Ranch style fit postwar years

The housing shortage that followed the close of World War II brought a spate of mass-produced, sparsely detailed but laudably affordable tract developments such as New York’s pioneering Levittown.

By the mid-1950s, however, such modest designs were already being displaced by the rambling, low-slung California rancher, a home style that better reflected the vast wealth and national pride during the postwar era.

Around this time, a more populist brand of Modernism made an appearance with the progressive designs of California developer Joseph Eichler. With their flat roofs, bold facades and broad sweeps of plate glass, Eichler homes drew heavily on the tenets of Europe’s Bauhaus school of design and found tremendous appeal among architecturally sophisticated tract buyers. Sadly, there weren’t a whole lot of the latter, and Eichler went broke in 1967.

The ‘60s were turbulent, and architectural trends proved no exception. While most houses continued along the well-worn rancher rut, architects of custom homes were happy to experiment.

Perhaps the most influential of the Modernist ideas also came from California, though from an improbable source: the tiny coastal village of Gualala, where architect Charles Moore was building a development known as the Sea Ranch. Its houses featured artful arrangements of shed-roofed cubes clad in cedar siding, and the fresh approach had enormous influence on residential architecture well into the ‘70s. Sea Ranch-inspired designs were popular in hilly, wooded areas where their outlines peeked out of the treetops.

Sea Ranch’s inspiration came none too soon because, by the end of the ‘60s, the stalwart rancher had just about run its course. After two decades of popularity, people were finally tiring of its now-predictable floor plan, with rooms strung methodically along a seemingly endless central hall. And, in any case, the vast, flat-as-a-tabletop building sites that were required to show these sprawling homes to best advantage were growing few and far between.

A version of the rancher in which the floor levels were offset by a half-story offered an interim solution, and the so-called split-level became the very embodiment of modernity during the 1960s.

In the suburbs, developers began to focus on two-story floor plans as a way to accommodate ever-bigger homes on ever-tighter lots. This in turn led rather naturally to more traditional styles coming to the fore, such as Spanish Revival, half-timber and even some rather scrawny-looking Colonials.

These timid early attempts at traditionalism were rather two-dimensional, yet they were the harbinger of the tidal wave of traditional architecture that would swamp Modernism by the end of the century.

The baby boom generation, having grown up in ornament-challenged ranchers and schooled in flat-topped boxes, now hungered for tradition with a vengeance.

Next time: From fin-de-siecle to the future.

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Arrol Gellner is an architect with 24 years’ experience in residential and commercial architecture. Distributed by Inman News Features.