#1: Stahl House - Case Study House 22
Built: 1960
Architect: Pierre Koenig
Where: Hollywood Hills
Status: This iconic home remains in-demand for high style photo shoots.
Structure: Steel frame, with exposed ceiling of steel decking. The roof is covered with composition roofing and gravel. Walls are glass and steel decking. Interior walls are faced with insulated wallboard. Steel caissons support the house, on a steep and tricky site.

The steel roof beams draw the eye towards the view, as though any drawing is needed. The Stahl house is one of the most famous modern homes anywhere, thanks to Julius Shulman's classic shot of well-dressed partygoers enjoying cocktails in a glass box floating above the lights of Los Angeles.

The steel allowed Koenig to create a house that appears almost immaterial. Inside, nothing is allowed to block views -- not suspended kitchen cabinetry nor the see-through fireplace. Steel beams and decking provide south- and west-facing overhangs that control summer sun. The steel allows the house to cantilever out over a rock face towards Los Angeles, as though it is reaching for the lights of the city below.

More even than as a practical residence, the Stahl house has functioned as an iconic image of modernity, thanks to Shulman's image. Architect Norman Foster wrote of "the heroic nighttime view of Pierre Koenig's Case Study house," and said: "If I had to choose one snapshot, one architectural moment, of which I would like to have been the author, this is surely it."

Photo: David Glomb

#2: Lovell Health House
Built: 1929
Architect: Richard Neutra
Where: Los Angeles
Status: The home remains in superb condition.
Structure: Steel frame encased in concrete, with plastered interior walls of metal lath.

The granddaddy of California steel houses, Neutra's Lovell Health house set the scene for much that followed. Almost certainly the first steel-framed modern house in California, the Lovell house is framed in off-the-shelf steel posts and beams, with 12-inch steel wing plates at junctures for lateral strength. Window casements are steel.

Like so many California steel houses that followed, the Lovell house used steel to handle a steep slope. The house's distinctive cantilevers are suspended from the roof. Unlike most of the steel houses, the Lovell uses steel for interior partitions -- as a steel mesh encased in plaster. But with its shot-on stucco exterior, it looks less like a steel house than like concrete floating atop glass walls. The steel is implied.

The result, according to a fan, British architect Terry Farrell, is a home with "all the glamour of Hollywood and the West Coast."

Photo: Tim Street-Porter

#3: Johnson House
Built: 1962
Architect: Pierre Koenig
Where: Carmel Valley
Status: The house was restored and expanded by Cynthia and Fred Riebe during the 1990s with the help of Koenig himself.
Structure: Steel-framed and steel-sided. The ceilings and exterior walls are unadorned, corrugated steel decking. Laminated wallboard sheathes the interior walls.

The house, Koenig's only building in Northern California, was built on a 20-by-20-foot grid. Glass curtain walls open the house to the landscaping and expansive views. A see-through central fireplace forms the centerpiece of the open-plan living-dining area.

Koenig's additions in 1988 included two new bedrooms, filling the former carport and entry, and providing a new carport in an added wing. The project also involved stripping away a dropped ceiling, wood veneer paneling that hid the steel siding, bay windows, and Victorian-style beveled-glass doors.

"It's absolutely, completely functional and complete and honest in the delight of its revealed structure. It's so simple and beautiful, so unadorned. It's direct and a joy to live in," Cynthia Riebe says of the house. "I love the night light and how it changes, and the reflections through the interior and the exterior. There's no boundary between the two."

To her, even the house's negative -- hard surfaces that are acoustically cruel -- turns positive. "It's a house where you speak in hushed tones. But that only adds to its tranquility. It's very serene."

Photo: Julius Shulman & Juergen Nogai

#4: Albert Frey House II
Built: 1963-64
Architect: Albert Frey
Where: Palm Springs
Status: Well preserved and owned by the Palm Springs Museum.
Structure: Steel frame, with corrugated aluminum and glass walls.

The second Palm Springs house that Frey designed for himself is a hillside landmark. From a distance, its corrugated roof of CorTen steel comes across as Spanish terra cotta tile. The steel-framed house has a well-insulated shed roof that slops down toward the south, for sun control. The wall facing the pool is all glass.

The house is small, and really a single room. Its most dramatic element is a granite boulder that plunges through the rear wall into both the living and sleeping areas. Frey painted the ceiling blue.

Frey carefully fit the house into the site. "I had a very careful survey made showing the contours and all the rock," Frey told an interviewer. "Then I put up some strings to see how the design would work out. We then established the levels, and then I had to fit the glass to the rock."

"The slope of the roof follows the slope of the terrain," he said. "The contrast between the natural rock and the high tech materials is rather exciting."

