Alison King's Modern Phoenix house tour in April 2008 will focus on the houses you see here, built between 1962 and 1967 by Allied, and designed by the architect Charles Schreiber.

Nice, huh? Scroll down and let the design sink in. Let your eyes play over the facade; the lines are just incredibly good, a visual pleasure of asymmetry and imbalance and mass/void contrast. They make you want to go in. They take paint well. The photo below, the mint-green number, is probably the least modified.

There are three clusters of this design: a few in South Scottsdale in the Village Grove subdivision, a few in a funny easy-to-overlook part of town called Hidden Village, and a few more in the Village Meadows subdivision tucked away up in northwest Phoenix, fairly close to the track.

There were two architect Schreibers, Charles and Arthur, twins actually. After earning degrees at Armour Institute in Chicago and putting together a respectable career of conventional custom houses, they moved to Phoenix and became very successful: worked with Del Webb at Sun City, worked with Henry Kaiser at Hawaii-Kai, and if you live in central Phoenix the odds are fair that the Schreibers designed your house.

Not all of them look like this, of course. These are special. These are (maybe) 50 out of an estimated 150,000 houses the Schreibers designed.

It's funny but also kind of appropriate that the Schreibers were not what you'd call committed stark-raving modernists. They didn't design this model to express themselves, or to display their superior tastes, or Do More with Less, or any other variety of True Belief. They were designing what the public wanted. Filtered through the intervening years, with these houses we can see our own modernist desires looking back at us. It's not an unpleasant feeling.

Interested? Sign up for the tour!