Siting - Eames House

In 1945, the Eameses published their original plans for their house in LA. Designed for a 1.4 acre meadow site sloping down to the ocean, their initial strategy was to split the house into 2 one-story volumes: a studio art space set into the hillside and a living space. The living space was conceived as a bridge with 2 sides: the bedrooms and living room faced the ocean while the toilets, kitchen, and stair faced the driveway. Click here to see the original design.

1945 site plan

1945 enlarged site plan

1945 model

1945 perspective

1945 section

In 1947, two events motivated the redesign of the house. First, after seeing how similar Mies van der Rohe’s conceptual sketch of an elevated steel and glass house was to their design, Charles wanted to change the design to avoid appearing to mimic Mies. Second and most importantly, according to Ray, "they had fallen in love with the meadow." When Charles and Ray returned from long days at the office, they often paused to inhale the scent of eucalyptus and smile, rejuvenated.

Even though some of the building parts such as the roof trusses had already been fabricated and delivered to the site, the Eames reconfigured the parts into a new design. They rotated the living space volume 90 degrees to align with the studio art space so both structures ran parallel to the contours of the site and an existing line of eucalyptus trees. Siting the house behind the trees meant they had to excavate into the hillside. To achieve this, the Eameses constructed a 200 foot long eight foot high retaining wall that ran the full length of the house. The wall served to support a first floor from which they incorporated new 4” steel columns to accommodate a second floor. Click here to see the built design. Soil from the excavated land was used to create a berm between the Eames house and their neighbor. 

1949 revised site plan

1949 enlarged site plan

1949 model

1949 elevation

1949 section

Today, the east side of the house faces a meadow, with oblique views of the Pacific Ocean. While the original house design elevated the living space above the land, the new design tucked the house into the landscape. The simple reconfiguration of the building massing shows how a house could change from bisecting and dominating a site to opening up and responding to a site. Placed behind a row of eucalyptus trees the house’s slender streel structure, touches the land lightly, taking advantage of the trees’ shade and beauty without encroaching on them.

In a letter to Peter Blake after living in the house for 8 months, Charles Eames remarked, “Many of the most pleasant things about the house are things on which we had not planned, but which came one by one as surprise. The difference between the shapes of things in sunlight, twilight, and at night, and the little things that happen in relation to the trees and shadows.”