Photo: David Glomb

#5: Julius Shulman House
Built: 1950
Architect: Raphael Soriano
Where: Los Angeles
Status: Excellent. Shulman still lives there.
Structure: Steel frame in-filled with wood stud walls and wooden joists on steel roof beams, unlike the steel decking used in many other steel-framed houses.

Soriano, who'd worked with Neutra, became a much stronger proponent of steel in houses. This house, which he designed for architectural photographer Shulman, was his first all-steel-framed house.

The frame uses hollow steel pipe columns, laterally braced with steel rods, supporting I-beams. The steel framework is enclosed within the walls on three sides of the house, but exposed on the window-wall side. The wooden studs made it easier to attach interior wallboard. For exterior sheathing, Soriano chose stucco. For garage and entry doors, he used corrugated aluminum. Ceilings are sand-finished plaster, not exposed steel decking.

Like many steel houses, this one doesn't shout "steel." It comes across, instead, like grouped glass pavilions hemmed in by forest -- thanks to Shulman's own jungle-like landscape design. Shulman wanted a livable house that fit his personality, not something that used steel for its own sake or that represented Soriano's style.

In fact, he told a San Francisco audience recently, Soriano hated how Shulman furnished the place. "When Soriano came to visit us," Shulman admitted, "he refused to sit in our chairs. 'Take that crap out of here!' But this is a comfortable house."

Photo: Julius Shulman

#6: Eames House - Case Study House 8
Built: 1948-49
Architect: Charles and Ray Eames
Where: Pacific Palisades
Status: The house is well preserved and opened by the Eames Foundation for tours by appointment.
Structure: Steel frame with four-inch steel columns, a steel-deck ceiling, and a partial second-story supported by open-web steel joists. Painted a dark gray, the steel starkly exposes the structure.

Husband-and-wife designers Charles and Ray Eames designed the house for themselves, and also used it as their studio and a private art gallery. The strictly modular plan placed a courtyard between house and studio.

The home's interior, with its two-story, 17-foot-tall living area, is spacious, and looks out onto a eucalyptus grove. Spiral stairs lead upstairs.

Combining elegance with an unusually explicit machine-made aesthetic, the Eames house recalls a Mondrian painting, with multi-colored exterior stucco panels of pure white, bright blue, and deep black. The steel sash windows, which suggest transparent shoji screens, provide a touch of Japan as well. Also adding to the joyous mix of materials are exterior panels of transparent and translucent glass, and wire-mesh safety glass in the studio. The wire mesh, Charles Eames wrote in 'Art & Architecture,' "became an important contributing aesthetic element."

"Case Study-wise," he wrote, "it is interesting to consider how the rigidity of the system was responsible for the free use of space and to see how the most matter-of-fact structure resulted in pattern and texture."

Photo: Tim Street-Porter

#7: Bailey House - Case Study House 21
Built: 1959
Architect: Pierre Koenig
Where: Los Angeles
Status: Recently sold via auction, the house is restored, with the help of Koenig.
Structure: Steel frame prefabricated in the shop, with standard steel roof decking used for ceiling and walls.

A classic International Style box, the Bailey house could have descended from the clouds. A simple rectangle, with a carport creating an L-shape, the house sits atop a moat. Visually, the house is more about water than it is about steel. An interior atrium, which pokes through the steel ceiling, has rivulets of water running over its mosaic walls.

Living areas and bedrooms have sliding doors that open fully onto the atrium, creating an indoor-outdoor living space. From the tub, the Baileys could look through the atrium at the stars. The black-painted steel beams are exposed, as is the white, steel-deck ceiling.

"I was trying to develop 1,300 square feet in an efficient, social, and exciting plan that people could afford," Koenig has said.

Photo: John Edward Linden

#8: The X-100
Built: 1956
Architect: Jones & Emmons
Where: San Mateo, in the Joe Eichler subdivision of San Mateo Highlands
Status: Very good condition and intact, some restoration work anticipated.
Structure: Steel framed, with steel decking for roof and walls.

Exposed steel beams painted red-orange, and fluted steel ceiling decking are radical enough in custom homes. The X-100 was a builder's tract home or, as suggested by the 'X,' an experimental tract home.

Built as a one-of-a-kind showpiece in 1956 to attract buyers to Eichler's new San Mateo subdivision, the X-100 was the subject of considerable media attention during the era, and reportedly hosted 150,000 visitors during its grand opening. (Tour the X-100 through a long-lost 1950s newsreel.)

This was developer Joe Eichler's second try at a steel-framed home in California -- the first was a year earlier, with Raphael Soriano. A. Quincy Jones, the principal architect of the X-100, produced a simple, livable plan, with a concrete block street façade that protects private gardens, and a wall of glass opening to a pool. The roof decking is crimped to serve as a diaphragm to handle earthquake and wind loads. The house sits on an often-windy ridge. Exterior walls are clad in high-density Douglas fir plywood and plastic panels.

