The Stahl House, also known as Case Study House Number 22, was designed by Pierre Koenig in 1959 for Buck and Carlotta Stahl. It sits on a precipitous lot in the Hollywood Hills that Buck Stahl had bought for a few hundred dollars several years earlier because no other architect believed it could be built upon. The plot is essentially a triangle of dirt cantilevered out over the city.
The plan is an L, with the two arms wrapping a swimming pool and a paved terrace at the inner angle, and a wall of glass on every elevation that faces the view. The plan footprint is roughly two hundred square metres on a single level. The structural system is a light steel frame: H-section columns at three-metre intervals support deep transverse steel beams that span the full width of the house and cantilever beyond the hillside support. The cantilever is the central architectural argument of the design. From the city below, the living room appears to float weightlessly, supported by nothing visible at all, an effect achieved by setting the structural beams above the ceiling line and recessing the foundations into the slope behind. The walls are entirely floor-to-ceiling plate glass except for two solid bays of bedroom and bathroom. The roof projects approximately two metres beyond the glass on the principal elevation, shading the interior in summer and admitting low winter sun. The floor is poured concrete with a polished terrazzo finish in the public areas. The pool runs along the cantilever, deliberately so that its surface reflects the sky and reads, from inside the house, as continuous with the Los Angeles basin below.
Julius Shulman’s 1960 photograph of two women in white dresses seated in the glass living room with the city of Los Angeles spread beneath them is one of the most famous architectural photographs of the twentieth century, and it defined the post-war image of Los Angeles as a city of glass houses cantilevered over the basin. Koenig had demonstrated that a structurally rigorous, materially honest modernism could be built using ordinary industrial steel.