Fascination with Eichlers Peaks with His
Writing 'Modernism Rebuilds the American Dream'
By Paul Adamson
For most of the past decade, I have been consumed by a fascination with the Eichler homes. I first wrote about them in 1984, when I was a graduate student of architecture at Columbia University. I argued then that California's Eichlers qualified as a modern vernacular: modern by social intent and aesthetic expression, and vernacular by their use of local materials and methods and their accommodation of regional traditions.
Ten years later, after returning to the Bay Area, I was invited to speak at a seminar in Seattle for the American Institute of Architects. There, I presented a paper on the Eichlers, suggesting that this special group of homes had valuable lessons to teach modern designers. The reception I received at that talk was astonishingly enthusiastic. Several curious attendees even asked if there was a book available on the subject.
That experience convinced me to get into to some serious research. Soon afterward I met Eichler Network publisher Marty Arbunich, and we began to collaborate on a series of newsletter articles, each intended as a piece of what we hoped could be a comprehensive study of Joe Eichler's extraordinary legacy of affordable modern housing.
But my motivation for writing 'Eichler: Modernism Rebuilds the American Dream' actually began to form long before my days at Columbia, while I was a child growing up in the Bay Area. I consider myself a product of the 'American Dream.' My parents came to the United States from England on an extended visit in the mid-1950s. It was easy for Britons to obtain green card status during the early postwar, and as many English people did during that time, my father and mother came to America to travel, work, and generally escape the gloom of postwar Europe. My parents were friends from neighboring districts in London, and they traveled together across Canada and down the West Coast to the San Francisco Bay Area, where they worked, my mother in an architectural office and my father as an estimator for a contracting firm.
In 1957, having stayed a year longer than they originally planned, they returned to London and were married, but immediately returned to California. My father was convinced that he could build a career in California. Had he stayed in London, he felt his professional life would have consisted of, as he put it, "waiting to fill dead men's shoes." In San Francisco, he became successful, and his faith that the newness of California would support his dreams of a better life never wavered.
I remember my parents enthusing about the ambient pleasures of the region -- the clear, bright sunlight, warm temperatures, and the abundant natural landscape. We vacationed in the deserts, Death Valley and Palm Springs, because there was nothing like that in England, and indulged in outdoor hobbies. We also enjoyed our houses, first a tiny two-bedroom hillside house in Marin County, then a stretched-out, ranch-style home in the hills of Orinda, and finally a remodeled 1920s craftsman bungalow in Los Altos. Each one enabled the indoor-outdoor living made famous by shelter magazines of the postwar period.
Regardless of their personal satisfaction with their homes, however, my parents embraced 'house hunting,' as did many people we knew, as a weekend recreation. Driving around the suburban neighborhoods of the Bay Area, we saw the eclectic variety of homes for sale. Occasionally our drives would be punctuated with a sighting of a house that offered distinctive qualities, and sometimes my mother or father would call out, "There's an Eichler!" To them the Eichler homes epitomized California living. More than that, however, the houses built by Joe Eichler stood out from their surroundings because they were well designed, not beholden to a preconceived image, and yet marked by a consistency, purity, and elegance almost unique amid the bland predictability of ever-spreading middle-class tracts.
The idea that good design -- and by this I mean design as a holistic practice, not just making things look a certain way -- should be accessible to as many people as possible was one of the principle missions of the modern movement. The industrial process made this concept practical. The Bauhaus recognized it, but although their influence was profound, the actual output of products resulting from their designs was limited. During the postwar period in America, the potential for mass production of consumer goods lent renewed currency to the idea that well-designed products might be made widely accessible. America's premier industrial designer of the period, Charles Eames, and his wife and partner, Ray, understood that modernity could democratize improvements in everyday life when they declared that industrialization could "get the most of the best to the greatest number of people for the least." A half century after Eames made that statement, and 70 years after the close of the Bauhaus, stores including Ikea, Crate and Barrel, and the Pottery Barn have realized the concept that good design can be made widely accessible to people of moderate income. However, the home itself, while also mass produced at prices accessible to middle-income consumers, has yet to receive the serious attention of designers. (Interestingly an architect was a principle founder of Crate and Barrel.)
Modernist architects have consistently tinkered with designs for mass-produced houses, and there have been some notable examples. Walter Gropius designed an all-steel house that was built as staff quarters at the Bauhaus. Le Corbusier also argued that the houses could be mass-produced, and he built a number of abstractly austere "houses for workers" that were intended to look machine-made. In the United States, Frank Lloyd Wright introduced a systematized construction method for middle-class homes in the 1930s, and then designed and built dozens of his so-called Usonians for individual clients.
Since then, numerous efforts by lesser-known designers and builders have periodically surfaced long enough to get mentioned in the news, and then quickly disappeared again. The potential for a sustained production of well-designed, mass-produced houses still remains unrealized. Eichler's developments, notable for their ingenuity and elegant design, remind us that it is possible to surpass the status quo.
I was motivated to write 'Modernism Rebuilds the American Dream' to find the reasons that, amid the expanding realm of sprawl of unimaginative and unsatisfying cheek-by-jowl tract home developments, the Eichlers remain the rarest of exceptions. Even today, despite the Eichlers' example and those of numerous similar, although smaller, efforts elsewhere, architects design only ten percent of American housing.
The chapters in our book outline a search for the answers to a number of questions surrounding this condition: Where did the ideas behind these exceptionally well-designed homes come from? Who was Joe Eichler, and who were the people he found to join him in his groundbreaking work? How were these elegant homes built, and how was their builder able to keep the building process, atypical in almost every respect, within the constraints of merchant-builder costs? What was the effect of the Eichlers on the housing market, and what did their builder have to do to sell them to a largely tradition-bound public? And finally, just how did Eichler's developments make a lasting difference to American middle-class residential life?.
The legacy of Eichler Homes will likely endure and grow in importance as the largely unplanned suburban realm continues to be the residential context of choice for the majority of families, not just in the United States, but wherever middle-class populations are expanding around the globe.
It is my hope -- and that of my collaborators, Marty Arbunich and Ernie Braun -- that 'Eichler: Modernism Rebuilds the American Dream' can inform and even inspire those who dare to imagine that everyday life, despite the pervasive pressures of expanding costs and shrinking resources, can be lived within an environment that is both practically manageable and aesthetically enriching.
Order your copy of 'Modernism Rebuilds the American Dream' today.
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