The designer of five thousand Eichlers.

Claude Oakland was born in Louisiana in 1919 and took his architecture degree at Tulane. He served in the Seabees in the Second World War and was discharged at Camp Parks, in Dublin, California. He worked in Bruce Goff’s Berkeley office before joining Anshen & Allen in 1950, where he became the principal designer of Eichler houses.

In 1960 Oakland founded Claude Oakland & Associates with Kinji Imada, and the Eichler account went with him. The firm became Oakland & Imada in 1977. He worked with Eichler until Eichler’s death in 1974 — through Eichler Homes, and then through Joseph L. Eichler Associates.

Dave Weinstein credits him with more than five thousand Eichler homes. He designed the Gallery model in 1963, 104 townhouses at Diamond Heights in San Francisco, and the interiors of the Summit on Russian Hill, 1963–65.

Outside Eichler: a concrete house in El Cerrito for the engineer T. Y. Lin (1969), the Lakeside Apartments in Oakland (1976) and an office for George S. Nolte & Associates in San Jose (1982).

SFGate credits Oakland with the Eichler atrium. Eichler Network’s own investigation concludes no single firm can claim it — and it points to Anshen & Allen’s Plan 37 of August 1951, whose open court was built in Atherton at 73 Hawthorne Drive. Oakland had joined the firm the year before. No source we have found names him on Plan 37 or on 19 Irving, and we will not put him there.

The Oakland & Imada Collection at UC Berkeley’s Environmental Design Archives runs to 57 linear feet, most of it Eichler project records, and Berkeley has published a virtual collection of Eichler site plans from it. We found no Atherton items in the finding aid. How to use it is on our records page.