The Architects

A Quincy Jones and Frederick Emmons each began their own practices in the immediate postwar, and each pursued reforms to small house design. Emmons joined with his brother, Donn, also an architect, to design a prototypical house for a competition held by the American Gas Association. Emmons worked for William Wurster and Allied Engineers before opening his own practice in 1946. He operated his own firm until joining with Jones in 1950. Together the partners were responsible for designs that, by Emmons' estimate, resulted in the construction of some 5,000 of Eichler's homes. Frederick Emmons retired from practice and moved to the Bay Area in 1972 where he lived until his death in 1998. Jones reverted his practice to a sole proprietorship, which continued until his passing in 1979.

The Book

For a more intensive study of the modern design career of A. Quincy Jones, don't miss 'A. Quincy Jones,' the newly published monograph from Phaidon Press. Authored by architect Cory Buckner, who contributed our Jones and Emmons California review here, the 250-page retrospective promises to be a welcome addition to every Eichlerphile's library.

The Tour Guide

Southern California

• Mutual Housing Association (cooperative development of 150 homes, 32 originals remain today), 1948: Brentwood. Good examples located at 946 and 947 Stonehill Lane, 12404 Rochedale Lane, 860 Hanley Avenue.

• Southdown Estates, 1953: Bienveneda Avenue, Pacific Palisades.

• Jones & Emmons office, 1955: 12248 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles.

• Frederick E. Emmons residence, 1954: 661 Brooktree Road, Santa Monica.

• Shorecliff Towers apartments, 1961: 535 Ocean Avenue, Santa Monica.

• University Research Library, 1964: Circle Drive North near Royce Drive, UCLA University, Westwood.

• Congregational Church of Northridge, 1959: 9659 Balboa Blvd., Northridge.

• St. Michael and All Angels Church, 1961: 3646 Coldwater Canyon Road, Studio City.

• Klein-Norton warehouse (now Ron Rezek Lighting), 1951: 4200 Sepulveda Boulevard, Culver City.

• Infrared, Inc., 1961: undetermined location, Carpinteria.

Northern California

• Ladera Project, 1952: built examples of designs on Aliso Way, Portola Valley.

• X-100 steel Eichler, 1956: 1586 Lexington Ave., San Mateo.

• Edgewood Plaza and Eichler offices, 1958: 1101 Embarcadero Road, Palo Alto.

• Capehart Housing (aka McClellan Housing), 1957-'60: 3 miles north of and adjunct to McClellan Air Force Base (closed 2001), Sacramento.

• Duisenberg Medical Building (since renamed), 1958: undetermined location, Los Altos.

• Laguna Eichler high rise (and complex), 1962: 66 Cleary Court, San Francisco.

• Ferne-Alma Apartments, 1962: Ferne Avenue and Alma Street, Palo Alto.

ARCHITECT A. QUINCY JONES
Touring California with architect A. Quincy Jones --
the remarkable modern designs of Jones & Emmons

From the pages of the Eichler Network newsletter
By Cory Buckner

Southern California

Architect A. Quincy Jones's three-decade career (1945-69) included an 18-year partnership with Frederick E. Emmons that turned out designs for thousands of Eichler homes. During that span, they produced a wide variety of other work throughout Southern California, remarkable designs that ranged from small residential projects to university master plans.

Their practice was consistent in their implementation of rationalized building systems, sensitive site design, attention to the user, and experimentation with both design and materials. The partnership grew to include commissions for churches, manufacturing plants, university structures, libraries, and commercial buildings of varying size. They made certain that there was always a residential project on the boards, serving as a laboratory for many of the ideas used in other structures. Often taking advantage of industrial prefabricated units to provide affordable yet refined architecture, Jones and Emmons bridged the gap between custom-built and merchant-built homes, producing dynamic, livable housing for the postwar moderate-income family.

Their partnership began shortly after the innovative developer, Joseph Eichler, was awarded 'Subdivision of the Year' by the magazine Architectural Forum in December 1950. The same issue featured a 'Builder's House of the Year' designed by A. Quincy Jones. Eichler contacted Jones and invited him to tour a Palo Alto development he had just completed. By the end of his visit, Eichler had proposed to Jones that the Builder of the Year team with the Architect of the Year. A handshake cemented a working relationship, which lasted until Eichler's death in 1974.