Eichler homes were known for their expansive areas. But steel beams allowed even more freedom from internal supports. While the X-100's brochure touted the home as "an exciting exploration into future living," Eichler never developed another steel house.

Photo: Ernie Braun

#9: Norton House
Built: 1959-60
Architect: David Beverley Thorne
Where: Portola Valley
Status: Beautifully maintained
Structure: Steel-frame, post-and-beam house whose cantilever over a steep hillside is supported by a reinforced concrete structure buried in the hillside.

Thorne designed this house for an executive of Bethlehem Steel, which was keen to promote steel in residential construction. The house uses a steel cage in-filled with wood, and bravely cantilevers over a steep canyon. Thorne believed in using steel when it would accomplish what couldn't be done with other materials, or as elegantly or inexpensively with other materials. Steel also supports a view-side deck that runs the length of the house.

True to his Northern California roots, however, the house has a woodsy feeling, thanks to its exterior redwood paneling, and wooden floors and deck. But the steel posts and beams are proudly expressed inside and out, soaring through the house towards the view. In the front of the house, the beams taper at their ends to thin arrow points, a Thorne touch. "It gives it a very light and elegant look, not the blunt end of an I-beam you usually see," says the home's owner, Mike Nuttal.

Thorne and client Frank Norton did some of the work themselves, including installation of the steel frame.

Photo: David Toerge

#10: Moore House
Built: 1962
Architect: Donald Wexler; Bernard Perlin, engineer
Where: Palm Springs
Status: Its meticulous restoration helped spur Palm Springs' newfound love of all things mid-century modern.
Structure: Like the Perlin House of Los Angeles, the Moore house (as well as the six other steel tract homes Wexler designed for the Alexander Construction Co.) is held up by structural steel panels, not a steel frame. Steel panels also make up the roof and ceiling.

The Moore house has the same footprint as the other Wexler steel houses. It has a flat roof with a pop-up central area providing clerestory glass. The panels and inner core of bathroom and utilities were prefabricated. Glass walls open to the backyard.

When Jim Moore called upon Wexler to help with the restoration, the architect hesitated. The neighborhood had deteriorated and the houses had been badly altered. "When Jim first called me to talk about working with him on it, I didn't even want to go to that area," Wexler says. "I didn't want to see those houses."

After the restoration, Wexler says, "It was like a time warp. He [Moore] put it back exactly the way it was built."

Photo: David Glomb

#11: Rosen House
Built: 1961-62
Architect: Craig Ellwood
Where: Los Angeles
Status: Beautifully maintained and intact.
Structure: Steel frame in-filled with ceramic-coated brick on the outside and walnut panels and plaster inside.

The 4,500-square foot Rosen house hovers above a sea of pebbles like a pristine box in the wilderness. Ellwood detailed his steelwork to emphasize that the house was in, but definitely not part of, its surroundings, which British magazine 'Architectural Design' called "stupendously wild."

The steel columns that support the house rest invisibly atop concrete piers thanks to grouting that is so dark the connections disappear. Thus, the house appears to float. Ellwood elevated the house to provide better views. A deeply recessed porch faces the pool.

The house, framed in white steel beams in-filled with charcoal-colored brick, is built around an open-air, central atrium. Only two interior partitions touch the exterior walls, so the house seems almost like a single space. Photo: John Edward Linden

#12: Perlin House
Built: 1959-60
Architect: Donald Wexler
Where: Los Angeles
Status: Original owner, original shape. "We'll never move, I'm sure," Bernard Perlin vows.
Structure: The steel houses designed by Wexler with engineer Bernard Perlin are held up by structural steel panels (not by steel studs) that also serve as walls. Steel beams support the steel roof decking.

"It's efficient," Perlin says about using steel panels for both structure and cladding. "Why double up? If it works as the structure for horizontal, lateral loads as well as vertical loads, why not use it?"

The single-story, 3,500-square-foot home is almost entirely steel and glass. Inside, the walls are exposed panels of light-gauge steel, undisguised by sheetrock or wallboard. The Perlins hang pictures using magnets, not tacks. "On this house I went a little over-board," Perlin confesses.

Outside, the house is sheathed in the same steel paneling except for the glassed areas and a small section clothed in 'Arizona driftwood' rock.

A dropped ceiling of fiberglass acoustic tiles hides the utilities. "The beauty of steel are the big overhangs you can get by letting the deck just hang out," Perlin says. "We have lots of shade in the summertime."

Photo: courtesy Bernard Perlin