Raphael Soriano

Wagener's detailed, clearly written, and exquisitely illustrated study of the work of the mid-twentieth-century architect Raphael Soriano is a paean to the vanished middle-class, egalitarian Los Angeles. On the eve of the Second World War no other city in America was so democratic (it could be argued), because in no other city was the freestanding, single-family house so predominant. And in no other city was the middle-class housing stock so architecturally distinguished; the California bungalow, which two architectural historians have called "the closest thing to a democratic art that has ever been produced," flourished there. By the mid-1940s a number of the city's most distinguished architects — including Soriano, Richard Neutra, Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen, and Soriano's protégés Pierre Koenig and Craig Ellwood — recognized that the techniques and materials of the war industries, especially the aeronautical industry, could be used to design and build a new type of affordable and beautiful house for southern California's swelling population. They were enlisted in the Case Study House program (1945-1966), which aimed to build avant-garde Modernist family homes on a bourgeois budget. Marked by a fluidity of indoor and outdoor space (the Case Study architects, Soriano in particular, were adept at interweaving rooms and patios), and built largely of glass framed in lightweight steel, these clean-lined houses also managed (unlike Philip Johnson's and Mies van der Rohe's soulless domestic glass boxes back east) to be jaunty, relaxed, and remarkably livable. Soriano's work was the apotheosis of the Case Study House ideals. Like his mentors Rudolf Schindler and Neutra, Soriano molded the understated, pure Modernist aesthetic to the climate and good life of southern California. But he was equally attentive to cost and to the need for easy and fast construction, and was hence imaginative and innovative in his frequent use of prefabricated, industrial, and off-the-shelf materials. This book places Soriano's designs in the cultural, political, and economic context of postwar southern California, and it keenly assesses both his breezy, family-friendly houses and his contribution to the Case Study movement (his pioneering use of steel module frames eliminated the need for interior, load-bearing walls and resulted in the open floor plans that became a distinguishing feature of the program's houses). But Wagener's most impressive feat is his revealing use of photographs, notably those by the great architectural photographer Julius Shulman. (Shulman's beguiling nighttime photograph of two women in cocktail dresses sitting in Case Study House #22, which seems to hover above the lights of the San Fernando Valley, is an iconic image of modern architecture.) Shulman has always seemed especially sensitive to Soriano's vision, perhaps because he has now lived for more than half a century in a house designed by the architect.

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