With the added workload of the Eichler commission, Jones contacted Emmons, whom he had met when they both worked for the joint venture of Allied Engineers, in San Pedro, California, prior to their active service in the war. The partnership was created in the early months of 1951 and lasted until Emmons' retirement in December 1969. The years of working with an enlightened developer proved invaluable to Jones and Emmons. In 1957, the two architects and John L. Chapman addressed the subject of the developer home in depth in a book, 'Builders' Homes for Better Living' (Reinhold Publishing). The publication was written on the assumption that the same basic points were equally important to builder and buyer. They called out simple rudimentary steps for builders to follow in order to provide developer's housing without repetition and create vibrant, livable communities.

The authors were clear to point out that a good house did not stand alone but was situated within a community which in turn was dependent on facilities for education, shopping, worship, recreation, and play. Through graphic examples and photographs of projects produced by themselves and others, the partners conveyed a logical approach to planning and design in layperson's terms. They emphasized sensitivity to the site and an interplay between house and garden, and combined those elements with a focus on labor-saving methods and designs. The result was advanced, modern housing for the postwar moderate-income family. The book dedication reads, "To Joseph Eichler, a truly progressive builder, whose untiring efforts have advanced greatly the concepts of today's development houses, this book is respectfully dedicated."

Jones designed and completed his own house in 1954 in the same community in Brentwood for which he previously had developed 27 houses for 300 lots in 1948. The earlier project, tract housing for the Mutual Housing Association -- a collaboration by Jones, architect Whitney R. Smith, and structural engineer Edgardo Contini -- was the only successful cooperative housing development built in postwar California. The houses were finished with building materials in their natural state; concrete block, redwood siding, exposed Douglas fir plywood, and tongue-and-groove ceiling planks, with no applied plaster or paint. Walls of glass gave a sensation of free-flowing space, making a 1,200-square-foot house seem twice the size by extending the sight line to the property line. The MHA tract offered young families an opportunity to experience modern architecture within a modest budget.

Jones's own house was a steel-frame structure, a departure from the wooden post-and-beam structures of the MHA development. Jones was one of several architects who hoped that steel would increase in popularity and compete with wood-frame construction. With Jones concerned about the depletion of forests caused by the housing boom, his building with steel seemed ecologically sound and afforded open planning with the longspans available with steel construction. The 2,700-square-foot home burned in the noted Bel Air fire of 1961.

A year after the completion of the Jones House, Emmons finished building his own house in Santa Monica Canyon. Both architects' homes were designed as steel post-and-beam structures arranged around interior courtyards, where dissolving boundaries between indoor and outdoor space created a sense of openness and tranquility. Garrett Eckbo, the modernist landscape architect, designed the landscape for the Emmons House and used his characteristic circular stepping stones. A striking circular metal planter became a feature off the master bedroom, and privacy fences of obscure glass, another Eckbo signature, masked the street and neighbors to the side.

Eichler had hoped that steel-frame homes would be an economical approach to the developer home and hired Raphael Soriano to design a steel-framed house in Palo Alto in 1955. A year later, Jones and Emmons completed the X-100, the experimental steel house in San Mateo, for Eichler. The X-100 was a sophisticated composition of painted steel posts and beams with inner garden courtyards that softened the inherently cold quality of the steel structure. Eichler did not pursue the change to steel framing since the rising cost of steel made it prohibitive for the mass-housing market.

In 1955, Jones and Emmons completed their own office structure on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Los Angeles. Built in two phases, the office began as a wood-framed, open, two-story studio space. The expansion, built primarily of steel, was completed three years later. The addition provided the principals another private office, and a conference room, each surrounding an inner courtyard. The ground-floor work areas and offices looked onto garden areas. Jones and Emmons reasoned that the least an employer could do for their employees was to provide a pleasant work environment. The openness of plan was accentuated by a two-story space in the central drafting area, and the two offices for the principals were designed to permit smaller meetings, leaving the conference room free for use of the associates when necessary. The interlocking composition of horizontal planes was strongly present throughout the interior and exterior. Privacy was created for the offices facing the street with the use of masonry garden walls and expanded metal screens.

Jones and Emmons' office building was a laboratory for experimenting with advanced ideas for working environments. Intercommunication between departments was handled through a switchboard in the reception area and by telephone. Radiant heating in five zones compensated for the cool climate near the ocean, and the through-ventilation of the building made the office quite comfortable in the warmest weather. The reception space, including an atrium garden, was designed to act as a constantly changing exhibit space for the firm's work. Access to the atrium gardens was through sliding steel-frame doors by Arcadia Metal Products. The exterior of the upper area facing Santa Monica Boulevard was faced with expanded metal panels, typical of the commercial buildings produced by the office in the mid-'50s. Exposed masonry block on garden walls that penetrated both interior and exterior courtyards, plaster panels with vertical reglets, and floor-to-ceiling glass were not common elements in commercial design at that period of time.

