Photos by Colin RobertsonAbout ModernistLogic,
and me, Tom Eich
My first passion is modernist architecture and design. Following my career at IDEO and in Silicon Valley, I am now building ModernistLogic, focusing solely on renovating and preserving modernist buildings. For decades, I designed renovations for my own and others’ Eichler and midcentury homes in the Bay Area, later for my homes in New York, then for my and others’ homes in Palm Springs.
All buildings have intrinsic logic, which can frame new possibilities for sensitive renovations, with designs that reflect a synthesis of what was, what is, and what can be realized.
What Modernism has taught me
Barcelona Pavillion by 3coma14, via Wikimedia Commons
Barcelona Pavilion, photo by author
Lovell beach house, Rudolf Schindler, 1926 Marvin Rand, photographer, via Wikimedia Commons
From my vintage copy of an Eichler Homes sales brochure for Faircourt in Palo Alto, showing the same model as my family's 1956 home
I was always a drawer, model maker, and builder, obsessed first with cars in the 1960s. US Car design became increasingly sad by the early 1970s, and by age 10, moving to a new master-planned community, my attention switched to architecture. I soon studied the Bauhaus, and Mies van der Rohe’s, Neutra’s, and Schindler’s work in North America. At age 15, my family relocated to Palo Alto, California, and moved into a 1956 Eichler house designed by A. Quincy Jones and Frederick Emmons.
So there I was, already obsessed with modern design, living in Palo Alto, with 3000 Eichler homes in town. I toured the neighborhoods, houses and community centers, and sketched their many designs, interpolating the rigorous post-and-beam structural logic. I’ve been building on such logic ever since, while pursuing a career as an engineer and designer, driven by my eternal love for modernism. Now I am devoting full time to designing homes for 21st century modernists.