WEXLER'S PALM SPRINGS STEEL
Dreaming in steel: Palm Springs' tiny enclave of
seven modern steel homes is a desert landmark

From the pages of CA-Modern magazine
By Dave Weinstein

By the mid-1950s, steel houses seemed like a dream about to come true. Socially conscious architects, keen to provide well-designed, quickly built, and affordable housing for the booming postwar suburbs, focused on mass production. For many of them, that meant steel.

"It certainly lends itself to mass production better than wood does," says Bernard Perlin, an engineer with a California steel company at the time. "Your automobile and refrigerator and other appliances certainly prove that. It is a better material, stronger material. You don't have to worry about termites."

Architects, of course, were dreaming about more than steel's ability to resist bugs. Steel houses, prefabricated in the factory then erected on site in a day or two, would solve the housing crisis and turn the construction industry on its head.

A basic house, some reckoned, could sell for little more than a car. Carpenters, who worked in a craftsman tradition harking back to medieval days, would be replaced by an assembly line harking back to Henry Ford. Homebuyers would relish the convenience of living in a rationally arranged "machine for living," in the phrase invented by Le Corbusier.

No building material was as machine-like as steel -- not even reinforced concrete or plastics or plywood, which other architects dreamed about. Steel was poetic as well. Architects could devise elegant, sliver-thin profiles that allowed the house to dematerialize.

Few architects, it turned out, produced steel-frame houses for the masses. One of the few who did, Donald Wexler, saw steel not as a universal material but as something ideal for the only place he did business -- the desert.

In the early 1960s, for the developers George and Robert Alexander, Wexler and his engineer, Perlin, designed a neighborhood of 38 flat- or folded-roofed all-steel homes at the edge of Palm Springs. Seven were built, and seven remain, a monument to a time that dreamed of steel, and pleasant places to live.

"I have to talk about the desert," Wexler says, in his matter-of-fact way, when asked recently about his vision for steel housing. "Steel, concrete, and glass are ideal materials for any building in the desert. They are inorganic, and they don't deteriorate in the extreme temperatures we have."

Unlike many so-called 'steel houses,' which are framed in steel but sided and roofed in other materials, the Wexler-Perlin models are all steel -- framing, roof, exterior siding. Only the interior siding is drywall. They use steel as a decorative as well as structural feature, exposed beams creating the home's look while revealing its structure, and allowing for a lightness that is almost ethereal.

"I don't think you could have had this thin a profile of wall if it was wood," says artist Jim Isermann, who lives in one of Wexler and Perlin's steel houses, built in 1962. "The walls are only three inches thick. There's so little between inside and outside.

Isermann's house is almost a single space wrapping around a core of bathroom, kitchen, and utilities. The core was assembled at the factory and trucked to the site. Steel wall and ceiling panels were also prefabricated. The house was assembled on site in a few days.

The main living air opens onto the backyard and pool through sliding glass. "Actually," Wexler says, "the houses are mostly glass."

There are drawbacks, Isermann says, though he loves the house and is one of Wexler's biggest fans. The house gets hot in the summer, and the steel retains the heat. Also, he says, "The steel makes noises as it expands." The first time he heard the banging, he thought the front door was slamming.

Isermann's house has a flat roof, so its look is classic, almost International Style. The roof next door is a series of jocular folds. Another house has a roof that pops up to provide clerestory windows. All have low garden walls of Utah green quartzite.

Wexler worked in Los Angeles for one of the modern progenitors of the steel house, Richard Neutra, who designed the steel-framed Lovell house in 1926.

Neutra didn't stick with steel as his primary material. But he inspired several younger architects to become steel enthusiasts. Several were called on by the Los Angeles-based 'Arts & Architecture' magazine for its program of Case Study houses, which ran from 1946 to the mid-'60s. The goal was to design modern, affordable homes that could serve as models for homebuilders everywhere. Eight Case Study houses used steel for framing, siding or both.

Architects who designed steel Case Study houses included Raphael Soriano, Charles and Ray Eames, Craig Ellwood, Pierre Koenig, and A. Quincy Jones of the firm Jones & Emmons, one of Joe Eichler's principal architects.

In 1954 Jones designed a house for his family from steel, which he appreciated for its economy and ease of use.

But there was resistance to steel houses, in part because of their look. "Soriano was sensitive by force to the amount of steel a client would accept, and in the 1940s and 1950s that was not very much," Esther McCoy wrote in 'Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses.' "His ceilings were plastered, walls were usually a dark hardwood plywood, fireplaces were red brick, standard size or a Roman split."

