 probably becomes the volume contemplation about courtyards as what could potentially ease at the very least our COVID clause that we're currently in. So this is our disciplinary professional reflection on that one. And we're broadcasting live from three intercontinental locations back to Honolulu, Hawaii with you DeSoto, hi DeSoto. Hello everybody. And on the west coast of the continental US in Long Beach, California, Ron Lindgren, hi Ron. Hello everyone. And we started out with this actually making a pool of what we all know about it and whatnot. And we started out with me thinking, so we started out in Germany and we slowly but surely move over to you DeSoto in Hawaii. But we end up making a longer stop at your home. You're selected home because you're from the home away from home in Nebraska. But you decided to be on the west coast in California. So let's get the first slide up because I want to chip in. You see at the top right my dear friend and agent, Chris Ford, I wouldn't sit here because he was navigating me through the jungle of the American academia and continues to do so. So one of these years, it was actually when our president was stopping over and trying to meet with Kim Jong-un and I got so scared that I took the plane to see him and the gentlemen that we see at the end of the show. So we were at one of these Palo Alto startup cafes. And we had this very heated discussion holding on to. And now it's green screen doesn't let me show it to you. And the iPhone number six was coming out that he just had. So while we had this discussion very heatedly, I believe the reason why Apple decided to repurpose the case of the five and made it the SE was that someone must have listened to us and said there must be some more old fogies speaking about myself, but we can sell the new technology in an old case. So why is that relevant? Sometimes thinking about other things the architecture makes us understand architecture better. And you see at the bottom that it's no secret that the until recently the chief designer, Joanie Ives has been open about that the German industrial designer, Dieter Rahm, has been inspiration for his product. So in architecture there were rumors and they were not confirmed until recently that actually Steve Jobs grew up in an Eichler house. At the house you see that he grew up in is at the top in the middle of the house as it turned out. But as business partner from the beginning, Steve Bosnia, who you see at the very top in the left has been growing up in one. So that got us thinking about Eichler is this show about courtyards and Eichler's were very much about courtyards. So the second slide is when you the soda and I talked about it, you said, oh yeah, I have a book about that. And that's the one at the bottom. And I said, I used to have one too. And that's at the top left. And the two other pictures is wrong you because you have been sharing with us at custom made home for himself. But in the last show very excitingly that as avant-garde, the kind of Americanization of the Bauhaus basically made it into mainstream as with your own home. So that's very interesting. So the soda and the third is that you scan the heck out of your book. And if we can get the next slide up and this that please. And these are the images you provided and tell me about this new selection process. Well, the pictures that I chose here of the various Eichler homes, I chose because they illustrate two very important aspects of these homes. And first of all, excuse me, they have outdoor living spaces surrounded by fences which make these patios kind of into an extension of the home. But probably even more importantly, they include which have for a while really open to the sky. And as we've been saying, this is something that we want people to be able to use now in the days of COVID because the more you're outside, the less likely you are to be exposed to and or get sick with COVID-19. So we find in the past some very important lessons for us living today in the year 2020. And for the potential future under COVID, right? Absolutely. So next slide, let's look at who that guy was that Joseph Eichler. And as you can see, he didn't look like an architect and he wasn't one. He was actually born at the turn of the last century. And at age 47, his firm of his mother's family for egg and butter wholesale has stopped business. So he found himself being too early, too young to retire and not wealthy enough to retire. So he basically figured out he has to do something else. And the next slide tells us around that time, he basically rented Wright and the name of that house, I had to look it up, is the Bedford Palace. And it's one of these Smithsonian homes. So the more inclusive work of Frank Hart Wright, the houses for the people. And so he lived in there and he informed them and he basically gave them the idea to bring this to the masses, which Frank Hart Wright wasn't successful because his thinking was too flamboyant and too rich in detail. So too complicated and too costly to bring to the people. And I have to consist at the very top here and formed by that partner. And I shared in the past that I'm sort of, I think it's sad that he's remembered by the American public for his most more extravagant flamboyant work at Guggenheim and Falling Water, while the Houstonian houses and particularly what inspired me for the Pasifas Kindergarten for my hometown to build the first of the Gritt Kindergarten, our firm looked back into the, for what's it called, the solar hemicycle, the Jacobs House too in Madison, Wisconsin, not that far away from where he grew up on Brown. And again, that being said, let's go on to the next slide because that's what Eichler then, you know, he said, I can't mass-produce the Frank Hart Wright as much as I love them. I need to strip them more down. And this indeed