In their commercial as well as residential projects, Jones and Emmons dissolved boundaries between indoor and outdoor space. They completed the Fullerton headquarters building for Arcadia Metal Products, a company specializing in sliding-glass doors and perforated metal panels used throughout their projects, the same year as the their own office. The building featured interior gardens at the entry, and clerestory windows providing natural light in the workspace. These were features also used on the Klein-Norton Warehouse building completed a year earlier, in 1954. Similar in horizontal language and choice of materials to the Arcadia building, both structures had obscure glass with a metal-frame structure at their respective entrances and an exposed masonry block wall that extended into gardens.

Beams soared to the heavens, straining against their anchored ends, creating a structural tension and drama in Jones and Emmons' church designs. St. Michael and All Angels Church in Studio City, completed in 1961, and the Congregational Church of Northridge, completed a year later, are still standing testament to Jones and Emmons' constant search for the structural innovative solution to a given program. Glued-laminated beams span the nave of St. Michael's church and rise up to a height of 46 feet, where skylights between each bay wash the wooden ceiling. The soaring pyramidal roof of the Congregational Church recalls the experience of entering a forest or a sacred space of the past, where magnificence and silence humbled congregations.

In considering the whole environment rather than the individual homes of the housing development, Jones and Emmons brought together a love of nature with an analytical approach to problem solving. The Greenmeadow development of Palo Alto was the first of Eichler's projects to include a community center, a swimming pool, and a nursery school for 180 houses. For that project, Jones and Emmons worked with the progressive landscape designer, Thomas Church, who was based in San Francisco. Church was one of a school of landscape designers that broke new ground in the postwar years. The idea of introducing community facilities into a housing development became very popular after completion of the original phase of the project in 1955.

Considering an institution as a whole rather than as a series of individual projects led the architects to create several master plans for projects that had initially consisted of a single building. St. Matthew's Parish in Pacific Palisades had hired Jones and Emmons to add an extension to a small church previously designed by Carelton Winslow. Lacking a cohesive master plan for their future needs, the Parish soon followed the architects' advice and commissioned a master plan which encompassed converting the church to a chapel with the addition of a new church, a nursery school, kindergarten, elementary school, rectory, assistant rector's house, a memorial garden, a library, and a recreation building with a deck and pool. The renovated Winslow church, which was to be used as a chapel once the new church was built, burned in 1978 but many of the secondary buildings are in use today. Jones and Emmons' innovative proposals and exquisite drawings for the future church were not implemented but are preserved at the A. Quincy Jones Architecture Archive, at University of California at Los Angeles.

From 1945 to 1966, John Entenza's Case Study program became one of the most unorthodox and influential design projects ever attempted. At the end of World War II, Entenza, editor of Arts & Architecture magazine, combined the postwar population's desperate need for housing with the architectural talent available in Southern California to create an innovative program of house design. The magazine became the architect's client, with the intention of building the houses, furnishing them, opening them to the public viewing, and featuring them in its pages.

In answer to Entenza's inquiry, if Jones and Emmons had any projects that would qualify as a Case Study, the architects, in 1961, submitted a multiple-house proposal sponsored by Eichler Homes. It was to be the only tract house development represented in the Case Study program. Their proposal was not the standard tract house development. Located in the San Fernando Valley with its high summer temperatures, each of the proposed 250 houses on the 140-acre parcel was surrounded by earth berms. The berms would both thermally insulate the house and provide privacy from the gaze of neighboring houses. It was an original and inventive plan that came to a swift end when the City Council Committee on Zoning rejected the project.

Maintaining a consistent interest in exploring new technologies, one of the partnership's most innovative projects was the Shorecliff Towers in Santa Monica, an apartment building designed by Jones and Emmons in the early 1960s, at the same time as their design for the Laguna Eichler complex in San Francisco. Using slip-form construction for the Shorecliff, all load-bearing walls were poured continuously from ground level to penthouse. The floor slabs, complete with radiant heating, were cast in place three floors behind the moving wall forms.

In 1969, the National American Institute of Architects awarded their annual Architectural Firm Award for 'Overall Achievement in Architecture' to Jones and Emmons, in honor of their consistent high quality of work. The prolific, innovative career of Jones and Emmons spanned nearly two decades and resulted in dynamic, site-sensitive architecture that to this day creates joy to the user and awe to the visitor.

Northern California

While most of their workload was concentrated in Southern California, Jones and Emmons were no strangers to Northern California. In fact, during their two-decade partnership, the architects made their mark repeatedly, from Palo Alto to Sacramento, with several distinguished design projects.

