Better Living in Eichlerville: California Modernism’s Influence on Apple

Join Homay King, Professor and Chair on the Catherine Fales Fellowship in the Department of History of Art, for an endowed lecture. King's talk will study a set of Californian suburban tract housing developments built by Joseph Eichler during the 1950s-1970s. Working with architects who had studied California Modernism with Richard Neutra and his circle, Eichler aimed to bring Bauhaus-inspired designs for modern living to middle-class Californians, concentrated in Silicon Valley along the San Francisco peninsula. His mass-produced, post-and-beam construction homes made with natural materials would soon become a recognizable hallmark of the California suburbs, featured in photography, films, and music videos. Eichler homes—with their flat, opaque, nearly windowless front facades and transparent glass backs—reversed the dominant model of suburban domestic architecture, which had been characterized by front-facing “picture windows.” Eichler’s tract housing shaped the design of personal computers that were being produced in the same place and time: Steve Jobs grew up in an Eichler look-alike and cited its influence on his aesthetic. Digital technology design, King argues, drew upon California Modernist principles of seamless minimalism, privacy and private property, and “indoor-outdoor living.” The talk also addresses Eichler’s public advocacy for open-access housing, which led to surprisingly diverse demographics in these neighborhoods at a time when many suburbs practiced legally enforced segregation. The presentation is derived from King’s book manuscript in progress, Go West: A Mythology of California’s Silicon Valley, for which she was awarded an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Visiting Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art.

Homay King is Professor and Chair on the Catherine Fales Fellowship in the Department of History of Art at Bryn Mawr College, where she co-founded the Program in Film Studies. She is the author of two books, both published by Duke University Press: Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier, which inspired the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute exhibition China: Through the Looking Glass, and Virtual Memory: Time-based Art and the Dream of Digitality, which won the Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award of Distinction from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Her essays on film, media, and contemporary art have appeared in Afterall, Afterimage, Camera Obscura, Discourse, Film Criticism, Film Quarterly, JCMS, liquid blackness, October, and over a dozen edited volumes including The Andy Warhol Film Catalogue Raisonné and The Oxford Handbook of Film Theory. She is a member of the Camera Obscura editorial collective, and appears in a video essay on the Criterion Collection edition of Shanghai Express. Currently, she is working on a book project entitled Go West: A Mythology of California’s Silicon Valley, for which she was awarded an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellowship at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

A reception will follow in the Old Library London Room.