reminds us of what we've been talking before and what's the foundation of your guys and Ron, the legacy of life, very, very kind of lean and mean and elegant modernism, right? Yet there's some significant differences. So let's talk about that guys. Chip in. I'd like to say that this is certainly sort of an ultimate shot of what living and like with house must have been like. There's a birthday party going on. Everybody's got their birthday hats. But notice that, although this is definitely a modern mid-century tract home, that these people feel more comfortable living under a sheltering gabled roof or a pitched roof. And that sort of preference is because the general public felt, you know, more comfortable with that a home had pitched or gabled roofs. Well, you also pointed out, Ron, that at the time period that this was going on, there was a prejudice against modern flat roofed homes to the point where banks, in some cases, wouldn't give people mortgages for homes like that because they were considered to be not as saleable as more traditional looking houses. Indeed. Houses decided to dwell on what we're focusing on and the comprised eventually probably of eight volumes shows here in the courtyard. And you guys had some humorous observations that were seen here, right? Yeah, I love this shot. Apparently at home parties in the 1950s and 60s apparently meant that the men wore suits and ties and the women brought out their most stylish cocktail dresses. And this is California, by the way. Yeah, and I pointed out when we discussed this earlier that this is a publicity picture. This is not reality. And publicity pictures are very carefully set up to sell something. And the models have all been placed very carefully, the lighting, et cetera. So this is not reality. And so no, people in Eichler Homes probably were not having parties that looked like this, even in their courtyards. It's as wonderful as their courtyards were. The next thing here, being staged now, grandly, the most famous case study house, care clinics, case study house 22. Also, it's very staged, you know, the women and their skirts there. Oh yeah, oh yeah. And the showman was talking about that. But we're getting to something here that's something really nerdy admittedly here because we're talking about the fine grain between the different movements and modernism, where Eichler went a little bit more traditional as you were pointing out, Ron, and then obviously your former boss and business partner at Killingsworth, having been more on the hardcore side of the ultra modernist with these scandalous flat roofs that were connotated with socialism. Let's go to the next slide. That all being said, under that umbrella, you have some very interesting project here to share. Please kick in. What is that? Besides the buildings he's more famous for, especially the case study houses, also took his time at traditional homes. But what I didn't know, in fact, I had no idea that Ed had designed a small gable roof comb in a similar style and a residential scale of sort of a typical Eichler house until he pointed it out to me while we were taking a drive together through our shared neighborhood of Bixby Knowles, which is in North Long Beach. The house itself is sort of a mystery to me. I thought I haven't been able to determine ownership in the exact year that it was built during the 1960s. But I'd like to show how Ed took some of the Eichler attitudes towards modern living and put his spin on it. Now this photograph shows that Ed always designed gardens to accompany his homes. So he produced his own landscape drawings that were included in the building documents. And he was a very savvy plungeman. He knew what grew. And I think this photograph of this very handsome priest and the succulent sort of a test to that skill. And these houses would not be what they are without their placement among a landscape being designed to go with it. And if you look at the next slide, at the very front, wanted to be very public. And so he produced and asked the owner to develop and maintain a very large rose garden that you see at the right. But at the left, you see some bollards and some lights, which actually stand as sentinels to the entry drive into the motor court. And here again is Ed being both modern. You look at those bollards, but at the same time they have a very traditional touch. Now let's take a look at the house itself with the next slide, please. At the right of these pictures, right lower, you can see the home's sloping gabled roof, very low sloping, very thin roof. At the left, you see a pair of steel and translucent glass doors which open not into the house, but into an outdoor entry court at the front of the house. And Ed designed this pair of doors and their very delicate appearance and the fine proportions of this doorway are hallmarks of the kind of details you would have with the home. But this is very much an Eichler sort of home. And in the next slide, we see that those memorable doors are a portion of the entry court's glass privacy wall. And even the elegant drought resistant plants and their architectonic pots are basically, today's knockoffs of what were Ed's original selection back in the 60s. And finally, to go to this last, the next slide, we've sort of seen the house in its neighborly. The garden entry court off the street is revealed as being for both automobiles and pedestrians. The garage forms one side of the sleeping courtyard while there is, as you can see, a rectilinear topiary hedge that forms the others. Now, the current owners didn't allow me to take photos in their home, but I do know that the floor to sloping ceiling glass wall provide exquisite and broad views of the beautifully maintained fairways of the private country clubs, 18-hole golf course. And frankly, as I looked at these photos that I took recently, the