A home for California’s baby boomers
Analysis and image of children’s spaces in the Case Study House program
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.20868/cn.2024.5338Keywords:
Typological analysis, Arts & Architecture, Childhood, Postwar, Single-family homesAbstract
The Case Study House program was launched with the objective of exploring housing solutions adapted to the new reality of California’s post-World War II middle class. This article seeks to determine whether the needs and desires of the youngest members of the family unit were considered in this process or whether, on the contrary, the program was alien to them. The results of a complete
typological and functional analysis are offered, oriented to questions strictly related to the family and children’s habitat, such as the size and relative position of the bedrooms, their environmental characteristics, the furniture, and the importance of play as a generator and colonizer of domestic spaces. In addition, the presence of children in the image projected by the program is studied in the drawings and photographs as originally published in Arts & Architecture magazine. The intersection of both analyses offers an unprecedented vision of this well-known architectural experiment.
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