ART WARS:
Mother of Beauty
In memory of architect Pierre Koenig…
Mother of Beauty: A Note on Modernism.
“… Case Study House #22 … was high drama — one in which the entire city becomes part of the architect’s composition. Approached along a winding street set high in the Hollywood Hills, the house first appears as a blank concrete screen. From here, the visitor steps out onto a concrete deck that overlooks a swimming pool. Just beyond it, the house’s living room — enclosed in a glass-and steel-frame — cantilevers out from the edge of the hill toward the horizon.
The house was immortalized in a now famous image taken by the architectural photographer Julius Shulman. In it, two women, clad in immaculate white cocktail dresses, are perched on the edge of their seats in the glass-enclosed living room, their pose suggesting a kind of sanitized suburban bliss. A night view of the city spreads out beneath them, an endless grid of twinkling lights that perfectly captures the infinite hopes of the postwar American dream….
“My blue dream…”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Perhaps no house, in fact, better sums up the mix of outward confidence and psychic unease that defined Cold War America….”