minded new technology worker, he would create “towers in the park”surrounded by greenery and laced into freeways. He would design vast high-rises that stacked families in hundreds of identical compartments, give them “open plan” living areas without room dividers, sit them in no-frills furniture that Corbusier preferred to call “equipment.”
You can find the bastard progeny of those towers in skylines from Warsaw to Chicago. Housing projects gray and stark, they are today’s emblems of beehive alienation, the worst possible place to look for Corbusier’s optimism realized. No, to find that, you would do far better to go to where Purism met the American Dream, places where single-family homes were mass assembled from three blueprints and shopped for like cars, places like Clarendon Manor. In such blue sky subdivisions, Corbusier’s tower of identical compartments was unpacked and spread out, forming an architecture all the more “pure, neat, clean and healthy.” We who dwelt in them were as Corbusier had predicted. The era’s new worker, the aerospace worker, did want to live surrounded by greenery and laced into freeways. We had indeed “acquired a taste for fresh air and clear daylight.” And what we wanted were $22,000 Parthenons expressive of the same cold reason we saw in the lines of a jet fighter’s fuselage.
There was a man in the Valley of Heart’s Delight who made it his business to build the purest tract house forms of all. He was named Joseph Eichler. Joe Eichler had been a rather conventionally minded fellow until the day in 1936 when he happened to rent a home designed by Corbusier’s fellow Modernist prophet, Frank Lloyd Wright. With its bold spaces (a long, glass-walled living room) and latest technology (“radiant heating” via water pipes in the concrete floors), the home was to Joe Eichler a revelation, and when the cigar-chewing dairy wholesaler eventually decided to get out of butter and into subdivisions, he hired Wright disciples as his architects. They gave him a three-bedroom house with a sleek flat roof, floor-to-ceiling glass along the rear facade, post and beam ceilings, radiant heating, an open plan interior that spoke of free-flowing emptiness, all of this massproducible with a 1949 price tag of $9,000. By 1967, Joseph Eichler would build some 10,000 houses in Northern California, a particularly large concentration of them in areas closest to Lockheed.
From the street, Eichlers resembled lined-up, identical, earth-toned bunkers, their redwood-sided fronts punctured by the merest, if any, glass. You entered the private realm of the bunker through a door, and then—this was an Eichler trademark—suddenly found yourself standing in an open-air atrium. The atrium, an Eichler sales booster from the day it was introduced in 1957, was the
extra
dollop of emptiness you passed through before you met the true front door of the house and all the glassy walls and clean space within. “The Eichler design stunned us,” my father remembers of the first one he and my mother explored on one of their house-shopping expeditions. “The low lines, all that glass. We thought it was a marvelous house. It had this California look to it. It was like nothing we’d seen in the Midwest.”
Which, indeed, was the genius of the Eichler design, the way it congratulated its owner for fleeing places so encumbering as, say, the Midwest. Midwest weather made flat roofs and atriums impossible. Midwest people were suspicious of houses with no windows on the street and too few walls inside. A Midwest house (like the lives within it) stuck with tradition. No, the Eichler was like nothing you’d ever see in the Midwest.
A whole new adventure for us
, the Eichler said to its owner.
For everyone!
said the many streets lined with Eichlers, streets that ran in concentric circles closing finally around a swimming pool with a clubhouse, for that was the modern shape Eichler gave the entire neighborhoods he
You can find the bastard progeny of those towers in skylines from Warsaw to Chicago. Housing projects gray and stark, they are today’s emblems of beehive alienation, the worst possible place to look for Corbusier’s optimism realized. No, to find that, you would do far better to go to where Purism met the American Dream, places where single-family homes were mass assembled from three blueprints and shopped for like cars, places like Clarendon Manor. In such blue sky subdivisions, Corbusier’s tower of identical compartments was unpacked and spread out, forming an architecture all the more “pure, neat, clean and healthy.” We who dwelt in them were as Corbusier had predicted. The era’s new worker, the aerospace worker, did want to live surrounded by greenery and laced into freeways. We had indeed “acquired a taste for fresh air and clear daylight.” And what we wanted were $22,000 Parthenons expressive of the same cold reason we saw in the lines of a jet fighter’s fuselage.
There was a man in the Valley of Heart’s Delight who made it his business to build the purest tract house forms of all. He was named Joseph Eichler. Joe Eichler had been a rather conventionally minded fellow until the day in 1936 when he happened to rent a home designed by Corbusier’s fellow Modernist prophet, Frank Lloyd Wright. With its bold spaces (a long, glass-walled living room) and latest technology (“radiant heating” via water pipes in the concrete floors), the home was to Joe Eichler a revelation, and when the cigar-chewing dairy wholesaler eventually decided to get out of butter and into subdivisions, he hired Wright disciples as his architects. They gave him a three-bedroom house with a sleek flat roof, floor-to-ceiling glass along the rear facade, post and beam ceilings, radiant heating, an open plan interior that spoke of free-flowing emptiness, all of this massproducible with a 1949 price tag of $9,000. By 1967, Joseph Eichler would build some 10,000 houses in Northern California, a particularly large concentration of them in areas closest to Lockheed.
From the street, Eichlers resembled lined-up, identical, earth-toned bunkers, their redwood-sided fronts punctured by the merest, if any, glass. You entered the private realm of the bunker through a door, and then—this was an Eichler trademark—suddenly found yourself standing in an open-air atrium. The atrium, an Eichler sales booster from the day it was introduced in 1957, was the
extra
dollop of emptiness you passed through before you met the true front door of the house and all the glassy walls and clean space within. “The Eichler design stunned us,” my father remembers of the first one he and my mother explored on one of their house-shopping expeditions. “The low lines, all that glass. We thought it was a marvelous house. It had this California look to it. It was like nothing we’d seen in the Midwest.”
Which, indeed, was the genius of the Eichler design, the way it congratulated its owner for fleeing places so encumbering as, say, the Midwest. Midwest weather made flat roofs and atriums impossible. Midwest people were suspicious of houses with no windows on the street and too few walls inside. A Midwest house (like the lives within it) stuck with tradition. No, the Eichler was like nothing you’d ever see in the Midwest.
A whole new adventure for us
, the Eichler said to its owner.
For everyone!
said the many streets lined with Eichlers, streets that ran in concentric circles closing finally around a swimming pool with a clubhouse, for that was the modern shape Eichler gave the entire neighborhoods he
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