The Eames House, also known as Case Study House Number 8, was designed and built by Charles and Ray Eames as their own home and studio in Pacific Palisades, on a meadow site overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It was one of the Case Study Houses commissioned by John Entenza for Arts & Architecture magazine between 1945 and 1966, a programme that promoted the use of modern industrial materials and methods in single-family residential design.
The plan is two parallel rectangular volumes set into a hillside cut behind a row of eucalyptus trees. The principal volume, the house, is approximately seventeen by seven metres and rises two storeys; the second volume, the studio, is smaller and stands at a short distance, with an open paved courtyard between them. Both volumes are framed in standard off-the-shelf steel sections, with H-columns at three-metre centres and lightweight open-web steel joists spanning between them. The walls between the columns are filled with modular panels, each approximately one bay wide, in alternating materials: clear glass, translucent wire-reinforced glass, painted stucco, and exposed plywood. Several panels are painted in primary colours and a few neutral tones, producing the Mondrian-like elevation that became one of the most recognisable images of post-war American modernism. The interior of the house is a single double-height living room with a sleeping mezzanine, while the studio block is similarly organised. Construction was remarkably rapid: after the steel frame was erected in approximately sixteen hours, the structure was sheathed by five men in five working days. The materials were ordered from catalogue, which was the central polemic of the project.
The Eames House remains the canonical demonstration of the Case Study programme’s claim that elegant, intelligent modernism could be built with industrial off-the-shelf parts. Charles and Ray Eames lived and worked here for the remainder of their lives, and the house continues to be preserved exactly as they left it.