Eighty years after the Case Study Houses program famously challenged architects such as Richard Neutra, Charles Eames, and Eero Saarinen to create easily replicable architectural home designs to help address the postwar housing crisis in L.A., Case Study 2.0 is similarly rising to a new challenge: accelerating the rebuilding of architecturally beautiful homes for victims of the L.A. fires.
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Backen & Backen
The brainchild of Steven and Jason Somers at Crest Real Estate, the city’s leading land use and permit expediting consultancy, Case Study 2.0 is creating a comprehensive catalog of single-family homes designed by 40 of the most talented architects in the world, including Standard Architecture, Backen & Backen, Morphosis, Oppenheim Architecture, Lovers Unite, and Marmol Radziner, to name just a few. The architects were prompted to design for the most common lot sizes, with strict fire resilience, zoning standards, and construction budgets. No McMansions here: The structures need to be 3,000 square feet or fewer. The dozens of designs that homeowners can choose from range in style from traditional to hyper-minimalist to brutalist but will be realizable in less time and at a lower cost, given that the designs are templated, and the architects, material partners, and other parties are discounting their products and services.
Lovers Unite
Courtesy of Marmol Radziner
With instantly executable designs, homeowners can immediately cut four months out of their development process by skipping the design discovery stage. The efficiencies only grow from there, with a preferred set of construction, consulting, and material partners. Even with such elite architecture on deck, Case Study 2.0 sits comfortably between the truly custom and prefab. “We’re trying to provide this middle option that is architecturally beautiful, something that people can be proud of building, but that is less expensive and faster than the custom home options,” says Steven. “We’re trying to figure out how you rebuild 100 years of character in the next five. And we think by bringing these high-level architects to bear on this problem, that’s how we can help solve the problem.” To learn more about the program, visit casestudy2c.com.
