Descriptive Summary
Biographical/Historical Note
Administrative Information
Separated Materials
Scope and Content of Collection
Indexing Terms
Descriptive Summary
Title: Pierre Koenig papers and drawings
Date (inclusive): 1925-2007
Number: 2006.M.30
Creator/Collector:
Koenig, Pierre
Physical Description:
239.6 Linear Feet
(165 boxes, 275 flatfile folders, 6 rolls)
Repository:
The Getty Research Institute
Special Collections
1200 Getty Center Drive, Suite 1100
Los Angeles 90049-1688
reference@getty.edu
URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10020/askref
(310) 440-7390
Abstract: The archive of Los Angeles architect
Pierre Koenig, consisting of drawings, photographs, documents, writings and client
correspondence, and three models. The archive is an important resource for the study of
Southern California Modernism, as well as for the study of pre-fabrication in housing in the
United States.
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Language: Collection material is in English
Biographical/Historical Note
Pierre Koenig was born in San Francisco on October 17, 1925. Even as a boy, Koenig
displayed a nascent interest in architecture and Modernism. In 1939, the family moved to San
Gabriel, a Los Angeles suburb, and here, among a new group of friends who also wanted to be
architects, Koenig's earlier interest crystallized. Yet World War II loomed, and at age 17
Koenig enlisted in the United States Army Advanced Special Training Program, which offered a
compressed 4-year college degree in 2 years. However, in 1943 the program was abruptly ended
and after only one semester of study at the University of Utah, School of Engineering,
Koenig was sent to basic training. From 1943-1946, Koenig served on the front lines in
France and Germany as a flash ranging observer, spotting enemy fire and calculating their
position, with the 292nd Field Artillery Observation Battalion.
After the war, Koenig returned to Los Angeles and applied to the University of Southern
California (USC), School of Architecture. Due the influx of returning GIs, there was a
two-year waiting list for admission, and Koenig spent this time studying at Pasadena City
College until he was finally admitted to USC in 1948. At this time, USC was the leading
architectural school in California, and a hotbed of new ideas brought about by the aftermath
of the war: ideas about how architecture should respond to social issues, such as the
population boom in Los Angeles and the need for low-cost housing, and ideas about how to
apply the new materials and industrialized techniques of the wartime economy, such as
mass-production and pre-fabrication, to peacetime. Although Koenig struggled somewhat within
the strictures of a traditional academic framework, he certainly absorbed the new ideas
surrounding him, and they would continue to guide him throughout his career.
After receiving his B.Arch in 1952, Koenig worked both independently and for a number of
other architectural practices. In fact, Koenig had begun designing and building houses while
still a student. When a USC studio instructor rejected his design for a steel house,
questioning the applicability of steel to residential architecture, Koenig decided to prove
him wrong. His response, Koenig House No. 1, designed and built by Koenig in 1950, was
constructed at a cost lower than a traditional wood frame structure and earned him the
American Institute of Architects' "House and Home" Award of Merit. After graduation, Koenig
would design and build three more steel houses in rapid succession. During this period he
also worked for other practices, both to supplement his income and for the professional
experience required before taking the California licensing exam. In 1950, the same year he
built his first house, Koenig worked as a draftsman for Raphael Soriano, who shared his
interest in steel, doing the presentation renderings for Soriano's unnumbered Case Study
House. Koenig subsequently worked for brief periods for Candreva and Jarrett, Edward
Fickett, Kistner, Wright and Wright, and finally in 1956 for Jones and Emmons, on the
Eichler X-100 steel model. Also in this period, Koenig began a short-lived furniture
business, designing and building modern case goods.
1957 was a watershed year for Pierre Koenig. He was licensed; he received his first
invitation to participate in an international exhibition, the São Paulo Biennial; and
Arts and Architecture magazine published his designs for a "Low-cost
Production House" exemplifying his goal to produce "off-the-shelf" houses as efficiently as
automobiles. Most importantly though John Entenza invited him to participate in
Art
and Architecture
's Case Study House Program.