Eichler Homes commissioned the firm's core work in the north. Beginning in the early 1950s and continuing for more than a decade, Jones and Emmons produced dynamic, livable housing for the postwar moderate-income family at Joseph Eichler's request. They also were intent on creating quality community planning, a concept their firm exhibited from its first collaboration with Eichler, the 1952 Ladera Project in Portola Valley. Twice featured in Arts & Architecture magazine, the development's plan called for seven different single-family designs on a hillside setting that featured pairs of mirrored plans, shared driveways, and high density with a feeling of spaciousness. While Jones and Emmons' Ladera Project was never fully completed, the ideas they introduced there -- in particular the concept of shared landscapes -- carried over to future projects. Two years later, their designs for the Greenmeadow development in Palo Alto included a community center with a nursery school and a swimming pool. The development was typical of the thoughtful arrangement of one house to another carried through to the thoughtful arrangement of house to community, a philosophy that remained constant in the housing proposal produced by the firm of Jones and Emmons.

Jones and Emmons' first commission in Northern California was with the mortician Nicholas Daphne. In 1949, Daphne commissioned Jones to design a mortuary in San Francisco at Market and Duboce Streets. As a great supporter of modern architecture, Daphne contacted Frank Lloyd Wright after the war, and asked him to design his mortuary, but inevitably severed relations with Wright. In 1948, while returning by car from Arizona, Daphne drove through Palm Springs and stopped at the Town and Country Restaurant, which had been designed as a joint venture by Paul R. Williams and A. Quincy Jones. Daphne was so impressed by the qualities of the architecture that he sought out the rstaurant's architects, and ultimately commissioned Jones to design a building for his San Francisco Funeral Services.

At the request of Daphne, Jones and Emmons worked with a consulting architectural firm in New York, Petroff and Clarkson, who had experience in mortuary design. The organization of the design provided for three basic functions: the conducting of the funeral arrangements, the preparation of the deceased for burial, and the conducting of the funeral ceremony. Concealed ramps transported the deceased to a second-story viewing room. Sitting rooms were integrated with the landscape, resulting in areas conducive for quiet contemplation. Jones and Emmons' design leveled out the sloping site. Parking was designed underneath the structure and the building was situated to one side of the site, leaving room for a future chapel. The chapel was never built, leaving park-like surroundings for the buildings that were constructed. To draw attention away from the unattractive surroundings, the building's focus was inward, on to landscaped courtyards.

The Daphne contained many of the modern elements characteristic of postwar architecture. Large expanses of glass and interlocking of horizontal and vertical planes connected indoor and outdoor space. The ground plane was freed up for vehicular movement. The flat-roofed building of redwood and brick appeared to float above a porte-cochere. A simple rectilinear structure with ribbon windows integrated with a series of courtyards created a commercial structure very much in human scale. Jones designed his own Southern California home the same time as this project; both showed the same transparency and form.

In 2000, preservation groups rallied in an unsuccessful attempt to save the Daphne when threatened with demolition to make way for low-income housing. Inevitably razed, Daphne's San Francisco Funeral Services was a sad loss, not only as one of a handful of postwar modern commercial structures in the city of San Francisco, but as perhaps the most interesting commercial project designed by Jones and Emmons in Northern California.

In the mid-1950s, Eichler commissioned architect Raphael Soriano to design a steel prototype, in Palo Alto, the first steel house in the country for a merchant builder. It was completed in 1955; and a year later, Jones and Emmons finished another steel house for Eichler in San Mateo, the X-100. Jones had finished construction on his own steel house for his family in 1954. It was designed with precision and efficiency in order to have all of the steel for the house delivered at one time on one truck and erected in one week. In actuality its rigid steel frame was completed in three months. The X-100 was the firm's first steel house project for mass production. Steel demanded a precision unlike wood construction, which could tolerate variances in details of one half of an inch. The ease and speed of steel construction promised great savings in labor. Houses could be designed as an open box with the few non-structural walls finished in standard panels of gypsum board easily applied to a steel grid.

Arguably the most prominent of the 11,000 homes Eichler built, the X-100 is an H-plan with the enclosed courts designated as gardens, creating the impression of a much larger house. The long spans of the steel beams allow for an open plan, the only floor-to-ceiling walls are at the bathroom and secondary bedroom areas. Curtains separate the master bedroom from the rest of the house. In the garden area, exposed aggregate concrete circles contain the same radiant heating as the house flooring. Jones and Emmons were able to marry the industrial practicality of steel construction with the softness of planted areas using transparent glass walls facing garden areas. Although the steel house promised economics in labor costs and erection time, steel plants were not geared for the nuances of residential building; and steel, perceived as a cold material, was not readily embraced in the residential market. Eichler discontinued further research on the steel house.

