He helped to break the mold for affordable housing not only in Palm Springs, but also in the west San Fernando Valley in the 1950s.
"Before that, affordable tract houses were tacky, low-ceiling cracker boxes with holes poked out for windows," he says.
Though he went on to design high-rise office towers, condominiums, hotels and hospitals, those modest post-and-beam tract houses are what have become most iconic.
In the San Fernando Valley, where many of his homes had been renovated beyond recognition, young families are moving in and painstakingly restoring them to their original condition. In the desert, where his homes have been more consistently maintained, owners frequently phone Krisel for advice on how to update them without ruining their design integrity.
Architecture critic Alan Hess says Krisel and his design partner Dan Palmer, who died last year, deserve every bit of the increased attention that their work has been getting.
"They brought excellent and elegant modern design to mass-produced housing," Hess says. "That's significant because every big name in modern architecture at midcentury tried to crack into the mass-produced housing market. And they all failed. Palmer and Krisel, who weren't at all well-known, solved the problem."
Michael Stern, curator of the "Julius Shulman: Palm Springs" exhibition opening Friday at the Palm Springs Art Museum, says he has devoted an entire wall in the show to the work of Palmer and Krisel.
"What Bill Krisel did was bring modernism to the masses," Stern says. Before him, only the wealthy could build modern homes, commissioning well-known architects and the costly materials they used. "Krisel packed excellent architecture into houses of modest size, made of modest materials, and he did it on a very thin dime."
KRISEL was a young married man, fresh out of USC and stints in the studios of noted architects Paul Laszlo and Victor Gruen, when he realized he was a bit too late to compete with the likes of Neutra and Rudolph Schindler.
"I was just starting out, they were already well-established," Krisel says. "Why hire me when you could get one of them?"
He looked for a niche not yet tackled and found it in a fortuitous friendship with Bob Alexander, son of builder George Alexander, who was putting up tracts of unattractive but affordable houses for the postwar generation. "I knew homes by the big-name modernists were priced way beyond middle-class reach," Krisel says. "I also knew no one was offering affordable modernism for that market."
