100 PHOTOGRAPHS 31
For decades, the California Dream meant the chance to
own a stucco home on a sliver of paradise. The point was
the yard with the palm trees, not the contour of the walls.
Julius Shulman helped change all that. In May 1960, the
Brooklyn-born photographer headed to architect Pierre
Koenig’s Stahl House, a glass- enclosed Hollywood Hills
home with a breathtaking view of Los Angeles—one of
36 Case Study Houses that were part of an architectural
experiment extolling the virtues of modernist theory and
industrial materials. Shulman photographed most of the
houses in the project, helping demystify modernism by
highlighting its graceful simplicity and humanizing its
angular edges. But none of his other pictures was more
influential than the one he took of Case Study House No.
- To show the essence of this air-breaking cantilevered
building, Shulman set two glamorous women in cocktail
dresses inside the house, where they appear to be floating
above a mythic, twinkling city. The photo, which he called
“one of my masterpieces,” is the most successful real estate
image ever taken. It perfected the art of aspirational staging,
turning a house into the embodiment of the Good Life, of
stardusted Hollywood, of California as the Promised Land.
And, thanks to Shulman, that dream now includes a glass
box in the sky.
CASE STUDY HOUSE NO. 22, LOS ANGELES Julius Shulman, 1960