BOB ANSHEN: SELF-MADE MAN
The Bay Area Architect Was a Mastermind Whose
Inventions Included Eichler Homes -- and Himself

From the pages of CA-Modern magazine
By Dave Weinstein

By all accounts Robert Anshen should have been in pictures -- though he did not have matinee idol looks.

"Anshen was aggressive, loud, sarcastic," says Ned Eichler, son of the builder Joe Eichler, who was Anshen's second most important client back in the 1950s. "Also, he was absolutely ugly. He was like a character out of Dickens. He had a small body, and the size of his head bore no relation to the size of his body."

Still, when Anshen was onstage -- and he was always onstage -- he absolutely commanded attention -- so much so people barely noticed his lifelong architectural partner and best friend, Steve Allen, even though Allen was a large man and Anshen short and thin, weighing in at roughly 125 pounds. "Steve was always so quiet," says Augie Rath, who worked for their San Francisco-based firm, Anshen and Allen, in the 1950s and '60s. "Bob, you knew the instant he walked in the door."

"When Anshen laughed, it was really a bold, loud laugh. He prided himself on being aggressive, on being a character. I think to some degree he invented himself," Ned Eichler says, adding, "Anshen was one of the greatest characters I've ever met."

Anshen's life itself had the arc of a drama, a picaresque tale that veered from hero quest to mystery story, leavened throughout with comedy.

The drama recounts how Anshen (born 1910) and Allen (1912), both Easterners, stranded in San Francisco in 1937 by poverty after traveling the globe, convinced a multi-millionaire to give them their first job -- a job that put them on the map and that led to most of the jobs that followed; how Anshen, a hero with an outsized personality and seemingly magical powers, made a name for himself as a young David battling the Goliath of the International Style; how he championed housing for the masses, prefabricated dwellings, and regional planning; how he worked with Joe Eichler to give America its largest collection of modern tract homes; how he became a Brooks Brothers bohemian; and how, a flawed hero, he died suddenly and young, his death surrounded by mystery.

Anshen and Allen, best known today as the original designers of Eichler homes, were responsible for several defining innovations, including the homes' orientations to the backyard, and the atrium. The firm worked on Eichler homes from 1950 to 1960, when Claude Oakland, an employee who had been doing much of the design, formed his own firm and took over the account.

In a 1960 article in the American Institute of Architects Journal, Anshen discussed the genesis of their design for Eichler Homes. He and Allen decided in 1949 "as a matter of policy that wherever possible the building would be blank to the front," he wrote. Anshen and Allen's concern was with privacy.

Eichler, Anshen wrote, was "leery" about the suggestion, worrying "whether a house that did not look like a house but looked like a blank wall to the street would sell at all, but being a forward-thinking man, he went along with the architect."

But Anshen and Allen did much more than Eichler homes. Theirs was one of only a handful of Bay Area modern firms that got its start before World War II. The firm played a major role in setting the tone for Bay Area modernism as something warmer and more Wrightian than its Southern California counterpart.

And although Anshen and Allen collaborated closely -- "No one of them did anything without the full discussion and approval of the other," says Derek Parker, a longtime architect with the firm -- it was Anshen who, through his personality, defined the firm. It was certainly Anshen, a wily marketer who secured many of the jobs.

"Bob had a way of talk that was extremely convincing," says Donald Olsen, a good friend in the 1940s and early '50s. "He didn't allow the other person to object."

"He was an actor," says Los Angeles architect Ray Kappe, who worked for Anshen and Allen in the early 1950s. "He demanded attention."

His face might not have been pretty, but it was expressive -- especially when telling jokes, the late architect Warren Callister remembered. "Bob Anshen's face was like something rubber."

Like an actor, Anshen had a magic that drew people to him. And despite his looks, women swooned.

"It was common for him at a party to come behind a woman and pinch her on the fanny," recalls architect Donald Olsen, "and she would turn around in wrath, and he would look at her and she would just fall. She was his!"