Case Study House # 21, immediately followed by Case Study House # 22, defined Koenig's
style and brought him great attention. With their steel construction, open-planning, and
emphasis on the unity of nature and architecture, these two steel houses exemplified the
California aesthetic as being different from East Coast Modernism. Despite their conceptual
similarities, the two houses were quite different from one another. Case Study House # 22,
which quickly came to be seen as the perfect manifestation of modernity in Los Angeles and
of life in post-war America in general, was a unique custom house, an exercise in overcoming
the engineering issues of a near vertical site. Case Study House #21, on the other hand, was
meant to be a prototype for affordable, mass-producible housing, an embodiment of Koenig's
belief in architecture as a social study.
After this early recognition, Koenig went on to have a long and prolific career as an
architect, designing and building over forty-three steel and glass houses, including
award-winning structures, such as Schwartz House and Koenig House No. 2, as well as many
residential additions and renovations and commercial buildings. Throughout his long years of
architectural practice Koenig never relinquished the principles that led him to design and
build his first house. He retained a sense of mission, never losing his commitment to the
social agenda of Modernism. He truly believed that he could make people's lives better
through architecture.
In addition to his architectural practice, Koenig was passionate about teaching. In 1964,
Koenig officially joined the faculty of the USC School of Architecture as an assistant
professor, having worked as an instructor there since 1961. He gained tenure and promotion
to Associate Professor in 1970 and then to Full Professor in 1997. Along with his teaching
load, Koenig filled a variety of administrative roles during his many years at USC including
serving as Assistant Director of the Institute of Building Research, and Director and
Founder of both the Natural Forces Laboratory and the undergraduate Building Science
Program.
Koenig's work has had a tremendous impact on contemporary architects worldwide. He was
elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects in 1971 and named
an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 2000. His work has
received numerous awards and has been celebrated in over one thousand journal and periodical
articles and more than seventy books. Exhibits in cities around the world have featured his
architecture. In 1989, a landmark exhibition, Blueprints for Modern Living: History and
Legacy of the Case Study Houses, held at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art,
included a full-scale walk-through model of Case Study House #22. Pierre Koenig remained
active in both his architectural practice and his teaching until shortly before his death in
April 2004.
Administrative Information
Access
Open for use by qualified researchers, with the exception of unreformatted computer files.
Contact the repository for information regarding access to the architectural models.
All videos have been reformatted, except for a few that were damaged or contained duplicate
content. Digitized versions are available online.
Connect to digitized video
recordings.
Access to video recordings is available on-site only.
Publication Rights
Preferred Citation
Pierre Koenig papers and drawings, 1925-2007, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles,
Accession no. 2006.M.30.
http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cifa2006m30
Acquisition Information
Acquired in 2006.
Processing History
Sheila Prospero rehoused the collection upon receipt in 2006. Alan Tomlinson processed the
collection in 2008-2009. Ann Harrison did further processing and created the series
arrangement and initial finding aid in 2010. After the initial acquisition, subsequent
additions of material in 2008, 2013 and 2015 were incorporated into the collection and the
finding aid was revised accordingly.
Digitized Material
Separated Materials
One book and several issues of a periodical were separated to the library.
Scope and Content of Collection
The Pierre Koenig papers and drawings contain the archive of this Los Angeles architect
best-known for his work in steel and participation in the Case Study House Program.
Consisting of drawings, photographs and slides, documents, client correspondence, and three
models, the archive provides in-depth information about Koenig's 50-year career. The archive
is an important resource for the study of Southern California Modernism, as well as for the
study of pre-fabrication in housing in the United States.