house, now I think it's more of a Cliff May sort of home. Cliff May, an architect, also did many tract houses in California. And DeSoto, you seem to have a family relationship with an author that had done a book about Cliff May. Exactly, the book that's illustrated in the upper right corner, which is called Cliff May, The Modern Ranch House, is written by my cousin's husband, Daniel Gregory. And my cousin is Mary, Gregory, and he grew up, Daniel grew up in a house that was one of Cliff May's early designs. So that inspired him to wanna write about him. And we're seeing that both Cliff May and Joseph Eichler are important figures in this post-war period of tract housing and that type of thing that was going on very much in California after World War II. And Ron, thanks a lot for shedding a light on this exquisite, I guess, exception to the rule of, which gets us to the next slide, of ads having been choosing to be on that scandalous, you know, flat-roof socialist group associated and the picture you've provided at the bottom right of the triad houses on the arrow if you really chose that again, and then there is Richard Neutra project at the top of that. We're also zooming into the T-shirt again that you've provided us that puts all these modern masters together. And they actually have plays probably very widely ads next to Richard Neutra, right? So there were one gang. And can you please recall, because I think Frank Wright was on there too, but can you please quickly share how big that discrepancy was between these groups and particularly Wright and Neutra, please, Ron? Yeah, although it's hard to believe, we all know that Frank Wright's career was extremely long. And he actually hit some fallow periods where he wasn't doing so well. And in fact, when Richard Neutra, immigrating to the United States and then to California, became very popular and ended up in magazines, books and whatever, Wright, who at that time was drowning in debt and didn't have much work, was really jealous of Neutra. His jealousy came out in comments that he would make about Neutra. It's funny, this seems like a very strange sort of curve. But listen to this, Wright called Neutra a Johnny jump-up in a bed of pansies. Yeah, which is, there's a lot of baggage in that statement, which we don't have time to get into. What a nice guy in history tells us any way as much Frank Wright has been right. So that being said, she had this ultra-modern sort of post-Bauhausian group with Ed and Neutra and Schindler and Gropius. And then you had, at the very bottom left, you had the general public that was rather clueless and looked more for traditional, probably where they came from, the Victorian or the Tudor. And then as we've been keeping thinking about it, at the top, Wright, this illustration of the ranch house might have been the compromise, right, between the two. It was, as you said, the subtle, it was modern, but as you say, Ron, it was also traditional that it was picking up on some kind of heritage of the Spanish colonial, right, and the more agricultural court yard, right? Yeah, there's just where Corks Bay differed from Eichler in the sense that they were, this is obviously a one-off home, but even some of May's tract homes took the sprawl a bit more, and they also hearted back more literally to historical past architecture, especially Spanish-American ranchers. And some people are just comfortable with that feeling of their ties with the past under a rancher roof. Yeah, I think of the next slide, we see now the ranch house is history itself, and there's this magazine called Atomic Ranch that we show a cover on the Tuck Wright, and that issue is about Eichler homes, so they were seeing Eichler as being one of their members, so to speak, and the two shows we quoted at the bottom right is, it didn't go as far as we said in the 60s, the German president lived in a flat roof bungalow with a courtyard, and in America, even the pretty reactionary Ronald Reagan lived in a ranch house, so I guess no surprise that on the left, that Julius Schulman picture was depicting that kind of compromise of American modern, you know, proletarian living, and you guys got a kick out of the image and wanna share your thoughts and your knowledge from the behind the scenes having worked with Julius, Ronald Wright. Well, I was gonna say that this is very much, like I mentioned earlier, a publicity picture, and it's idealizing the modern tract home with mother pushing the lawnmower on the left, and Junior and his bicycle on the driveway, but it's also just a place you, it's got this branch of an orange tree with orange fruit on it hanging so beautifully above them, and we all agree that we're sure that that was a branch that somebody cut off of a real tree or held, so that it was in just the right position to suggest that there was an orange tree growing on this property. Yeah, yeah, I'd like to mention that this staging is really trying to sell the fact that Eichler was talking about carefree informal living, and how much more informal could you be than the woman outside in their shorts blowing the lawn? When I see on the right, the electric pole sticking up in the background, of course, I would have photoshopped that out of the picture, but that wasn't possible No, it wasn't possible, man, no. We didn't have those electronic tools. Exactly. Well, let's slowly but surely go back home to Hawaii, which is home for all of us in different ways, and so let's go to the next slide because we were thinking with the bottom part that you guys talk about more elaboratively, but the bottom part of the top left, bottom left picture, Ajeeb reminded us of what Eichler was for California and probably the closest to that in Hawaii was Henry J. Kaiser, who was Hawaii, Kai was also initially trying to develop a larger subdivision for the people and