The Eames House: Sixteen Hours to Build the Frame

Charles and Ray Eames designed their house in nineteen forty-five as part of a program called the Case Study House experiment, in which Arts and Architecture magazine commissioned leading modernist architects to design demonstration homes using postwar industrial materials. The Eameses planned a cantilevered steel-and-glass box projecting dramatically over a Pacific Palisades hillside. The design drawings were published. The steel was ordered.

Then nothing happened for three years. Postwar shortages held the steel in a warehouse somewhere in the supply chain. Charles and Ray moved onto the meadow in front of the building site and waited. They sat there through two California summers and winters, watching the light move across the grass, watching the eucalyptus trees at the edge of the bluff.

When the steel finally arrived in nineteen forty-nine, they had spent so much time in that meadow that they had changed their minds about the building entirely. The cantilevered structure they had designed would have blocked the meadow they had come to love. They scrapped it. Working with the same steel that had already been ordered, cut to the same dimensions, they designed a new house from scratch: two rectangular volumes set back from the meadow's edge, the steel frame a grid of black industrial members filled with colored panels and glass. The new design was erected quickly, about a day and a half from foundation to completed steel frame.

Charles and Ray moved in on Christmas Eve, nineteen forty-nine, and never left. The house became the fullest expression of the design philosophy they had been developing since the war: that industrial materials, used honestly, could produce beauty. The National Park Service designated it a National Historic Landmark in two thousand and six. About fifteen thousand people visit it each year to stand in the meadow they waited in.