The architects who talked Eichler into architecture.

Robert Anshen and Stephen Allen met as students at the University of Pennsylvania and settled in San Francisco in 1937. Their first built work was the Davies House in Woodside, completed in November 1941 for the oil executive Ralph K. Davies. They were unlicensed and had built nothing; they won it by mailing Davies a certified cheque for $100 with a letter asking for a meeting.

It was Bob Anshen, remembered by contemporaries as a skilled negotiator, who convinced Joseph Eichler to hire architects to design his houses at all. The firm’s first Eichler work was Sunnyvale Manor II, fifty-one houses. Then came University Gardens in Palo Alto, about fifty homes at $9,400 — the first Eichlers in Palo Alto, the first post-and-beam Eichlers, with walls of glass facing the back garden, built on a plan called AA-1.

In a 1960 article in the journal of the American Institute of Architects, the firm set out a rule that defines the Eichler street to this day: “wherever possible the building would be blank to the front.” The house turned its back on the street and its face to the garden.

Eichler, by the same account, was “leery” of houses with no traditional street face — but “being a forward-thinking man, he went along with the architect.”

It is hard to think of a better sentence to read in Atherton.

Robert Anshen was born in Revere, Massachusetts, in 1910. Steve Allen — William Stephen Allen Jr. — was born in Neptune Township, New Jersey, in 1912. Both took their bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, in 1935 and 1936.

Anshen was technical director of the Vallejo Housing Authority during the war and lectured at Berkeley in 1952–53; Allen served in the Navy from 1942 to 1946, sat on the San Francisco Art Commission and led the Northern California chapter of the AIA. Allen became a Fellow of the AIA in 1959, Anshen in 1962. Allen summed up the division of labour, as Docomomo quotes him: “Bob talks and I draw.”

Robert Anshen died in San Francisco in May 1964. Steve Allen died in 1992.

The firm’s best-known building is the Chapel of the Holy Cross in Sedona, Arizona, completed in 1956 and given an AIA First Honor Award in 1957. In San Francisco it built the American President Lines Building (1960) and the Bank of California tower at 400 California Street (1967); elsewhere, the visitor centre at Dinosaur National Monument (1956) and the Lawrence Hall of Science at Berkeley (1968).

The Davies House of 1941 — nearly 6,000 square feet — was set into a garden Thomas Church had already laid out in 1937. The firm later specialised in hospitals and was acquired by Stantec in 2010.

Two attributions that circulate, Bank of America and San Francisco International Airport, we could not confirm, so they are not here.

The firm’s papers are at UC Berkeley. Where to find them.

Two anecdotes about how Anshen met Eichler circulate widely — one has him asking “why are you selling homes that aren’t modern?”, another has him telling Eichler he is a fool to build one house when he could build thousands. We could not find either in any archival, journalistic or preservation source. Neither could we find a count of how many Eichler plans the firm drew. So none of the three is on this page.