Cold Case

ON A MARCH NIGHT in my first spring in Los Angeles, a rocket took off from Vandenberg Air Force Base and left a glowing, smoky arc in the air high over the Pacific Ocean. It was very large and bright, a new star that kept occupying my thoughts, preventing me from sleeping. So like any other Los Angeles insomniac, I got in my car and drove. I went into the Hollywood Hills, hoping for another glimpse of the rocket, and up to Mulholland Drive along the spine of the Santa Monica Mountains, but I couldn’t keep it in sight. I turned south, downshifting along a darkened North Beverly Glen Boulevard. I could tell that the contrail was dissipating and, fearing that I would miss the rest of the rocket’s ascent, volte-faced to higher ground. And there I was, yo-yoing back north along the stygian corridors of Bel Air Road, an uphill slalom among tree branches and upturned trash receptacles before it appeared again, drifting high in the sky like a fiery white ribbon. I floored it, speeding up the curving ascent until I glimpsed something else in the road. It was a long, glowing rectangle hovering near the crest. At first, I thought it was a mirror catching my headlights, but that could not be. It was pale and glimmering, a soft phosphorescence. I stopped beside it and finally saw that it was a house with a long wall of frosted glass that caught the ambient glow from within and dispersed it out into the cool night.

Only in hindsight would I have recognized this illuminated scene as the Henry Salzman Residence, otherwise known as Case Study House #16 (1952), one of three designed by Craig Ellwood for John Entenza’s fabled Case Study House Program. I was literally in the dark, an architecturally curious, newly minted film school dropout, unable to get a sense of the exposed steel framing, of floor-to-ceiling windows that created an illusion of a house shot through with light. Now, with years of training of architectural history behind me, I somehow keep going back to Reyner Banham’s characterization of Ellwood’s domestic projects as “an architecture of elegant omission.” It seems a blithe turn of phrase at first, telegraphing structural clarity and the rejection of ornament—two shibboleths of modernism. It finds surprising literary purchase, however, as a working definition of noir. I’m thinking specifically of noir’s local subvariant, homespun detective fare that takes place in the seaside haunts and darkening hills of postwar Los Angeles. These are the purlieus of novels like Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939) and Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place (1947), where a shimmering marine layer or bolt of sunlight can be as menacing as a shadow.

WHETHER A BUILDING OR A NOVEL, “an architecture of elegant omission” is built around calibrated asymmetries of information. Just as an author withholds information in service of a story arc, an architect conceals structure with false façades and red herrings. And the reader must become complicit, recognizing the center of a hurricane not by the momentous dip in air pressure, but rather by the whorling bands that give it its recognizable form. Gay Talese fostered such complicity in 1965 when the editors at Esquire asked him to profile Frank Sinatra, who at the time was in the middle of a public relations maelstrom thanks to his high-profile affair with a much younger Mia Farrow and media speculation about his connections to the Mafia. Sinatra did not want to perform. He did not want to be bothered. One of the most famous celebrities on the face of the planet had become the quarry gone to ground, a honey-voiced Fantômas drifting into self-imposed obscurity. So Talese began constructing his profile by doing what any self-respecting private eye would do: He tailed Sinatra throughout Los Angeles, keeping a low profile, and followed him to a nightclub in Beverly Hills. He would not talk to Sinatra, but he did interview the cast of characters who surrounded him. Handlers. Courtiers. Fans. Even a sullen Harlan Ellison, whom Sinatra berated for wearing a hippie getup. Talese wove the strands of his source material into something electric. “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” was published in 1966, the greatest trick ever conceived had been played on unsuspecting readers. Here was a profile without a subject, a work of signature journalism built on foundations of conjecture and hearsay.

Case Study House #16 eluded controversy and intrigue alike. In a city whose pulpy underbelly provided endless inspiration for tabloid journalism, noir fiction, and cinema, here, at 1811 Bel Air Road, stood a house built upon a bedrock of probity—a domestic marvel of structural clarity that remained defiantly unenigmatic. Case Study House #16 conducted aspects of its life in the public eye: first in the specifications catalogued meticulously across multiple issues of Arts & Architecture from 1951 to 1953, then in the many books and articles dedicated to the Case Study House Program, and later in televised house tours. Yet for the mundane particulars that interested me—parcel numbers, chains of title, phone numbers, the sort of administrative minutiae that would hardly captivate those drawn to the house’s architectural legacy—I had to consult a 2017 report by the Los Angeles Department of City Planning recommending that Case Study House #16 be declared a historic-cultural monument. Within that report lies a copy of the 1954 index of registered voters listing the Mulholland Drive address of Henry Salzman, the house’s general contractor and original owner, as well as a scanned page from the Westwood-Brentwood-Bel Air City Directory of 1958–59 identifying one Muriel A. Norton as the original occupant. She began renting the house from Salzman in 1953; in 1967, she purchased the house, where she lived until her death in 2019. (As of August, it was on the market for a cool $5.4 million.)

Like other entries in the Case Study House Program, the Salzman residence existed in a state of chronic exposure—every beam, every connection, every intention radiographically revealed for popular consumption. But on that cool spring evening, on that nighttime wander up Bel Air Road, standing there transfixed by the diffuse radiance emanating from Case Study House #16, I did not achieve any sense of clarity. It was as if I, and not the building, had been shot through with a massive dose of roentgens. This was not illumination, but revelation: the hidden architecture of my own thinking suddenly rendered visible, every assumption and predisposition exposed like bone beneath flesh, every interpretive reflex laid bare, revealing not what I was seeing in front of me, but the very apparatus through which I experienced it. For many nights I dreamed of movies, of beams of light emanating from whirring projectors onto screens in front of me. It was in film school that I learned of life at twenty-four frames per second, of senses tricked by the persistence of vision to view the blurring of discrete images as motion, a parlor trick forever associated with the onset of modernity. But it was the flip side of this operation that really captured my imagination. This is what the neurologist Oliver Sacks called “cinematographic vision” or “akinetopsia,” a condition where someone is unable to perceive motion and instead sees the world as a series of “flickering stills,” as if the visual sensorium were a broken projector. Perhaps this is precisely the condition required of the architectural historian—to abandon the illusion of seamless narrative and instead examine each frame with diagnostic precision.

