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VERNACULAR, REGIONAL AND MODERN

LEWIS MUMFORD’S BAY REGION STYLE

AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF WILLIAM WURSTER

Jane Castle 2006

SUPERVISOR: PETER KOHANE CO-SUPERVISOR: ANN QUINLAN

THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES Thesis/Dissertation Sheet

Surname or Family name: CASTLE

First name: JANE Other name/s: ELIZABETH

Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: MArch

School: ARCHITECTURE Faculty: FACULTY OF THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

Title: Vernacular and Modern: Lewis Mumford’s Bay Region Style and the Architecture of William Wurster

Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE)

This thesis examines aspects of the work of American writer and social critic, Lewis Mumford, and the domestic buildings of architect William Wurster. It reveals parallels in their careers, particularly evident in an Arts and Crafts influence and the regional emphasis both men combined with an otherwise overtly Modernist outlook. Several chapters are devoted to the background of, and influences on, Mumford’s regionalism and Wurster’s architecture. Mumford, a spiritual descendent of John Ruskin, admired Wurster’s work for its reflection of his own regionalist ideas, which are traced to Arts and Crafts figures Patrick Geddes, William Morris, William Lethaby and Ruskin. These figures are important to this study, firstly because the influence of their philosophical perspective allowed Mumford, almost uniquely, to position himself as a spokesman for both Romanticism and Modernism with equal validity, and secondly because of their influence upon early Californian architects such as Bernard Maybeck, and subsequently upon Wurster and his colleagues. Throughout the thesis, an important architectural distinction is highlighted between regional Modernism and the International Style. This distinction polarised the American architectural community after Mumford published an article in 1947 suggesting that the “Bay Region Style” represented a regionally appropriate alternative to the abstract formulas of International Style architecture and nominated Wurster as its most significant representative. Wurster’s regional Modernism was distinct from the bulk of American Modernism because of its regional influences and its indebtedness to vernacular forms, apparent in buildings such as his Gregory Farmhouse. In 1948, Henry-Russel Hitchcock organised a symposium at New York’s Museum of Modern Art to refute Mumford’s article. Its participants acrimoniously rejected a regionalist alternative to the International Style, and architectural historians have suggested that authentic regional development in the Bay Region largely ceased because of such adverse theoretical and academic scrutiny. After examining the influences on Mumford and Wurster, the thesis concludes that twentieth century regional architectural development in the San Francisco Bay Region has influenced subsequent Western domestic architecture. Wurster suggested that architects should employ the regional and vernacular rather than emulate historical styles or follow theoretical models in their buildings and Mumford, upon whose work Critical Regionalism was later founded, is central to any understanding of the importance of the vernacular, regional and historical in modern architecture.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Peter Kohane and co-supervisor Ann Quinlan, for their direction, insightful comments and editorial thoroughness. Both inspired numerous rewrites of many “final” drafts, and vastly improved my knowledge of academic writing and research.

Linda Corkery also offered supervision assistance and very kindly gave encouraging and helpful suggestions. For her help, I am extremely grateful.

Daniel Gregory (grandson of Warren and Sadie Gregory who commissioned the Gregory Farmhouse) very graciously invited me to visit the building and spent many hours answering my questions about the farmhouse and many other aspects of Wurster’s work and Bay Region architecture. He and Evie Gregory (the original owners’ daughter-in-law) showed great kindness, humour and hospitality at the family’s beautiful Scotts Valley property. Without their help, I would have been unable to complete a large part of this thesis and I thank them wholeheartedly.

Robert and Rose, thank you for putting up with the loss of so many weekends and evenings, for taking a month out to drive me around the Bay Region and for the editorial assistance each of you offered. And to Jude, at least you got to spend more quality time with your granddaughter than you may have ever thought possible.

ABSTRACT page ii

PREFACE page iv A NOTE ON THE USE OF THE TERM “VERNACULAR” IN ARCHITECTURE

INTRODUCTION page 1

CHAPTER ONE page 7 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM

CHAPTER TWO page 32 LEWIS MUMFORD’S STUDY OF REGIONAL ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA

CHAPTER THREE page 57 THE BAY REGION STYLE: VERNACULAR ORIGINS, REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND LEGACY

CHAPTER FOUR page 84 WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM

CHAPTER FIVE page 119 WILLIAM WURSTER’S GREGORY FARMHOUSE: A CASE STUDY OF REGIONAL MODERNISM

CONCLUSION page 140

REFERENCES page 143

ABSTRACT

ABSTRACT page ii Francisco Bay Region has influenced subsequent Western domestic architecture. Wurster suggested that architects should employ the regional and vernacular rather than emulate historical styles or follow theoretical models in their buildings and Mumford, upon whose work Critical Regionalism was later founded, is central to any understanding of the importance of the vernacular, regional and historical in modern architecture.

ABSTRACT page iii PREFACE | A NOTE ON THE USE OF THE TERM VERNACULAR IN ARCHITECTURE

While this thesis primarily focuses on regionalism and its importance in the work of Lewis Mumford and William Wurster, an examination of vernacular forms is central to the understanding of the development of their work. Rather than using “vernacular” as an accepted term I feel it is important to include a note clarifying definitions of and approaches to it in architectural theory and its use in a modern context. Within architectural theory the word vernacular is often used ambiguously and with little consistency, so that a relationship as nebulous as that between vernacular and modern architecture is rarely described with clarity, and is often reduced to a comparison of stylistic features. The word vernacular is derived from the Latin vernaculus, or native, and is most frequently used in the study of language to refer to the common or native language of a place or culture, usually as opposed to its literary or academic language. The word was first extended by analogy to architecture in the mid-nineteenth century by architect Giles Gilbert Scott.1 Paul Oliver, editor of Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World (1997) described vernacular architecture as “the term most widely used to denote indigenous, tribal, folk, peasant and traditional architecture.”2 Oliver explained that he used vernacular over competing terminology, such as indigenous, spontaneous, anonymous, folk, peasant, rural or traditional since vernacular architecture is not always that produced by the indigenous inhabitants of a place, nor is it necessarily rural, anonymous or confined to the dwellings of “peasants” in socially stratified cultural systems. Oliver pointed out that, despite many attempts to create one, there is no accepted definition of vernacular architecture, “for the term is used to embrace an immense range of building types, forms, traditions, uses and contexts.”3 He nevertheless prefaced his encyclopedia with the following working definition: Vernacular architecture comprises the dwellings and all other buildings of a people. Related to their environmental contexts and available resources, they are customarily owner- or community-built, utilising traditional technologies. All forms of vernacular architecture are built to meet specific needs

PREFACE page iv accommodating the values, economies and ways of living of the cultures that produce them.4

Even if there is some agreement within architectural theory to the term “vernacular architecture” describing the buildings of pre-industrial cultures, there is little general acceptance of the degree to which vernacular architecture relates to modern architecture. Theorists and historians in the U.S.A. tend to apply the word vernacular more broadly than Australian and British writers, defining by context whether they are referring to the folk variety or to that of an identifiable architect. For instance American writers Marc Treib, Catherine Bauer, Alan Michelson and Wurster (among others) often describe local types that have appeared specifically in one area due to regional influences as vernacular, whether they are architect designed or not.5

Approaches to vernacular theory in architecture While vernacular architecture defies a simplistic definition, architect Charles Correa succinctly described its usefulness to architects: “the old architecture – especially the vernacular – has much to teach us as it always develops a typology of fundamental common sense.”6 However while this offers a general sense of the way in which vernacular architecture may influence the modern architect, like many vernacular design theories, it does not give any concrete way of determining the motivations of a designer in turning to vernacular sources for inspiration. Architectural writers grapple with the problem of meaningfully discussing vernacular architecture in a modern setting, and the terminology around the concept is far from standardised. The term “neo-vernacular” is used, by Oliver, to describe the squatter’s developments around many of the world’s large cities, however he concedes that the term is often also used to describe the work of architects who are strongly influenced by earlier vernacular designs.7 Furthermore, many terms, including ‘vernacular’, are used by architectural writers to describe modern architecture that is unique to a particular culture. For instance, four theorists quoted within this thesis use differing terminology to

PREFACE page v define the cultural importance of Wurster’s architecture: Esther McCoy described it as “indigenous”, Mumford called it “native”, Catherine Bauer used “vernacular” and Marc Treib “modern vernacular.” Wurster himself called the Bay Region work “the nearest thing to a contemporary vernacular that this country has yet produced.”8 As Wurster is a trained, modern architect his work evidently does not conform to what Oliver called vernacular architecture nor to what author of Architecture Without Architects (1964) Bernard Rudofsky called “non-pedigreed architecture”, which he explained “for want of a generic label we shall call…vernacular, anonymous, spontaneous, indigenous, rural as the case may be.”9 Rudofsky is perhaps most responsible for popularising traditional vernacular architecture and making its forms available as iconic architectural precedents. Rudofsky’s 1964 New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition and publication Architecture Without Architects was inspired by the richness of vernacular architecture compared to what he saw as the blandness of modern Western designs. Rudofsky described vernacular architecture as “the largest untapped source of architectural inspiration for industrial man”10 and speculated that many technological precedents usually thought to be modern are “old hat in vernacular architecture—prefabrication, standardisation, flexible and moveable structures…floor heating, air conditioning, light control, even elevators.”11 Architectural historian Eleftherios Pavlides argued that Rudofsky’s work could be understood as contributing more than aesthetic or stylistic precedents and illustrated something of the experiential qualities of vernacular architecture, writing that “he sought to identify and present the qualities of regional vernacular architecture that conveyed a sense of well-being.”12 Pavlides offered a structured analysis of the relationship between the vernacular and the modern in architecture. He argued that there are, broadly, three modes of vernacular influence upon modern architectural practice. The three are described as “architecture as an iconic, picturesque evocation of symbolic identity; architecture

PREFACE page vi as determined by climate, material, or function; and architecture as the embodiment of experiential, emotional, spiritual and sensory qualities.”13 The first of these, the iconic or picturesque evocation, describes the stance of vernacular revivalists, who look to vernacular architecture to provide inspiration for picturesque interpretations of “locally derived pure forms.”14 These revivalists attempt to capture something of an idealised past that is presumed to be timeless and available for appropriation and reconstruction. Pavlides noted that: in several 19th-century North European countries the picturesque evocation of the vernacular in general, and the Gothic style in particular, also expressed a nostalgic response to the disappearing pre-industrial environment, a romantic yearning for simpler times. Architects like Phillip Webb, Edwin Lutyens and C.F.A. Voysey imitated vernacular features, including native domestic Gothic building prototypes, adopted rules of composition such as asymmetry for example, and were influenced by informal qualities such as the rustic use of materials.15

He suggested that the architectural discourse of the Arts and Crafts movement in late nineteenth century England might be seen as an instance of this iconic or picturesque evocation of vernacular architectural prototypes, although this apparently considers only the aesthetic qualities of Arts and Crafts architectural discourse and not its political or moral considerations. Pavlides suggests that the second approach, climatic, material and functional determinism, describes Modernist architects who looked only to those elements of vernacular architecture that supported their ideological position. According to Pavlides: only features of vernacular architecture that fit the filter of Modernist ideology served as stylistic inspiration for the design work of modern architects. Stylistic features thought to be determined by the rational processes included formal qualities such as the primary forms of mass and space, flat roofs, absence of exterior decoration, repetition of masses, and white interiors and exteriors.16

He identified Le Corbusier’s Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut (1955) at Ronchamp and Walter Gropius’ Sommerfeld House (1919) in Berlin as among buildings inspired by such highly selective investigations of vernacular forms.

PREFACE page vii The third of Pavlides’ approaches to the vernacular, the experiential, encourages the reinterpretation of vernacular precedents, methods and materials, however not as formulae, nor in order to reproduce past types for either stylistic or nostalgic reasons. “The goal of the experiential approach” according to Pavlides, “is to enhance the quality of habitation, to create places where inhabitants will feel at home. The qualities that enhance the act of dwelling can be learned from vernacular architecture without mimicking vernacular prototypes.”17 The results of this “experiential approach” to vernacular architecture may be observed in the work and theoretical approach of Bay Area architects like Bernard Maybeck and Wurster, who studied and understood the vernacular precedents of their region and subtly reinterpreted these in their own work. Beyond the Bay Area, the same tendency may be seen in the architecture of such geographically diverse designers as Luis Barragan and Glen Murcutt, and Post-Modernists Christopher Alexander and Charles Moore. These Post- Modernists, according to Pavlides “explored the expressive possibilities of a great variety of vernacular sources.”18 In this method of appropriating vernacular architectural sources, the modern architect does not use vernacular precedents explicitly, but rather interprets the principles that governed their development and use. In Pavlides’ terminology: “The experiential approach to vernacular architecture requires an interpretation of the vernacular though the poetic sensibility of the architect.”19 Kenneth Frampton also wrote of the relationship between vernacular architecture and his own theories of Critical Regionalism. He described vernacular architecture as that “spontaneously produced by the combined interaction of climate, culture, myth and craft” and noted that “while opposed to the sentimental simulation of local vernacular, Critical Regionalism will, on occasion, insert reinterpreted vernacular elements as disjunctive episodes within the whole.” 20 Architectural theorist Alan Michelson author of a doctoral thesis on Wurster titled “Towards a Regional Synthesis: The Suburban and Country Residences of William Wilson Wurster” wrote a corollary to Frampton’s analysis:

PREFACE page viii “Vernacular architecture was a direct, unique reflection of specific regional conditions, and he [Wurster] scrutinized it wherever possible.”21 Where Frampton saw vernacular forms as an influence upon regionalism, Michelson saw the vernacular as necessarily emerging from regional. Within this thesis the term vernacular is generally used to refer to buildings of pre-industrial cultures and particularly to their non-architect designed structures. It is also used to reference the owner-built developments of farmers, miners, missionaries and other “settlers” on the West Coast of America in the period before the late-nineteenth century. Vernacular architecture is not used to describe architects’ designs, however many scholarly sources referenced within the thesis do use the term “vernacular” to describe modern, architect-designed buildings.

PREFACE page ix PREFACE | NOTES

1 Oliver, P. 2003, Dwellings: The Vernacular House World Wide, Phaidon, London, p.12 2 Oliver, P. (ed.), 1997, Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of The World, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p.xxi 3 Oliver (ed.) 1997, p.xxi 4 Ibid. p.xxiii 5 Examples of these uses are quoted and referenced throughout this thesis. Marc Treib, Professor of Architecture at the University of California at Berkeley is the author of An Everyday Modernism: The Houses of William Wurster, which was published in conjunction with a retrospective exhibition of Wurster’s work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1995- 96. Catherine Bauer was an influential writer on housing in America and Europe and author of Modern Housing (1934). She argued for social equity in housing and believed that America should create its own indigenous dwelling forms and not follow European styles. She met Mumford in 1929 in New York and the two influenced each other’s work and became romantically linked. In 1940 Bauer and Wurster were working at the University of California at Berkeley, Bauer as Rosenberg Professor of Public Social Service. Wurster and Bauer married that year. Alan Michelson completed his Ph.D. in art history, titled Towards a Regional Synthesis: The Suburban and Country Residences of William Wilson Wurster from Stanford University in 1993. 6 Correa, C. 1989, ‘Transfers and Transformations’ in Khan, H. Charles Correa: Architect in India, Butterworth Architecture, London, p.172 7 Oliver 1997, p.xxii 8 Wurster, W. 1945, ‘The Twentieth-Century Architect’ in Architecture: A Profession and a Career, Washington D.C., American Institute of Architects Press, Reprinted in Treib, M. (ed.) 1999, An Everyday Modernism: The Houses of William Wurster, University of California Press, California, p.230 9 Rudofsky, B. 1964, Architecture Without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture, Academy Editions, London, unpaginated 10 Rudofsky 1964, unpaginated 11 Ibid. During the mid to late twentieth century some of these technologies were translated into modern domestic design in the Bay Region. For example much of Charles Callister’s Berkeley architecture can be seen as having incorporated the screening, planning and structural technologies of Japanese vernacular architecture. Examples are shown in Chapter Three below. 12 Pavlides, E. 1997, ‘Approaches and Concepts: Architectural’ in Oliver (ed.) 1997, p.14 13 Ibid. pp.12-13 14 Ibid. p.12 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. pp.12-13 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Frampton, K. 1985, ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance’ in Postmodern Culture, H. Foster (ed.), Pluto Press, London and Sydney, p.314 21 Michelson, A. 1993, PhD Thesis: “Towards a Regional Synthesis: The Suburban And Country Residences Of William Wilson Wurster”, 1922-1964, Stanford University, order no. AAC 9403985, p.345

PREFACE page x INTRODUCTION

This thesis examines relationships between the work of American architectural writer and cultural critic Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) and his contemporary, San Francisco Bay Region architect William Wurster (1895-1973). Significant philosophical links between Mumford and Wurster become apparent through historical investigation of Mumford’s regionalism and Wurster’s regional approach to Modernist design. The notable early work of both men dates from the mid- 1920s: Mumford’s Sticks and Stones (1924) laid the foundations of his architectural regionalism and is centrally concerned with his study of the history and authentic development of American architecture, while Wurster’s Gregory Farmhouse (1927) is lauded as one of America’s most significant experiments in regional modern design, marking the beginning of the period in his work described by Marc Treib as “essays in modern vernacular.”1 Significantly, both Mumford and Wurster are shown to have been greatly interested in vernacular architecture. For Mumford it represented a crucial aspect of his study of American cultural history, as he sought examples of authentic continuity between America’s regional vernacular buildings and its nineteenth and twentieth century architecture.2 In 1947 Mumford wrote an article in The New Yorker in which he praised California’s “Bay Region Style” as an example of authentic regional development and named Wurster as its leading designer.3 America’s leading architectural Modernists of the mid-twentieth century vehemently opposed Mumford’s suggestion that the Bay Region’s architecture was a distinct regional form and ridiculed Bay Region domestic design.4 However despite this opposition, the theorists and buildings researched in this thesis contribute to the assertion that Bay Region architecture was an influential, progressive and contemporary Modernist school, that acknowledged historical precedents and developed as a uniquely regional architectural form suited to the culture and environment of America’s West Coast. This thesis further argues that Wurster’s architecture was influenced by general principals and specific prototypes from California’s vernacular buildings. For both Mumford and Wurster this interest in the vernacular is traced broadly to

