What the Stahl House says about L.A.

Frank Gehry died last Friday at 96, just as I was posting last week’s Punch List. I happened to be in Los Angeles, to speak at a conference organized by the Cultural Landscape Foundation, and so the next morning I had the odd experience of picking up a print copy of the Los Angeles Times to see, on the front page, the obituary of Gehry I’d filed more than seven years earlier, shortly before leaving the paper to take a job in the L.A. Mayor’s Office.

I then spent the next 48 hours making pilgrimages to see a number of my favorite Gehry projects around town, including a little bank branch in the Valley, from 1982, that channels Light and Space artists like Larry Bell; the 1965 Danziger Studio on Melrose, a stunner hidden in stucco-clad plain sight; and of course the architect’s own house in Santa Monica, a modest pink bungalow he remade beginning in 1977 by wrapping it in chain link, corrugated metal, and other workaday materials of the Southern California built landscape.

Tomorrow I’ll be sharing a remembrance of the time my wife Rachel and I shared a meal with the architect at that house, in an essay called “Frank Gehry Makes Matzo Brei.” (Subscribe here to be sure you receive it.) Today, though, we’ll be considering another hugely influential work of L.A. residential architecture:

The Stahl House is for sale. I’m interested less in the difference between what it cost to build ($37,500, in 1960 dollars) and its ambitious asking price ($25 million), a gap that has preoccupied some observers, and more in what its design, beginning with its posture toward the city around it, reveals about Los Angeles. In that sense the house just might be the preeminent architectural emblem of 20th-century Southern California.

Designed by Pierre Koenig, a modernist trained at USC, it is also known as Case Study House No. 22, for its membership in the group of designs commissioned as prototypes for stylish postwar living by “Arts & Architecture” magazine and its tastemaking editor, John Entenza. The house cantilevers over a steep lot in the Hollywood Hills, just up the road from the Chateau Marmont and about ten miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. In the spring of 1960, as it was nearing completion but before its owners, Buck and Carlotta Stahl, moved in with their infant son, the photographer Julius Shulman made a series of pictures of it.

One of these belongs on a very short list of the most significant architectural photographs of the last century, offering what Patrick Hodgkinson, with only slight exaggeration, called “the ecstatic view from the edge of a precipice.” Norman Foster has written that the image embodies “the whole spirit of late 20th century architecture,” adding: “If I had to choose one snapshot, one architectural moment, of which I would like to have been the author, this is surely it.”

The photo shows the house at night, with its glassed-in living room hovering above the roomy grid of L.A. boulevards—the territory Reyner Banham famously called the “Plains of Id”—and features two young women in white evening dresses seated near the floor-to-ceiling windows. The women weren’t part of the Stahl family or connected to Arts & Architecture; they were invited to the photo shoot by Jim Jennings, a USC architecture student then moonlighting in Koenig’s office. One, Ann Lightbody, was a 21-year-old UCLA student and Jennings’ fiancée. The other, a childhood friend of Lightbody’s from Pasadena named Cynthia Tindle, was still in high school.

There are number of technical achievements to be glimpsed in the photo’s composition, starting with the way Shulman positions the edge of the roofline on axis with the lights of the boulevards below. (He used a seven-minute exposure to make the underside of that roofline visible.) But what I’ve always found most captivating about the photograph is the way it makes legible—makes glamorous, even—a certain paradox about Los Angeles architecture. Like so many of the city’s landmarks, including the Hollywood Bowl and the Griffith Observatory, the Stahl House earns its quintessential Los Angeles-ness precisely by its distance, and even its estrangement, from the city around it.

This is more than anything what Shulman’s photograph captures. (Two other works from the same era, Ed Ruscha’s bird’s-eye view of Dodger Stadium, from the series “Thirtyfour parking lots in Los Angeles,” and David Hockney’s painting “A Bigger Splash,” are in the same vein.) To be in the geographic and cultural middle of the city and at arm’s length from it at the same time—this mixture of distance and proximity, suburbanism and metropolitanism, opportunity and elbow room, view and repose—is, in a nutshell, the singular appeal of modern Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles of 1960, at least. In those days, just before Banham began making regular trips from London, and as the region’s gargantuan freeway network was being filled in thanks to plenty of federal subsidy, a middle-class couple like the Stahls (who both worked in aviation, he in sales and she as a receptionist) could afford to buy an empty lot in the Hollywood Hills and commission a talented young architect like Koenig to build a house there.

Not that getting it finished was easy. The Stahls were turned down by a number of architects, some of them daunted by the prospect of building on the dramatically sloped lot, and then, as they were seeking a construction loan, by a series of banks. In the end it was a Black-owned bank, Broadway Federal Savings and Loan Association, whose board included the pioneering Los Angeles architect Paul R. Williams, that agreed to lend the Stahls the money they needed.