"He would kiss your hand and it wasn't an affectation," says Helen Olsen, a designer and Donald's wife. "It was natural for Bob to do this. I enjoyed him. He was completely different from anyone else I've ever run into, really. I could see why he would get clients, because he would sit and listen and even seem interested in what you had to say."

"If Anshen and Allen is bread," Olsen says, "Steve Allen is the dough, and Anshen is the yeast -- the perfect combination."

"The relationship between those two was extraordinary," Parker says, "and because of their differences, and the way they were able to resolve their differences, they made each other better."

Anshen and Allen -- whose relationship became one of the profession's great friendships -- were known for welcoming young architects to the area, often hiring them on the spot.

When architects Warren Callister and Jack Hillmer arrived in San Francisco right after the war, they scoped out the scene by visiting all the modern architects. "Most of them said maybe you'd like to go to Seattle or Portland, go somewhere else," Hillmer remembered. "I've always loved Bob Anshen, because his reaction was just the reverse. He said, 'I hope you'll stay here, because we need all the good architects we can get.'"

The story told most often about Anshen and Allen, though somewhat differently each time, concerns how they secured their first job.

The young architects, having gone through the staid school of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, were working for separate small San Francisco firms in the late 1930s when word got out that Ralph K. Davies, vice president and marketing genius for Standard Oil of California (he devised its Chevron logo) wanted a house. A Tudor house.

But why would Davies talk to two unknowns? Anshen recalled a scene from a Horatio Alger book he'd read at age seven. He and Allen composed a letter to Davies saying they knew his time was worth money, so they would pay him $100 for a half hour of it to make their presentation. Each borrowed $50 from their bosses.

"We recommended a house that would have all of the qualities, the warmth, the charm and spirit of a Tudor house, with the amenities, the forms, and techniques of the present day," Allen wrote in a tribute to Davies, years later. The house in Woodside was completed a few days before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The 6,000-square-foot Davies house won both press attention and the firm its staunchest patron. Designing Standard Oil stations became a mainstay for the partners after the war; they designed an office tower, the International Building, in 1957 for American President Lines -- which Davies took over in the 1950s; they also designed APL staterooms; another house for Davies; and found much work, through friends and associates of Davies, including buildings for the University of California.

Both the Sonya Silverstone house in Taxco, Mexico, from 1949, and the Chapel of the Holy Cross in Sedona, Arizona, among Anshen and Allen's most praised works, came to them from friends of Davies.

Pearl Harbor sent Davies to Washington, where he supervised the American petroleum industry for the government. It sent Allen into the Navy.

Anshen snagged a job overseeing war housing for the Vallejo Housing Authority. Anshen and his wife Eleanor also wrote for progressive architectural magazines and Anshen lectured about America's need for rational, national, and regional planning. Like his colleagues in the progressive planning association Telesis, he wanted to see Bay Area cities and special districts consolidate into one regional government.

The Anshens called for the massive, postwar production of public housing, along with privately built housing, and expected much of it to be prefabricated in the factory.

"There should be continued public control over all developments, which would include regulation of population density and building density," they wrote.

The Anshens were also mainstays at the California Labor School during the war and shortly thereafter.

The school, a center for the Bay Area's left wing intelligentsia, featured lectures, workshops and classes on architecture, art, folk dancing, and more. Like so many at the time, Donald Olsen says, Anshen proclaimed his interest in Marxism and had a library to prove it.

In 1947 the Anshens were investigated, along with most of the school, by the state legislature's Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities, which called the school "a Stalin-directed institution of propaganda to indoctrinate veterans with hatred for both the people and the government of the United States."

Anshen may have been a bit of a Marxist, but he appreciated good living too well to begrudge the rich their luxuries, especially their architectural luxuries. Instead, he faulted them for not spending enough on quality architecture.

"Even wealthy people hesitate, for some strange psychological reason, to spend vast sums of money on a dwelling," he wrote in 1956. "When one is rich," he continued, "it is just as ostentatious to pretend that one is poor, as it is ostentatious for one who is poor to pretend to be rich."

