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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

Introduction:
Eichler's Wrightian Experience

By Paul Adamson

A great admirer of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Joseph Eichler had moved 
his family to California from New York in 1940, and three years later had 
the rare opportunity to rent a Usonian House Wright designed for Sidney and 
Louise Bazett, in Hillsborough, just south of San Francisco. Although 
consisting of only a living/dining room and three small ship's cabin-like 
bedrooms, including the guest house, the Bazett residence accommo-
dated Eichler and his family, sometimes as many as seven people at a time, 
from 1943 until 1945, when the house was sold to Louis and Betty Frank.

Eichler's experience living in the Bazett house was profound, and inspired 
a change in his life. He had been the treasurer for the family produce 
business, but was forced to change careers when the company encountered 
difficulties during the war. Inspired by Wright's use of natural materials 
and his masterful manipulation of daylight, he later remarked that the 
Bazett house introduced him to "an entirely new way of living." Living 
there, he wrote, "was such a wonderful experience," that he determined to 
go into the house-building business himself with the idea of producing 
"contemporary houses for sale to the person of average income."

Wright

On the scale of the individual family, Wright imagined the Usonian: a warm, 
open-planned, small home designed for convenience, economy, and comfort. 
Wright's model of residential design for the "everyman" would provide 
abundant lessons for the designers of Eichler Homes. While the formal 
imagery of the Eichlers more closely resembles European Modernism, their 
integration with the landscape and the specific use of indigenous materials 
owes a debt to Wright, who pursued his vision of the well-designed small 
house with a sense of moral purpose.

Unlike the mass-
produced Eichlers, Wright's Usonians were always custom designed for 
individual clients, but the homes were always very modestly scaled; their 
planning made efficient with built-in furniture and a minimum of 
circulation space. The architects who designed Eichler's homes would employ 
many of Wright's Usonian principles when designing Eichler's prototypes.

Many features of Wright's Usonian houses, including the Bazett house, and 
the more famous Hanna house constructed in Palo Alto in 1938, are common to 
the Eichler homes. It would seem likely, considering their proximity and 
their considerable notoriety, that these homes provided Eichler's first 
architect, Bob Anshen, who felt such deep sympathy toward Wright's work, 
convenient resources for ideas and techniques. In fact, the design 
parameters Wright defined for his Usonians were remarkably similar to those 
Anshen would employ in his prototypical designs for Eichler.

When seen today, the Bazett house is obviously a product of an earlier 
time. The fact that nothing about the house is standardized points to a 
condition, before modern codes and the machine-like construction methods of 
contemporary building, when houses were "hand crafted." Ornament aside, 
however, it is the careful accommodation of the intimate duties and 
pleasures of domestic life that have made this Usonian meaningful for the 
Franks for almost 55 years. And for Joe Eichler and Bob Anshen, the house 
was a touchstone that never ceased to resonate for either of them as they 
strove to transcend the limits of merchant building.

http://www.eichlernetwork.com/ENStry11.html