INTRODUCTION Page 1 the legacy of founding studies in European and world architecture made by James Fergusson (1808-1886) and, more significantly, John Ruskin (1819- 1900).5 Ruskin’s nineteenth century political, moral and aesthetic studies of European Gothic building represented the foundation of the Arts and Crafts movement, the legacy of which profoundly influenced Mumford’s work and was a significant force in the development of Bay Region Style architecture. Two related arguments are also advanced, arising from the study of regionalism in the work of Mumford and Wurster. The first is that an important general dictum for modern architects arises from Mumford’s regionalism: that regional cultures will stagnate if they refuse to acknowledge the universal and, conversely, for modern architecture to progress, it must necessarily see local building traditions and culture as an influence equally as important as global practice.6 Secondly it is argued that Wurster’s work has been influential in showing how regional influences play a role in modern architectural practice. Vernacular sources informed Wurster’s modern domestic designs, at times by offering stylistic forms and building materials, but more generally by suggesting approaches to design and localised ways of dwelling that had developed in the Bay Region, providing a continuity of lived experience for him to build upon. The thesis is structured as two parallel historical studies, examining the influences and development first of Mumford’s life and work, and subsequently of Wurster’s. Chapter One provides an overview of Mumford’s historical placement, and describes how his writing was related to the philosophies of the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain, particularly to Ruskin, William Morris (1834-1896), Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) and William Lethaby (1857-1931). In Chapter Two the development of Mumford’s regionalism is examined in detail. Three important elements in this examination are: the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement; Mumford’s investigation of American architecture leading to his “discovery” of the Bay Region Style; and his opposition to the International Style, the dominant force in mid-twentieth century American architecture. Mumford’s impact upon later writing on regionalism is then examined through a brief analysis of the

INTRODUCTION Page 2 extent of his influence upon the work of later twentieth century Critical Regionalists Alexander Tzonis, Liane Lefaivre and Kenneth Frampton. A parallel historical analysis leading to William Wurster’s work is examined in Chapters Three and Four, through a study of the development of Bay Region architecture. In particular these chapters examine the influence upon Modernist Bay Region design of Californian vernacular architecture and the domestic work of the Bay Region architects who preceded and greatly influenced Wurster and his colleagues. Perhaps most significant among these was Bernard Maybeck (1862-1957). The important similarities between Mumford’s philosophical lineage and Wurster’s can be seen in the extent to which early twentieth century Bay Region architecture was shaped by the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement. This was expressed through Maybeck’s involvement in the Ruskin and Hillside Clubs, which espoused Romantic-era ideals and sought to establish regionally appropriate built development in the hills above Berkeley. In chapter four, Wurster’s work is examined in detail, and in particular it is explained how his own region and its vernacular architecture played a significant role in his design work. It is also argued in this chapter that Wurster’s legacy has been to show that regionalism and vernacular precedents are not distinct from Modernism, and that his application of these elements to the built environment of the Bay Region has influenced subsequent designers of modern domestic architecture. The final chapter provides a case study of one of Wurster’s most important buildings, the Gregory Farmhouse. In this chapter its regional and vernacular qualities are examined in detail.

Methodology Following a period of literature review and research of published sources, analysis was undertaken of the Bay Region’s vernacular and architect-designed buildings. Areas investigated included: San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, Piedmont, Mill Valley and surrounding areas; the Scotts Valley, and the regions south of it, including Pasatiempo and Big Sur; as well as Monterey and the rural district around Stockton. Site visits were made to the buildings of significant

INTRODUCTION Page 3 architects in the area, including Maybeck, Wurster, Charles Callister, Charles and Henry Greene and Julia Morgan among others. Interviews were important to the research methodology. Daniel Gregory, the grandson of Wurster’s clients Warren and Sadie Gregory supplied many personal anecdotes and historical details, and arranged an extensive site visit to the Gregory Farmhouse where measured drawings, photography and video footage were taken. Evie Gregory, a client of Wurster’s and the daughter-in-law of Warren and Sadie Gregory also provided invaluable personal details about Wurster and the early period of the Gregory Farmhouse. Research was undertaken in the archives of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA), Bancroft Research Library at the University of California, Berkeley Campus (UC Berkeley) and, most significantly, in the Environmental Design Archives, also on the UC Berkeley campus, which houses the Wurster Collection. Primary sources were examined and copied, including plans, letters, articles, transcripts of lectures and other documents donated to the college by Wurster towards the end of his career. Due to Wurster’s limited publication as a writer, journals and newspaper articles became an invaluable source of information, particularly as Wurster often expanded his theoretical position in interviews. Also particularly valid to this thesis was The New Yorker to which Mumford contributed for several decades, transcripts from the New York Museum of Modern Art symposium ‘What is Happening to Modern Architecture?’, the catalogue to the 1949 exhibition ‘The Domestic Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Region’ and journals such as Pencil Points, Architectural Record and Arts and Architecture. The Bay Region was chosen as a field of study because it represents a good example of a documented architectural form infused with strong regional and vernacular influences. Its links to important historical figures in regionalism and vernacular study in the U.S.A. and Britain make it uniquely suited to a historical investigation of the evolution of regional modern design. Furthermore Bay Region architecture had an important influence in the mid-century on Australian Modernist design, as is documented by Robyn Boyd within this thesis,

INTRODUCTION Page 4 and the lessons learned from the regional modernist designs of the region have continuing relevance to Australia’s quest for architectural self-definition.

INTRODUCTION Page 5 INTRODUCTION | NOTES

1 Treib, M. (ed.) 1999, An Everyday Modernism: The Houses of William Wurster, University of California Press, California, p.23 2 Although this thesis concentrates on Mumford’s architectural writing, his study of regionalism in America is far broader, covering American cultural artefacts in all areas of the arts. See particularly his books The Golden Day (1926), The Brown Decades (1931) and Sticks and Stones (1924). 3 Mumford, L. 1947, ‘The Sky Line’, in The New Yorker, October 11, 1947, pp.96-99 4 The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 1948, ‘What is Happening to Modern Architecture? A Symposium at the Museum of Modern Art’ in The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, Spring 1948: Vol. XV, No.3, Museum of Modern Art, New York, gives a transcript of the most significant altercation of the controversy between Mumford and America’s leading architectural Modernists. Two excellent contemporary analyses are given in Gail Fenske’s 1997 essay ‘Lewis Mumford, Henry-Russell Hitchcock and the Bay Region Style’ and Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre’s 2003 work ‘Critical Regionalism’. 5 Both were influenced by Augustus Pugin’s (1812-1852) writing, as mentioned in the text below. 6 Tzonis, A. & Lefaivre, L. 2003, Critical Regionalism, Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World, Prestel, Munich. advance a similar argument, which they claim was also indebted to Mumford’s work. See p.6 and pp.24-39.

INTRODUCTION Page 6 CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM

Despite an informal education and a career largely devoted to non-academic and journalistic cultural criticism, Lewis Mumford has gained stature as one of the most respected intellectual voices in twentieth century America.1 Mumford wrote over thirty books and hundreds of articles that contributed to the study of American society and culture between the 1920s and 1980s, mainly on the subjects of architecture, literature, art and technology. His writing on regionalism developed over several decades and has fundamentally influenced subsequent architects, planners and theorists. Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, the founders of the Critical Regionalist school, have also expressed an explicit indebtedness to Mumford’s work in the development of their regionalist philosophy.2 This chapter examines the most significant influences upon the development of Mumford’s regionalism and discusses how the vernacular, ancient and traditional architecture of Europe and Asia has been relevant to his work and to that of four of his significant predecessors. The first of these four is nineteenth century Scottish architect and architectural historian James Fergusson. Fergusson was influential in promoting the idea that within the traditional buildings of pre-industrial societies (which this thesis accepts as vernacular buildings) the true and pure principles of architecture may be discerned.3 While not overtly aligned with the Ruskinian tradition in which we will place Mumford, Fergusson was nevertheless among the most widely read of nineteenth century writers on architecture. Hanno Kruft, editor of A History of Architectural Theory: From Vitruvius to the Present (1994) described Fergusson’s Illustrated Handbook of Architecture (1855) as “the standard architectural history of the Victorian age.”4 Remnants of Fergusson’s ideas will be seen to be present in Ruskin’s work, in that of Arts and Crafts writers Morris and Lethaby and in Mumford’s own work also. Fergusson’s architectural analysis was overtly scientific, which contrasted sharply with Ruskin’s anti-rationalism.5 Ruskin had argued in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) that only a moral or spiritual attitude to architecture was

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 7 appropriate since “every subject should surely, at a period like the present, be taken up in this spirit, or not at all.”6 Mumford’s writing contains an interesting tension between the rationality of Modernism and the spiritual approach he adopted from his Arts and Crafts antecedents. This Arts and Crafts approach, founded in Ruskin’s work, held that the Gothic period represented architectural and social models worthy of emulating. Mumford, by contrast, remained forward-looking, with a largely favourable view of technology’s ability to redeem. While he retained an appreciation for pre-industrial architectural forms, it was within a broader regional philosophy that he understood them as precedents. As will be expanded upon in the following chapter, this allowed him to use the universal themes of Modernism to discuss architecture, without forgoing his belief in the importance of the localised, the cultural and the historical in the development of vernacular and regional forms. Mumford’s writing was greatly influenced by a socialist tradition that led from Ruskin’s work. The writers in this tradition were not just vociferous about humanitarian concerns but fiercely anti-establishment and predisposed to action. Susan Zlotnick described the Ruskinian tradition’s reaction to the economic rationalism of nineteenth century industrial England: Carlyle, Ruskin and Dickens belong to this tradition of humanitarian concern. Faced with the innumerable examples of human wretchedness associated with early industrialism—from child labor, to urban squalor, to unsafe workplaces—these social critics called for immediate intervention, while the political economists seemed willing to accept misery in the short term because they believed that an unregulated market would benefit everyone in the long run.7

This tradition was also one with an extreme position against modernity and mechanisation. That Mumford, whose career spanned much of the twentieth century, was its representative during the ascendancy and climax of the Modernist movement created a tension throughout his entire work, as he struggled to unite the philosophical debt he owed to a Romantic and anti- rationalist movement with his wholehearted support for the ideals of Modernism.8

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 8 Moreover this tradition was focused not on the aesthetic, but the moral, spiritual and social study of architecture. The idea that architecture could be made up of intangible qualities, social constructs, historical and regional principles was assiduously continued by Mumford, and was a key element in his writing on regionalism. It was in this element of the continuation of Ruskin’s tradition that he was most opposed by the proponents of International Style Modernism, who reduced Mumford’s arguments about distinct regional types entirely to stylistic features, ignoring Mumford’s regional arguments and his notion that a continuity of spirit, not of style, may exist between architectural periods.9

Nineteenth century studies of world architecture Mumford’s examination of vernacular American architecture may be seen as extending from studies of Gothic and world architecture from the 1830s in Britain. The nineteenth century British interest in Gothic architecture was largely founded in architect and writer Augustus Pugin’s work from the 1830s. This interest was subsequently developed and greatly popularised by Ruskin and Fergusson in their contemporaneous studies during the mid-nineteenth century. Ruskin studied Gothic building traditions and saw in their construction methods a celebration of the humanity of craftsmen and their society’s pre-capitalist moral values.10 Krishan Kumar in his introduction to William Morris’s News From Nowhere wrote: Ruskin, who was probably the single most important influence on Morris, taught him that architecture was a moral and social thing - that it expressed the spirit of an age, and of the lives of the ordinary people. It was an index of the health or diseased state of society. Gothic art and architecture, Ruskin held, as opposed to classical and Renaissance forms, celebrated the skills of the ordinary artisan, his joy and creativity in labour.11

In Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851-3) he expanded upon the political and moral themes that had been first introduced into architectural writing by Pugin.12 Introducing this moral investigation Ruskin wrote in The Seven Lamps of Architecture that every branch of human endeavour becomes:

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 9 the actual expression of some ultimate nerve or fibre of the mighty laws which govern the moral world. However mean or inconsiderable the act, there is something in the well doing of it, which has fellowship with the noblest forms of manly virtue; and the truth, decision, and temperance, which we reverently regard as honourable conditions of the spiritual being, have a representative or derivative influence over the works of the hand, the movements of the frame, and the action of the intellect.

And as thus every action, down even to the drawing of a line or utterance of a syllable, is capable of a peculiar dignity in the manner of it, which we sometimes express by saying it is truly done (as a line or tone is true), so also it is capable of dignity still higher in the motive of it. For there is no action so slight, nor so mean, but it may be done to a great purpose, and ennobled therefore; nor is any purpose so great but that slight actions may help it, and may be so done as to help it much, most especially that chief of all purposes, the pleasing of God.13

Fergusson, whose work was in many ways related to both Ruskin’s and Pugin’s nevertheless differed markedly in both his method and conclusions. He advanced his historical and ethnographic study of architecture by scientific method, having taken advantage of Britain’s colonisation of India to travel throughout the region in the 1830s and document its architecture. His work contains a detailed and previously unattainable body of information on the architecture of Eastern Asia, and particularly the Indian sub-continent. Kruft described Fergusson as “a Victorian positivist” and “a thinker who had a system of schemas, categories and tables to hand with which he could absorb any concept. He developed a universal aesthetic and produced a points system by which, by means of three aesthetic categories, the value of a work of art could be judged.”14 Fergusson’s method was premised on an enticing (almost Gnostic) a- priori assumption that traditional exotic architecture was based upon “true principles” that were absent from his own century’s Classical revival styles of architecture. Moreover he believed that Europe too had once possessed such knowledge; he wrote in his A History of Architecture in All Countries: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day (1865): …not only was I able to extend my personal observations to the examples found in almost all countries between China and the Atlantic shore, but I lived familiarly among a people who were still practicing their traditional art

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 10 on the same principles as those which guided the architects of the middle ages in the production of similar but scarcely more beautiful or original works. With these antecedents I found myself in possession of a considerable amount of information regarding buildings which had not previously been described, and—what I considered of more value—of an insight into the theory of the art, which was even more novel.15

What is fascinating about Fergusson is his comparative obscurity compared to the extent of his influence on subsequent architectural writing and the esteem with which his work was regarded in the nineteenth century. Ruskin wrote of Fergusson in the Stones of Venice: “I hope to find in him a noble ally, ready to join with me in war upon affectation, falsehood, and prejudice, of every kind: I have derived much instruction from his most interesting work, and I hope for much more from its continuation.”16 Yet Ruskin was concerned to attenuate the similarities between his work and Fergusson’s and he devoted an appendix in The Stones of Venice passionately refuting the link. In the appendix he wrote disparagingly of Fergusson’s method: “But there is no end to the fallacies and confusions of Mr. Fergusson’s arrangement. It is a perfect entanglement of gun- cotton, and explodes into vacuity wherever one holds a light to it.”17 Despite the fact that Fergusson’s Victorian prejudices and reliance on scientific method eventually rendered his work anachronistic, his influence, or at least the legacy of his ideas, can be traced throughout subsequent writing in architectural theory. Compare for instance the quote from Fergusson above with Mumford’s writing in 1939: “Some of the finest modern work I have seen – in domestic design at all events – is what has been done in the last five years in Hawaii and the Pacific Northwest; it is based not on any copying of traditional oriental forms but upon an understanding of the principles behind them.”18 In his opposition to the glorification of Gothic Revival architecture Fergusson was at odds with much of his age. He chided the architects of Gothic buildings (whether Gothic or Gothic Revival) for missing “one of the most obvious and most important elements of architectural design,”19 that being, for Fergusson, the use of massive materials to create grandeur. Rather, he thought they used smaller materials which displayed their much less important skills in construction. He also

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 11 expressed a reaction against reviving the Gothic in terms that were almost exactly those Mumford would advance against Ruskin and Pugin a century later. Fergusson wrote in 1865 that when a reaction finally came to Europe’s previous 300 years of “copying classical forms…it was not, unfortunately in the direction of freedom; but towards a more servile imitation of another style, which—whether better or worse in itself—was not a style of our age...”20 Compare this with Mumford’s later criticism (discussed again in Chapter Two), which argued: “Pugin and Ruskin…sought to give to some moment in the development of Gothic architecture, such as the style of Thirteenth Century Lombardy which Ruskin favoured, the same stereotyped authority that Palladianism had claimed for the Classic.”21 Despite his admiration for ornament, Fergusson also advanced many arguments that seem to anticipate those of Modernism. He believed that function should guide design, writing that true architecture “consisted in designing a building so as to be most suitable and convenient for the purposes required.”22 Another idea advanced by Fergusson was the general dictum that principle was important to design but that style was not: “the wigwam grew into a hut, the hut into a house, the house into a palace…but it never lost the original idea of a shelter.”23 Or indeed his counsel (in a manner of speech we may compare with Wurster’s plainness in later chapters) to those who questioned where to look for guidance if not to the Gothic, “‘our own national style’…The obvious answer, that it is to be found in the exercise of common sense, where all the rest of the world have found it...”24 Furthermore the Orientalism that so influenced America’s nineteenth and early twentieth century architects, such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Bay Region architects, Bernard Maybeck, Charles and Henry Greene or Harwell Hamilton Harris owes much to Fergusson’s pioneering studies and drawings of the buildings of Asia.25 Fergusson’s writing, although thoroughly Victorian, was strangely prescient. When Mumford, in Sticks and Stones wrote of the settlement of New England as a period of authentic historical and regional architectural development when “good building was almost universal”26 Fergusson had again

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 12 pre-empted him, albeit with Victorian ethnographic values, arguing that within authentic architectural traditions: …where European civilization or its influences have not yet permeated…not only the Egyptian, the Greek, and the Gothic architects, but even the indolent and half-civilized inhabitants of India, the stolid Tartars of Thibet and China, and the savage Mexicans, succeeded in erecting great and beautiful buildings. No race, however rude or remote, has failed, when working on this system to produce buildings which are admired by all who behold them…27

