ABSTRACT
For the steel house architect of 1950, “the only two directions”, as Philip Johnson has pointed out, “were light steel and heavy. The light steel by Neutra, and the heavy by Mies and Prouvé.” 1 In America, lightweight steel houses were recognizably Californian, as the earlier Case Study Houses demonstrated. Heavyweight steel was associated with Mies’s Chicago buildings – the Farnsworth House and the buildings on the Illinois Institute of Technology campus. But had the iniative in 1955 of a Californian developer, Joseph Eichler, and his architect, A. Quincy Jones, paid off, then their example at Barrington, Illinois, could have upset the balance.
