The house is never just a house. It is a spatial apparatus for the reproduction of a particular form of life: the nuclear family, the gendered division of labour, the privatisation of care. The Case Study House program, launched by Arts & Architecture magazine in postwar Los Angeles, understood itself as a scientific project — objective, free from preconceived ideas, working from the given conditions of materials and techniques. What it never subjected to the same scrutiny was its fundamental unit of analysis. The nuclear family was treated not as a historical and ideological construction but as a natural fact, as self-evident as the steel frame or the glass wall.
This project takes Case Study House #17B, designed by Craig Ellwood and completed in 1956, as its site and its problem. It reads the house as a machine for the reproduction of a specific social order: unpaid domestic labour assigned to women, private ownership as the horizon of aspiration, the household as the basic cell of capitalist accumulation. The house's subsequent transformation by John Woolf — who buried Ellwood's exposed structure beneath Greek columns and Hollywood Regency plasterwork — is not treated as an aesthetic aberration but as a further case study in the same logic: the house as commodity, its form shaped by market desire rather than collective need.
Against this, the project <Case Study House #17B ver.2020> proposes aollective living. The ground floor is opened, the structure reinforced, and prefabricated units installed above to house thirty-six people in place of one nuclear family. Domestic labour is collectivised. Ownership is organised through a Community Land Trust. The project does not argue that architecture alone can resolve the contradictions it inherits. It argues some thing more modest and more precise: that the formal decisions of a building — who shares what, where care takes place, how space is owned — are never neutral, and that taking those decisions seriously is a political act.
The house is never just a house. It is a spatial apparatus for the reproduction of a particular form of life: the nuclear family, the gendered division of labour, the privatisation of care. The Case Study House program, launched by Arts & Architecture magazine in postwar Los Angeles, understood itself as a scientific project — objective, free from preconceived ideas, working from the given conditions of materials and techniques. What it never subjected to the same scrutiny was its fundamental unit of analysis. The nuclear family was treated not as a historical and ideological construction but as a natural fact, as self-evident as the steel frame or the glass wall.
This project takes Case Study House #17B, designed by Craig Ellwood and completed in 1956, as its site and its problem. It reads the house as a machine for the reproduction of a specific social order: unpaid domestic labour assigned to women, private ownership as the horizon of aspiration, the household as the basic cell of capitalist accumulation. The house's subsequent transformation by John Woolf — who buried Ellwood's exposed structure beneath Greek columns and Hollywood Regency plasterwork — is not treated as an aesthetic aberration but as a further case study in the same logic: the house as commodity, its form shaped by market desire rather than collective need.
Against this, the project <Case Study House #17B ver.2020> proposes aollective living. The ground floor is opened, the structure reinforced, and prefabricated units installed above to house thirty-six people in place of one nuclear family. Domestic labour is collectivised. Ownership is organised through a Community Land Trust. The project does not argue that architecture alone can resolve the contradictions it inherits. It argues some thing more modest and more precise: that the formal decisions of a building — who shares what, where care takes place, how space is owned — are never neutral, and that taking those decisions seriously is a political act.