Beyond some general principles they held in common however, Fergusson differed substantially from the Ruskinian tradition in which Mumford is placed. The socialism that underpinned this tradition, as well as its understanding that architecture must be a moral and social study, are absent from Fergusson’s work. In his rational and scientific scheme, and his conception of architecture, the roles of architect, builder, engineer or stonemason are entirely distinct, and, except for that of the architect, purely mechanical. Fergusson claimed: The art of the builder consists in merely heaping the materials together, so as to attain the desired end in the speediest and readiest fashion…the art…of the engineer consists in selecting the best and most appropriate materials…and using these in the most scientific manner, so as to ensure an economical but satisfactory result. Where the engineer leaves off, the art of the architect begins. His object is to arrange the materials of the engineer, not so much with regard to economical as to artistic effects, and by light and shade, and outline to produce a form that in itself shall be permanently beautiful. He then adds ornament, which by its meaning doubles the effect of the disposition he has just made, and by its elegance throws a charm over the whole composition.28

He claimed that “this division of labour is essential to success, and was always practised where art was a reality.”29 Fergusson’s system is perhaps realistic and more descriptive of modern building methods than the appeals to medieval society made by Ruskin and Morris, yet to those Romantic-era followers of Ruskin and Carlyle there could have been little so repugnant as such a vindication of modern society and particularly its concomitant technologies such as the division of labour. Indeed Gothic architecture was valued by Ruskin precisely because it represented the antithesis of the industrial institution of

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 13 divided labour. For Ruskin, division of labour represented a monumental assault on human dignity. He wrote, “We have much studied and much perfected of late the great civilised invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. It is not truly speaking the labour that is divided; but the men; divided into mere segments of men – broken into small fragments and crumbs of life.”30 Where Fergusson devalued the workman’s contribution to architecture, Ruskin and his followers saw Gothic building as celebrations of the liberated worker. In Gothic cathedrals Ruskin praised the “fantastic ignorance of those old sculptors… [the] ugly goblins and formless monsters” and cautions not to mock them “for they are the signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being…which must be the first aim of all Europe at this day to regain for her children.”31

The influence of John Ruskin’s philosophy and regionalism Mumford’s influences were extremely broad and, while this thesis concentrates on his British philosophical antecedents, American thinkers and social philosophers were also of great importance to him. In particular Mumford admired writer Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and philosopher and environmentalist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), as well as his colleagues on the influential journal The Dial. These included sociologist Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) (whose work is later analysed in this thesis for its influence on Wurster’s Gregory Farmhouse) and writer and critic, Van Wyck Brooks (1886- 1963). This chapter however explores how Mumford’s work was in large part prefigured by a series of writers in Britain sharing Mumford’s profound interest in architecture and (perhaps with the exception of Fergusson) an indebtedness to John Ruskin. Mumford’s work has been highly influential among academic philosophers, historians, architects and the public, yet, like Ruskin, he was a self- appointed critic of the arts, architecture and culture rather than an academic philosopher of any identifiable tradition. His association with Ruskin is perhaps not surprising given that Mumford’s education largely consisted in browsing in the New York Public Library. Ruskin’s influence in the decades around the turn of the

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 14 century would have been difficult to avoid in general reading: his writing largely defined the British Romantic movement, has arguably shaped the policies of modern Labour parties and greatly influenced diverse figures such as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, Marcel Proust, Bernard Maybeck and George Bernard Shaw.32 He was also the greatest intellectual influence upon the Arts and Crafts movement and Lethaby and Morris, leaders within that movement, were, in turn, important influences upon Mumford. Mumford is placed within a unique tradition of socialist polymaths: American cultural historian David Shi called him “a spiritual descendant of Emerson and Thoreau, Morris and Ruskin.”33 These writers may perhaps today be loosely considered environmentalists, although their intellectual base was far broader than the term implies and “public intellectuals” is a more apt label. Ruskin, as founder of this tradition, is particularly difficult to classify. He was an artist, art critic, social theorist, political scientist and architectural writer, contributing significantly to each field. Like Mumford he was a public intellectual and not an academic specialist; Kruft described him as a “utopian theorist and man of letters.”34 He was perhaps most greatly influenced by Scottish writer and social critic Thomas Carlyle, whose dislike of modernity and strong associations with German Romanticism contributed to Ruskin’s anti-modern and anti- rationalist position.35 Michael Lowy and Robert Sayre, authors of Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity (2001) described Carlyle as “the only one of his [Ruskin’s] predecessors with which he identified completely and whom he venerated unreservedly…only Carlyle manifested an opposition to modernity that was as violent, as pure, and as absolute as Ruskin’s own.”36 This trait was passed unadulterated from Ruskin to Morris, who wrote “…apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilisation.”37 Mumford too inherited a dislike for modernity, but not with the passion of his predecessors, and he maintained a belief that the modern age could yet produce utopian living conditions. Broad influences such as the Bible, Joseph Turner’s artwork, nature, poetry and European architecture figure at least as prominently in Ruskin’s prose

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 15 as does any particular thinker or philosophical tradition and the breadth of Ruskin’s themes and influences is well summed-up by John Rosenberg, editor of The Genius of John Ruskin (1963), who exclaimed that: “one cannot read Ruskin for very long without a sense of bafflement, perhaps of rage, but always of revelation…his works are as burdened with contradiction as experience itself.”38 Although not strictly aligned with any tradition, Ruskin may be compared broadly with nineteenth century socialists Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895). His questioning of the legitimacy of rationalism (in an age of broad public acceptance that progress was both inevitable and virtuous) associates him with nascent European anti-rationalist philosophies and movements which emerged following Emmanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) work, particularly the German Romantic tradition, and German anti-rationalist philosophers such as Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) and Franz Brentano (1838-1917) precursors to Edmund Husserl’s (1859-1938) phenomenological philosophy and the existential philosophies of the twentieth century.39 However while sharing certain traits with such German philosophers, Ruskin and the writers of the British Arts and Crafts and Romantic movements tended to be general and political, writing practical and popular works aimed at a non-academic audience. Most of Mumford’s immediate influences, including Morris, and Lethaby, lay within this tradition. Lethaby was one of a number of mentor-figures with whom Mumford initiated correspondences which continued throughout his life. Two others, also indebted to Ruskin, included American architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) and Scottish scientist and writer Patrick Geddes (1854-1932). Geddes, a Scottish biologist and botanist is colloquially known as the “professor of things in general” and was perhaps the most formative influence on Mumford in his early career, particularly given Geddes’ generalist approach. Essentially an environmentalist he described himself as a landscape architect, introducing the term to Britain. He was described by philosopher Monroe C. Beardsley as inadequately studied but nevertheless an “extraordinary Victorian” who “deserves to be recorded along with Morris as a follower of Ruskin, but one who struck out on his own in many directions.”40 For Mumford, both Geddes and Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928), the

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 16 founder of the British Garden City Movement and another follower of Ruskin, were extremely important writers who served as intellectual role models.41 Author Robert Wojtowicz argued in his 1996 book Lewis Mumford and American Modernism: “Mumford never finished college, but in Geddes and Howard, he found the direction he needed in life.”42 Mumford’s emergence as an intellectual public figure may be attributed to his discovery of intellectuals in a tradition following Ruskin, who were generalists and not academic specialists. The writers in the Ruskinian tradition in which we identify Mumford have historically had a regional emphasis. Ruskin had written passionately on regionalism and the importance of regional distinctions, believing that architecture connected a culture to its environment through time. Miller wrote that Mumford learned “from John Ruskin that every stone has a tongue and every tongue tells a story.”43 Ruskin read the character of a people through their architecture: “It is true” he wrote, “greatly and deeply true, that the architecture of the north is rude and wild…I believe it is in this very character that it deserves our profoundest reverence.”44 Regional architectural differences were important to Ruskin because regional differences in building reflected the character of the people. The characteristics of the Gothic builder he distilled as “1. Savageness or Rudeness. 2. Love of Change. 3. Love of nature. 4. Disturbed imagination 5. Obstinacy. 6. Generosity.”45 He wrote lyrically of regional differences and, to Ruskin, industrial processes only removed local character from buildings and detracted from the regionally developed characteristics of society. Mumford continued Ruskin’s argument; however his regionalism represented more than just a modernisation of Ruskin’s philosophy. Miller commented that Mumford “…was one of the first critics to break down that [Ruskin's] false distinction between architecture and building, and to open our eyes to the beauty and worth of vernacular forms.”46 Where Ruskin had concentrated only on what he believed to be “architecture” which he distinguished from building or engineering. Mumford, whose architectural regionalism examined the entire built environment, branded this element of Ruskin’s architectural analysis “a downright false one.”47

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 17 The most significant Arts and Crafts figure to follow Ruskin was William Morris, whose writing also contained passionate regionalist arguments. While he absorbed Ruskin’s writing completely, he also expanded his architectural analysis to the study of non-Gothic domestic vernacular British forms. He wrote in 1895 of his own house, Kelmscott Manor: so much has the old house grown up out of the soil and the lives of those that lived on it; needing no grand office-architect, with no great longing for anything else than correctness, and to be like Julius Caesar; but some thin thread of tradition, a half-anxious sense of the delight of the meadow and acre and wood and river; a certain amount (not too much let us hope) of common sense, a liking for making materials serve ones turn, and perhaps at bottom some little grain of sentiment. This I think was what went to the making of the old house; might we not manage to find some sympathy for all that from henceforward; or must we but shrink before the Philistine with one, Alas that it must perish!48

Morris’s greatest architectural delight was the only house he ever commissioned, The Red House (1859) (Figure 1, Figure 2), which he devised as his “earthly paradise.” It was designed by his friend, Arts and Crafts architect Philip Webb (1831-1915). The cost of the house forced Morris to sell it within five years,

however his successful Figure 1: Philip Webb, The Red House (1859), Bexley Heath manufacturing firm grew from the experience of constructing and furnishing the building. To suit Morris’s love of hand crafted and well made things and hatred of machine made things, each piece was designed and manufactured by Morris and his acquaintances. Friend and biographer John William Mackail recalled in his The Life of William Morris (1899): “not a chair, or table, or bed; not a cloth or paper hanging for the walls;

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 18 nor tiles to line fireplaces or passages; nor a curtain or a candlestick; nor a jug to hold wine or a glass to drink it out of; but had to be reinvented…to escape the ugliness of the current article.”49 The house was made of red brick, unusual enough in 1859 for the dwelling to be named for it. The intention in the design was to create a modern and informal dwelling based on craft principles, however without referencing or mimicking historical styles. Faia and Lester Wertheimer in Architectural History (2004) wrote: “the importance of [the Red House] lay in its informality, its absence of decoration and its simple vernacular. With their emphasis on basic form, sound materials, and good craftsmanship, Morris and Webb anticipated the Modern movement by at least fifty years.”50 Morris had also explored the regionalist idea of a garden city, where the rural and city functions were combined. His model, following Ruskin, was

based upon an Figure 2: Philip Webb, The Red House (1859), idealisation of social Bexley Heath, floor plan bonds and city planning from the Middle Ages. His vision of London as a garden city is laid out in News From Nowhere (1890)51: The soapworks with their smoke-vomiting chimneys were gone, the engineers’ works gone, and no sound of riveting and hammering came down the west wind from Thorneycrofts…both shores had a line of very pretty houses, low and not large, standing back a little way from the river; they were mostly built of red brick…and looked, above all, comfortable, and as if they were, so to say, alive and sympathetic with the life of the dwellers in them. There was a continuous garden in front of them going down to the water’s edge, in which flowers were now blooming luxuriantly...52

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 19 This utopian vision was directly threatened by modernity. Morris blamed industrialists, the market economy, the power of the machine and modern industrial methods for environmental degradation and the devaluation of humanity. For him they were responsible for the “short-sighted reckless brutality of squalor that so disgraces our intricate civilisation.”53 This sentiment is carried forcefully into American writing through the work of Van Wyck Brooks, who greatly influenced Mumford early in his career. Wyck Brooks wrote disparagingly of the destructive methods of European settlement of the U.S.A., in terms Mumford was to reproduce almost verbatim in Sticks and Stones, describing development for profit as the antithesis of authentic regional development.54

William Lethaby: Bridging the Arts and Crafts Movement and modernity As an architect in Britain roughly contemporaneous with Maybeck, Lethaby worked during a unique period in history, participating in and contributing to the Arts and Crafts movement at a time when its philosophy was becoming untenable. Like Mumford, Lethaby was cautiously optimistic about technology while maintaining a respect for the ancient, handmade and vernacular. Gillian Naylor in her book The Arts and Crafts Movement argued that Lethaby had tried to “reconcile two traditions – the rational and the romantic.”55 Fergusson must also be recognised as a major influence upon Lethaby’s work. Fergusson’s books were standard reference works throughout the nineteenth century, and Lethaby deferred frequently to Fergusson in matters of fact.56 They differed absolutely in their view of the source of architectural inspiration: for Lethaby it was nature, whereas Fergusson claimed “no true building was ever designed to look like anything in either the animal, vegetable or mineral kingdoms.”57 However despite differing on its source and meaning, both Lethaby and Fergusson viewed the world’s vernacular architecture as providing fundamental axioms that should guide architects in their practice. Where Fergusson had discussed the true principles of architecture Lethaby claimed: “certain ideas common in the architecture of many lands and religions, the

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 20 purpose behind structure and form which may be called the esoteric principles of architecture.”58 Lethaby’s Architecture, Mysticism and Myth (1891/92) is, like Fergusson’s earlier A History of World Architecture (1867), an attempt to document aspects of global vernacular built form, and is distinguished by its emphasis on the symbolism behind buildings rather than aesthetic or formal description. Lethaby later described his book as “the most ignorant work ever published”59 but maintained its underlying thesis for a new work, Architecture, Nature and Magic (first published 1928), a quarter of a century later. This underlying thesis, as Lethaby explained it, was that: …the development of building practice and ideas of the world structure acted and reacted on one another…[and] beyond this specific and direct interaction, Nature was further the source of much of what is called architectural decoration in a way that is not recognised in the histories, or attributed to ‘aesthetic design’, whatever that may be…60

Echoing Fergusson’s reverence for vernacular design principles that had evolved over millennia, Lethaby despised the architectural individualism and sham styles of his age describing the advancement of architectural styles as an end in themselves as “the terror.”61 He argued that architects needed instead to look to the pure forms, the “types ready to hand.”62 Like both Ruskin and Fergusson, Lethaby believed that beauty in buildings arose from adherence to utility: “that is what we have to get back into our buildings – high functional beauty.”63 Architectural writer Trevor Garnham in his 1993 book on Lethaby’s building Melsetter Figure 3: William Lethaby, Melsetter House (Figure 3), an important example of Arts House, 1898, Orkney

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 21 and Crafts architecture, suggested that Lethaby’s had used vernacular precedents in the design, however not as an attempt to create or revive a style: The selection of a familiar vernacular model should not be seen as an arts and crafts style, for that would simply continue the 19th century’s action replay of history going nowhere, but establishing a guiding framework within which the work of craftsmen might begin to resonate with these deeper meanings.64

To Lethaby, building must exist in a continuum to have any meaning. In Architecture (1911) Lethaby stated: “No art that is only one man deep is worth much; it should be a thousand men deep, we cannot forget historical knowledge, nor would we if we might.”65 Lethaby looked continually to the origins of architecture through ethnology, anthropology and mythology to provide alternative sources from which contemporary designers could explore meaning in architecture, and restore an authenticity to architecture beyond the restraints of historicism. In his 1911 work Architecture Lethaby wrote: ancient architecture had a meaning and a message; it was religious, magical, symbolic and cosmological. It is the large content of it in these senses that makes it quite a different thing from the commercial grandeurs in the ecclesiastical and department-store ‘styles’ of the present day which we call by the same word, architecture.66

Lethaby believed that symbolism could strengthen the relationship between nature and culture although he thought the relationship was being eroded by the emerging dominance of a scientific perspective, arguing “…the passing of the old ages of magic into the ages of science has opened a widening abyss between them and us and a great gulf is thus set between ancient magic architecture and modern scientific buildings.”67 He believed ancient buildings were designed around an understanding of their purpose and he was concerned that architecture was becoming guided by aesthetic principles rather than by an understanding of content and meaning accessible to a majority of people. Lethaby represented a turning point in the Arts and Crafts tradition, and it can perhaps be attributed to his struggle to reconcile Romantic and rational philosophies that Mumford was able to maintain certain Arts and Crafts ideals while remaining above all a Modernist thinker. Michael Saler wrote in The Avant-

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 22 Garde in Interwar England (1999): “Lethaby was the most influential of Ruskin and Morris's apostles in the early years of the new century… [he] propagated Ruskin’s definition of art as the joyful expression of the individual’s spirit. He helped restore the medieval workshop tradition, with its emphasis on fitness for purpose and truth to nature…his own attempts to train designers for modern industry at the Central School became the model for the more successful German industrial design movement.”68 The Bauhaus school is central to this German movement, and it is ironic that Lethaby should have been influential upon Mumford as well as on the Bauhaus, which prefigured much of International Style architecture.69 What this perhaps shows is the fragility of the divide between Arts and Crafts philosophy and Modernist philosophy. Since the time of Fergusson and Ruskin the “Modernist” ideas of fitness to function, truth to materials and cautious use of ornament had been present in architectural theory. While Lethaby followed Ruskin and Morris in his commitment to the Arts and Crafts movement, he also recognised that the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement could be applied to modernity, and reluctantly abandoned the idea of recreating medieval conditions. Architectural historian Shams Naga argued that this was a difficult position for Lethaby to take, claiming that it represented a dilemma for the remaining Arts and Crafts thinkers of the twentieth century. While architects like Lethaby “were rooted in nineteenth century Romanticism, they preached rationalism which caused much controversy. They are considered on the one hand prophets of the Modern movement and on the other traitors to the Romantic movement.”70 After William Morris’s death in 1896 Lethaby became the founding principal of the Central School of Arts and Crafts and a leading advocate for the Arts and Crafts movement. Lethaby’s connection to Morris and Ruskin can be most easily recognised in their commonality of thought regarding architecture and labour. Lethaby wrote that “labour, work, art really make up what should be one body of human service.”71 However, unlike Ruskin and Morris, Lethaby witnessed the twentieth century’s rapid adoption of technological change and the eventual catastrophe of World War One. Garnham summarised Lethaby’s

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 23 predicament: “during the 1890s we can see [him] emerge as a major architectural critic, witness his mind struggling to reconcile the contradictions tearing at the age, to hold onto his love of crafts, to foster his interest in symbolism and to pursue the obligation he felt to the rationalist, scientific age.”72 Even by the late 1920s, despite his complete intellectual acceptance of the realities of the Modernist period, Lethaby was never really able to break with the past or deny the value of craft. He says in the introduction to Architecture, Nature and Magic (1928): however desirable it might be to continue the old ways or revert to past types, it is, I feel on reviewing the attempts that have been made, impossible. We have passed into a scientific age, and the old practical arts, produced instinctively belong to an entirely different era…In saying that the old ways are closed to us, please do think I would have it so if it might be otherwise; my own mind rests with the poetries of ancient art and I am altogether inadequate for the methods of science. However, I do see that science has a new magic wonder of its own, and that the manufacture of sham antiquity in our buildings is vain and silly.73

While Lethaby came to acknowledge and respect the place of the machine he remained a Romantic figure continuing Ruskin’s opposition to such modern necessities as divided labour, and never let science’s successes blind him to its failings. Where Lethaby perhaps saw a defeated Arts and Crafts tradition, the younger American, Mumford, was more inclined to genuinely accept the challenge of the age.

