Back To The '50S

By Belinda Luscombe

When Rob Ball was buying his new house, he knew he couldn't talk to anyone about it, not even his friends. Not that Ball, a Los Angeles-based industrial designer, was doing anything illegal. It was just that he wanted a modernist house. "These houses are so hard to come by, I would see the same people going out to see every home," he says. "I knew people who were actually taking off work to go out with their Realtors whenever a modernist home came on the market." So when the family of a good friend approached him about buying their home, a structure partly made of glass and birch that an architect originally designed for his family in 1950, Ball quickly put up the money and shut up until he moved in last August.

If there were a "pasts" market on the stock exchange similar to the futures market, it would be prudent to start investing in the midcentury now. For if ever one decade were in love with another, the '90s is crazy about the '50s. This is not the '50s of Happy Days or Pleasantville, where people are decent but unsophisticated. This is the sleekly glamorous decade of architects Richard Neutra, Pierre Koenig, John Lautner and Albert Frey and designers Charles and Ray Eames. This is the decade when the rest of the world looked with envy at American products, homes and life-styles. Some people consider it the golden age of American design in this century.

Now the era's airy, glassy, geometric houses have caught on with stylesetters in the film and fashion worlds, who are buying up the old originals and restoring them. And the spare, functional furniture from the '50s has been getting so popular that upscale stores featuring it have sprung up in Manhattan's trendy meat-packing district and on the equally fashion-forward La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, Ikea and Crate & Barrel have begun producing knockoffs for the mass market. The taste for things '50s-ish has also seeped into fashion (haven't you noticed all those sweater sets and pleated skirts?) and industrial design (wait till you get a look at the finlike taillights planned for future Cadillacs).

Why the '50s now? To a certain degree, it's simply its turn. As Art Nouveau and Art Deco became too popular and expensive, younger people began to search for something else that looked cool enough to claim as their own. The '50s were a neat fit. Like the current decade, it was a time of optimism and excitement when rapid technological change led people to think about the future. Financially, things were on an upward tick, and America saw few imminent threats to its power. But more important than the current premillennial bout of optimism, the fascination with the stark elegance of the '50s reflects a backlash against the TV-in-every-room consumption of the '70s and '80s. For thirtysomethings with a little money to throw around, more has proved to be less. "The whole modern movement started to provide graceful living for people no matter what their economic status," says architect Koenig, who built his first house in 1950 for $5,000. "It was not a style, not a passing fancy; it was a social movement."

The political has now become personal. Dan Cracchiolo, an executive at movie producer Joel Silver's company, bought Case Study House 21, a sister to the much photographed No. 22 that Koenig designed in 1960 as part of a series of houses commissioned by Arts & Architecture magazine to show off new materials and building techniques. Says Cracchiolo, who spent a year working with Koenig to painstakingly return his home to its original glory: "This house is about simplifying your life, about storing things away a little more and choosing a minimal amount of things to be shown. It's just enough simplicity to totally change your life." When Hollywood suits are forced into simplicity by their houses, you know something's going on.

Of course, not everyone can afford a modernist house. The attitude--simple but stylish living--can be achieved almost as well, and far more cheaply, with furniture from the period. The most desirable are the designs by the husband and wife team of Charles and Ray Eames. A worldwide tour of their work is now at London's Design Museum and coming to the Library of Congress among other U.S. venues next year. Original Eames pieces fetch high prices. Bonhams, a London auction house, is holding a sale of the couple's furniture this week. The reserve price for a prototype dining chair: $20,000. For those with less extravagant budgets, the home division of Herman Miller, resurrected in 1994 after countless inquiries from the public about where to buy Eames furniture, has rereleased several pieces--this year it was the "erector set" storage unit, yours for a mere $810 to $3,250.

Scandinavian designers are popular too, particularly Alvar Aalto and Arne Jacobsen. The U.S. is now the world's biggest buyer of Aalto's undulating but plainspoken furniture. Five years ago, it was only the 10th biggest.