in fact, our show with Rick Prada demonstrates that he was rather successful in doing that, but you guys please elaborate more on the rock wrapping case study house that we see at the bottom in the couple of pictures. Well, I just wanted to say quickly that the picture on the lower left was a really iconic image in the United States after World War II and this was the first case study house from 1945 and it never got built. It never went beyond until, as Ron will tell us later on, but the addition of two things are going on here that are interesting. To designate it, to really make it clear that this is the end of World War II, there's a Jeep in the driveway of this fantasy house, meaning the war has ended and Jeeps are now available for the public, but overhead is this little personal helicopter and that was a fantasy of that post-war period too that everybody was gonna have their own personal aircraft to commute in, which did not ever happen, but Ron, tell us about this house that you've actually seen in person. Yes, I was first surprised to find this very, one of my favorite homes in the case study house program from 1945, the very year that the program came into existence. And when you look at these drawings, one comment I've always had about architecture is there isn't all that much humor in it. Ralph Rapson was a funny guy and he sensed humor came through in his drawings, but more seriously, this unbuilt, innovative design was among the most unconventional of all the entire case study houses. It was an open, pavilion-like structure and it was bisected completely by an interior courtyard, which he called a green belt. And that planning separated the communal spaces of the house from the bedrooms. That courtyard bisected the house completely and it was 12 feet wide and covered in glass. There were three bedrooms on one side, living kitchen and dining rooms in the other and in fact, the community space was expanded because you could open folding doors on the bedrooms to open the bedrooms completely open to the courtyard itself. The architect said of his plan for once, the complete integration of inside and outside will have been accomplished. The idea of encompassing nature directly within the house, Rapson felt, demonstrating an original solution for the problem of a confined urban site. A picture of the sketch of Rapsons at the lower right shows that the court might be an ornamental or a vegetable garden, or at the other right, a closely monitored children's playground as the sketches show. Again, Rapson's humor comes in because the child apparently has stubbed a toe or something, but it's falling there while mom looks out. But look closer at the drawing on the left. This is one of Rapsons' most playful drawings. You can see a woman hanging out her worsen to dry on a clothesline in an outdoor service yard. On such yards were an absolute home necessity in the pre-war. Rapson got it wrong though. The real post-war revolution in domestic living wasn't skies full of personal helicopters or flying cars, but the availability of residential electric washers and dryers which completely eliminated the need for service yards. Right. Absolutely. And we need to wrap up and go to the next slide, really a quick second to the last one. Has this happened in Hawaii? Not besides the little enclaves here and there of modern style, one in the foothills of Yohua, the Soto where we had a Christmas party in an octopus house that had a courtyard. Not to the scale that Eichler, we're talking 11,000 houses. We're talking entire subdivisions designed by Eichler. This is us using the original wifi's old episodes as research materials. It's one of the early episodes that depicts on that sort of challenge of developing out there. And it actually says at the bottom, affordable housing, but it never happened to a degree. We've now looked at it with Eichler and that's, you know, it is what it is. And so with that, it should happen in the future. And next slide and last slide is to phase out. Here is another interesting parallel between Eichler and your friend and boss and partner at Peelings with Ron is that they both also experimented in residential high rise, you pointing out in the show all the proposed projects and then in a couple of volumes about the only one executed, which is our Albert Square and Honolulu. What we see on the top left is when at my escape trip with our friend, Kurt Sandberg, take us around and he took me up to Russian Hill where that is to this project that's called The Summit. And that is an Eichler high rise development that unfortunately as business wise broke his neck and make him run bankrupt. Then only go a little bit back to a single family development after that, before he died. But both having been trying to basically bring their idea to the multi-story elevation and this is an equally nice find what our friend Kurt calls that for nice, right? Floor to ceiling glass, you know, when nice wrap all around it. So another interesting sort of parallel between two people and on that last note before we have to face out talking parallels one of the designers, architects that Eichler choose to work with him was at best friends and who was that on a clothing belt on? Yeah, A Quincy Jones, wonderful architect, wonderful educator, you and I got to know each other because of their connections at the University of Southern California. And A Quincy Jones designed some early combs and Ed and Quincy became very good friends. In fact, I would say that A Quincy Jones was Ed's favorite architect. All right, and on that note, we're out of time. So dear friends, look forward to see you soon again in the remaining volumes of this episode and more to come. So and until then you and everyone else please stay safe and sound through easy breezy and easy breezy spaces and places. Bye bye guys, bye.