UNFOLDING THE EICHLER DESIGN
The evolution of the Eichler design -- pivotal turns
and experiments enroute to a better way of living

From the pages of the Eichler Network Newsletter
By Paul Adamson

Among many young California architects during the 1950s, there was a feeling of American can-do optimism, mixed with an altruistic belief in the potential of modern architecture to support a better way of life. And some even experimented with small modular house designs for their own use. Before either Bob Anshen or A. Quincy Jones ever met Joseph Eichler, the two architects were grappling with the issues surrounding the postwar housing crisis. Anshen and his wife, Eleanor, who were living in Cambridge, Massachusetts immediately after the World War II, wrote and lectured on their recommendations for mass production and standardization in the construction industry.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, Jones set up his own practice in 1946, and by 1948 he had already built a house for himself and a modern tract house prototype for a Los Angeles developer. Both architects realized the need for inexpensive quick-to-build houses, but both also realized that while mass production - or merchant building - was the only economical way to fulfill this need, equal attention was owed to quality-of-life issues.

Joseph Eichler was quite aware of these conflicting needs when he began building houses in the late 1940s. However, he was unable to resolve the opposing issues of comfort and economy until he began hiring architects. He relied upon Anshen & Allen and later Jones & Emmons to devise a construction system which would be efficient to build, but inherently flexible enough to provide opportunities for individual designs.

Jones, who had designed a prototypical house for the Los Angeles-based builder, Hvistendahl, came to Eichler Homes equipped with an intimate knowledge of the parameters of merchant builder design. Anshen, on the other hand, had only theorized on the subject. His only residential design experience had involved custom homes, including a $3.5 million house for Ralph Davies, owner of a San Francisco-based cruise line, and Joseph Eichler's own house, in Atherton, which would cost a healthy $50,000.

Both architects proposed a post-and-beam construction method which had the twin benefits of a speedy erection time and plan flexibility. The Eichler architects' design strategy of post-and-beam structure and exposed wood panels was a simple one which nonetheless imbued their mass-produced product with the feel of a high-quality living environment. Furthermore, the Eichler vocabulary proved a resilient one which would permit the houses to evolve over time to accommodate changes in market demands without sacrificing its distinctive feel and image.

Over the course of the first 15 years of Eichler history, from 1950 until 1965, the designs of the houses would go through several important changes, but the high-quality feeling and the sense of freedom and livability would remain consistent throughout the entire term of development. In addition to their design of individual house models, the architects experimented with a succession of site-planning strategies, which implied a variety of living styles, including one un-built example which exhibited surprisingly farsighted ideas about land use and energy consciousness.

The challenge Eichler and his architects faced - to design a house which could rise above the ordinary builder quality, while remaining affordable to middle-class home buyers - was a serious one. An article in Arts & Architecture in May 1948 defined the issue Eichler and his architects would face when they joined forces a year later: " To the typical operative builder, a house is a commodity, an object to be bought and sold. But the word 'commodity' has another and equally correct definition: 'the quality or state of being commodious; convenience; accommodation; benefit; advantage.'" Resisting the ordinary builder mentality, and instead striving to achieve this second definition of commodity, would always be the goal of Eichler and his design staff.

Eichler's first architect-designed homes, 51 Anshen & Allen models, went on the market in 1950. Built in Sunnyvale, beyond the typical San Francisco commute, where land was relatively inexpensive, they were 'T'-shaped in plan, with the living-dining room in the stem of the 'T,' and under a high flat roof which overlapped the other two wings. Those two wings were formed by two bedrooms on the back and the garage on the street side. The bedroom wing helped define and shelter a backyard patio made accessible from the living room through a glass door in a floor-to-ceiling glass wall.

Jim San Jule, the marketing partner of Eichler Homes up until the mid-1950s, described this model as " a real gem," because of its superefficient planning and handsome proportions that made the interior space seem much larger than the actual 1,044 square feet. The plan consisted of three bedrooms, one bath, living room, kitchen, and a dining alcove. The price was $9,500, including the appliances.

