At the same time mid-century modernism -- a uniquely American style with its roots in Frank Lloyd Wright, Cliff May (pioneer of the California Ranch House), Los Angeles architect, Richard Neutra and Japanese architecture -- became the darling of modern residential architecture..
Figure 2, Cliff May ranch house
Figure 3, Richard Neutra, home at Palm Springs
In the 1950s, Joseph Eichler, a prominent Los Angeles/San Francisco Bay home builder, after living in one of Frank Lloyd's "Usnian" houses hired some of the leading modern architects of the time to design modern homes that would be affordable to the average home buyer of the time. His subdivisions are to be found in many cities in California and his homes have become icons of the mid-century modernist movement, with many communities sponsoring home tours every year.
Figure 5, Two homes developed by Joseph Eichler
More about Eichler homes and mid-century modernism: The Eichler Network
In the late 1960's, after serving for nearly seven years in the Army, I decided to leave the Army and get a degree in architecture at the University of Oregon. The modernist movement was still influential at that time. but had advanced from the mid-century modernist style and the closely related Second Bay Area Tradition, founded by William Wurster to the Third Bay Area Tradition, founded by Joseph Esherick.
I had studied architecture under Donlyn Lyndon at the University of Oregon. Lyndon was a partner of Charles Moore in the firm of MLTW which developed Sea Ranch, a prize winning second home development on the northern California coast. Lyndon and Moore were the progeny of the Third Bay Area Tradition founded by Joseph Esherick. this style later pervaded the Pacific Northwest and, at the University of Oregon was often referred to as "Splinter Modern" because of its generous use of rough, re-sawn Douglas Fir and cedar.
The California Modernist style had also incorporated many elements of a uniquely Bay Area style that originated with William Wurster, former head of the Department of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley..
He had a great influence on Joseph Eichler, advocating the development of small houses that offered the livability of those of greater scale, and he influenced the building of affordable mass-produced housing. His designs embodied principles of simplicity and economy, yet incorporated complex human needs. See his book , An Everyday Moidernism on Amazon.
While at the University of Oregon, my design class took a field trip to San Francisco and Berkeley where we visited the offices of Esherick and William Callister, another leading practitioner, and I was able to meet both of them. We also toured the UC California Department of Architecture and some of the buildings in the San Francisco area that gave rise to the two movements as well as the First Bay Area Tradition, founded by Bernard Maybeck.
One aspect of West Coast modern architecture is its emphasis on the client's needs dating to the work of Richard Neutra. Neutra would spend endless hours having his clients fill out forms regarding how they lived and worked in their homes. And through interviews he would construct a program of the user's needs that would serve as a guide for the design. That was the model we followed at the University of Oregon, and it results in very user-friendly homes. That "user-friendly" philosophy was later employed in the design of software.
Before I leave this subject, I would like to address some common misconceptions that the California mid-century modernist grew out of the Bau Haus in Germany. and the work of Mies van der Rohe. Actually, the opposite is true. While Mies van der Rohe had been a disciple of Walter Gropuis, the founder of the Bau Haus, he drew much of his inspiration from Frank Lloyd Wright as a result of a book, The Wasmuth Portfolio, a collection of photographs of Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie School homes. Le Corbusier had also viewed the Wasmuth Portfolio and was enthralled by Wrights open space planning. The portfolio has also been implicated in the move to Los Angeles of Austrian architect Richard Neutra, who later became a central figure in California Modernism.
Figure 5, Mies van der Rohe, Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois.
Although this house is horizontal and has large areas of glass, it shares nothing else with American mid-century modernism. It is a completely European modern house in that it does not even give lip-service to the user's needs. It makes a good party pavilion but is basically considered to be unlivable because of its sacrifice of function to pure formal design. This tendency of European Modernism to give primary consideration of formalism above other considerations has been given as the excuse for the development of post-modernism. But post-modernism is more concerned with marketing and fashion than with livability. And its "rebellion" against modernism is merely a marketing ploy intended to lend legitimacy to and disguise the profit-motive that took over the art world in the 1960's. It has since dominated the arts in order to soak the new crop of shiftless trust-fund babies created by the Reagan tax policies in the Late Capitalist Period.. I may discuss this preposterous movement later since one of the most important tasks facing the world today is to smash post-modernism and the savage capitalism whose boots it licks.
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