Anshen had another run-in with the authorities during the war years -- but this time, Olsen remembers, he rather enjoyed it. An official for the State Board of Architectural Examiners, reading about the Davies house and noting that neither Anshen nor Allen were licensed, called on Anshen in Vallejo.

After a few drinks and dinner, according to court records, the official asked Anshen how much he might pay to see the answers for the architects' licensing exam. "Oh, come, come. They are worth more than that to you," the official chided when Anshen suggested $150.

Anshen called the police and ended up acting out a drama for their benefit. Shortly thereafter, in the dining room of San Francisco's Mark Hopkins Hotel, Anshen handed the architectural examiner an envelope with ten $20 bills -- after waving the wad in the air "to make sure he was seen," according to Olsen. Officers swept in for the arrest.

Once the war ended, Anshen and Allen were back in business, designing several small homes.

They also got Davies to finance a project they hoped would transform homebuilding in America -- 'factory-fabricated houses' using lightweight, fiberglass 'stretched skin panels' of their own design that were bolted together on site. Only one was built, in the Berkeley hills. They blamed the high cost of materials and the reluctance of builders to adopt a new technique.

During their career together, Anshen and Allen designed perhaps two-dozen more conventional custom homes, several thousand modern homes in tracts for Eichler and the San Francisco Peninsula developers Mackay and Gavello, and townhouses at the Golden Gateway redevelopment near San Francisco's Embarcadero Center. They designed small offices, retail, industrial buildings, several garages, and a small hotel, circular in plan, that San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen dismissed as a "rusty donut."

The Silverstone house in Mexico, which Architectural Record admiringly described as "a cross between a Mayan temple and the things Miss Carmen Miranda wears on her head," used freeform-curved concrete beams, cast on site, to support a gabled roof with a skylight filling the ridgeline. Garden rooms alternated with walled rooms and opened onto tropical gardens and waterfalls. "A landmark of 20th century modernism," architectural historians Donald Leslie Johnson and Donald Langmead later wrote.

As the firm grew from a single floor and a handful of employees at 461 Bush Street to three floors with about 35, they took on larger projects: the 22-story International Building, the Bank of California (601 and 400 California Street, respectively), the Chemistry Building and Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley, and the beautifully sculptural, concrete visitors center at Dinosaur National Monument in Utah.

Both Anshen and Allen supervised the design of projects, working with teams of associate designers and draftsmen. Allen himself was a superb draftsman. Not Anshen. "Whenever he would do a drawing in the office, he did everything a young draftsman tried not to do," Ray Kappe remembers. "He would burn it, and stamp it upside down."

"Bob was an idea-a-minute guy," Parker remembers. "Ninety-nine percent of them were nonsense, but one percent were genius. Steve, in his careful way, was wonderful at recognizing the one percent."

"Bob was quite a talent, but a talent more from the standpoint of having ideas or concepts," Kappe says. "I can remember the Sedona project. He walks in one morning with a couple of lines, and that was the project. It was a beautiful project. There wasn't a lot to it . . . But it ended up as an architectural masterpiece."

Anshen and Allen gave the firm's architects creative freedom -- within limits. "He gave architects a lot of leeway, yes," says Walter Brooks, who worked on Eichler homes in the early 1950s. "But he also gave them attention and watched over what they were doing."

It was Anshen who set the tone for the office. Donald Olsen remembers a conference room that was significantly larger than the drafting room. "He had a conference table, it must have been 12 feet long at least, and in one corner there was a thing that held a big bottle of scotch upside down with a dispenser and glasses. Then, in the opposite corner, 12 feet away, was the same sort of thing, a huge dispenser of bourbon."

Like Eichler, Anshen and Allen's favorite restaurant was Sam's Grill, in downtown San Francisco. "An employee who didn't accept (Anshen's) invitation for a 'quick meal at Sam's' never really became part of the office," architect Woody Stockwell wrote in his memoir, 'When the Lions Come.'