The development of Mumford’s regionalism Mumford made valuable contributions to urban and regional planning in his extensive architectural writing, which included among other books Sticks and Stones (1924), The South in Architecture (1942) and Roots of Contemporary American Architecture (1952) and several decades as the architectural writer for The New Yorker. His overwhelming vision was for the development of authentic American architecture in an America made up not just of large cities, but of regions planned according to local environmental conditions, developing in accordance with local history and traditions.74 And yet in a departure from Ruskin

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 24 and Morris, his regional emphasis should not to be thought of as pastoral. Mumford was fully cognisant of the city as the dwelling place of modernity and, unlike the writers of the Arts and Crafts movement, he envisioned realistic rather than utopian responses to modern urban development within his regionalism, for example his response to the urban and suburban architecture of the Bay Region.75 The Arts and Crafts movement’s socialist scepticism of a market economy as a basis for society remained an element of Mumford’s writing throughout his life, however his recognition of Bay Region architecture as a positive regional model is a good example of his departure from the Arts and Crafts tradition. Far from utopian or socialist, Bay Region architecture was a school of predominantly urban, even suburban, upper middle-class, Modernist architecture consisting of mainly detached dwellings in expensive locations. Patrick Geddes also had a profound influence on Mumford’s early interest in regionalism and the possibility for a regional modern city. Bruce Pfieffer and Robert Wojtowicz, Mumford’s biographers in Frank Lloyd Wright & Lewis Mumford: Thirty Years of Correspondence (2001), described Geddes as “the Scottish polymath who proposed an evolutionary and regional approach to modern society.” Geddes was the role model from whom Mumford developed his focus on the modern city as the locus of cultural and intellectual life. After reading Geddes, Mumford began documenting New York, following its transport routes, noting its geography and describing its architecture in detail, from major buildings through to owner-built structures.76 Early in his career Mumford became the secretary and spokesman of the Regional Planning Association of America, which he joined in 1923. Pfieffer and Wojtowicz described the association and its activities as: a loosely organized group of architects, planners, economists and writers who embraced Geddes’ regionalism and Howard’s garden city model as a two-pronged solution to the metropolitan sprawl overtaking the East Coast of the United States. Over the next decade, the association effectively combined Geddes’ and Howard’s ideas to form the “regional city,” a self- contained community that was of moderate density yet closely balanced with its rural surroundings.77

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 25 The vehemence of Mumford’s anti-technological tone in his early writing, for instance in the first edition of Sticks and Stones, can be seen to have been prefigured by arguments stretching from Carlyle and Ruskin to Morris and Geddes. These ideas had lost much of their potency by the early decades of the twentieth century and, later in his career, Mumford re-evaluated his early work, that had been written under the strong influence of Geddes. For instance, in the preface to the 1954 edition of Sticks and Stones he noted “…in the spring of 1923, meeting Patrick Geddes in New York for the first time, I fell under the spell of his sharp critical reaction against our machine-ridden civilisation.”78 Although Mumford evidently matured beyond his early influences, Ruskin’s ideas and those of his many followers represented recurring themes throughout his work. Mumford may have broken with Arts and Crafts tradition by engaging with the Modernist movement and by his fascination with the possibilities of machine technology, however he remained in part a Romantic figure, troubled by the actual and potential evils that technology represented. While his ever-developing regionalism was forward looking rather than seeking a return to past ages, he never abandoned the idea of the garden city, although Mumford biographer Donald Miller highlighted Mumford’s extreme disappointment of the results when he saw the actual Garden Cities, Letchworth and Welwyn, that had been built in Britain.79 Although a Modernist, Mumford dissociated himself from the International Style, which he saw as a rationalist and theory-driven approach to architecture. He genuinely believed that many of the world’s social and environmental problems could be solved by the type of non-positivist scientific approach suggested by Geddes and other writers. Casey Blake, summarising Mumford’s influences in his introduction to Mumford’s Art and Technics, wrote: Convinced that Geddes's holistic approach to evolution and social development opened the door to a reintegration of science and the humanities, and to a postindustrial "organic" culture, Mumford began a correspondence with his new mentor in 1917…At the same time, Mumford read widely in the work of such thinkers as William James, John Dewev, Henri Bergson, Peter Kropotkin, and Alfred North Whitehead who, like Geddes, were promoting a nonpositivist scientific method that emphasized

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 26 the subjective elements of human consciousness. Mumford’s antipositivism also drew him to political and cultural critics of industrial capitalism, including the English romantics and Fabians— John Ruskin, William Morris, George Bernard Shaw, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb…80

In the twentieth century Mumford had no choice but to accept Modernity and as his regionalism developed it increasingly insisted upon architecture’s openness to influences from past and present, and local and universal. He argued in Technics and Civilisation (1934) that human beings could no longer hope to exist as pre-machine beings. Rather the race should look to a new societal model, rather than attempt to resurrect an idealised past as Morris had done. Society could no longer hope to undo technical progress but must embrace, understand and move beyond it; constructing a future humanity rather than a past one: …our capacity to go beyond the machine rests upon our power to assimilate the machine. Until we have absorbed the lessons of objectivity, impersonality, neutrality, the lessons of the mechanical realm we cannot go further in our development toward the more richly organic, the more profoundly human.81

A central failing of the Arts and Crafts movement had been its blinkered approach to technology, which rendered the movement unable to continue into the twentieth century. Gillian Naylor wrote “Theirs was a personal and subjective approach, and although they came to appreciate intellectually the fact of a machine as the normal tool of our civilisation they were unable or unwilling to absorb [these] lessons of objectivity.”82 Mumford’s regionalism developed as a response to the Romantic tradition’s inability to engage with the modern period, and conversely, the inability of most Modernists to accept the ancient, vernacular, traditional and local as meaningful and relevant to modern culture. Technological advances in communication and transportation in the twentieth century realised the idea of a global or universal culture, however Mumford, far from fearing universal culture’s potential to overrun the regional, instead embraced the modern period as a time when local and regional elements of cultures could flourish, enriching universal

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 27 culture through diverse regional influences. His regionalism was a philosophy intended to show that Modernist architecture was not a style awaiting classification, but rather that it was a way of proceeding. To him, Modernism meant building the appropriate building for the location, learning from the local and the universal and embracing the ideals of both Romantic and rational traditions.

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1 Mumford spent some time in formal tertiary education at New York’s City College, starting in 1912, however he found academic specialisation limiting, and embarked instead on a course of self-directed education, primarily in the New York Public Library. For a discussion of his acceptance as an intellectual voice in America see, for instance, Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout editors of The City Reader (3rd edition 2003, Routledge New York, p.92), who refer to Mumford as “the last great public intellectual.” 2 A discussion in the following chapter contains detailed references to Mumford’s influence upon Critical Regionalism. 3 See for example Fergusson’s introduction in Fergusson, J. 1865, A History of Architecture in All Countries: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day, John Murray, London 4 Kruft, H. 1994, A History of Architectural Theory: From Vitruvius to the Present, Princeton Architectural Press, U.S.A., p.335 5 Anti-rationalism should not be thought of as synonymous with anti-scientific. Most of those mentioned in this thesis as anti-rationalists, certainly Ruskin, Morris and Mumford, were interested in science and believers in the scientific method. Their “anti-rationalism” resides in variously held beliefs that rationalism and the positivist scientific method has limits and that its results must be seen contextually, not as absolute truths or as ends in themselves, and certainly not as applicable the human realm, for instance to the social sciences, economics, or architectural theory. 6 Ruskin J. 1907 (first published 1849), The Seven Lamps of Architecture, Routledge New Universal Library, London, p.6 7 Zlotnick, S. 2004, ‘Contextualizing David Levy’s How the Dismal Science Got Its Name’, in Colander, D. Prasch, R. Sheth, F. (eds.), Race, Liberalism, and Economics, University of Michigan Press, p.93 8 Luccarelli, M. 1995, Lewis Mumford and the Ecological Region: The Politics of Planning, The Guilford Press, New York and London, pp.59-60 gives Lucarelli’s analysis of Mumford’s Modernist position. 9 This is most evident in the arguments at the ‘What is Happening to Modern Architecture’ symposium at New York’s MoMA (MoMA, 1948), which are examined in later chapters. Mumford’s call for an extension to other places of Bay Region principles was interpreted as him suggesting redwood be used universally as a building material. 10 See for example Ruskin, J. 1997, Unto This Last and other Writings, Penguin Classics, London pp.75-80 (the extract comes from The Stones of Venice, Vol II, which was first published in 1851) 11 Morris, W. 1995 (first published 1890) News from Nowhere or, An Epoch of Rest, Krishan Kumar (ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p.viii 12 This analysis of Pugin’s contribution is found in Kruft 1994, p.327 13 Ruskin 1907, pp.4-5 14 Kruft 1994, pp.334-35 15 Fergusson, J. 1865, A History of Architecture in All Countries: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day, John Murray, London, p.iii 16 Ruskin, J. 2005 (first published 1851), The Stones of Venice, Kessinger Publishing, p.385 17 Ibid. I owe the discovery of this point to the mention of it in Peter Kohane’s thesis, Kohane, P. 1993, Architecture Labour and the Human Body: Fergusson, Cockerell and Ruskin, PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania, U.M.I. Dissertation Services, Michigan (order no. 9331805) p.417 18 Mumford, L. 2000, Sidewalk Critic: Lewis Mumford's Writings on New York, Princeton Architectural Press, p.229 (Originally published as ‘The Sky Line: The American Tradition’ in The New Yorker, March 11, 1939) 19 Fergusson 1865, p.14 20 Ibid. p.xiii 21Mumford, L. (ed.), 1972, Roots of Contemporary American Architecture: 37 Essays from the Mid- Nineteenth Century to the Present, Dover Publications, New York, p.9 22 Fergusson 1865, p.6 23 Ibid. p.6 24 Ibid. p.xiv 25 For one account of Fergusson’s influence on Orientalism see MacKenzie, J. 1995, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts, Manchester University Press, p.95; Lisa Germany (Germany, L. 2000, Harwell Hamilton Harris, University of California Press, California) discusses Orientalism in the work of Harris and Greene and Greene; Wright’s use of Japanese forms is well documented.

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26 Mumford, 1955, (first published 1924) Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilisation, Second Revised Edition, Dover Publications, New York, p.13 27 Fergusson, 1865, p.6 28 Ibid. pp. 9-10 29 Ibid. p.10 30 Ruskin 1997, p.87 (from The Stones of Venice, Vol II) 31 Ibid. pp.85-86 32 Lowy, M. and Sayre, R. 2001, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, Duke University Press, p.146 give one good account Ruskin’s influence. It is also well documented in many other sources. See also Pugh, M., 2002, The Making of Modern British Politics, 1867-1945, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, pp.123-124 33 Shi, D. 2001, The Simple Life, University of Georgia Press, p.230 34 Kruft 1994, p.335 35 Ruskin commented that he owed more to Carlyle than to any other writer in Ruskin, J. 1905, The Complete Works of John Ruskin, T.Y. Crowell & Co, London, 1905, p.339 36 Lowy & Sayre 2001, pp.128-9 37 Morris, W. 1910-15, ‘How I Became A Socialist’, in The Collected Works of William Morris, Vol. 23, Longmans, Green and Co., London, p.279 38 Ruskin, J. 1998 (first published 1964), The Genius of John Ruskin, John D. Rosenberg (ed.), University of Virginia Press, p.10 39 Discussions of philosophical backgrounds to Mumford and Ruskin may be found in various texts. See for instance Pepper, D. 1996, Modern Environmentalism, Routledge, London, p.190; Richard Wrightman Fox (ed.), 1998, A Companion to American Thought, Blackwell Publishing, p.17. For an overview and criticism of the development and legitimacy of rationalism and the exact sciences see Husserl, E. 1970, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Northwestern University Press, Evanston 40 Beardsley, M. C. 1975, (first published 1966), Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present: A Short History, University of Alabama Press, p.307. For an account of Mumford’s correspondence with Geddes see See Novak, F. (ed.) 1995, Lewis Mumford and Patrick Geddes: The Correspondence, Routledge, London 41 The Garden City was a city designed to be integrated with its own agricultural production, and was described in Howard’s 1898 book To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. The Garden City model was realised in two separate developments in the UK, first at Letchworth, a development built at the turn of the century and again, after World War I in the development of Welwyn Garden City. 42 Wojtowicz, R. 1996, Lewis Mumford and American Modernism: Eutopian Theories for Architecture and Urban Planning, Cambridge University Press, U.S.A., p.2 43 Miller, D. 1989, Lewis Mumford: A Life, Grove Press, N.Y., p.172 44 Ruskin 1997, p.80 (from The Stones of Venice, Vol II) 45 Ruskin 1997, p.79 (from The Stones of Venice, Vol II) 46 Miller 1989, p.173 47 Mumford, L. 2000 (first published 1952), Art and Technics, Columbia University Press, N.Y., p.119 48 Morris referring to his house Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire, from Morris, W. 1895, ‘Gossip About an Old House on the Upper Thames’, in The Quest, Number IV, November 1895, Messrs. Cornish Brothers, Birmingham 49 Mackail, J. 2001 (first published 1899), The Life of William Morris, The Electric Book Co., London, p.156 50 Wertheimer, F. and Wertheimer, L. 2004, Architectural History, Kaplan AEC Architecture, p.79 51 see Kruft 1994, p.342 52 Morris, W. 1970 (first published 1890), News From Nowhere, Routledge and Kegan Paul Press, London and Southampton, pp.5-6 53 Morris, W. 1993, News From Nowhere and Other Writings, Penguin, London, p.245 54 Lucarelli analyses Mumford’s debt to Brooks on this point in Lucarelli 1995, pp.42-43 55 Naylor, G. 1971, Arts and Crafts Movement: A Study of Its Sources, Ideals, and Influence on Design Theory, MIT Press, p.47 56 Throughout Lethaby’s work are references like “…Mr Fergusson tells us that the temple of Herod was 100 cubits long in the body, 100 cubits high, and 100 cubits broad on the façade…” Lethaby, W. 1892 (first published 1891), Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, Percival & Co., London, p.65

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57 Fergusson 1865, p.5; see also Lethaby, W. 1956 (first published as serial in The Builder, 1928), Architecture, Nature and Magic, Gerald Duckworth & Co, London, p.16 58 Lethaby, 1892, p.v; The idea that vernacular architecture contains a store of “true principles” is attractive, though perhaps specious. It is clear from the discussion of the term vernacular in the preface to this thesis that the remnants of this idea live on in the writing of prominent vernacular theorists, such as Bernard Rudofsky, Paul Oliver or Eleftherios Pavlides. Although Mumford often refutes it, he nevertheless frequently subscribes to similar notions, for instance speaking of the architectural innovation achieved of returning to the “simple elemental forms of the seventeenth century farmhouse.” (Mumford (ed.) 1972, p.10) 59 Lethaby 1956, p.10 60 Ibid. p.16 61 Ibid. p.147 62 Lethaby, W. 1908, ‘The Theory of Greek Architecture’, in RIBA Journal vol.15 1908, p.215 63 Lethaby, 1956, p.146 64 Garnham, T. 1993, Melsetter House, Phaidon, London, unpaginated (Chapter heading ‘Folklore and the Historical Sense’) 65 Lethaby, W. 1955, Architecture: An Introduction to the History and Theory of the Art of Building, Oxford University Press, London, p.192 66 Lethaby 1956, p.63 67 Ibid. p.147 68 Saler, M. 1999, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground, Oxford University Press, U.S.A., p.104 69 The Central School, under the direction of Lethaby, taught arts and crafts, using practitioners as teachers and usually employing practical methods. Its influence on the Bauhaus is well documented. See for instance Maciuika, J. 2005, Before The Bauhaus: Architecture, Politics, and the German State, 1890-1920, Cambridge University Press, UK, pp.104-131 70 Naga, S. 1992, William Richard Lethaby: The Romantic Modernist, PhD Thesis, University of Pennsylvania, U.S.A., p.6 71 Lethaby, W. 1938, Form in Civilisation: Collected Papers on Art and Labour, Oxford University Press, London, p.229 72 Garnham 1993, unpaginated (Chapter heading ‘Far and distant from the land of unsought gain’) 73 Lethaby 1956, p.16 74 See for instance Mumford’s discussion of New England village development in Mumford 1955, ch.1, or Mumford (ed.) 1972, p.10 75 While critical of much American domestic architecture, Mumford is sanguine about modern urban development in America throughout his writing – see for example Mumford 1955, p.86 76 Lloyd Wright, F. Pfieffer, B. Mumford, L. 2001, Frank Lloyd Wright & Lewis Mumford: Thirty Years of Correspondence, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, p.7 77 Lloyd Wright, Pfieffer, Mumford 2001, p.8 78 Mumford 1924, preface 79 Miller 1989, p.470 80 Blake, C. ‘Introduction’ in Mumford, L. 2000 (first published 1952), Art and Technics, Columbia University Press, N.Y., pp.xi-xii 81 Mumford, L. 1934, Technics and Civilisation, Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., London, p.363 82 Naylor 1971, p.8

