On a quiet block of North Sunny View Drive, in the Racquet Club Estates neighborhood at the north end of Palm Springs, there is a house with walls three and a half inches thick. Knock on them and they answer back with a faint metallic note. The roof is a single plane of steel, tilted so slightly that you would swear it is flat. The whole thing arrived, more or less, on five trucks from Los Angeles.

It is one of seven. There were supposed to be thirty-eight.

A tract house made in a factory

In late 1961, the Alexander Construction Company — the father-and-son developers George and Robert Alexander, who were in the middle of putting up more than 2,000 modern tract homes across the Coachella Valley — commissioned the architects Donald Wexler and Richard "Ric" Harrison to try something no one in the desert had attempted at scale: a house built almost entirely of steel.

The structural engineer was Bernard Perlin. The steel components came from Calcor, a Los Angeles fabricator. The plan was a 38-house tract in the Riviera Gardens section of Racquet Club Estates, sold at prices between $13,000 and $17,000 — squarely competitive with the wood-framed tract houses going up all around them.

"It certainly lends itself to mass production better than wood does," Perlin said of steel, pointing out that it was stronger and that termites had no interest in it.

Wexler's own reasoning was about the climate. "Steel, concrete, and glass are ideal materials for any building in the desert," he said. "They are inorganic, and they don't deteriorate in the extreme temperatures we have."

Three days on site

The genius of the system was that it split the difference between a kit and a module. The messy, expensive part of any house — the kitchen, two bathrooms, the laundry, a central hallway, and every run of plumbing, wiring and ductwork — was built in Los Angeles as a single nine-by-thirty-six-foot steel core and trucked to the lot in one piece.

Everything else came flat. The walls were steel "sandwich" panels sixteen inches wide: galvanized light-gauge steel outside, gypsum board and fiberglass insulation in a hollow middle, drywall facing the rooms. They slotted into a steel track laid on the concrete slab. The roof went on over the frame as a steel plane with deep overhangs to keep the sun off the glass.

According to the house's National Register nomination, once the slab was poured the actual assembly could be done in three days, not counting site preparation and interior finishing. Other accounts put the whole job, start to finish, at under thirty days. Either way, it was a startling pace for a 1,400-square-foot, two-to-four-bedroom house with walls of sliding glass opening onto the backyard.

Why there are only seven

Three model homes opened to the public in March 1962. Four more production houses followed that year. Then the numbers stopped working.

Calcor was taken over by another company, which raised the price of the steel components it sold to the builder. With margins already thin on a house priced to compete with wood, the Alexanders cancelled the rest of the tract.

The architectural historian Peter Moruzzi has put it bluntly: if the price of steel hadn't gone up, "you would probably see thousands of steel houses instead of the few half dozen."

What it is like to live in one

The seven survivors — on the 3100 block of Sunny View Drive and the 300 block of East Molino Road — are private homes, and most of what is known about living in them comes from the people who have chosen to.

The artist Jim Isermann, who has lived in one of the 1962 houses, has been candid about the trade-offs. Steel holds the summer heat, and the frame ticks and pops as it expands and contracts through the desert's wide daily temperature swings. But he has also pointed to the thing that makes the houses feel the way they do: walls so thin that no wood-framed house could match them, which lets the glass and the light do most of the work.

That thinness is the point. Stand in one of these living rooms and the house almost disappears. The low garden walls of green Utah quartzite, the deep roof edge, the sliding doors running nearly the full width of the back of the house — the architecture is mostly framing for the view of the mountains.

Owners have tended to be protective of what makes them unusual. Brian McGuire, who led the effort to get his steel house recognized while Wexler was still alive, has described it as "a home, it's a hobby, it's a trophy, it's a toy."

Recognition, finally

For decades the steel houses were simply old tract homes on a quiet street. They were rediscovered in the early 1990s as Palm Springs began to take its modernist inheritance seriously, and in time all seven were designated Palm Springs Class 1 Historic Sites. In 2012, Steel Development House No. 2, at 3125 North Sunny View Drive, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The nomination called the houses "environmentally sensitive, affordable, rapidly assembled homes for the middle class that were practical, stylish, responsive to a harsh environment, and virtually indestructible."

Wexler lived to see it. He died in 2015, at 89, having also given Palm Springs its airport terminal and a long list of other buildings and houses. But the steel houses remain the clearest statement of his idea that a good modern house did not have to be a one-off for a wealthy client, and could be built, quickly and well, for almost anyone.

Sixty-four years on, there are still only seven. They are still standing, their steel still sound, which is more or less exactly what their architect said would happen.

If you go

The Wexler Steel Houses are private residences. You can see them from the street on the 3100 block of North Sunny View Drive and the 300 block of East Molino Road in Palm Springs; please do not approach the houses or enter the properties. Some are occasionally opened during Modernism Week tours.