"We felt people would respond to the stuff, and they have," says Jack Feldman, who with Jim Wolrod and Fred Schneider (former singer with the B-52's) owns Form and Function in New York City. The store, open since June, is a gallery of chaste-but-playful pieces from the era. "We stock pieces from California designers like Greta Grossman that most people have never heard of, but who designed for the Case Study houses, and they've been flying out the door," he says. Even failures from the period are being revived. Telstar, a tiny start-up company in Milwaukee, Wis., is offering a reproduction of the Predicta TV set, which was a spectacular failure when it was first introduced in 1958. The updated model has '90s amenities, such as color and a remote control, costs more than $2,000 and already has competitors.

Fashion has often dipped into the '50s for inspiration, but these days skirts by the likes of Hussein Chalayan, Karl Lagerfeld and Marc Jacobs are looking distinctly fuller and wider. It's now possible to wear a twin set and full pleated skirt without irony. (The poodle skirt, however, is still out of the question.) Auto designers are also beginning to use some of the hallmark motifs of the midcentury cars. Besides the fins planned for the Cadillac, the 1999 Mustang has triangular wind scoops on the side reminiscent of the 1964 model, and Ford is reintroducing the Thunderbird.

Those with low or no budgets can indulge their interest in the '50s in the photo-filled pages of magazines like Metropolitan Home, Elle Decor and Wallpaper* (which, like TIME, is owned by Time Warner). A slew of books have come out this year, including lush coffee-table tomes on Koenig, Frey, Lautner and the photographer most closely associated with the era, Julius Shulman.

Any talk of a trend in the '90s, of course, has to be tempered by the consideration that this is a pick-'n'-package decade, its denizens choosing parts of many eras and repackaging them for easier and faster consumption. Witness the mini glam-rock revival rippling through the culture just this month. Regard for the Contemporary style, as this breed of modernism is often known, has risen steadily, however. "After living in one of these homes for a week," says Koenig of his designs, "people can never go back to a conventional house with little windows."

He's exaggerating, but he's probably right. The best houses and designs of the era stripped away all that was extraneous, somehow enhancing the natural grace of the form that was left. The houses are shelters instead of enclosures; residents dwell in them while dwelling simultaneously in the outside environment. There are fewer elements in the open plan of the houses, but each has purpose. And instead of adding bulk, the steel enables rooms, staircases and mezzanines to float, and spaces to take on unique forms.

Los Angeles was a perfect proving ground for this slicker, more humanized and glamorous version of modernism than the Bauhaus produced. It had the climate and the light. It had the talent, the money and the daring to support a new design movement. And of course there was all that postwar production capacity. Eames' molded plywood chairs, in fact, used a technology he developed for making lightweight splints for the Navy.

The current renaissance in midcentury modernism is particularly sweet for Koenig, 73, who has lived long enough to become cool twice. A life-size replica of his famous Case Study house 22 in a 1989 exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art caused a new legion of fans and clients to seek him out. In addition to restoring Cracchiolo's house, the architect has a new project in Carmel Valley and recently finished a house in Santa Monica Canyon. Koenig, who teaches at the University of Southern California, isn't completely happy with his lot, though. He wishes his technique of building with glass and steel had been more fully embraced. "It should have taken off, especially in California," he says, partly blaming the building industry for its resistance to the idea. "They're the perfect houses for earthquakes because they hold together and they're sturdy, like shorter high-rises."

And here may lie the most important reason why young style seekers are returning to the '50s to find good design. They don't know where to look for it among their peers. There are no Case Study house programs anymore. Companies like Herman Miller and Knoll no longer seek out promising young designers to show them how modern technologies can lead to a whole new era of design. The Case Study house program was a remarkable experiment, and it produced unprecedented, timeless houses. It did not, as its creators had hoped, bring about the use of prefabricated industrial materials in domestic architecture to make well-designed homes more affordable. Design is still the privilege of the wealthy, despite the best and most creative efforts of the modernists. Case Study house 22 cost only $35,000 to build. Its last known asking price was $2.2 million. If the current craze for the '50s proves anything, it's that a well-designed house, chair or even spoon can still sell well a half-century after its introduction. In other words, it's time to prepare for 2050.

--With reporting by Dan Cray and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

With reporting by Dan Cray and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles