Architectural idealist / Modernist Joseph Allen Stein preferred to design public housing and finished his career in India When Bay Area architects of a certain age talk about their youthful ideals -- building for the common man, using design to create a better society -- the name Joseph Allen Stein keeps coming up. No one was as committed to designing for workers and the poor, nor as rigorous in his denunciations of injustice or his analysis of social ills. Though small, the house would seem spacious because of walls of windows, clever floor plans and a garden setting; his preferred material was concrete. [...] Stein, who died in 2001 after suffering from Parkinson's disease, left a legacy in California of several houses that helped define Bay Area Modernism. During World War II, Stein designed housing for war workers that set the tone for his later residential work -- a house that is essentially a square but seems anything but, because the nonstructural interior walls are diagonals, and because angular, trellis-topped terraces are as intrinsic to the living space as the actual rooms. Built using structural concrete blocks -- for ease of assembly and to save rationed wood and metal -- one of the designs called for a rope-roof topped with fabric. Stein designed the house as an experiment in housing "the typical American family," such as his own -- husband, wife (Margaret) and two children, David and Ethan. The way Stein arranges space clearly suggests that he regarded social and communal values as crucial as the need for sleep and food. In sections, the concrete panels are shaped like shallow C's, to allow for insulation between the outer skin of concrete and inner skin of wallboard or plywood. Royston's home has an exposed concrete floor coated and waxed so it has a polished look. Since Higgins' house had no ceiling light in the living room, track lighting was added. A wall of cabinetry often greets people who enter a Stein home, providing access in one direction to the bedrooms, in the other to the public space. Stein regarded gardens as "the chief opportunity to achieve some measure of poetry and beauty in low-cost housing." Every room opens onto a functionally equivalent garden: children's rooms onto play spaces, adults' rooms onto sitting areas, the kitchen onto a dining patio. Kay and Bill Parker's small Stein home, on a sloping site in San Rafael, tucks a carport beneath the living area, with steps leading from car to a hidden hillside courtyard that opens onto a the glass-walled living space. The closest the elder Stein came to turning his house designs into a full-fledged community was Ladera, a cooperative housing project in Portola Valley, which he designed in the late 1940s with architect John Funk and Royston. Joseph Allen Stein and Associates, founded in 1955 in Delhi, and its successor firms handled architecture, planning and engineering for clients such as the Ford Foundation and the World Bank, city and state governments, and schools and universities. A quiet, thoughtful man who enjoyed photography and reading Shakespeare and books about social issues, Stein became a dedicated futurist, interested in first Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller.