The Eames House, built in a weekend from a catalog

The Case Study House program asked architects a plain postwar question. Could you build a good modern house out of the materials America had just finished using to win a war?

Charles and Ray Eames answered on a meadow in Pacific Palisades with a eucalyptus windbreak and a view of the ocean. Their first design threw a bridge of steel out over the slope. Then the steel arrived, they walked the site again, and they scrapped it. The new plan tucked two boxes against the hillside behind the trees, using the exact same order of parts.

Everything came from catalogs. Open web steel joists. Standard sash windows. Factory decking. The frame went up in a day and a half, five workers, no crane heroics. The whole structure used less steel per square foot than a typical wood frame house of the same size.

Then the fun started. They filled the panel grid like a Mondrian, some bays glass, some bays stucco in blue, red, white and black. Inside they kept almost nothing built in, because they wanted the house to change as their lives did.

And it changed constantly. Kites hung from the ceiling. Folk art from three continents piled on shelves. Dried tumbleweed sat in the living room for years because Ray liked the shape. Photographs of the interior from 1950 and 1975 look like two different rooms in the same happy argument.

Charles died in 1978, Ray exactly ten years later to the day. The house was left as they kept it, down to the placement of the objects, and it is now preserved as an artifact of how two people actually lived.

It cost very little, went up in almost no time, and it remains the most convincing argument ever built that mass produced parts can make something deeply personal.