evening dresses.But the

picture which first appeared on the front cover

of the ‘Sunday Pictorial’ sectionof the Los An-

geles Examiner on 17 July 1960 was symbolic.

Like so much popular music, it caught the spir-

it of the moment, the Zeitgeist: Los Angeles,

the city of angels at the dawn of the 1960s and

the Kennedy era. It was a decade which, for

America, started with so much hope but ended

in so much chaos. Perhaps that is the lasting

significance of this house; it is an enduring

statement of hope and expectation.

Pierre Koenig was born in San Fran-

cisco on 17 October 1925 ; his parents were

both second-generation immigrants, his

mother of French descent and his father of Cer-

man, hrmr the European name. In 1939 , while

still at high school, he movcci with his family

to Los Angeles, to the San Gabriel valley just

south of Pasadena, where he found everything,

in contrast to San Francisco, to be “warm,

sunny and colourful...new

and bright and clean, es-

pecially the architecture.1” Soon

after, in 1941 , the United States entered the

War and Koenig, then aged just seventeen, en-

listed in the US Army Advanced Special Train-

ing Program, which promised an accelerated

college education. But in 1943 , after just a

few months at the University of Utah, the pro-

gramme was cancelled and Koenig was sent

to Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia.

Active service in France and Germany—as a

flash ranging observer with the duty to spot

enemy gunfire and calculate, through triangu-

lation, their position—kept him in Europe un-

til well after VE Day, and it was not until 1946

that he was shipped back to the UnitedStates

on the Cunard Liner Queen Mary. On that jour-

ney he shunned the squalor of thetroops’ quar-

ters below decks for a bed-roll in a lifeboat.

The Gl Bill granted Koenig the finan-

cial support to undertake college training and,

after two years at Pasadena City College, he

finally gained admittance to the archi-tecture

t h e s e v e n - m i n u t e e x p o s u r e • l u l i u s s r u l m a n ’ s p h o t o g r a p h o f c a s e s t u d y • h o u s e # 2 2

1 Pierre Koenig, quoted in James Steele and David jenkins, Pierre Koenig, Phaidon Press, London,1998, p. 9

C H A P T E R 3T I T L E T I T L E T I T L E T L E