"Having rarely eaten breakfast, Bob's daily sustenance began with two dry martinis, straight up. A New York steak usually followed this, but I always had the feeling that the entree was just for show."

Many architects returned to their drafting boards groggy -- but Anshen, none the worse, would head off to a meeting. "It was a very happy office," Rath says, adding, "It was loose, put it that way."

"Bob was a master of telling stories," says Olsen. "He could go on and on with great detail."

"He told one joke for a week," Jack Hillmer recalled, "and we would hear him tell it to different people. But he would embellish it and make it better each time."

"One day I came into the office when we were sharing the drafting room," Callister added. "Bob was going through a card file. It was a card file of jokes. The reason he always had a joke, he took the front card and put it to the back."

"He was put out that I caught him, I think."

Anshen was easy to anger and often difficult to work with -- though employees and clients forgave him because of his endearing qualities. He and Allen fought often, Derek Parker remembers, but made up readily. "Bob used to fire me regularly once a week, but I was always too busy to leave," Parker says.

Anshen and Allen, "Frank Lloyd Wright aficionados but not devotees, if you see the difference," according to Bay Area architect Henrik Bull, developed a style that was in conscious opposition both to the historical, Beaux-Arts styles in which they were trained, and the International Style of Mies van der Rohe.

"We felt we were fighting the International School; that was the enemy, as far as we were concerned," Allen told historian Joanne Stewart Wetzel.

Anshen, who loved to hector his colleagues at conventions, took the opportunity in 1962 to lambaste Mies' and Philip Johnson's Seagram Building in New York -- then and now an International Style monument -- as an example of "thin, sterile boxes, flat-faced nonentities with no quality of delight."

"We're sick of the glass box," he announced.

Successful as he was at corporate architecture, Anshen, his son John says, was always an artist at heart. He gravitated to the bohemian scene -- though he never looked like a bohemian. "He always dressed the same," Ned Eichler remembers. "He wore a gray suit with a vest, a white shirt with a knit tie, and black shoes and white socks."

The Anshens lived in the city during the early years of the firm. "He and Ellie used to ride horses in Golden Gate Park early in the morning before coming to the office," architect and friend Jack Hillmer recalled -- the only athletic endeavor friends recall Anshen undertaking.

The couple split after Bob met the beautiful Frances Ney at a dinner. Are you married, she asked. His reply, John says, was, "Yes. But..." They began dating after he divorced.

Anshen was already part of the San Francisco artistic and literary scene, friends with sculptor Bennie Bufano, Beat writer Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and others. Ney, whom he married around 1956, put him at the center of it through her friendship with writers Henry Miller and Frieda Lawrence and other artists from the Carmel-Big Sur crowd -- and because she owned one of the first houseboats in Sausalito, where her neighbors included artist Jean 'Yanko' Varda and writer Alan Watts, who shared the ferryboat Vallejo, and painter Gordon Onslow-Ford.

"He loved the whole barge scene. It was very bohemian," says John Anshen who, along with his sister Haven, were Frances's children from a prior marriage. Bob adopted both.

Varda, a man in his 60s who was never seen without two or three young beauties on his arm, was already famous for parties on the Vallejo. Bob and Frances threw some hot ones too. "His Christmas parties were wild, the greatest damn parties I've ever been to in my life," Rath recalls. "Odetta would come to the party, fantastic people all over."

Despite his reputation for chasing women, however, Anshen found it hard at times to get his mind off work. Dancer (later, writer) Maya Angelou, who had a boat nearby, recalls a tête-à-tête with Anshen at one party. "Bob Anshen waved me over, and I stayed a while listening to him discourse on the merits of solar heating systems."

Anshen wasn't the world's most attentive dad. He'd buy Giants baseball tickets, but on game day a guy from the office would take John. Still, John admired his father greatly. "The way people showed him respect, a young boy feels that," he says. "It was because people genuinely liked him, and put up with his eccentricities."

