Environmental Designs
White always sought to relate buildings to their wider surroundings. His designs for small farmhouses in the Coachella Valley and his passive solar energy designs of the 1970s show that his concern for building with nature was a life-long project.
The ’ranch house’ for White meant more than just a popular residential style. Throughout his career White designed houses for farmers and ranchers, several of which are shown here. Most intriguing are the model farmhouses White designed in the mid-1950s for Coachella Valley Farms, a company that intended to create the “world’s largest small-farm development” on huge swaths of land near Bermuda Dunes in the Coachella Valley. The Ratliff farmhouse (La Quinta, 1956), one of White’s most beautiful desert homes, was distinguished by its unusual steel construction and innovative curved roof.
In the early 1970s White’s long experience with orienting buildings in the extreme desert sun gave him an advantage during the energy crisis and this later work shows the continuity of his thinking from his earliest desert dwellings.
His copious use of slump-, concrete-, and pumice-block masonry reveals his awareness of the importance of thermal mass and insulation. The extroverted curves of White’s desert designs can be understood as mimicking the course of the sun across the sky. And White's development of Heat Exchanger Window designs shows his ongoing quest for energy efficient houses and buildings.
Walter White continued to experiment with solar, passive-solar, and autarkic (self-sufficient) house designs through the 1970s and 1980s. With curved walls and roofs, walls of glass and Heat Exchanger Windows, White continued to work with and expand upon the designs and inventions of his early years.
In the 1980s White moved back to Los Angeles and continued to work up until his death in 2002. His inventions and forward-thinking architectural designs continue to inspire desert-based and environmentally conscious architects and designers.