Howard Robert Eichen

03/01/1931 – 03/02/2013

The morning after his 82nd birthday, architect and innovator Howard Robert Eichen quietly left the planet he loved, surrounded by his wife, children and grandchildren at the San Diego VA Medical Center.

Howard committed his life to creating Sustainable Housing decades before ‘sustainability’ became a household word. His first notable recycling project began back in the 1960s, when he saved Fullerton’s old California Hotel from the wrecking ball to redesign and re-purpose it into a downtown shopping showplace – the Villa del Sol.

An inventor and visionary, Howie (as he was known by family and friends) worked right up to the end – conceiving new ways to build; recycling landfill into clean, green modular units suitable for constructing affordable, fireproof, earthquake-resistant housing.

Until the day he died Howie dedicated himself to continuing the work of another visionary, Buckminster Fuller. He was committed to furthering a new model of housing – cleaner, safer and stronger – in which his grandchildren and their grandchildren might live.