July 01--Midcentury Modern architect Donald Wexler designed several classic Palm Springs buildings, including the main terminal of Palm Springs International Airport, the Royal Hawaiian Estates development and Dinah Shore's home, purchased last year by Leonardo DiCaprio, which could be the ultimate "Mad Men" era house with its floor-to-ceiling glass walls, sunken bar and massive stone fireplace.
But the most revolutionary project designed by Wexler was far more modest in scope.
In the early 1960s, he created a series of moderately priced, prefab homes that used a highly unusual material for residences: steel.
The steel walls of the homes were constructed in Los Angeles and shipped to the desert, where they were erected in place in just four hours. An entire home took only about a month to complete. And even though the houses were technically prefab, they were sleek structures that captured the look of Midcentury Modern, including soaring windows like in the Dinah Shore home.
"They're so light, these steel houses that Don designed are just almost floating because the material allows that to happen," said architectural historian Peter Moruzzi in the documentary film "Journeyman Architect: the Life and Work of Donald Wexler."
"You can have this glass, you can have this indoor-outdoor flow that is almost beyond anything you could find of wood."
Wexler, whose work was showcased during the popular "Wexler Weekend" in Palm Springs in 2010, died Friday at his home in Palm Desert. He was 89.
Alan Hess, an architect and historian, said there was nothing about the Wexler houses that looked run-of-the-mill.
"The spaces, the room, layout, the way that the outdoors were made part of the living space were all really beautifully done," Hess said in an interview Wednesday. "When you take modern materials and use them to create beautiful spaces for living, that's the ideal in modern architecture."
The National Register of Historic Places recognized one of the steel homes in 2012, saying it demonstrated "the possibilities for rapidly assembled and affordable homes for the middle class."
Except that the middle class never had much access to them, except on tours.
The homes were a tremendous success, architecturally, but after the project was built, the price of steel rose to the point that they were not practical as moderately priced homes.
The seven houses in the initial development were the only ones built. Some of the owners who have restored the homes to their pristine state show them off on the popular Midcentury Modern architecture tours that are wildly popular in the Palm Springs area.
"If it wasn't for the fact that the cost of steel increased," Moruzzi said, "there would probably be thousands of steel houses in Palm Springs."
A full obit of Donald Wexler will appear later at latimes.com/obits.