San Jule remembers Robert Anshen telling him that he thought that this was the best house he ever designed. The idea of commodiousness was well achieved in Anshen's first effort at merchant-builder housing, and apparently the public thought so as well; all 51 houses were sold within two weeks.

These houses were built just before the beginning of the Korean war and the onset of material shortages that would follow. So the architects were able to use redwood tongue-and-groove siding for the exterior, redwood plywood throughout the interior, and wood cabinetry. Copper piping was used in the radiant heating system, and based on a recent survey, there have been very few maintenance problems with the systems of this vintage. As soon as material rationing took effect, the company was forced to resort to exterior plywood wall sheathing, Masonite cabinets, and the far-inferior steel radiant heat piping.

The next significant design development was one which would seem to most contemporary readers as quite unremarkable, but in fact was a first for local home builders. Casting around for ideas to improve upon Anshen's original design, Eichler considered installing radiant heating in the backyard patio. San Jule made some preliminary estimates, and discovered that a second bathroom would cost about the same amount, and furthermore would offer a practical feature no other builder was currently providing.

Beginning with the Meadows project in Palo Alto, in 1950, Eichler introduced a second bathroom into the typical plans. With this seemingly modest addition, the houses became significantly more sophisticated. Anshen immediately conceived a layout with a master bedroom suite - an accommodation which, until then, was reserved only for custom homes. The other bathroom was placed in between the children's bedrooms. As San Jule remembers, Bay Area home buyers from then on were no longer satisfied with just one bathroom.

The company's success at the Mountain View and Palo Alto subdivisions was marred somewhat when Anshen & Eichler disagreed over the architectural firm's compensation. The $100-per-house royalty Eichler had been paying Anshen & Allen seemed to him shockingly high when they began; so when Anshen sought to renegotiate the agreement, Eichler broached and the two had a falling out.

It was at this time that Eichler became aware of the work of A. Quincy Jones, whose prototypical builder house for Hvistendahl had won him a first Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects. In December of 1950, Eichler called Jones for an interview. By the end of January, Jones, who in the meantime had joined with Frederick Emmons, had secured the commission for an Eichler subdivision.

The dispute between Anshen & Eichler was short-lived, and soon both architectural firms were working concurrently on Eichler projects. Eventually their arrangement became more of a collaboration which Eichler found useful for fostering new ideas. The Eichler house design was improved over time through a continual process of analysis. Jones would fly up to Palo Alto to meet about new projects; and during his visits, Jones, Anshen, and Eichler would walk completed tracts to appraise their previous successes and failures.

Elaine Jones, wife of the late architect, recalled their process: " They never lost track of any one of those neighborhoods. They kept their eyes on them, and found out what worked well and what didn't." By observing how people lived in the houses, they found out what people had to do to accommodate their lives. " When they found conditions were well maintained," she continued, " that was a good sign. If they found things were messy, there was usually a reason."

One innovation that came from one of their walk-throughs was the outside door from the children's bathroom. Giving children access to their own part of the house allowed the family to keep the living areas neat. Keeping things tidy was always a challenge for middle-class Eichler owners, who typically could not afford to hire domestic help. The architects responded by developing built-in furniture to help establish order in their living patterns. According to Architectural Forum, the single most popular feature of the first tract was the built-in breakfast bar, which not only collected the kitchen functions together, but gave the housewife a 'command center' from which she could oversee her children while she worked.

The collaboration of Jones & Emmons with Anshen & Allen contributed to a fertile environment for developing new ideas. One product of this collaboration was the interior atrium. It is difficult to establish specific authorship for this idea; however, the Terra Linda subdivision of 1956 was apparently the first to use atrium models in the majority of the homes, and both architectural firms offered atrium designs there.