As Etan Rosenbloom has noted, “It was a great irony that this minority-owned bank was the only one willing to underwrite this white couple” to build a house in a part of L.A. where Black homebuyers were “still not welcome due to racist housing covenants (technically illegal by 1958, but still prevalent).”

The bank requested a couple of changes to Koenig’s design, in order to boost the value of the property and protect its investment. One was to add a swimming pool to the design, which the architect soon did, ingeniously cantilevering its far edge out over the slope in the same way the living room was. As the critic Esther McCoy wrote in 1975 of the revamped design, “As in most Koenig houses, water becomes a part of the floor plan.” 

What the Stahl house says about the Los Angeles of 2025 is a trickier question. You could of course look at its price tag and lament the pace at which housing costs in Southern California have raced forward. (The median list price for a house in Los Angeles County these days is just under one million dollars.) You also might begin to get a sense of a historic preservation challenge unique to Los Angeles, namely that such a high percentage of its architectural landmarks are single-family houses, many of them tucked away on narrow roads in the hills where public access is tricky, parking scarce, and neighbors often litigious. Just ask LACMA, which is preparing to open John Lautner’s remote and dramatic Sheats-Goldstein House, of “The Big Lebowski” fame, to the public in the coming years.

Finally, in the wake of this year’s apocalyptic L.A. fires, you could note the vulnerability of the house’s hillside parcel, the sort of locale that now strikes us as courting climate change–fueled disaster. Indeed, two other Case Study houses, the Eames House and Studio (#8) in the Palisades and the Saul Bass House in Altadena (#20b), narrowly escaped destruction during the January fires.

Still, the Case Study designs have hardly waned as a touchstone for architects or developers. There are two nascent fire-recovery efforts directly inspired by the program. Case Study: Adapt has new prototypes by (among many others) Bestor Architecture, Assemblage+, Johnston Marklee, and Marmol Radziner, while Case Study 2.0 features designs by Jennifer Siegal and Morphosis (and… Marmol Radziner).

In the end, it’s not the photograph with the two young women that is my favorite Shulman image of the house. Nor is it a similar one, in color and nearly as famous, showing a solitary man looking out over the city below, his back to the camera. It’s a different kind of picture—a behind-the-scenes shot that the Getty Research Institute, where the photo is held, credits to both Koenig and Shulman, suggesting perhaps the architect himself took it. It shows Shulman in the process of photographing the house, perched precariously on a low wall just as the house itself is perched on its steep hillside. An assistant helpfully holds up a tree branch, a trick Shulman was known to use to frame his architectural portraits with a landscaped edge.

What the picture embodies is not the innovative and forward-looking nature of the house but the patience, labor, and resourcefulness required to bring it, and its legend, into being. When it comes to the production of architecture and architectural photographs—however stylish the results in either case—there is always a backstory.

It was this lesser-known image that I found myself thinking about during the visits I made to the Stahl House, where I discovered not a blinding source of design glamour but a smallish, spectacularly positioned, and well-made work of architecture beginning, like those heady promises of postwar Los Angeles, to show its age.

Special thanks to Maristella Casciato and Maria Mathioudakis of the Getty Research Institute for their generous assistance.

News & Notes

Some of my favorite Gehry obits and remembrances include pieces by Carolina Miranda, Paul Goldberger, Mark Lamster, and (with the view from the architect’s native Canada) Alex Bozikovic.

In what surely qualifies as a crowning career achievement, tonight I’ll be introducing a Yale Film Archive screening of “Die Hard,” which as I’m sure you know is not just a Christmas movie but also a classic slice of 1980s L.A. (with a couple of Frank Lloyd Wright Easter eggs to boot). If you’re in New Haven, please join us! If not, you might enjoy revisiting Geoff Manaugh’s great 2010 Bldgblog post, which does for Nakatomi Plaza what Jameson did for the Bonaventure.

The “size and scope” of the White House ballroom plan hasn’t changed, Bloomberg CityLab reports, despite the switch in architects we covered last week.

Related: Trump’s D.C. demolition spree may not be finished.

Andrea Dietz and Peggy Deamer offer their take on the DOE’s controversial decision to exclude architecture from the ranks of professional degrees.

In a coda to the Venice Architecture Biennale that originally was going to take place at our Speakers’ Corner grandstand, but ultimately happened on Zoom, Edwin Heathcoate, Kate Wagner, and Justin Shubow debate “Classicism Now.”

Calibri catching strays: Are you following the typeface brouhaha at Foggy Bottom? Michael Bierut, if you’re out there and want to write a guest post, hit me up.

Remixing a famous photograph from 1932, Time magazine put some AI slop on its cover to honor “The Architects of AI,” its collective “Person of the Year” for 2025. Back in 2007, I wrote about how architect was replacing engineer as America’s metaphorical job description of choice. 

The last word this week goes to Seattle’s mayor-elect, Katie Wilson: “I believe you should be able to raise a family in an apartment, as I am. And that the city should be your living room, and the park should be your backyard.”

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