Joseph Eichler

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Joseph Eichler (1900 - 1974) was a California-based, post-war residential real estate developer known for building homes in the Modernist style. Between 1950 and 1974, his company, Eichler Homes, built over 11,000 homes in Northern California and three communities in Southern California, along with 3 homes in Chestnut Ridge NY, which came to be known as Eichlers and changed the California lifestyle. During this period Eichler became one of the nation's most influential builders of modern homes. The San Francisco Bay Area Eichlers are mostly in San Francisco, Sacramento, Marin County, the East Bay, San Mateo County, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale and San Jose. The Southern California Eichler communities are in Orange, Thousand Oaks, and Granada Hills.

Unlike many of the merchant builders, Joseph Eichler was a social visionary and commissioned designs for planned communities with parks and community centers. Eichler homes are from a branch of Modernist architecture that has come to be known as "California Modern," and typically feature glass walls, post-and-beam construction and open floorplans in a style indebted to Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright. "Bringing the outside in," was one of his goals, achieved via atriums and floor-to-ceiling glass windows looking out on protected garden areas and ponds. Eichler used well-known architects to design both the site plans and the homes themselves, including A. Quincy Jones and Raphael Soriano. Eichler also employed one of San Francisco's small but prominent modernist architectural firms, Anshen & Allen. At first, Anshen & Allen was his sole architect, but Eichler shortly brought in the firm Jones & Emmons, and Soriano as well. Eichler also built semi-custom designs for individual clients by commission. Due to soaring land prices by the mid-1960s redevelopment blossomed and Eichler began building low- and high-rise redevelopment projects in San Francisco's Western Addition and Bayview, and luxury high-rises and clustered housing on Russian Hill and Diamond Heights, along with the trendsetting co-op communities Pomeroy Green and Pomeroy West in Santa Clara.

Eichler, unlike most builders at the time, established a non-discrimination policy and offered homes for sale to anyone of any religion or race. In 1958, he resigned from the National Association of Home Builders, because they refused to support a non-discrimination policy.