Pierre Koenig Case Study Houses Are Elegant L.A. Architectural Icons

                        Rendering, Case Study House #22, 1958-60

   The Case Study House Program, one of America’s most innovative architectural experiments, consisted of 36 prototypical houses built in Southern California between 1945 and 1966. The program, the houses that emerged from it and their architects have been endlessly studied and emulated.
   Two of the best-known Case Study Houses — #21 and #22 –were designed by Pierre Koenig. In his landmark book, “The Architecture of Four Ecologies,” Reyner Banham, who, with Esther McCoy, wrote most incisively and eloquently about Los Angeles architecture, described Koenig’s work as “…an architecture of elegant omission that takes Mies van der Rohe’s dictum about ‘Weniger ist Mehr’ (less is more) even further than the master himself had ever done.”
   An exhibition that opened last Saturday at Craig Krull Gallery at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica, is devoted to Koenig’s Case Study Houses and includes his renderings, scale models, vintage photographs by noted architectural photographer Julius Shulman and related ephemera.
   Also showing at the Gallery is an exhibition of paintings. The Miramar Project, by leading L.A. painter Peter Alexander (Santa Monica Mirror, May 8, 2002), featuring works done by him during a stay at the Fairmount Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica.
   One of the preeminent artists in the 1960s Light and Space/Finish Fetish group, Alexander has made small acrylic and pastel paintings on black board of the lights on the Santa Monica Pier and large acrylic on panel paintings of the shimmery water in the hotel’s pool. The paintings were shown at the Hotel itself for one weekend, May 11-12, before they were moved to the Gallery.
   Together the Koenig and Alexander exhibitions tell a great deal about Los Angeles and its fabled light. They will be on view through June 29.