The Pierre Koenig archive documents an extremely important chapter in post-war American
domestic architecture: the development of post-and-beam structures that could be constructed
for a reasonable price. Before the war, European architects, such as Walter Gropius, Konrad
Wachsmann, and J.J.P. Oud, had sought to mass-produce housing from standardized,
pre-fabricated components. Koenig's work can be seen to a certain extent as a continuation
of this quest. Following the Second World War, many well-known architects, such as Ludwig
Mies van der Rohe, Buckminster Fuller, Raphael Soriano, and Jean Prouvé, addressed the
enormous need for good, but inexpensive housing. Yet Koenig's work differed significantly
from theirs. This is largely due to how deeply his work is rooted in the architecture of
Southern California. Koenig formed his style by melding the aesthetics of Charles and Henry
Greene's and Rudolf Schindler's Asian-inspired, wood-frame residences, which incorporated
indoor and outdoor living through modular planning; the pre-fabricated modular components
advanced in Frank Lloyd Wright's textile concrete block homes built in the early 1920s and
Richard J. Neutra's unprecedented domestic use of steel frame construction in the Lovell
Health House of 1929. It is also due to his commitment to steel as a material. Koenig stands
out from his contemporaries for his use of steel not only for the structural skeletons of
his houses, but for their walls and roofs as well. John Entenza's
Arts and
Architecture
magazine brought the idea of steel residential construction to the
mainstream through the Case Study House Program of 1945 to 1963, which promoted modern,
indoor-outdoor California living through innovative steel-frame design and construction.
Although, Koenig was one of the youngest architects included in the Case Study House
Program, the editors of
Arts and Architecture considered Koenig's Case Study
House #21 (the Bailey Residence, 1959) the program's quintessential example of an
affordable, modest-sized, single-family home.
Records and drawings relating to Pierre Koenig's architectural projects form Series I, the
core of the archive. With over 2,000 original and reproduction drawings, the archive is very
complete. More than eighty executed and unexecuted building projects, including all of
Koenig's major houses, such as Case Study Houses #21 and #22, the Johnson House in Carmel
Valley, CA (1962), the Iwata House in Monterey Park, CA (1963), the Gantert House in Los
Angeles (1983), and the Schwartz House in Santa Monica (1996), are represented in the
archive. A particularly interesting project is the Chemehuevi Indian Reservation Planning
Program, sponsored by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. Koenig
and his USC students designed pre-fabricated steel homes for the reservation located near
Havasu Lake in San Bernardino County, California, but the project was never built.
The two subsequent series record other aspects of Koenig's professional life. Series II is
comprised of Koenig's teaching materials and documentation of his administrative role at the
University of Southern California, School of Architecture. Koenig took his teaching
seriously. He was very conscious of the fact that he was training the next generation of
architects and proud of the fact that he had supervised over 100 student research projects
investigating the interaction of structures and the natural environment. Series III is
comprised of all the other materials, aside from the individual project files, relating to
Koenig's role as an architect, such as his office files and reference files. Koenig was
active in interpreting and publicizing his work, and he also maintained documentation of
others citing his work in a variety of media from clippings to exhibitions to videos.
Series IV is comprised of Pierre Koenig's personal papers. His college class projects trace
Koenig's emerging development as an architect and the extensive documentation of his early
military service helps place his personal development. The memorials marking Koenig's death
in 2004 are documented in the final series of the archive.
Arrangement
Arranged in five series:
.Series I. Project records, 1950-2004;
Series II. Faculty
papers, 1961-2004;
Series III.Other
professional papers, 1945-2007;
Series IV. Personal
papers, 1925-2004;
Series V. In memoriam,
2004
Indexing Terms
Subjects - Topics
Architecture -- California -- Los Angeles
Architects -- California -- Los Angeles
Architect-designed houses -- California
Architecture, Modern -- 20th century -- California, Southern
Modern movement (Architecture) -- California
Subjects - Places
Los Angeles (Calif.) -- Buildings, structures, etc. -- 20th
century
Genres and Forms of Material
Architectural drawings -- 20th century
Architectural models
CD-ROMs
Floppy disks
Video recordings
Slides (photographs) -- 20th century
Architectural drawings -- United States -- 20th century
Gelatin silver prints -- United States -- 20th century
Photographic prints -- California -- 20th century
Contributors
Koenig, Pierre