40-Year-Old Discovery

As a retired architect with 42 years experience in Southern California, I was appalled to read that the “experts” who attended the Las Vegas convention of the National Assn. of Home Builders have just discovered the way to design and build an affordable starter home (“Survival Tool,” Feb. 2).

The solution has been there in front of their faces for more than 40 years: i.e., the “post-and-beam” tract houses that were built by the thousands in Southern California around the middle 1950s and early 1960s, and shown weekly in the Los Angeles Times Real Estate section and old Home magazine. Each of the cost-savings suggested were an “everyday” requirement of those homes.

The award-winning tract houses designed by Palmer & Krisel, Jones & Emmons, Edward Fickett, and other AIA architects could be duplicated today and fill the need better than anything designed since 1970. What’s the big revelation about how to design and build intelligently, efficiently, functionally, inexpensively, attractively, etc.?

WILLIAM KRISEL, A.I.A. emeritus

(Formerly Palmer & Krisel, A.I.A.)