IN HOUDINI: THE MAN WHO WALKS THROUGH WALLS (1959), the pulp novelist turned biographer William Lindsay Gresham noted that Erik Weisz developed the alter ego “Harry Houdini” by studying the writings of Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin obsessively and becoming the nineteenth-century illusionist himself, divining method from text, transforming research into spectacle. But consider Houdini’s approach to manacles and handcuffs: Through careful observation he discovered that the majority were manufactured by a single company, thus sharing the same key. His secret had nothing to do with supernatural prowess or mystical insight; instead, he realized that a banal fact of mass production could enable seemingly impossible acts of escape. Is this also not how historians work? Like Houdini with his handcuffs, we look for the boring detail that is actually a skeleton key to the spectacular. Historical interpretation becomes its own escape act—the abductive leap from overwhelming complexity to ordinary causality.

Case Study House #16, luminous and transparent, is not itself a mystery. The enigma lies instead with its architect, Craig Ellwood—or, rather, with the carefully constructed persona who called himself “Craig Ellwood.” He came into this world as Johnnie Burke, a Texan-born “Okie” who as a young child migrated with his family to California during the Great Depression and later enlisted in the US Army Air Force, serving as a radio operator aboard B-24 bombers. With his brother Cleve, Johnnie established a construction company—this while taking night classes at UCLA in structural engineering. Not long afterward, he parlayed his budding talents for cost estimation and value engineering into some of the earliest Case Study homes. The origin of the Craig Ellwood is the stuff of legend (Burke pilfered the surname from a Llords & Elwood Wines and Spirits at 8847 Beverly Boulevard) and befits a figure who existed more as a performance than a person, himself a product of the modernist mythology he so skillfully assembled behind the sleek surfaces of his own creation.

Esther McCoy’s 1968 monograph Craig Ellwood: Architecture is not where one should go to learn about the architect and his work. Her book (pity introduction notwithstanding) reads like a glancing, high-altitude travelogue through an unlikely career. Its telemetric spin keeps everything beyond its ken at a distance, abandoning insight and critical reflection in service of those sumptuous drawings, of photographs that transport the reader to the salad days of second-wave modernism.

The most captivating image is found on the cover, which depicts an interior of Ellwood’s unrealized Bridge House (1968). Somewhere in this collage lurks the cipher to the transformation from Johnnie Burke to Craig Ellwood. There is only the faintest suggestion of a building, as if the architecture itself has dissolved into pure aperture, directing our gaze through phantom windows toward borrowed views. At its center hovers what might be an ancient sculpture of a reclining woman—it’s Henry Moore’s Draped Reclining Figure (1952–3), razored out from a book (perhaps the cover to John Russell’s 1965 paperback, Henry Moore: Sculptures) and inserted into a domestic scene. The pastiche consciously echoes Mies van der Rohe’s Resor House collages from the 1940s, yet where Mies anchored his vision in the real landscape of Wyoming, Ellwood’s composition drifts in ambiguity. This spectral building—which would find its material echo in his Art Center College (1976), a gargantuan glass-and-steel valise cantilevered across the Pasadena canyon—reveals itself as pure assemblage conjured from the flotsam and jetsam of modernist longing. In this cover image, the book inadvertently reveals what it otherwise conceals: that Ellwood’s architecture, like Burke’s transformation, exists most fully in the space between documentation and disappearance, between the drawn line and the void it frames.

I NOW TURN, IN HOT PURSUIT OF A CONCLUSION, to the first detective story ever written, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841). The main character, an armchair gumshoe named C. Auguste Dupin, compares how a detective looks for evidence to looking at the night sky:

It is an invective against keeping your blinders on, an appeal to appreciate the importance of looking at something not directly, but obliquely, within a larger fabric of meaning. Tracing a single clue—a telephone number, a contractor’s name, a photograph’s caption—leads to a whirlwind of others, each discovery pulling in its wake a constellation of related evidence until what began as peripheral vision becomes a vast firmament of interpretation. Sleuthing thrives on this kind of lateral movement, this willingness to follow tangential leads that circle back to illuminate the central mystery. For it is only by approaching Case Study House #16 peripherally, through the debris field of its cultural moment, that Ellwood’s world begins to materialize in the margins of my vision.

As an architectural historian writing a book about Case Study House #16, I find myself working like a detective—pursuing leads through archives, reconstructing vanished worlds, piecing together fragments of evidence. I take this parallel to heart: I’ve structured my investigation as a pulp novel, where the act of detection becomes both method and metaphor. My fictional gumshoe must see through Johnnie Burke’s eyes as Burke translates the construction of airplane fuselages into the geometries of postwar optimism, transforming himself into Craig Ellwood along the way. This is also the historian’s impossible task: to reconstruct the apparatus of perception, to glimpse the world as it appeared in a discrete moment in time. To truly break the case of Case Study House #16, I must become not merely a chronicler of Ellwood’s architectural production, but the temporary vessel of his design intelligence, his way of perceiving space, structure, and the technological possibilities that seemed to hum with futurity in 1950s Los Angeles. But that’s a story for another time.