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In his early architectural writing, particularly Sticks and Stones (1924), Mumford had sought regional examples of American built form, but had yet to acknowledge the importance of architecture away from the East Coast of the country. Sticks and Stones, although one of the seminal works on American architecture, largely ignores the bulk of the country; even the Chicago school is only briefly mentioned and Mumford had by that stage only seen it in photographs.1 He rectified the omission of a Figure 1: Lewis Mumford, 1940s serious study of Louis Sullivan (1856-1924) and Frank Lloyd Wright in The Brown Decades. However it was not until 1947 that his architectural writing finally referenced the history of the Bay Region, through to Wurster and other contemporary West Coast architects. In his writing over the following years Mumford continually lauded the Bay Region Style as a “native and humane form of Modernism”2 and contrasted it with the “tags and clichés”3 of the International Style, a polarisation that was to dominate the ensuing architectural debate. Mumford’s identification of the Bay Region Style represented the culmination of his study of the history of American architecture and his desire to discern authentic regional development within it. In the Bay Region he discovered a school of architectural design that he believed was not only unique, but moreover incorporated the ideals of his own regionalist philosophy. Like the designers of the Arts and Crafts movement, the Bay Region’s architects had incorporated regional history into their work, but while the past represented an end in itself for the Arts and Crafts movement, it represented to the Bay Region’s architects one part of a far broader, forward- looking philosophy. Furthermore the mid-twentieth century Bay Region architects were unmistakably Modernists, but to Mumford, their ability to incorporate the local and the historical made their Modernism more worldly

CHAPTER TWO | LEWIS MUMFORD’S STUDY OF REGIONAL ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA Page 32 and mature than that of much contemporary European Modernism and International Style architecture.4

Mumford’s regionalist perspective It is not necessarily possible to define Mumford’s regionalism since it developed and changed over his career; Lefaivre complains that Mumford “did not make things easy for anyone wishing to get a clear overview of his regionalist paradigm”5 He was nevertheless explicit about many points within it and his writing in the decades before his discovery of the Bay Region Style had made it plain that his regionalism was concerned with architecture’s suitability to its local conditions and had little to do with style or aesthetics. Rather it was engaged with abstract concepts of universal and local forces and questions about dwelling, and the authentic development of a cultural home. He wrote in 1941 that “regional forms are those which most closely meet the actual conditions of life and which most fully succeed in making a people feel at home in their environment.”6 While Mumford described the aesthetic and spatial qualities of buildings he was explicit about the difference between instances of architectural design and the architectural principles behind them; crucial to his regional schema was that the same principles would produce different results in different contexts. In 1941, discussing Frank Lloyd Wright he wrote, …as a proper regional adaptation, Wright’s open type of plan was admirable, given the time and the place for which it was created. But to take a form that grew out of such a highly localized characteristic and to attempt to universalize it is as serious an error as not understanding its fitness and appropriateness in its own environment. The universal element in Wright’s architecture is not his open plan: it is rather the recognition that the plan must be in conformity, not merely with the climate and the landscape and the soil and the native materials, but with the social institutions and the dominant types of personality in the region.”7

Mumford was critical of inward-looking theories which associated regions with notions of purely local or with singular national identity, and his opposition to these became more urgent in The South in Architecture (1941), consisting of four essays that he delivered as lectures to students at Alabama College, and written while the Nazis dominated Europe. He began the lecture

CHAPTER TWO | LEWIS MUMFORD’S STUDY OF REGIONAL ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA Page 33 series with an impassioned speech in favour of the US entering the war in Europe, which anticipated his architectural argument about the interplay between the regional and the universal through a series of contemporary analogies to America’s regional and global responsibilities: “Can I, in decency” he asks his audience “ stay at my desk to write about the historic achievements of American culture at a time when, for lack of energy and will and moral conviction, all those achievements, and everything else we value, may be swallowed up by the destruction of the great civilisation that supported them?…[would I] stay at my desk when a grass fire had broken out and was threatening the home of a neighbour?”8 For Mumford the logical conclusion of any bounded and radically local analysis, of the type he criticised as “self- sufficient and self-contained”9 was not regionalism, but cultural stagnation. Mumford described regional development as a long-term process: “it takes generations for a regional product to be achieved,” he said of winemaking, “…so it is with architectural forms. We are only beginning to know enough about ourselves and about our environment to create a regional architecture.”10 Mumford distinguished authentic regional development from speculative development, mimicry of past styles, or any belief that design may be codified. On this last point Mumford believed that the International Style faltered as an authentic architectural response, since he saw in its rules “restrictive and arid formulas”11 that were no less limiting than those that governed Classical revivalists. It is an important element of his regionalism that architecture is simultaneously of its region and of its time and, crucially, that it is never thought of as having reached a point of conclusion or perfection. In Roots of Contemporary American Architecture (1952) Mumford argued that revival architects believed they had found perfection in Classical forms, and had been copying and measuring the Classical to discover the rules of design since the time of the earliest printed books. Images of ancient Greek and Roman buildings had begun to advance extinct forms of architecture as more legitimate than local ones. In the sixteenth century, Mumford argued, these printed images of distant, ancient buildings “seemed fresh and modern, whereas the recent past seemed fusty, old-fashioned and ridiculous…no one thought of measuring or copying or reproducing the local,

CHAPTER TWO | LEWIS MUMFORD’S STUDY OF REGIONAL ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA Page 34 vernacular architecture.”12 He called mistaking ancient Greek and Roman forms for perfection “the brittle error of the Renascence modes.”13 Although Ruskin had been similarly opposed to the predominance of Classical forms in nineteenth century architectural design, Mumford’s diversion from his philosophical heritage is suggested in his argument that Ruskin, too, had made the same mistake: “this error had been taken over even by the opponents of the Renascence modes, like Pugin and Ruskin; for these men sought to give to some moment in the development of Gothic architecture, such as the style of Thirteenth Century Lombardy which Ruskin favoured, the same stereotyped authority that Palladianism had claimed for the classic.”14 A similar error is continued, according to Mumford, by any theory that supposes that “time does not make a difference: that it is possible, by some formula for proportion, some fixation on special forms, to possess an eternal quality in art without doing justice to the time-bound, the local, the living and the subjective, and therefore the unique and finally incalculable.”15 In this broad swathe he included not just the revival architects, but those who sought perfection in geometrical constructs like the golden mean, and particularly those who believed that Modernism provided a system of design in which a single approach was suitable internationally.16 Furthermore, for Mumford, regionalism as a basis for architecture implied that human cultural associations with a region would be acknowledged by the built environment. Commercial approaches to development (land seen purely for its real estate or speculative value or regions developed purely for the exploitation of their resources) Mumford found particularly repugnant, as had the Arts and Crafts writers before him. He argued in Sticks and Stones, his early overview of American architecture, that the bulk of America’s architecture had little authenticity because the country itself had been settled in a tradition that viewed the land “not as a home, a permanent seat of culture, but as a means to something else – principally as a means to the temporary advantages of profitable speculation and exploitation.”17 Where communities were built around mining, trapping, trading, timber and other temporary ventures which brought quick wealth but little long-term stability or cultural development, the legacy was a detestable built environment. Most of America’s urban development had occurred in

CHAPTER TWO | LEWIS MUMFORD’S STUDY OF REGIONAL ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA Page 35 post-industrial times and, for Mumford, was largely shaped by technology and commerce, coupled with a restless pioneer sprit that had overrun America’s rural areas. Mumford argued that America’s very nature carried a concomitant inauthenticity within it that had prevented true regional development from occurring on a wide scale, suggesting in Roots of Contemporary American Architecture, that settlers who were venturing into the unknown subconsciously favoured revival styles in architecture: “if they carried the ‘classic’ with them, they would always feel at home.”18

Regionalism in early American architecture Mumford saw only a few examples of authentic regional development in America’s built history before 1860, primarily in the seventeenth century rural communities of New England. He argued in Sticks and Stones that the built forms of these communities, although initially versions of medieval British and European vernacular structures, over time became adapted to American conditions during a period when he believed “good building was almost universal.”19 The urban structure, he believed, achieved “a pretty fair pitch of worldly perfection”20 and went so far as to ask “would it be an exaggeration to say that there has never been a more complete and intelligent partnership between the earth and man than existed, for a little while, in the old New England village? In what other part of the world has such a harmonious balance between the natural and the social environment been preserved?”21 In this early American model of urban development, communities were only allowed to grow to a certain size before a satellite town was built, and some land was always retained for communal use. The similarities are clear here between Mumford’s interpretation of New England and Howard’s Garden City model; Mumford claimed he liked to refer to the settlement of New England as “Yankee communism.”22 Although on its publication Sticks and Stones was criticised for its romantic depiction of agricultural life in seventeenth century New England villages, which, arguably, was more often arduous and unrewarding than perfect, Mumford still viewed this pattern of development as far superior to the gridiron of streets forced upon much of America.23 In 1995, Mark Luccarelli in exploring Mumford’s writing on regionalism in his book Lewis Mumford and the Ecological Region: The

CHAPTER TWO | LEWIS MUMFORD’S STUDY OF REGIONAL ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA Page 36 Politics of Planning explained the connection between Mumford’s appreciation for the regional and vernacular and his preference for pre-industrial urban structures: The design of houses, the use of indigenous materials, the layout of streets, the reliance on local sources of power such as wind and water all reflect a more intimate and functional relation to geographic conditions. The material culture of pre-industrial Europe reflected the forces of environment; consequently, regional variation was pronounced. This meant beautiful and functional architecture and crafts – vernacular traditions that Mumford appreciated.24

Conversely, according to Mumford, America’s regions had evolved in patterns developed not for any consideration of people or regional characteristics but for the ease of standardisation and sale “by people who had no more civic scruples than the keeper of a lottery.”25 In The South in Architecture Mumford described the slow development from the original buildings of early settlers, through to a uniquely American regional form.26 It took, for example some experience of a North American winter for Elizabethan clapboard houses to gain the extra layer of cladding required to protect the inhabitants from the weather and it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that the “typical light frame construction, with an air space to serve for insulation, became a characteristic American form.”27 But Mumford believed this was still just a variation on European vernacular forms. Necessity, but not imaginative architectural innovation, had driven the development of American architecture in the first century after colonisation. The types of changes made to these European forms were frequently those necessitated by mundane issues, for instance the scarcity of iron nails, the abundance of timber, which by that time was comparatively rare in Europe and the gradual development of sawmills and hence the more frequent availability of standardised, cut timber. Perhaps most important was the absence of architects; Mumford claimed there were no professional architects on the continent until the mid-1700s.28 Pattern books supplied the designs until then, “and these designs were carried out with such local modifications as lack of labor, lack of materials or lack of taste might suggest…precisely what gives our early provincial work much of its freshness and charm.”29 Mumford recognised the great inventiveness of early settlers in America, but

CHAPTER TWO | LEWIS MUMFORD’S STUDY OF REGIONAL ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA Page 37 characterised that first century’s architectural innovations not as developments in vernacular or regional design, but as technical advances that made it possible to hold on to an unsuitable architecture. American inventiveness may have given its population the comfort of central heating; however devices to control temperature were only so vital because the houses had been designed for Europe’s climate rather than America’s.30 Mumford argued that these regional architectural modifications were distinguished from true architectural innovations and the development of vernacular American regional forms. He argued that “it is much easier to copy ornament than to find out all that needs to be found out about the geology, the soil, the climate, the working conditions and the social customs of a neighbourhood for which a building is designed.”31 While the European influence lost potency over time, Mumford claimed that in America “the conscious effort to make full use of regional resources and regional opportunities...goes back no farther than the eighteen-eighties.”32 Before this, for Mumford, American architecture had not developed far beyond European ornament forced into an American mould. Even the New England communities that Mumford had praised for the strength of their regional development had been made up of buildings that he believed to be essentially copies of European structures, with such additions as climate, use and inventiveness suggested.33 Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Mumford noted, the importance of several specific examples of vernacular buildings of other cultures in this period in the development of more authentically regional Figure 2: "Vailima" (c1890), Robert Louis architecture in America Stevenson's house in Samoa particularly on the West Coast. Unlike Europe or the East Coast of the U.S.A., California could be envisaged either as a region of the American continent or as part of the Pacific Rim. Influences from the Pacific were far more

CHAPTER TWO | LEWIS MUMFORD’S STUDY OF REGIONAL ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA Page 38 acceptable as architectural precedents to populations on the West Coast than to those in the rest of the country. The influence of pacific tropical architecture was also strong, popularised through the publication of Robert Louis Stevenson’s house in Samoa (c1890) (Figure 2). This Samoan house introduced the elements of “wide window spaces and porches adapted to climate.”34 Similarly, around the turn of the century, influences from India where houses contained all the rooms on one floor helped shape the form of the ubiquitous Californian bungalow. Mumford highlighted the impact that traditional Japanese architecture had on modifying American ideas about space and order.35 The Japanese philosophies of purity and simplicity drawn from both dwellings and prints enabled American architects to realise the importance of design modules and standardisation. However those architects looking for inspiration in alternative regional and vernacular models were the exception. For Mumford, even though the period around the turn of the century contained the seeds for a flourishing of authentic American forms, it was characterised instead by “a fashionable reaction in favour of a genteel revivalism, safe and correct, based on picture-book precedents and doting tourists’ memories.”36

Other regionalist perspectives Mumford’s declaration in 1949 that the Bay Region Style represented a maturing of Modernist architecture in America was mirrored by architect and writer Harwell Hamilton Harris, who described a tension that grew on the East Coast in the early decades of the Modern movement between Modernist and regional architecture, a tension he believed was absent on the West Coast. The Eastern architects saw a dualism—either regional or modern—due to the rigidity with which they regarded their regional forms. Those on the West Coast however, like Maybeck, envisaged their region as still developing, and accepted that Modernist principles were another important influence, no more or less important than vernacular forms or any other precedent. In the explication of his theory Harris outlined the conditions that diminished regional development in New England while allowing a regional architecture to flourish in the San Francisco Bay area:

CHAPTER TWO | LEWIS MUMFORD’S STUDY OF REGIONAL ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA Page 39 The Regionalism of Liberation is the manifestation of a region that is especially in tune with the emerging thought of the time. We call such a manifestation “regional” only because it has not yet emerged elsewhere…Its virtue is that its manifestation has significance for the world outside itself…In California in the late Twenties and Thirties, modern European ideas met still-developing regionalism. In New England, on the other hand, European Modernism met a rigid and restrictive regionalism that at first resisted and then surrendered. New England accepted European Modernism whole because its own regionalism had been reduced to a collection of restrictions.37

Marc Treib in his 1999 book on William Wurster’s architecture concurred with Harris that the European Modernism was fundamentally at odds with the idea of regionalism, describing Modernism at one end of a spectrum with regionalism at the other. For Treib, the Bay Region architects could be understood as existing between these poles: Modernism implied that one could design virtually free from one’s locale, as if the prevailing aesthetic zeitgeist dissipated the influence of location, climate and client. The regionalists, on the other hand, exhibited stronger ties to local traditions than to current social and technical trends. A third group—today termed regional modernists— tried, in various ways, to create an architecture that simultaneously acknowledged its time and place.38

Another important idea to Mumford in the development of his regionalist view was the concept of a “usable past,”39 a phrase he borrowed from friend and literary critic Van Wyck Brooks. Mumford used it to describe the creative history of nineteenth century America from the 1860s to the turn of the century. This period, which he describes as the Brown Decades, he believed contained a nascent creative spirit, lost in the “sordidness … weaknesses … monstrosities … all the dun colours” of the period. “The treasure has long been buried” he wrote, “It is time to open it up.”40 Using this rich and undocumented creative history as a source of regional inspiration had nothing to do with copying the past: “Let us be clear about this,” Mumford wrote in The South in Architecture… …the forms that people used in other civilizations or in other periods of our own country’s history were intimately a part of the whole structure of their life. There is no method of mechanically reproducing those forms or bringing them to life…there is no such thing as a modern colonial house, any more than there is such a thing as a modern Tudor

CHAPTER TWO | LEWIS MUMFORD’S STUDY OF REGIONAL ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA Page 40 house; if it is modern it is not colonial, and if it is colonial it cannot be modern.”41

While the domestic architecture of the Brown Decades was generally characterised by “truckloads of bric-a-brac”42 the period is uniquely important to Mumford’s investigation of regionalism in America. He believed the country had entered the period with a European architecture and had left it, having clarified “the task and method of modern architecture”43 with an American one. The architectural types that he described as marking the beginning of regional variation in American architecture came from these Brown Decades and include “the low-lying prairie house of the middle west, the shingled cottages with steep pitched roofs of New England and the redwood house of the Bay Area in San Francisco.”44 Despite there having been American building, and even American vernacular forms, such as farm buildings and miner’s huts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Mumford claimed that the last decades of the nineteenth century produced the first truly American architecture: “One thing is plain: the movement toward utilizing the indigenous, the natural, the regional in the dwelling house resulted in the first buildings in the United States that could properly be called either original or truly contemporary or consciously wedded to their soil.”45 However in advocating the importance these building types Mumford was referring to something far more integral than the building’s aesthetic or physical features: “our task is not to imitate the past, but to understand it, so that we may face the opportunities of our own day and deal with them in an equally creative sprit.”46 Rather he was implying that for the first time American architects had understood their task as interpreting the climate, history and future of their region. Henry Hobson Richardson, Mumford claimed, was the first American architect “ready to face the totality of modern life.”47

Regional innovators: Richardson, Wright and Maybeck Mumford nominated Richardson as “our first true regional architect."48 Richardson’s Beaux Arts training had been cut short by the American Civil War, prompting his return to America, so while he had studied and been influenced by British and European writers, including Ruskin and Morris, his

CHAPTER TWO | LEWIS MUMFORD’S STUDY OF REGIONAL ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA Page 41 education was largely American. He worked with New England’s local granites and sandstone, creating domestic, commercial and religious buildings. His dwellings were highly original, sometimes with shingle facades, prefiguring Maybeck’s later work, or with massive walls of uncut boulders contrasting with intricately carved

stone, expressed heavy Figure 3 : Henry Hobson Richardson: Ames Gate Lodge (1880-81), timber members and North Easton, Massachusetts (photographer unknown) sculpted roofs. An example of his work is the Ames Gate Lodge (1881) in Massachusetts (Figure 3). Mumford believed Richardson, unlike Morris or Ruskin, was able to situate the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement within a progressive, technological society, arguing that Richardson’s “…influence on architecture in America was comparable to that of William Morris on the domestic arts in England; but unlike Morris’s it was based more confidently on the forces available in the nineteenth century and, instead of toying lovingly with archaic forms it reached out vigorously into the future.”49 He believed Richardson had taken the remnants of the European clapboard farmhouse, which still influenced American building through the nineteenth century, and replaced it with something uniquely American. His choice of materials responded to the American climate, while boldness and relaxed internal planning was suited to the culture. Mumford recognised Richardson’s contribution as more than just good design; he saw it as a step toward cultural maturity and recognition in stone that Americans could begin to look inward rather than to Europe for their own cultural insights: …he interpreted New England to itself and gave it a better sense of its own identity: he modified its puritanic austerities: he gave to its buildings a colour that they lacked: a colour derived from its native granites and sandstones, from weathered shingles and from the autumnal tints of sumach and red oak.50

