The Eichler Revolution: How One Developer Brought Modernism to the Masses
Picture this: It’s 1950, and in a modest tract development in Sunnyvale, California, something extraordinary is happening. While most American subdivisions are churning out cookie-cutter colonials and conservative Cape Cods, a developer named Joseph Eichler is building something radically different—homes with walls of glass, soaring ceilings, and courtyards that blur the line between indoors and out.
Welcome to the birth of affordable modernism.
A Bold Beginning
Eichler’s journey into revolutionary housing began around 1949–50, when his company started constructing modern tract developments that would fundamentally challenge what middle-class American housing could be. That first Sunnyvale project, known as Sunnymount Gardens, consisted of about 100 homes—a modest start to what would become an architectural movement.
Over the next two decades, Eichler Homes would build more than 11,000 single-family houses across California, from the late 1940s through the 1960s. But these weren’t just houses. They were manifestos in wood, glass, and concrete.
