“Better Living in Eichlerville: California Modernism’s Influence on Apple”
Friday, February 27th, 2026
10 a.m. – 12 p.m.
Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities
This talk studies 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.
About Homay King
Homay King is Professor and Chair on the Marie Neuberger Fund for the Study of the Arts in the Department of History of Art and Program in Film Studies at Bryn Mawr College. She is the author of Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier, and Virtual Memory: Time-based Art and the Dream of Digitality, both from Duke University Press. Her work has been published in Afterall, Afterimage, Discourse,Film Quarterly, JCMS, October, and elsewhere, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s catalogue for China Through the Looking Glass and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s The Andy Warhol Film Catalogue Raisonné, 1963-1965. Her current book project, Go West: A Mythology of California’s Silicon Valley, was awarded an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. She is a member of the Camera Obscura editorial collective.