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Mumford believed that Richardson’s work represented a “renunciation of…false historicism [which] had brought about a return to real history and restored continuity with living tradition.”51 Drawing a parallel with the Arts and Crafts movement in mid-nineteenth century England, Mumford argued that the same motivation had led William Morris and architect Philip Webb (1831- 1915) to design the Red House (1859) and that in both cases (Morris and Webb in England and Richardson in America), “one of the first steps in innovation…was to return to the simple elemental forms of the seventeenth century farmhouse, to a vernacular that was continuous with the whole tradition of building in the ages before it.”52 However while Mumford believed that Richardson had developed a clearly American response to the architecture of European settlement, he viewed Frank Lloyd Wright’s work as having gone much further, liberating and authenticating American architecture, describing Wright as “Richardson’s most eloquent continuator.”53 Mumford described Wright’s residential designs as “thoroughly native to the Middle West”54 demonstrating intimate regional responses. He highlighted Wright’s localised “prairie style” houses: “in their low pitched roofs, their rambling plans, their marked horizontally, they were deliberate adaptations to the landscape. At the very time when the archaic note of colonialism was being emphasised by the fashionable architect, Wright was showing his respect for the actual landscape and the actual problems of his day and locality.”55 An

example of Prairie style Figure 4 : Frank Lloyd Wright, Robie House (1909), Chicago (photographer unknown) architecture is the Robie House located on the campus of the University of Chicago (Figure 4). Mumford sought to locate authentic and intergenerational regional forms and in Wright’s work he discerned an individual who was most instrumental in

CHAPTER TWO | LEWIS MUMFORD’S STUDY OF REGIONAL ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA Page 43 forging an American form from the mass of local and universal influences. However Mumford did not believe Wright—whose contribution he described in The Brown Decades (1931) as “excellent individual work”—formed part of an ongoing regional culture, arguing that: the way to the new architecture requires the weaving together of the several lines of initiative which were first started during the Brown Decades…no one of these elements by itself is sufficient to create a fine architecture; but once they are comprehensively united and directed, once the new architecture becomes the medium, not of some individual’s tastes and desires, but the informed, positive consensus of the community, form will cease to be a sporadic possibility and become instead the mark of our whole civilisation.56

In 1931 he had not yet seen evidence for such conditions in the architecture of America. Mumford and Wright corresponded throughout their respective careers, despite a 10-year hiatus after a falling out over America’s involvement in World War Two.57 Mumford’s regionalism demanded that the universal was always present and he saw this most perfectly expressed architecturally in Wright’s designs, which he described as “universal both in their origin and in their destination, without for a moment losing esthetic contact with the place, the climate, the people for whom most immediately the building was created.”58 While Wright was above all else an architect, Mumford extended his ideas to other aspects of culture. When Wright, who embraced universality so completely in his regional designs, argued for a much narrower regionalism to avoid the U.S.A. entering the war, Mumford could not segment his philosophies so neatly. It was Wright’s synthesis of regional and universal influences that Mumford most appreciated, and he detailed this in The South in Architecture: “in Wright’s domestic architecture the gap between the universal and the local was closed up, for he created a truly organic form, in which both elements were steadily brought into play.”59 Wright’s regional influences included the typical suburban houses of the area, but more importantly Mumford thought Wright’s understanding of the character of the people of the Midwest gave to his designs their uniquely regional qualities. Wright’s innovative configurations of openness in domestic space Mumford saw as “the expression of a very

CHAPTER TWO | LEWIS MUMFORD’S STUDY OF REGIONAL ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA Page 44 marked regional trait: the easy sociability of the Middle Westerner and his preference for a markedly extroverted kind of life: in short, his openness of character as we call it.”60 Mumford also illuminated Wright’s capacity to integrate local factors in his choice of materials: He has tried to evolve a form that would identify it with its landscape and accentuate the native materials that were used. Part of his respect for nature consists in letting the raw wood, the raw stone, the raw brick show themselves with the least alteration of their original color and texture: part consists in making a harmonious use of the site, in mingling the structure with the earth and the vegetation.61

However while they maintained strong, natural connections to place and utilised local materials, Mumford identified a distinct universality in Wright’s work. In his discussion of Wright we can appreciate how far Mumford had moved from the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement when he praised Wright’s mechanical exactitude in standardised and machined parts. Mumford wrote that “no-one, even among the skyscraper architects, was more ready than Wright to use the machine as an instrument for creating art…its precision and standardization as the welcome aid rather than the handicap of modern architectural genius.”62 In Wright’s ability to imagine new forms of spatial design, Mumford believed he shared the Japanese craftsman’s sense of the proper use of materials, celebrating their natural qualities and giving his work a completeness, evident not only in planning and detailing, but extending to the structure’s relationship with its site.63 Wright, although he refuted it, is regarded as having accessed and assimilated many Japanese vernacular traditions, uniting American, European and Oriental design principles and creating a uniquely American architecture. He introduced into American design the notion of uniting the inside and the outside, an idea that would come to maturity in the favourable climate of America’s West Coast. Like Wright, Bernard Maybeck, whose work is examined in more detail in chapter three, was influenced by Japanese design and he and his contemporaries took the Japanese idea of uniting the garden and the dwelling to its conclusion, advising that in Berkeley, the house should merely be thought of as that part of the garden to be used in case of rain.64 He had much in common with Richardson, having returned to the U.S.A. after Beaux

CHAPTER TWO | LEWIS MUMFORD’S STUDY OF REGIONAL ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA Page 45 Arts training in Europe, strongly influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement and the work of Ruskin and Morris. He was also acutely interested in

local materials and Figure 5 : Bernard Maybeck: Mathewson House (1916), Berkeley (photo Jane Castle) regional architectural forms, which he transformed into highly original regional designs. His Matthewson House (Figure 5) exhibits many of Maybeck’s regional innovations: wide eaves, extensive use of glass, Japanese-influenced timber work and beams and a design to look pleasing from above, as the hillside sites around Berkeley meant that roofs would be visible to higher neighbours. Maybeck lived and worked in the Bay Region from the 1890s until his death in 1957, and was a significant influence upon the development of its architecture. Mumford perceived Maybeck and other early Bay Region architects as having been motivated by the same impulses that were bringing forth indigenous styles in the East of the country: “at the beginning Maybeck and Gill acclimated to California the seedlings that had been planted east of the Mississippi by Richardson, Sullivan, Wright and their followers.”65 Mumford blamed only the reticence of character of its individual practitioners for the relative obscurity of Bay Region architecture, compared, for instance, to the Chicago school. Without this reticence Maybeck’s work “would have been hailed long ago as the West Coast counterpart to Wright’s prairie architecture.”66

The Modernist architecture of Bay Region Mumford saw in Wurster’s work a Modernist architecture infused with true regionalism and suitability to the region’s people. According to him, unlike much Modern architecture the Bay Region Style emphasised the personal life of the client: “A house should be as personal as one’s clothes, and should fit

CHAPTER TWO | LEWIS MUMFORD’S STUDY OF REGIONAL ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA Page 46 the family life just as well…” he wrote in The New Yorker in 1949, “…this is not a new doctrine in the United States. People like Bernard Maybeck and William Wilson Wurster, in California, always practiced it, and they took good care that their houses did not resemble Figure 6 : William Wurster: Gate and water tower of Gregory Farmhouse (1928), Scotts Valley (photo Jane Castle) factories or museums.”67 (Figure 6) Until his discovery of the Bay Region Style, Mumford thought that no continuous tradition of architectural design in America had picked up “the thread of historical continuity”68 and created a modern regional architectural type, distinct from the bleakness that he perceived in European Modernism and from the banality of copied styles. It was to his great delight that within the domestic architecture of the Bay Region he found “the best architects of California, untouched by the Eastern reversion to the forms of colonialism and imperialism, carried on the domestic tradition of the eighties, which passed unbroken – though with fresh innovations – into the work of William Wurster and his colleagues.”69 Harris made a similar observation, commenting on the importance of Maybeck and his contemporaries to the development of later Bay Region work: The soil in which these houses are rooted is the same soil that led to the flowering of California architecture almost 50 years ago. It is a combination of abundance, free minds, love of nature, and an unspoiled countryside. Simple as such a combination seems, it has happened but seldom in the world’s history. The eventual reward for its cultivation is a spontaneous architecture in tune with democratic aspirations.70

Mumford perceived that the Bay Region Style, and specifically Wurster’s work, was set apart from much modern design by its commitment to both Modernism and regionalism. Fenske wrote that

CHAPTER TWO | LEWIS MUMFORD’S STUDY OF REGIONAL ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA Page 47 …it was Wurster’s architecture…that epitomized for Mumford the spirit of the Bay Region—an environment whose unique geography, climate and vegetation combined to stamp it with a powerful physical identity. It exemplified Mumford’s ideal modern regional idiom: it was not consciously or iconoclastically modern, nor obsessed with the theoretical debates of Europe, but rather straightforward and simple in its expression, and intimately adapted to human use; to precipitation, breezes, views and to the landscape; and to local vernacular craft traditions in wood and masonry.71

Moreover this was to Mumford much more than just an instance of regional architectural design, it was evidence of an entire regional approach, a regional subculture developing in urban America. Fenske argued that, “Mumford believed he had discovered through his direct experience of the built environment surrounding the San Francisco Bay…a fully developed regional culture.”72 While Mumford had documented the important contributions to authentic American regional design by visionary practitioners such as Richardson and Wright, it was in the Bay Region Style that he felt there had been a consolidation and loose codification of such ideas in an intergenerational and developing school. Moreover he noted a public acceptance on the West Coast that the Bay Region Style simply represented modern domestic architecture. Mumford wrote “no one out there is foolish enough to imagine there is any other proper way of building in our time.”73 Furthermore the Bay Region’s architects always maintained their commitment to client needs, which contrasted sharply with what Mumford saw as Wright’s egotism74 and the International Style’s formulaic aesthetic and spatial qualities which disregarded site and client.75 In the dwellings of the Bay Region Mumford “discovered” one result of a regional approach to architecture. When he advocated in his ‘Sky Line’ article the “spread to every part of the country of that native and humane form of Modernism”76 it was evident in the context of the article that he was suggesting the spread of architecture with similar theoretical considerations. Still his call was misinterpreted by the International Style’s proponents as a recommendation that architects everywhere should copy the Bay Region’s buildings.77 Walter Gropius (1883-1969) in a speech at the 1948 ‘What is Happening to Modern Architecture?’ symposium, reduced Mumford’s entire

CHAPTER TWO | LEWIS MUMFORD’S STUDY OF REGIONAL ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA Page 48 argument to “sentimental national prejudice”78 and he and other speakers implied that Mumford had intended that redwood “cottage style”79 architecture be replicated coast to coast. This was despite Mumford’s clearly stated position over decades that regionalism never involved copying any style, or any element of a built environment. “Regionalism” he had written in The South in Architecture, “is not a matter of using the most available local material or of copying some simple form of construction that our ancestors used, for want of anything better, a century or two ago.”80 He had long argued, over at least the two decades since the publication of Sticks and Stones that materiality and aesthetic characteristics were only regionally dependent, and perhaps not even relevant to regional development. Gropius’ derision was typical of the responses to Mumford’s work by the symposium’s participants. Mumford found this bitterly disappointing, evident in a letter he wrote to Alfred Barr, the symposium’s convenor, in which he lamented: I am utterly bewildered at the general extent and depth of the misunderstanding of what I thought I had very plainly expressed in The New Yorker…For the point about the Bay Region Style, in which it very definitely departs from your restricted definition of an International Architecture, is that it cannot be characterized by any single mode of building; and it certainly can’t be reduced to redwood cottage architecture…It is precisely the variety and range and universality of it that I was stressing…81

Gropius’ suggestion that Mumford’s regionalism was nationalist or chauvinist must have been particularly offensive to Mumford since his theory of regionalism had, since before World War Two specifically advocated that regions could only develop due to their consistent interaction with and reinterpretation of universal influences. He was adamant on this point in The South in Architecture: …one other error must be guarded against…the notion that the regional should be identified with the self-sufficient or the self- contained…every regional culture necessarily has a universal side to it. It is steadily open to influences which come from other parts of the world and from other cultures separated from the local culture in space or time or both together. It would be useful if we formed the habit of never using the word regional without mentally adding to it the idea of universal – remembering the constant contact and interchange between the local scene and the wide world that lies beyond it.82

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To Mumford this was a general theory, true of all regions in all times, but what he saw as the Nazi threat of a “world-wide spread of totalitarian tyranny”83 in the twentieth century made it especially necessary in the mid-twentieth century to ensure regionalism was broad and universal, against the radically narrow regional ideologies in Germany and Japan that had led to World War Two. He wrote in 1939: I have never liked to hear the epithet “International Style” applied to modern form, since it seemed to imply a uniformity an externality that were without regional color or variation, but the sources of good modern form are indeed international. And the fact is that the wider the sources we draw on the more likely we are to find just those combinations that are exquisitely fitted to local conditions. The last way to achieve a good regional style is by practicing cultural isolation.84

Lefaivre, later analysing the rift between Mumford and the MoMA argued in 2003 that there was no misunderstanding. Rather she believed that commercial interests had precipitated the MoMA’s opposition to Mumford’s attempts to position regionalism as a viable alternative to International Style Modernism. She argued that this position put him at odds with powerful opponents given the political, theoretical and financial interests at stake in major building development projects: “The MoMA meant business. Understandably the stakes were high. Among other things, the United Nations Headquarters building, the most prestigious commission of the immediate post-war period internationally was hanging in the balance...the credibility of both the MoMA and the International Style hinged on the success of the UN building.”85 Tzonis argued that Mumford too recognised that there was more to the opposition than simple misunderstanding. He recalled Mumford speaking at Harvard in 1970 and claiming “the modern movement was regionalist at heart but was hijacked by the dogmatic International Style approach – the solipsistic and chauvinistic expression of ‘authenticity’.”86 Architectural writer Gail Fenske noted that the most significant element in the rift between Mumford and Henry Russell Hitchcock, one of the theoretical founders of International Style architecture was Mumford’s refusal “to accept Hitchcock’s basic working assumption that modern buildings had to be context-free, autonomous objects of art.”87 Mumford’s position in the 1947

CHAPTER TWO | LEWIS MUMFORD’S STUDY OF REGIONAL ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA Page 50 Sky Line article was that International Style architecture had neglected regional and historical elements and he was, if anything, more vehement on this point over a decade later, when he wrote in 1959: many of the exponents of the ‘International Style’ hold—or at least once held… [that modern architecture consisted of]…a uniform movement, utilizing the machine to produce mechanically identical forms all over the planet without regard for historic tradition, for climatic differences, for accessible materials, for varied technical capabilities, for the individuality of the landscape or the urban form and, above all, for the unique expression of the individual spirit, the architect himself…88

The International Style’s proponents claimed in response to Mumford’s dismissals that he had simply misinterpreted their position, and that theirs was, in fact, the regional design philosophy, and that its scope included everything being done in the Bay Region. Walter Gropius spoke at the ‘What is Happening to Modern Architecture?’ symposium of being “struck by [Mumford’s] definition of the Bay Region Style as something new, characterized by an expression of the terrain, the climate, and the way of life, for that was almost precisely, in the same words, the initial aim of the leading modernists in the world twenty-five years back.”89 Fenske, however, argued that it took a highly selective reading of the International Style to support the argument that it was a regional school.90 And subsequent writers including Tzonis & Lefaivre and Treib have concurred with Mumford’s position that International Style architecture was doctrinal and, by definition, international, rather than regional, whereas the Bay Region represented a unique regional modern architectural type.