Because the architects were paid on a royalty basis, Eichler strove to be fair to both firms by building each subdivision with a more or less equal number of models from each firm. While each team surely made unique contributions to the designs, the success of the homes depended upon consistent principles. Elaine Jones described the collaborative nature of their creative process. " Mr. Eichler was obviously a good listener to both the firms who worked with him. Those men had to work together. If one architect wanted to make a change, he couldn't be dictatorial about it."

Typically, the architects did not take authorship for innovations. As Jones explained, " the houses came from a vocabulary of materials, and if anybody wanted something new, it was discussed among the group and planned for as a part of a controlled business process." One reason the Eichlers were so successful was that the participants worked together for the good of the overall design rather than competing for individual credit.

A feature which is more clear in origin was the gable roof. A. Quincy Jones had previously used a gable-roofed house design for a developer in Portland, Oregon. In the Northwest, where sunshine is not as plentiful or as bright as it is in California, the extra window height at the gable allowed daylight to penetrate into the center of the house even on overcast days. Furthermore, these houses were sited in a pine forest and the high windows offered views of the surrounding trees. In Eichler's Terra Linda and Lucas Valley subdivisions, the gable window allowed views of the rolling hills which so beautifully define the character of those Marin subdivisions.

Where geography was not so prominent, the architects depended upon large-scale site planning strategies to define the character of a subdivision. At the Meadows, in Palo Alto, where the existing site was flat and virtually treeless, Anshen & Allen experimented in 1950 with an abstract composition of concentric rings. The idea behind this shape was twofold. By arranging the homes in a radial pattern, it was possible to offer a sense of individuality with a minimum number of house designs.

Furthermore, the circular street pattern discouraged through traffic and so contributed to a sense of privacy and exclusivity. This layout seemed to be more compelling in theory, however, than in reality. It proved difficult for visitors to orient themselves in the rings of streets, and the gentle arc of the roadway did little to disguise the sameness of the houses.

More successful were the layouts at nearby Greenmeadow and Fairview, where the architects resorted to a more traditional village-like planning concept. At Greenmeadow, for example, the houses surrounded a park which contained a nursery school and a recreation center with a swimming pool. In a subsequent Palo Alto subdivision, residents familiar with the village-like Greenmeadow complex induced Eichler to build a swim and tennis club for them in an area previously planned for five houses.

Perhaps the most ambitious site plan was a subdivision Jones & Emmons prepared for a projected Eichler subdivision in Chatsworth, in Southern California. This project designed in 1961-'62 as part of the famous Case Study House program was remarkable for its farsighted approach to land uses and energy conservation. Here Quincy Jones imagined a site-planning strategy which would minimize the impact of the houses on the landscape, while making use of existing resources to protect the residents from the somewhat harsh high-desert climate, without resorting to air conditioning.

Jones's solution involved earth-burming around the houses to insulate the interiors from the weather and to disguise the buildings from the street.Architectural author Esther McCoy described Jones's strategy by saying, " A hole is cut in the earth and the house is slipped in." Elaine Jones defined the architect's goals for this subdivision in a monograph of A. Quincy Jones's work: "What he is striving for in (this project)," she wrote, "is a kind of earth sculpture in which houses blend with the land." The proposal, which required some joint ownership of interstitial landscaping, proved to be too radical for the local authorities, who were unsure that these spaces could be maintained. As a result, the project was denied planning approval.

Design efforts such as the Chatsworth project demonstrated how far Eichler was willing to go to develop new solutions for single-family housing. Eichler encouraged his architects to put their individual talents and skills to work, and together they challenged each other to continually improve upon their designs. Eichler recognized, before many other developers did, that architects could offer creative and useful solutions to the difficult issues surrounding merchant building.

When asked about his particular choices of architects, Eichler was deceptively modest. In an article in the December 1950 Architectural Forum, he was quoted as saying, "If I were in the dress business, I'd hire the best designers to create dresses for sale. I think the same reasoning applies to home building."

However, Eichler chose his architects with a keen eye. And those with whom he collaborated were especially adept at imbuing his standardized homes with a surprising degree of commodity, which made the experience of living in them personally satisfying on both a practical and a spiritual level.

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