The Alexanders weren't the first merchant builders to try steel. Eichler himself gave steel several shots. In 1955, working with Jones and Emmons, Eichler built a steel-framed showpiece house at Research Village, a model home project sponsored by U.S. Gypsum near Chicago. That same year, Eichler called upon Soriano to design the 'All-Steel Builders' house in Palo Alto. Jones designed Eichler's steel experimental house, the X-100, a year later in San Mateo Highlands. The house attracted much attention from the media and public. But Eichler never built another steel house.

It was the stresses of the desert climate, not Neutra's heritage, that got Wexler working in steel. Called to Palm Springs in 1952 to help design the tamarisk Country Club, Wexler was soon designing schools throughout the valley with partner Richard Harrison -- in steel.

Perlin, who was working for a Los Angeles steel company, Calcor Corps., knew about Wexler's steel schools and approached him in 1958 with another idea the company was developing -- steel houses. "I came by with as big a sample of a wall system as I could carry," Perlin remembers. The system used light-gauge structural steel and prefabricated panels and roofing.

U.S. Steel and Bethlehem Steel helped fund the project, hoping to develop new markets for their products.

Wexler was willing to try steel houses because of problems he'd had with an earlier house he built in Palm Springs -- a wood-framed house for himself. The wood warped in the heat, and required painting every few years. "That taught me," he says. "It was a good lesson, that wood is high maintenance."

They began by building a house for Perlin, on a hillside site in Los Angeles that today overlooks the Getty Museum. "For my house, I even went beyond overboard," he says. "The insides of the walls are steel. There's nothing that's not steel in our house other than the cabinets." Perlin still lives there. "It's relatively maintenance free," he says. "I painted it twice."

Wexler, who knew the Alexanders, convinced them to try steel for their next subdivision. "Originally we did three houses. Everything went along just beautifully," Wexler says. "Bob Alexander felt that as long as they were competitive with wood houses he wouldn't want to build anything else.

"Then a larger firm bought out Calcor. The long and short of the story, they upped the price on the steel. 'You've taken us out of competition,' Bob said."

"At the time," he adds, "a lot of developers were watching the Alexanders. I think Eichler was one of them."

Wexler and Perlin say steel houses were done in by the lack of industrial support. "Steel requires shop facilities and manufacturing that doesn't exist," Perlin says. Without that, he says, "It's like a custom anything. If you wanted a custom car, you'd have to pay a premium."

Designers of steel houses have also faced resistance from the trades. "Needless to say," Perlin notes, "the carpenters didn't want to have their livelihoods taken away."

Wexler also blames bureaucracy, the high cost of building permits, and cowardice for the failure of steel houses to take hold. "The whole thing is, who wants to be a pioneer?" he says. "The pioneer spirit has kind of left us. I don't see people experimenting as they did in the '50s, '60s or '70s."

Nonetheless, steel may be making a modest comeback in the desert. A new steel house was recently completed next door to Wexler's first Palm Springs house. Wexler served as design consultant. And the Los Angeles firm of Marmol + Radziner is marketing prefabricated steel-frame houses, shipping modules from its factory. Principal Leo Marmol is moving into 'the Desert House,' a flat-roofed, pristine prototype recently erected in Desert Hot Springs.

Wexler, meanwhile, remains proud of his steel neighborhood. "The seven steel houses, they'll never come down," he says. "Someone will have to bulldoze them or they'll be there forever."

• Donald Wexler and Bernard Perlin's seven Alexander steel houses can be found on Sunnyview Drive and Molino Road, half a mile from the Tramway Gas Station.

The Steel Mystique

When the architects who designed California's greatest steel-framed houses talk about the material, they focus on its functionality, strength, indestructibility, and its ability to span great distances. But don't let that fool you.

All you need do is visit a house that glories in its steel construction to realize that steel is more than something industrial. It has magic. A well-designed steel house shows off its structure -- but the effect is more spiritual than industrial, because the steel is so thin the house appears to levitate.

And few homes are as open and light as a home of steel, thanks to broad spans and unbroken spaces, walls of glass shaded by broad overhangs, and, often, clerestory windows that bring in light from above.

The house comes across not as industrial, but as elegant, even spiritual.

There's also an aura about steel that suggests a better tomorrow, a world in which house production has become rational, sophisticated, environmentally conscious.

No wonder steel appeals. "Steel is not something you can take up and put down," architect Pierre Koenig once said. "It is a way of life."

Photos: David Glomb and Barry Sturgill

For more on California steel, see our Front & Center feature on 12 of the Golden State's finest steel homes.

See other Palm Springs Stories