| buy book | BRAVE NEW HOUSES By Michael Webb. New York: Rizzoli. 2003 There was once a time in Southern California when ‘Brave New Houses’ would have meant residential design that was both socially and technologically pioneering: the explorations in inside-outside living in materials like concrete or aluminium by early émigrés to the West Coast, R. M. Schindler, Richard Neutra and Albert Frey. Then the Case Study Housing Program and architects like Charles and Ray Eames, Pierre Koenig, Raphael Soriano and Gregory Ain who shared a radical vision for housing made of industrial materials developed during the war, but integrated with the Southern California landscape. Although these houses were mostly single residences for private, daring clients, the vision was expansive: to transform the housing market and make mass-produced, open-plan dwellings available to the new middle class. Today’s Brave New Houses, as selected by Michael Webb, are more modest in their social and technological aspirations if more formally experimental. Webb has taken the view that bravery in architecture involves a client and architect who stand up to unadventurous mothers-in-law, bank managers and historicist design review boards and are ‘willing to take a chance and please themselves’. He has chosen 34 homes spanning Southern California from Santa Barbara to San Diego; houses that are located in open hills, ocean side or in tight urban sites; remodels and new build; by architects as established as Thom Mayne and Charles Gwathmey and as new to the field as Patrick Tighe and David Chun. He has also spoken to designer, clients and sometimes builders about the process of realizing a personal vision of home. While Spanish or neo-classical is still the style of choice for much custom and mass housing here, the houses chosen by Webb represent a good sampling of contemporary design in the Modernist spirit in LA today. While free of the uniformity of Case Study houses, the dwellings tend to be similarly minimalist and free-flowing, with large expanses of glass, hardwood floors and exposed structure. But the influence of Frank Gehry is felt in the inclination towards more sculptural forms, skewed volumes and at times idiosyncratic disposition of elements. There is currently a flowering of a new kind of brave new house in LA, and that is the environmentally sustainable one, in which architects are integrating solar power and the latest energy-saving materials and technologies into clean, modern designs. One of the exemplars, David Hertz, is included in Brave New Houses, but for the most part, that trend is not the focus of the book. Webb’s spotlight is on freedom of life-style and artistic expression, and his book offers a tasty survey of works in that spirit. FRANCES ANDERTON |