Mumford’s regionalist legacy Regionalism is perhaps most readily associated today with Critical Regionalism. This term, although widely attributed to Kenneth Frampton, was first developed by Tzonis and Lefaivre as a direct consequence of Mumford’s writing. In 2003 they wrote: “in this sense we use the term Critical Regionalism, a regionalism evolved from an internal, self-directed criticism. Mumford was the first to systematically rethink regionalism in these terms.”91 Mumford’s position was important to Tzonis and Lefaivre since it differed in a fundamental way from previous regionalist thinking, which had concentrated

CHAPTER TWO | LEWIS MUMFORD’S STUDY OF REGIONAL ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA Page 51 study on the uniqueness of individual regions rather than on the relationships between them.92 Lefaivre claimed Mumford’s work as the genesis for modern regionalist thinking, arguing that: the originality of this last position [the necessary nexus between the local, historical and universal] cannot be overestimated. For the first time a regionalism becomes an exercise in overcoming contradiction rather than reinforcing it. It steers a middle course between the particular and the universal. It perceived nothing mutually exclusive between one region and another, or between one region and the globe. In fact it sees not only the possibility, but the necessity for mutually beneficial negotiating to be carried out within a wider scheme of things. To repeat: this marked a major cognitive swing away from a centuries- old mental pattern of regionalist thinking based on an adversarial stance, on resistance to one based on what might be called engagement and in-betweening.93

Tzonis and Lefaivre defined the importance of Critical Regionalism in architectural theory, and the following passage succinctly encapsulates a relationship between Mumford’s regionalism and the approach to architecture typified by Wurster: As we move into the unknown territories of the twenty-first century, the unresolved conflict between globalization and diversity and the unanswered question of choosing between international intervention and identity, are increasingly leading to crises as vital as the threat of a nuclear catastrophe in the middle of the last century. The task of Critical Regionalism is to rethink architecture through the concept of the region. Whether this involves complex human ties or the balance of the ecosystem, it is opposed to mindlessly adopting the narcissistic dogmas in the name of universality, leading to environments that are economically costly and ecologically destructive to the human community. What we call the Critical Regionalist approach to design and the architecture of identity, recognises the value of the singular, circumscribes projects within the physical, social, and cultural constraints of the particular, aiming at sustaining diversity while benefiting from universality.94

Although Mumford’s regionalism profoundly influenced Tzonis and Lefaivre and Frampton and was the precursor to much current writing on regionalism in architecture, political and economic influences during the twentieth century precipitated a shift in perspective between Mumford’s early position and Frampton’s toward the end of the twentieth century. Significantly Mumford’s regionalism was not a theory designed to respond only to its time. In the mid-twentieth century an important issue in the regionalist debate was

CHAPTER TWO | LEWIS MUMFORD’S STUDY OF REGIONAL ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA Page 52 to ensure that regions were not insular, as Mumford put it, to guard against “the notion that the regional should be identified with the self-sufficient or the self-contained.”95 By 1985 regionalism no longer needed to emphasise the universal, rather it was the universal that dominated. However, regionalism— by that stage Frampton’s Critical Regionalism—suited the new circumstances just as well. As Frampton put it: “the fundamental strategy of Critical Regionalism is to mediate the impact of universal civilization with elements derived indirectly from the peculiarities of a particular place.”96 The threat posed by radically narrow regional theories like Nazism in the early twentieth century had, later in the same century been transformed into the threat posed by a radically open globalisation, a force that philosopher Paul Ricoeur identified as a great paradox for regional and traditional cultures. “It seems” Ricoeur wrote, “as if mankind, by approaching en masse a basic consumer culture, were also stopped en masse at a subcultural level. Thus we come to the crucial problem confronting nations just rising from underdevelopment. In order to get on to the road toward mechanization, is it necessary to jettison the old cultural past which has been the raison d’ètre of a nation?”97 The differences in global culture between the early and late twentieth century largely reversed the direction of Mumford’s theory, since the need to actively incorporate universal influences into regions had been replaced with the need to protect the local from global culture. While Mumford’s was concerned that the universal should be included in the region, he identified a fundamental relationship between the two, foreseeing that advances in technology could quickly make the universal the dominant force. The logic of Mumford’s theory however, remained valid; that the universal and the regional are equally necessary for cultural progress to be possible. Critical Regionalism is the direct product of Mumford’s insight and he remains the intellectual founder of modern regionalist theory, and the creator of a vocabulary with which to analyse what is problematic about the very notion of regions, including the one suggested by an international style of architecture.

CHAPTER TWO | LEWIS MUMFORD’S STUDY OF REGIONAL ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA Page 53 CHAPTER TWO | NOTES

1 The “Chicago School” is the name assigned by Henry Russell Hitchcock in his book Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration (1929) to the group of architects developing commercial structures in Chicago in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Important practitioners in the Chicago school were Louis Sullivan, Daniel Bernham, John Wellborn Root and Henry Hobson Richardson. Frank Lloyd Wright’s work is sometimes referred to as Chicago School, however is more usually distinguished from these commercial structures and referred to as Prairie School architecture. 2 Mumford 1947, p.97 3 Mumford, L. 1949, ‘The Architecture of the Bay Region’ in Domestic Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Region, The San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, unpaginated 4 Mumford 1947 5 Tzonis and Lefaivre 2003, p.34 6 Mumford, L. 1941, The South In Architecture, Harcourt Brace and Company, New York, and London, p.30 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. pp.5-6 9 Ibid. p.30 10 Ibid. pp.29-30 11 Mumford 1947, p.97 12 Mumford (ed.) 1972, p.32 13 Ibid. p.9 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 The Golden Mean is a geometric construct where a line is divided into two parts such that the ratio of the whole to the longer part is equal to the ratio of the longer part to the shorter part. The ratio is often thought to produce the most aesthetically pleasing shape; for instance when the two parts are used as the length and breadth of a rectangle, the result is a Golden Rectangle. Greek and Roman buildings are sometimes described as having been designed around this ratio; however the proofs of this are often spurious. 17 Mumford, 1955, (first published 1924) Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilisation, Second Revised Edition, Dover Publications, New York, p.202 18 Mumford (ed.) 1972, p.10 19 Mumford 1955, p.13 20 Ibid. p.28 21 Ibid. p.29 22 Ibid. p.18 23 For a summary of critical responses to Sticks and Stones see Wojtowicz, 1996, pp.46-53 24 Luccarelli 1995, p.28 25 Mumford 1955, p.86 26 Ibid. p.22; For these settlers, he noted, “the architecture of the Indian counted for nothing: neither the tepee nor the Iroquois long houses left an impression.” 27 Mumford 1941, p.23 28 Ibid. p.24 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. p.25 31 Ibid. p.24 32 Ibid. 33 Mumford 1955, pp.13-31 34 Mumford 1972, p.27; According to Mumford the Samoa house “Vailima” was “widely reproduced in photographs in the heyday of his [Stevenson’s] popularity.” (Mumford (ed.) 1972, p.27) 35 see for example Mumford (ed.) 1972, p.27 36 Ibid. p.13 37 Quoted in Frampton 1985, p.320 38 Treib 1999, p.9 39 Brooks, V.W. 1918, ‘On Creating a Usable Past’, The Dial, no. 64, April 11, 1918, pp.337- 41

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40 Mumford 1971, p.25 41 Mumford 1941, p.14 42 Mumford 1971, p.50 43 Ibid. p.51 44 Mumford (ed.) 1972, p.15 45 Ibid. p.13 46 Mumford 1941. p.18 47 Mumford 1971, p.52 48 Mumford 1941, p.102 49 Ibid. p.80 50 Ibid. p.96 51 Mumford, L. (ed.) 1972, Roots of Contemporary American Architecture: 37 Essays from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present, Dover Publications, New York, p.10 52 Ibid. 53 Mumford 1941, p.128; Wright was unimpressed with the insinuation that he and Richardson were somehow aligned – he wrote in a review of The South in Architecture article that he was “mildly mortified to learn from Mr. Mumford’s final lecture that I ‘widened and carried along the Richardson principles’ because I never believed Mr. Richardson had any ‘principles.’” (quoted in Wojtowicz 1996, p.70) 54 Mumford 1941, p.130 55 Mumford, L. 1971, (first published 1931) The Brown Decades: A Study of the Arts in America 1865-1895, Dover Publications, New York, p.76 56 Mumford 1971 p.82 57 The falling out was due to philosophical differences between Mumford’s interventionist and Wright’s isolationist views on the war. Mumford believed that all nations had a responsibility to fight Nazi oppression, a position he advocated in The South in Architecture and which Wright criticised publicly. The depth of the rift is evident in a letter to Wright in which Mumford wrote: “You shrink into your selfish ego and urge America to follow you; you are willing to abandon to their terrible fate the conquered, the helpless, the humiliated, the suffering…you dishonour all the generous impulses you once ennobled. Be silent! Lest you bring upon yourself some greater shame.” (Lloyd Wright, Pfieffer, Mumford, 2001, p.182) 58 Mumford (ed.) 1972, p.29 59 Mumford 1941, p.128 60 Ibid. p.131 61 Ibid. p.127 62 Ibid. p.128 63 compare Ibid. p.129 for Mumford’s discussion of Wright’s Japanese influences. 64 Maybeck, B. 1906, Hillside Building (Hillside Club Pamphlet), Berkeley, unpaginated, University of California Berkeley, College of Environmental Design archives 65 Mumford 1949, unpaginated 66 Ibid. 67 Mumford 1947, p.99 68 Mumford (ed.) 1972, p.10 69 Ibid., p.12 70 Harris wrote the comment in the exhibition notes for “Six West Coast Architects” a travelling exhibition that toured Melbourne and Sydney in 1948. Quoted in Germany 1991, p.119 71 Fenske 1997, p.69 72 Ibid. p.69 73 Mumford 1947, p.99 74 In a ‘Sky Line’ column Mumford reported that Wright famously took issue with a client (whom he calls John Smith) who decorated with “pleasant rugs and comfortable Aalto chairs.” Wright exclaimed “you have ruined this place completely and you have disgraced me. This is no longer a Frank Lloyd Wright house; it is a John Smith house now.” (Mumford 1947, p.96) Michelson also wrote of Wright’s ego, comparing his philosophy to Wurster’s: “Prompted by ego and evangelism, modernists, such as Wright, often sought to design house, grounds, and furnishings, in accord with a personal aesthetic vision. This exclusive, master-planning left little room for suggestions or personalizations by the client. Wurster avoided this egotism, this architecture of control. He conceived of the “frame for living” as an open, muted, but elegant

CHAPTER TWO | LEWIS MUMFORD’S STUDY OF REGIONAL ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA Page 55 background for daily routines, allowing the vitality of family life and the sensual richness of the Bay Region’s surroundings to infuse his residences’ interiors.” (Michelson 1993, p.8) 75 For a summary of the design philosophies of nine influential Bay Region architects, see Wurster, W. Hill, A. Dinwiddie, J. Dailey, G. Langhorst, F. McCarthy, F. Royston, R. Violich, F. & Williams, E. 1949, ‘Is There a Bay region Style?’ in Architectural Record, FW Dodge Corporation, New York, May 1949, from p.92; Wright’s egotism is discussed in Mumford 1947, p.96; Mumford’s opinion of International Style design is well documented throughout this thesis – for example his description of it as consisting of “restrictive and arid formulas” (Mumford 1947, p.99). 76 Mumford 1947, p.97 77 The “proponents” of the International Style were dominated by the community of theorists and practitioners centred on the East Coast and affiliated with the New York Museum of Modern Art, which had hosted Philip Johnson’s and Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s 1932 exhibition ‘Modern Architecture’ and published their book . This group, which included Johnson, Hitchcock, MoMA director Alfred Barr and architects such as Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius, represented the intellectual force behind the International Style, and rigorously defended it against Mumford’s criticisms. 78 Gropius 1948, p.12 79 Barr, A. 1948, ‘Alfred H. Barr, Jr.’, in MoMA 1948, pp.7-8 80 Mumford 1941, p.30 81 Mumford, L. 1948, ‘Lewis Mumford’, in MoMA 1948, p.21 82 Mumford 1941, p.30 83 Ibid. p.6 84 Mumford, 2000 p.229 (Originally published as ‘The Sky Line: The American Tradition’ in The New Yorker, March 11, 1939) 85 Tzonis & Lefaivre 2003, p.39 86 Ibid. p.6 87 Fenske, G. 1997, ‘Lewis Mumford, Henry-Russell Hitchcock and the Bay Region Style’ in The Education of the Architect: Historiography, Urbanism and the Growth of Architectural Knowledge, M. Pollack (ed.), The MIT Press, Cambridge and London, p.67 88 Mumford (ed.) 1972, p.x 89 Gropius, W. 1948, ‘Walter Gropius’ in MoMA 1948, p.11 90 Fenske 1997 91 Tzonis & Lefaivre 2003, p.34. Tzonis and Lefaivre outline their debt to Mumford in detail in this work; see particularly p.6 and pp.24-39 92 For instance Mumford’s differed from regionalism as Ruskin understood it in The Stones of Venice (1851-53). Tzonis and Lefaivre talk of “Mumford’s profound originality” (Tzonis & Lefaivre 2003, p.34) in creating an original regionalism that showed the interdependence between all regions. 93 Tzonis & Lefaivre 2003, p.27 94 Tzonis & Lefaivre 2003, p.20 95 Mumford 1941, p.30 96 Frampton 1985, p.109 97 Ricoeur, P. 1965, History and Truth, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, p.276

CHAPTER TWO | LEWIS MUMFORD’S STUDY OF REGIONAL ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA Page 56 CHAPTER THREE | THE BAY REGION STYLE: VERNACULAR ORIGINS, REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND LEGACY

The origins [of the Bay Region Style] were certainly mixed, but the result was a flexible native style which could go over into modern architecture without any serious break.1 – Elizabeth Mock, 1944

Mumford claimed that the regional architecture of the Bay Region was a more mature approach to Modernism than that of the International Style. This chapter describes how, throughout the Modernist period, Bay Region architects synthesised Modernist principles with the vernacular forms of the region and with the built legacy left by their Romantic-era predecessors. These earlier architects had, in turn, synthesised their Beaux Arts and Arts and Crafts ideas with designs inspired Figure 1: View from Berkeley Hills by the region’s vernacular buildings. Also (photo Jane Castle) examined is the strong Japanese influence on Bay Region architecture, and the chapter concludes with a summary of the Bay Region school’s importance for domestic architecture in the U.S.A. and elsewhere. Mumford’s regionalism demanded an interchange between the local and the universal. In the Bay Region, local influences were strong: the climate and culture distinguished the West Coast from the rest of America and its vernacular architecture was eclectic and unique, ranging from Spanish adobe structures to timber farm buildings and owner-built cottages of miners and settlers. 2 Yet universal influences were always present: Arts and Crafts ideas and Modernist ideas were equally valued, elements of Pacific cultures seemed analogous and relevant, and America’s developing architecture on the East Coast and Mid West provided Modernist prototypes as did mages of European Modernist architecture.

CHAPTER THREE | THE BAY REGION STYLE Page 57 The architecture Mumford identified as the Bay Region Style began its development in the late nineteenth century when Beaux Arts-influenced architects, including Maybeck, Julia Morgan, Willis Polk, Ernest Coxhead and John Galen Howard began practicing on the relatively undeveloped American West Coast. While Mumford was not the first to notice a significant architectural type in the Bay Region, he was the first to define and defend it, describing it as a dwelling type that had grown organically from the work of Maybeck and Gill. For Mumford these two showed “qualities of boldness, directness and human sensitivity, combined with a certain quiet restraint, that seems embedded in the very character of the region. The Bay Region architects have given form to their very informality.”3 These architects found inspiration in local owner-built structures. Maybeck, in particular, became fascinated by a timber dwelling in Piedmont near Berkeley, built in about 1876 by a neighbour, Swedenborgian Church minister Joseph Worcester (1836-1913).4 Maybeck’s client and friend, writer Charles Keeler later wrote that Maybeck found the building’s lack of ornamentation and raw timber finishes a revelation.5 The building was designed to imitate the beauty of nature or God, and was influenced by Worcester’s religion and his reading of Ruskin, particularly The Seven Lamps of Architecture.6

Figure 2: Worcester et al, Church of the New Jerusalem, Swedenborgian (1895), San Francisco (photos Jane Castle)

Worcester and A. Page Brown (1859-1896), with input from Maybeck, subsequently designed the influential Swedenborgian Church building (1894) in San Francisco (Figure 2).

CHAPTER THREE | THE BAY REGION STYLE Page 58 Maybeck’s Romantic-era architecture, inspired by local owner-built designs, developed over the first two decades of the twentieth century into a unique regional form and he and other architects in the region found clients willing to allow them to experiment with modern designs that incorporated elements of Californian and Japanese vernacular traditions. Yet these architects remained largely unevaluated by architectural theorists until the late 1940s when Mumford first referred to the Bay Region Style. Mumford stated in the catalogue to the San Francisco Museum of Art exhibition ‘The Domestic Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Region’ (1949): “This exhibition repairs a serious omission in the existing histories of American architecture: it establishes the existence of a vigorous tradition of modern building, which took root in California some half a century ago.”7 Tzonis and Lefaivre called Mumford’s short article defining the Bay Region Style “one of the most controversial and explosive articles of his career”8 and the existence of the Bay Region Style has continued to be the subject of debate. The original condemnation of it by architects and theorists such as Gropius, Henry Russell Hitchcock (1903-1987) and Marcel Breuer (1902-1981) has given way to more reflective writing about the style’s importance and legacy by architectural writers Treib, Fenske, Alan Michelson and Daniel Gregory among others. Yet in many ways it is the argument itself that has brought the eclectic architecture of the Bay Region recognition as a unified body of work; Woodbridge wrote in 1976 of the “Midas-like touch”9 of architects and historians creating history by studying it. The existence of the Bay Region Style was certainly established by articles, symposiums, exhibitions, international interest, attestations of its existence and the paradoxical denials of its existence by both its detractors and practitioners. In the abundance of contradictory publicity and scrutiny, architects, students and the public of all regions became influenced by Californian bungalows, ranch houses, Japanese-inspired timber joinery, sunny decks made liveable by overhung roofs and removable walls, gardens designed to be a part of the house and attractively enigmatic concepts like the kitchen cave, the room without a name and the indoor/outdoor room.10

CHAPTER THREE | THE BAY REGION STYLE Page 59 Tzonis and Lefaivre claimed that the reason Mumford’s article defining the Bay Region Style “caused such a stir was that it was the first time that regionalism had been recruited as an alternative to the International Style, the first time that ‘from the ground up’ (to use a phrase of Mumford’s) architecture posed a serious threat to the kind of ‘top-down’ elitist, artificially imposed, regimenting International Style architecture touted by the MoMA.”11 Mumford’s article had caused Figure 3: Architectural Record (May 1949), showing cover image of a Clarence Mayhew some controversy in the domestic design in Burlingame, San Francisco architectural community, however there was international interest only after MoMA reacted to it at the 1948 symposium.12 America’s Architectural Record of May 1949 noted that London’s Architectural Review had begun using the term “Bay Area Style…as an accepted phrase.”13 An exhibition of Bay Region architecture called ‘America To-day’ travelled to Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Brisbane in 1948 just seven months after the symposium and almost a year before San Francisco’s major ‘Domestic Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Region’ exhibition in 1949. Bay Region architect Ernest Kump visited Melbourne in October 1948 and gave a lecture that described the Bay Region’s architecture to a forum of students and architects. Kump later selected the Bay Region work for the travelling Australian exhibition, which included his own, and that of Wurster, Pietro Belluschi, Gardner Dailey, Mario Corbett and Harwell Hamilton Harris. Australian architect Robin Boyd’s 1948 article ‘California & Victoria, Architectural Twins’ in The Age newspaper reviewed the exhibition favourably, describing the Bay Region’s architecture as “a mode of building that is sufficiently apart from general international architecture to be classed as a distinctive type.”14 His article documented the movements in modern architecture in both California and Victoria:

CHAPTER THREE | THE BAY REGION STYLE Page 60 For a decade or so, the domestic architecture of the south-west coast of the U.S.A. and the south-east coast of Australia have been drawing closer akin…not because Australians are imitating Americans…but simply because the progressive architects of both countries have had to answer similar social and climatic problems with similar materials.”15

