The award-winning work of Koning Eizenberg reveals the influence of Southern California's unique modernist tradition and earlier craftsmen and bungalow architecture, as well as Los Angeles's stucco dingbat apartments and strip centers, arid climate, and strong natural colors. One of the most widely published of California architecture firms, Koning Eizenberg is best known for innovative, low-cost housing of all types in Los Angeles and its beach communities of Venice and Santa Monica: single room occupancy hotels, multi-family housing, artists' lofts, and single-family houses. In the last ten years, this rapidly expanding firm has designed many other projects, including a community center, offices for film production companies, a municipal gymnasium, and additions to the historic Farmer's Market in Los Angeles.
The young Australian team of Hank Koning and Julie Eizenberg arrived in Los Angeles from Melbourne in 1979 for graduate study at UCLA. They quickly embraced the burgeoning architectural scene dominated by local heroes Frank Gehry and Charles Moore and established their own practice in the early 1980s. Koning and Eizenberg first acquired hands-on experience as designers, developers, and builders of modest residential additions that played up the importance of outdoor space, courtyards, and inexpensive materials. Their work today continues to use sunlight, bright colors, landscape, and unexpected juxtapositions of scale and details to create eye-catching architecture in ordinary, vernacular contexts.
This first monograph on the firm features 26 projects and three essays, illustrated with photographs, plans, and Koning and Eizenberg's signature facade sketches and composition studies. Among the buildings included in this volume are Electric ArtBlock, twenty units of artists' work-from-home housing in Venice; the Simone Hotel, an SRO in downtown Los Angeles; the Ken Edwards Center for Community Services in Santa Monica; the Materials Research Laboratory at the University of California at Santa Barbara; Koning and Eizenberg's own house in Santa Monica; and ten additional single-family houses and additions.
William J. Mitchell is Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he holds a joint Professorship in Architecture and in Media Arts and Sciences. A Fellow of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, he taught previously at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and at the University of California at Los Angeles. His most recent book is City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn (1995).
Aaron Betsky is Curator of Architecture and Design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and a widely published architecture critic. He has been a contributing editor to Metropolitan Home and a regular contributor to Architectural Record, and is the author of Rizzoli's Violated Perfection: Architecture and the Fragmentation of the Modern (1990), as well as a recent book on the architect James Gamble Rogers.
