Wexler Steel Houses, November 2003
Excerpt by Barbara Lamprecht

How many times have we heard that the future of the American home lies in steel? Or that the customized factory-built house is right around the corner? Whether it's the sexy post-and-beam framing of the Case Study House program or the stucco-clad steel-stud framing that promises "you'll never know it's steel!" the stories are frustratingly futile. Wood always wins.

Most mid-century houses that defied convention prevail only as pedigreed collectibles. Nonetheless, supporters are still out there, arguing for them not as artifacts but as robust prototypes. In Palm Springs back in the early 1950s, well-known local architect Don Wexler recognized he could harness an innovative new system for school classrooms devised by Bernard Perlin, a civil engineer, with steel fabricator Calcor Corporation. Faced with a rapidly increasing population, the local school district challenged the two men to design classrooms cheaper than $10 per square foot. The steel-panel system they delivered also proved quick to build, aesthetically striking, and above all, durable for generations of kids and maintenance workers.

Then the two turned to housing. U.S. Steel and Bethlehem Steel provided funding, and an experienced, open-minded residential developer, the Los Angeles-based Alexander Construction Company, provided the land. Built for less than $8 per square foot ($45 today), the seven mass-produced Steel Development Houses rose in a few days in 1962 in a notoriously windy northern corner of the city. The tract's unprecious title fit the scruffy, generic neighborhood as well as its market: low-cost housing for the middle class. The glass-and-steel, terrazzo floored homes, sold for around $15,000 (about $91,000 today) and were the first - and last - built in a proposed housing project of 38. The radical houses attracted a lot of press. Plenty of steel-trade journals and architectural magazines, including Architectural Record's "Record Houses of 1963", featured the project by Wexler and his partner at the time, Ric Harrison. "What's unique is that we utilized the light-gauge panel system structurally, so it acts as bearing wall, shear wall, and roof diaphragm. I developed it, tested it, but Don made it aesthetically viable. I remember going to his office with a test panel. He fell in love with it and took it from there," said Perlin.

The engineer's system is simple, sturdy elastic; the architect's compositions asymmetrical and complex. With the punishing climate's propensity to warp wood beams, a twisting that can telegraph to the roof construction, "I thought that steel was ideal for the desert," said Wexler. Calcor's kit of parts used interlocking, 16-inch wide steel panels ranging from 18- to 22- gauge with 3-inch flanges or ribs at each end. The panels, typically spanning 13 feet, were screwed, pop-riveted, or bolted together and placed into a steel channel raceway inset into the concrete floor slab to hold walls. Identical roof panels received steel tabs every three panels to hang ceilings and mechanical runs. Where columns were necessary at openings or corners, instead of electing more expensive hot-rolled structural steel, Perlin employed the system's galvanized cold-rolled steel for hollow square tubes with 3/16-inch thick walls. (The tubes also became handy vehicles to drain roof water, something today's fire ratings prohibit.) Insulation consisted of pieces of drywall set into the cavities overlaid with fiberglass batt and an added .5-inch thick drywall, which deadened the unresidential sound of a light metal building, Wexler said. Like the classrooms, Perlin's own 1960, Wexler-designed, 3,400-square-foot home also included an added 24-gauge painted steel liner for its durability - "When they were little, our kids would just throw [metal] stuff at the walls and it would stick," said Perlin. The liners, however, were deemed too costly for the houses. The exterior walls and the factory-built, 9-by-36-foot core of two bathrooms and a kitchen supported the roof, permitting flexible interior configurations. Like architect Gregory Ain and developer Joseph Eichler, Wexler animated the site plan by flipping floor plans and variously orienting the houses. Different roof configurations, folded and flat, further individualized the modest orthogonal buildings.

Wexler's designs possess a grace and easy affability with the outdoors despite their efficient spaces and factory-built mechanical cores. In their asymmetry, deep cantilevers, and opposing directions of shifting lines and planes of painted steel or glass, the designs also show some debt to Wexler's early employer, Richard Neutra. Playing off the 9-foot ceilings, the light-colored walls, and the white and beige gravel landscapes, the daylighting in the houses is bright but soft.

In recent decades, both neighborhood and buildings deteriorated so badly that Wexler avoided the area. Today, all but one are restored, protected as a Class I Historic District. Now touted as "Modernist gems," one sold for $465,000 in April and another is quietly listed for substantially higher. One owned by artist Jim Isermann boasts a new, freestanding addition using the system by the Palm Springs firm O'Donnell + Escalante. Principals Lance O'Donnell and Ana Escalante said that after trying to get it right quickly, they slowed down to analyze. With Wexler's encouragement, they "took six months to understand the system," said Escalante. "It was an investment." Now, with three projects under way employing the system, "it's much faster." The firm adapted the system for today's energy requirements, thickening the wall section with an inch of rigid insulation and plywood as a thermal break for good reason apart from codes. The thin-walled 1962 houses are uncomfortable in summer and expensive to air-condition. Isermann said the original walls were noticeably hotter where the steel flanges conducted heat through the drywall, adding that the houses had typically been sold as second homes for temperate desert winters. He has retreated to the studio for the summer.

But the question remains: "If the system was so good, why haven't we seen any more in 50 years?" asks architect Bill Krisel, a friend of Wexler and award-winning designer of some 40,000 living units throughout the western states, including many for Alexander. He mentioned several reasons. Construction costs for contemporary wood homes ran as low as $6.50 per square foot, so the profit margin was much higher. Unions didn't like prefabricated mechanical runs and cores, even forcing them to be dismantled and reassembled on the site. Workers were uninterested in learning new techniques. They found it decidedly unpleasant to handle the metal in the scorching summers, exactly when developers wanted to build so that houses were ready for buyers escaping cold, dreary weather.

For Perlin and Wexler, in the desert, steel will rule in the long run. "My dream was to be able to go to a lumber yard and buy the sections, the panels. It made sense. To this day, it makes sense. Maybe we're a little old for it, but someone is going to do it," Perlin said.

For more info on renting Wexler's original home, click here

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