John says his father, who was born in a suburb of Boston, never talked much about his past. He believes his father worked briefly on Wall Street before switching to architecture.

After Bob and Frances divorced in 1961, Anshen stayed involved with his children, sending John to boarding school in Arizona near the Chapel of the Holy Cross.

Anshen moved to then-largely undeveloped De Silva Island, actually a peninsula on Richardson Bay north of Sausalito, where he expanded an existing cottage, giving it a sunken living room that jutted out over the bay.

By 1962 Anshen was sharing the home and his life with a 30-ish artist, Sara Raffetto. It was a grand romance. "They were invited to dinner together, and they left before the salad was served," in the words of Raffetto's later companion, James Pratt, who called Anshen "her great love."

Anshen remained as upbeat, gregarious, and imaginative as ever, though when Donald Olsen ran into his old friend, he thought he looked ill and dissipated.

Anshen always pushed himself hard, his son says. "He would go to sleep late but get up early and go to work. He loved to go to work." He also used barbiturates to fall asleep, and on occasion had to use oxygen. "He never took care of himself. And he smoked like a maniac," John says.

Ever the marketer, Anshen concocted a new idea -- he bought a gondola and sent it to a boatyard to be outfitted with a powerful engine. "He wanted to pick up clients at Fisherman's Wharf in his gondola to bring them over to De Silva Island and entertain them," Rath says.

Anshen and Raffetto had dinner at the Allen's home in the Sausalito hills on Sunday, May 24, 1964. Allen drove them home, apparently because Anshen lost his car keys. At 10:30 that night, Raffetto stumbled into a neighbor's house to report a fire. Neighbors saw Anshen in front of the house, but when firefighters arrived, he was gone. Raffetto, described by the sheriff as "an attractive blonde" and by the San Rafael Independent-Journal as a "mystery woman," was incoherent. The fire, which started under the house near an unused floor furnace, caused $1,000 in damage.

Later that evening, Allen noticed that Anshen's car was gone.

At nine the next morning, Anshen missed an important meeting with their Bank of California clients. Allen, who said his partner had been "in good health and spirits" the night before, called the police to report him missing. It's not clear if Allen knew about the fire. Around noon, Allen visited the apartment in their office on Bush Street in downtown San Francisco where Anshen sometimes stayed after a late night on the town. He found Anshen garbed in sweatshirt and shorts, dead at age 54.

'Mysterious Death of S.F. Architect' was the Chronicle's lead headline the next day. 'Twin Mysteries Probed in Death' was the Independent-Journal's. Anshen, the San Francisco coroner revealed, had been under treatment for low blood pressure, "a slight drinking problem, and depression."

The San Francisco coroner ruled the death accidental due to "barbiturate and alcohol poisoning." Arson investigators found a leaking oil line under the house and electrical problems.

Fourteen months after his death, the Independent-Journal announced a public auction. "In the market for a gondola? Here's a chance."

At Anshen and Allen offices, architects were distraught and shocked. They knew Anshen lived hard, but no one expected him to die. In retrospect, remembering how high spirited Anshen seemed, and how volatile, some said, yes, he might have been depressed. But no one ever saw him depressed.

No one took Anshen's death harder than Steve Allen. "Steve was never the same again," says Derek Parker, who became a partner in the firm shortly thereafter and helped it become the major firm it is today. "His energy level dropped, and he was less interested in the practice."

Asked about Anshen's virtues as an architect, Parker responds immediately. "Creativity, ideas. Nothing was sacred. He'd start each project anew. He had a good sense of design, a good sense of proportion. And he was always pushing for something new -- not to be novel, but to solve the problem."

Photos: Ernie Braun, Maynard L. Parker (courtesy Huntington Library, San Marino, CA), Kelly Cannon, Dave Cook (Eating in Translation); and courtesy John and Frances Anshen, Anshen + Allen

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