The steel-frame house: Restoring a Koenig

A talk by Neil Jackson 

Recorded at The Gallery, London EC1

Tuesday 28th March 2023

Born in San Francisco, Pierre Koenig (1925 – 2004) practiced mostly on the West Coast of the USA, creating a series of houses that have been described as “rational, beautiful, glamorous statements of the free-wheeling California life”. Best known for the design of the Case Study Houses No. 21 and 22 in 1960, Koenig established his reputation while still a student in the early 1950s by building a steel and glass house for himself. One of the advantages of a lightweight steel-frame house is that it can be altered, remodelled and restored with comparative ease, the structure and envelope comprising components that can be replaced or reconfigured as the changing needs or condition of the building demands. Such was the nature of Pierre Koenig’s domestic architecture. Using material from the Pierre Koenig archive at the Getty Research Institute’s Special Collection, and evidence collected on site visits in southern California, this lecture will show both how Pierre Koenig himself upgraded and modernised his own early buildings and how other architects later adapted and altered them.

Neil Jackson is Professor Emeritus of Architecture at the University of Liverpool and a Past-President of the SAHGB. An architect and an historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture, he is the author of Pierre Koenig (2007), Pierre Koenig: A View from the Archive (2019) and the prize-winning Craig Ellwood (2002).