DID you see The Limey, especially the party scene where London gangster Terence Stamp looks out over the LA skyline from a hillside des res with a pool perched seemingly at an impossible angle?

Breathtaking it was, yet perhaps not quite the image that the architects had in mind when the pioneering likes of Richard Neutra, Pierre Koenig, John Lautner, Walter Gropius and Raphael Soriano were designing their sleek, geometric buildings in glass and steel.

Today it would be called a designer lifestyle: back then, post-Depression and the Second World War, these spacious Californian dream houses represented the promise of "higher living" amid the revival of the American Dream, and no-one captured the modernist mood better than photographer Julius Shulman.

His architectural photography has the sheen of an advert: each house a show home, unreal as opposed to real estate, all lovely dresses and sun loungers, and not another house or neighbour in sight. It is like those car adverts of today, where the road is always open, and the only distraction is a mountain fire or a slow-moving cow. No wonder, so many of the photographs are captioned Case Study, as if we are observing a scientific experiment in perfect WASP living.

You note too that, as with the adverts and fashion shoots in so many glossy magazines in 2001, everyone is young, thin, perfectly groomed, unencumbered by the burden of children, unflustered - and, unlike today, white.

Each room is clinically clean, the bed made, the fruit ripe and uncut, the surfaces gleaming, the cocktail cabinet fully stocked by the pool.

Was this Feng Shui before we knew of it?

The houses are as much a model as the lounging men and women with their vacant expressions: all image and no contents, soulless and empty, abstract and forever young.

At the time, these cool homes looked futuristic, a symbol of the ever-progressive American society, with California the seductive nirvana. Today, they carry retro chic - like those postcard collections of Fifties advertising put together by Prion Books - but they also look so now. As 11-year-old Natalie M wrote in the comments' book: "I couldn't believe the date on them. They look more modern than that."

Indeed they do, but then that is as much a comment on the subsequent stagnation of architecture: Koenig and co were ahead of their time. "To West Yorkshire types, these homes might as well have been on the Moon," wrote another visitor.

Ah, the moon. Perhaps that will be the next location for architects designing for the very highest of American higher living.