Expanding his horizons beyond the housing market, Eichler, in 1954, commissioned the partnership to design the Edgewood Plaza, commercial space in Palo Alto. Completed in 1958 and located on Embarcadero Road near Highway 101, the project included a Lucky Market, a Shell Oil station, a bank, several commercial storefronts, and the Eichler offices. The Eichler Homes headquarters on St. Francis Drive, featuring exposed concrete block, walls of glass, and striking oversized wooden entrance doors, was later sold to Hewlett-Packard in 1964. The flat-topped plaza is now being considered for redevelopment or demolition due to declining retail sales and an increase in crime.

Further north, in Sacramento, the federal government commissioned Jones and Emmons in 1957 to design what was originally known as Capehart Housing, but was later renamed McClellan Air Force Base Family Housing in honor of the Arkansas senator. Completed in 1960, McClellan Housing contained a master plan and site design for 540 units designed for military personnel -- 318 for airmen, 222 for officers. The site covered 148 acres with schools proposed directly adjacent to the project.

One of the few military housing projects located off base, McClellan Housing was also unique in retaining architects, instead of using standard designs. The houses were modern, an unusual departure from previous military housing. The contemporary designs provided 1,300 to 1,800 square feet of living area with private porches and patios enclosed by redwood fencing. All the latest modern amenities were introduced such as air conditioning, sliding glass doors, and modern appliances. Post-and-beam framing with exposed concrete masonry units and vertical wood siding kept the costs at affordable levels, and was in keeping with the modern trends of the postwar era. The master plan and site development consisted of looped streets and cul de sacs branching off the main arterial road. Avoiding access directly onto a public street, personnel were able to park off the smaller streets and head into the larger public way. Avoiding garage doors along the public street improved the appearance of the project. As with some Eichler developments, a large centrally located recreation facility is located at the center. The development won for the architects the FHA 1963 Honor Award for Residential Design.

In the early 1960s, Eichler commissioned Jones and Emmons to design multi-family units. The Laguna Eichler Apartments in San Francisco's Western Addition was originally planned to be one of three high-rise structures, but Eichler sold two of the three sites to the Archdiocese of San Francisco for rebuilding St. Mary's Cathedral. Completed in 1964, the Laguna Eichler Apartments are part of a complex comprised of seven buildings: one 18-floor high rise and six 12-unit apartment buildings.

The high rise, designed by Jones and Emmons, includes 15 floors of apartments and three lower levels of parking. Within the building are 150 units, 149 of which have three bedrooms, the exception being the manager's apartment, which has two. The floor plans of each unit bear a striking similarity to the single-family homes Eichler built throughout California. In addition, each unit has a terrace or balcony and thick, eight-inch, load-bearing concrete walls that deaden sound from one unit to another. The six low-rise units were designed by architect Claude Oakland's firm.

The Ferne-Alma Apartments, completed in early 1963, also feature units similar in design to the Eichler Homes. Located at the corner of Ferne Avenue and Alma Street in Palo Alto, the units contain a living room with a large concrete block fireplace, opening to a private rear garden. Each of the two apartment buildings is designed with a swimming pool and children's play area. Radiant heating is used throughout the two-bedroom, two-bath units; a design element seen throughout the Eichler Homes.

In a letter written to Ned Eichler in 1960, Jones expressed his philosophy in approaching the designs he provided to Eichler Homes: "The design of the Eichler Homes expresses a solution that simplifies living patterns in today's complicated society. The houses have been designed so that a functional and easy living pattern will be provided in a rich environment. The functional and easy living pattern carries throughout the house plan, then to the limits of the lot, and then a thoughtful arrangement of one house to another is carried through the total community. Doctors have stated that mental health can be affected adversely by an inadequate environment, just as much as physical healthy an inadequate water supply. There is no question that the aesthetic satisfaction of people of all ages in just as important as the material.

"The intellectual, social, and technical conditions of our age makes it imperative that we return to honesty in thought and feeling in architecture. There is no place in residential living for the 'cinderella' house which does not fill today's needs. The forms of architecture of today can not be the personal whims (or result of prejudices) of people, or architects, simply for innovation at all costs. The new forms of living provided in Eichler Homes are a logical result of today's scientific knowledge. The Eichler home is an architecture of logic with consideration for people's emotions -- in other words, a rich architecture and a lasting architecture."

See other Eichler Modern Stories