X-100

About this property

The X-100 is an experimental steel house designed by A. Quincy Jones with his partner Frederick Emmons for Eichler Homes and built in 1956 at the San Mateo Highlands development in California. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2016. Eichler Homes was founded as a developer of tracts of single-family houses in the Bay Area suburbs during the California building boom that followed World War II. Joseph Eichler, the founder, insisted on modernist style and used only designs by architects, initially Anshen and Allen and later also Jones and Emmons. The company specialized in constructing these houses cheaply enough to be an affordable alternative to more conventional tract houses. The vast majority were of timber, using post and beam construction. Eichler had however commissioned a steel-frame house from Raphael Soriano in 1955; this was built in Palo Alto to demonstrate the practicality and cost-worthiness of building tract houses in steel rather than wood, was smaller than the X-100, and came in at a cost of $7 per square foot, according to Eichler comparable to that of a timber house. Jones had also designed a steel-frame house for the "Research Village" project sponsored by U.S. Gypsum in Barrington, Illinois, and another in 1954 as his personal residence in Crestwood Hills, Los Angeles (destroyed in the 1961 Bel Air Fire). Eichler commissioned the X-100 from Jones in 1955, with two aims: further exploration of the practicality of steel for future homes, also showcasing advanced household appliances, some of them prototypes; and promotion of the San Mateo Highlands development, whose location was at the time remote from highways. Its name may have been derived from the X-15, a crewed space project. Ground was broken in May 1956 and the grand opening took place on October 6. The house structure was pre-fabricated, with advice from Pierre Koenig, like Soriano a Los Angeles architect with considerable experience building in steel. The house has three bedrooms, two living rooms, and a kitchen grouped around the perimeter, with a central utility core containing two bathrooms and utility and laundry areas. Instead of the open atrium of many Eichler houses of the period, it has two interior gardens, dubbed the "entry garden" and the "game garden" by the company; there is also a children's play yard, which the two smaller bedrooms open onto, while the master bedroom has glass doors to the backyard. The landscaping was by Douglas Baylis. The thin steel supports and use of glass sliding doors both inside and along the entire rear facade create a sense of openness; the inside entrance to the master bedroom has curtains rather than a door. The house is on a ridge with views of the Coastal Range across open space preserved as watershed and a nature reserve; originally it was possible to see through the house to the hills from the street, which garden walls and gates now prevent.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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