Boyd does not refer to stylistic factors to connect the two regions. Modern architecture, he argued, should mean “building in the most suitable, logical way for the people and country concerned.”16 The previous year, in his book Victorian Modern (1947), Boyd had analysed the evolution of local Victorian design and acknowledged the influence of the Bay Region: “Thus the Victorian house has developed with something inherited from a century of Victorian living, something borrowed from the more sophisticated experience of California and a great deal learnt from the world-wide modern movement…”17 Despite international interest in the Bay Region’s architecture, when nine of its most significant practitioners were asked whether there was a Bay Area Style by the journal Architectural Record in May 1949 (Figure 3), all said no.18 Lewis Mumford perhaps felt he was owed more by this group, who had been critically accepted around the world on the strength of his arguments, and he took issue with their reticence: “it is useless to complain” he wrote in 1949 “as a Bay Region patriot did a little while ago in the Architectural Review of London that the Bay Region architects didn’t want to be ‘discovered’ and theorized over by Eastern critics…such critical reevaluation is the price of maturity.”19 In the same speech however, he admitted that referring to the “Bay Region Style” in the Sky Line article two years previously had been an “unfortunate slip.”20 Wurster had a final word on the subject a decade later: “Lewis Mumford called our style ‘the Bay Region Style’. That was unfortunate.”21 While denying the existence of a Bay Region Style in the Architectural Record article, each of the nine architects explained his position on Bay Region architecture. Wurster described the Bay Region’s architecture as having vitality and “real continuity in strong, lively independent work for more than half a century. If there is a ‘regional quality’ it rests mainly on the fact that building which still looks fresh and interesting today has been erected in the

CHAPTER THREE | THE BAY REGION STYLE Page 61 Bay Area every year since 1895.”22 Albert Hill claimed “I do not believe any man of integrity feels he is part of or is making a ‘style’…We are not working in a ‘style,’ we are working in honesty in our beliefs.”23 John Dinwiddie thought that to perceive a style in the Bay Region was a “sad commentary on our powers of observation…no precedent, no style. Q.E.D.”24 Frederick Langhorst claimed he would “shudder to think of [developing a style]”25 and thought the open-mindedness of Bay Region clients was responsible for the generally progressive architecture there. Francis McCarthy thought style meant “hastening obsolescence.”26 Only Gardner Dailey was positive toward the idea of a Bay Area Style, although he distanced it from architecture. He claimed that Bay Area people encouraged an “original,

creative spirit” and cited developments Figure 4: Mission Dolores (1776), San Francisco (photo Jane Castle) in the architecture of Polk, Maybeck, Louis Christian Mulgardt and Bruce Porter as ante-dating similar movements in the International Style by many years. He thought that the “strong individualistic spirit” of the region’s people allowed practitioners to “work side by side and yet influence each other very little.”27 He concluded that if there was a Bay Region Style it was the “culture and good taste, sophistication and appreciation of restraint of the people and artists of the Bay Region.”28

Origins of the Bay Region Style Architectural historian Elizabeth Kendall Thompson, who researched the Bay Area’s architecture for the ‘Domestic Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Region’ exhibition characterised the movement as possessing an “individualistic insistence on principle rather than style”29 the formal qualities of which were based on a relationship with the site and the client rather than determined by aesthetics. Kendall Thompson investigated the eighteenth century origins of Bay Region Style architecture and analysed the vernacular precedents, particularly the adobe missions [Figure 4] that she believed had

CHAPTER THREE | THE BAY REGION STYLE Page 62 influenced much of the area’s subsequent architecture. Hers is perhaps the most rational response to the arguing over whether or not a “style” existed in the Bay Region: Something of the spirit of the padres who built the adobe and brick- and-adobe missions in the earliest days of California’s recorded history has permeated the minds of architects ever since, so that there has been a continuing simplicity and sincerity in design among the architects of the region. Using native materials and methods to fill local living requirements, the padres built the Missions, unconscious that their work was an example of indigenous architecture, or indeed that it was architecture at all. In so simple and honest a way has the tradition begun which still exists that it has now become second nature to think in terms of local needs and possibilities, local materials and local methods of construction, rather than style. Not that Bay Area houses have ever lacked “style”; style, with each designer, has been an individual matter.30

Architects in the Bay Region may be seen as having continued a regional vernacular tradition by referencing the missions referred to by Kendall Thompson as well as Hispanic adobe houses and several Californian building types: the board-and-batten barn and house, the ranch and bungalow. Mumford and Kendall Thompson both noted in the mid-twentieth century the regional emphasis of the Bay Region’s architecture. Yet this emphasis is not surprising given the philosophy of the region’s early architects and theorists. Writer Charles Keeler who, as we shall see, was an influential force in shaping the development of the Berkeley region, wrote in The Simple Home (1904): “It has often been pointed out that all sound art is an expression springing from the nature which environs it. Its Figure 5: Cover of Hillside Club's booklet (1906), designed by Bernard principles may have been imported from afar, but the Maybeck application of those principles must be native. A home, for example must be adapted to the climate, the landscape and the life in which it is to serve its part.”31 Keeler was a committed proponent of Arts and Crafts philosophies, the ideals of which found regional application in the

CHAPTER THREE | THE BAY REGION STYLE Page 63 early twentieth century architecture of San Francisco. Ruskin’s and Morris’s writing was influential in the U.S.A. and appealed particularly to intellectuals who sought a retreat from materialism and the excesses of progress.32 Maybeck, an influential early Bay Region architect, was both friend and counsellor to Keeler, who, after meeting Maybeck, founded the ‘Ruskin Club’ in 1896 in Berkeley while his wife Louise founded the ‘Hillside Club’.33 Only women (architect Julia Morgan was one member) were allowed to join until 1902; Maybeck was the enthusiastic first male member.

Figure 6: Bernard Maybeck: Original and modern view of Keeler House (1895), Berkeley. Keeler’s prediction of the “white painted boxes” has come to fruition, even inside the original front gate, which can be seen in the photograph. (sketch Kenneth Cardwell, photo Jane Castle)

The Berkeley Hillside Club’s booklet Hillside Building (1906) (Figure 5) was written as a development plan for the area, and called for sensitive responses to the unique qualities of the region. Maybeck wrote in the booklet: “California climate demands a certain style of building. The roofs are to shed rain, but not snow; the windows are to let in all the sunlight possible, not to keep out the heat, - large openings, roofs of low pitch for Berkeley, - and the roofs made to look well from above.”34 The Club’s guidelines for building in the Berkeley Hills explicitly proscribed the development of the stark forms of much modern housing. Keeler wrote of a conversation he had had with Maybeck on the completion of Keeler’s Berkeley house (Figure 6): "But", I said to Mr. Maybeck, "its effect will become completely ruined when others come and build stupid white-painted boxes all about us". "You must see to it", he replied in his quiet, earnest tones that carried conviction, "that all the houses about you are in keeping with your own."35

CHAPTER THREE | THE BAY REGION STYLE Page 64 Keeler noted “it was not long before we found families to agree to buy the lots surrounding us and have Mr. Maybeck design their homes.”36

Figure 7: Albert Schweinfurth: Unitarian Church (1898), Berkeley (photo Jane Castle)

Keeler’s Ruskin Club met in the Unitarian Church (1898) (Figure 7) in Berkeley, designed by Albert Schweinfurth (1864-1900). This building was influenced by the Church of the New Jerusalem, Swedenborgian in San Francisco, which Keeler attributed to Maybeck. In his unpublished essay ‘Bernard Maybeck: A Gothic man in the 20th Century’, Keeler noted that Maybeck was inspired by Joseph Worcester’s Piedmont house “and in time designed for him the famous Swedenborgian Church in San Francisco.” 37 (Figure 2, p.58) While Maybeck drafted the plans, it seems more likely according to current

Figure 8: Worcester house, Piedmont (c1876) (photo Jane Castle) church literature that the building was designed collectively by several architects, designers and friends including Schweinfurth, Worcester, Maybeck and Brown.38 The Bay Region’s owner-built vernacular buildings were unlike anything Maybeck and his colleagues had studied in the European Beaux- Arts tradition. Keeler documented that “there came to Mr. Maybeck in his early California days an experience that profoundly affected his whole artistic

CHAPTER THREE | THE BAY REGION STYLE Page 65 outlook. He found a cottage in Piedmont on the hills back of Oakland, and next to him the Reverend Joseph Worcester had a little summer retreat.”39 When Maybeck saw the redwood board interior and shingle exterior of Worcester’s house (c1876) at Piedmont (Figure 8) he allegedly called it “an outstanding architectural revelation.”40 Worcester’s cottage, which still stands in Piedmont, was originally a single storey dwelling with unfinished timber internally and externally. The building was intended to weather naturally, representing a radical departure from the ornately painted and decorated timber clapboard houses common to the period. It featured overhanging eaves that created a large, covered porch with built-in seating, which became an outdoor room in summer. This dwelling is arguably the original building in the Bay Region Style, given its well-documented influence on Maybeck and the design of the Swedenborgian Church building, and hence on most other early Bay Region architects. The rustic simplicity of the Piedmont house and the Swedenborgian (Figure 2, p.58) and Unitarian churches (Figure 7, p.65) inspired Maybeck and his contemporaries to look beyond the formal qualities of European architecture and toward the vernacular buildings and materials of the San Francisco region.41 Leslie Freudenheim and Elisabeth Sussman in their 1974 book Building with Nature, Roots of the San Francisco Bay Region Tradition wrote that Worcester’s use of natural materials “awakened San Francisco’s architects to an appreciation of natural materials and a freedom from rigid historicisms.”42 They pointed out that Worcester “must have seen and appreciated the vernacular architecture of the state’s early history as well as its rough shelters.”43 Worcester’s Piedmont house also reveals roof forms, overhangs and porches possibly influenced by California’s early adobe architecture. The turn-of-the-century desire to re-examine traditional architectural forms also corresponded with a renewed interest in the Californian State’s strong pioneer roots. The end of the frontier period in America and the filling out of the country brought with it a nostalgic romanticising of frontier pride and the pioneers’ self-reliance. This, coupled with a perceived distance from the ideas and influences of both Europe and the American East Coast enabled

CHAPTER THREE | THE BAY REGION STYLE Page 66 architects in the Bay Region to reflect on California’s architectural heritage and develop individual, regional forms that responded to the local vernacular. There is little to visually or stylistically connect the phases or buildings of the Bay Region Style to Californian vernacular. Mumford argued in fact that the opposite was true: that Bay region architecture was distinguished by its variety of forms, with room for “personalities as different as Maybeck and Dailey and Wurster and Kump.”44 Keeler had also suggested a similar analysis, writing around 1920 of Maybeck’s designs: … Mr. Maybeck is most intimately known for his homes in the San Francisco Bay region. You may know them from any other architect's work because each one is so individual, so creative, so poetical. In many of them there is a Spanish influence--wide eaves and tile roof, and that sense of being handmade--but there is ever the Maybeckian touch that stamps them as having been created by a craftsman to fit the particular lives of the people for whom they were designed.45

Some loose stylistic characteristics however can be associated with the work of the Bay Region architects as a whole. The buildings are generally small- scale residential and often clad both internally and externally in redwood. David Gebhard in his introduction to Woodbridge’s Bay Area Houses (1976) observed “they suggest a visual mode which is vernacular and anti-urban.”46 Despite the increasing population, Bay Region design has tended to retain qualities more readily associated with rural sites than with the dense, suburban landscapes of San Francisco and Berkeley, such as large plot sizes, detached housing in varied styles, concentration on aspect, emphasis on landscaping and trees and unfinished timber façades. Vernacular connections are generally not the result of copied styles, however the conscious reinterpretation of the vernacular that we have seen in Maybeck’s work and will see in Wurster’s is a simple acknowledgment that generations of builders have made intelligent decisions based on interpretations of the region. The Bay Region Style existed because California’s architects augmented the themes of the Romantic era with both the new spatial forms of Modernism and vernacular precedents from California (and beyond, most notably from Japan) to produce buildings that uniquely suited their context. Early twentieth century built development in the Berkeley hills area, adjacent

CHAPTER THREE | THE BAY REGION STYLE Page 67 to the University of California where Maybeck taught and Wurster and many of his colleagues studied, was largely determined by the guidelines set out in the pamphlets of the Arts and Crafts-based Hillside Club. These guidelines represent the earliest codification of a type of building particular to the Berkeley area, and began a tradition of architecture calling for sensitive regional development and the building of homes that incorporated the outdoors and suited the topography and climate.

Figure 9: First phase Bay Region Style: Bernard Maybeck: First Church of Christ Scientist (1910), Berkeley; Main entry | Altar | Roof detail (photos: Jane Castle)

Bay Region Phases One of the most Midas-like inclusions in Woodbridge’s influential Bay Area Houses was the classification of the Bay Region’s architecture into three broad phases.47 The first phase covered the period from the 1890s to about 1920 and was described by Woodbridge as made up of the suburban shingle architecture of Coxhead, Howard and Polk and by the local participation in The Arts and Crafts movement of practitioners such as Maybeck, Morgan and Gutterson.48 A building symbolically associated with the first phase is Maybeck’s First Church of Christ Scientist in Berkeley, (Figure 9) a structure that exists today almost unchanged since its completion in 1910. Maybeck had recently seen the 1906 earthquake and subsequent fire and his choice of materials for

CHAPTER THREE | THE BAY REGION STYLE Page 68 this building reflects his innovative methods to mitigate future damage. The church appears to be a timber building at first glance, however the essentially Romantic-era structure with multiple levels of façade and elevation, is clad externally in Transite, a fire-resistant asbestos cement. This material, unusual for external use in a religious building, is handled sensitively and fixed with a system of semi-ornate brackets to protect its edges. The main structural elements at ground-level are simple plinths of unpainted reinforced concrete. The windows, which give the effect of delicately constructed rectangular lead- lighting are actually mass-produced, warehouse factory windows with lightly frosted glass. The entry is carefully designed to suggest reserved grandeur from the outside, giving no hint of interior masses or volumes. The visitor is led first into a low entry hall before the building opens suddenly in all dimensions into the spacious body of the church. The ceiling is dominated by a structural timber cross and doubles in height between the narthex and the nave. The perspective of the space is reversed by the decline of the floor toward the altar. The raised entry (or, rather, the lowered alter: the slope of the site is unnoticeable from the front, so the increased volume is unexpected) also places the visitor high within the space, giving the room a sense of increased vastness. The timber structure of the church is expressed throughout, and stencilling incorporating carpenters’ notches and construction-marks has been used to decorate the members. The second Bay Region phase (1920-1960), strongly influenced by elements in the first phase, saw the emergence of the redwood post and beam box, a form similar to the steel and concrete structures that Modernism’s functionalist designers were producing. Gardner Dailey’s House in Woodside (Figure 10) is a good example of the Modernist forms developed in the second phase; its simple timber construction and overt barn typology are typical of the period, yet the large floor-to-ceiling glassed areas create well-lit living areas integrated with the garden. It was in the middle of this phase that Mumford’s article first described the progression of Bay Region architecture as a school that had developed over the twentieth century. Architects in this second period, whether consciously or not, began to play a game of countering the modern with the traditional, while fundamentally changing the internal planning of residential dwellings to accommodate the new patterns of

CHAPTER THREE | THE BAY REGION STYLE Page 69 domestic life that emerged in the confident and prosperous America of the twentieth century, particularly after World War Two.

Figure 10: Second phase Bay Region Style: Gardner Dailey: House in Woodside (1940) (photo Morley Baer) A notable building from early in this phase is Wurster’s Gregory Farmhouse, which became immediately world famous as an icon of regionalism on its completion and publication in 1928.49 The second phase represents the most prolific and publicised period of Bay Region architecture. According to the University of California’s Kathleen James-Chakraborty, writing in 1999: “During the 1930s and 1940s, Wurster was the country’s most celebrated architect except for Wright; new houses in the North Berkeley hills filled the magazines. The work of John Dinwiddie, Michael Goodman, John Funk, Harwell Hamilton Harris, and Henry Hill, not to mention Wurster, inspired architects from coast to coast.”50 Treib’s book on Wurster is titled An Everyday Modernism and it is the ordinariness of the Bay Region Style in this period that made Mumford’s claim that a mature and innovative style had developed a target for MoMA ridicule. The phase is marked by a complete retreat from the ornamentation and romantic allusions of the architects of the first phase, whose Beaux-Arts training and Arts and Crafts idealism was quickly overturned by several factors, primarily the Modernist movement’s philosophies but also by a retreat from ostentation during The Depression of the 1930s, which exacerbated the divisions between economic classes. The effects of sociologist Thorstein Veblen’s criticism of ostentation in his The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899)

CHAPTER THREE | THE BAY REGION STYLE Page 70 were also influential in the simplicity of the design of Wurster’s Gregory Farmhouse.51 The third Bay Region phase (1960-1980s) (Figure 11) is an ironic inclusion in Woodbridge’s Bay Area Houses since it is the period of the Bay Region architectural tradition that Woodbridge and Gebhard describe as influenced by, if not developed by their own (and the book’s other authors) investigation into the first two phases. They wrote, “we ‘discovered’ the regional native genius of Bernard Maybeck, Julia Morgan, Ernest Coxhead, and John Hudson Thomas. Those of us who were historians plunged into this highly stimulating regional past, while those of us who were practicing architects took up the theme and participated in the development of the Third Bay Area Tradition.”52

Figure 11: Third phase Bay Region Style buildings: 1. Dwelling at 802 Shattuck Ave. Berkeley (Architect and date unknown) (photo Jane Castle) 2. Charles Moore: Sea Ranch Condominiums (1965) (photo Sturtevant)

This phase is characterised by a concentration on vertical spatial complexity, a new integration of builder’s vernacular details as well as the emergence of literary articulation of the ideas underlying design, in the written work of Charles Moore, Joseph Esherick and William Turnbull. Moore’s Sea Ranch Condominiums (1965) (at right in Figure 11) is the building that most iconically represents with the third phase. Situated on a remote coastal site a few hours drive north of San Francisco, the building is unique and yet the influence of earlier Bay Area architecture is evident in its form, materiality and

CHAPTER THREE | THE BAY REGION STYLE Page 71 relationship to site.53 In its development and synthesis of these earlier approaches to design, Sea Ranch makes clear that the architects of the first and second phases of the Bay Region Style had developed a distinct regional type. Architectural theorist Fenske argued: Sea Ranch…with its vernacular forms crafted in wood, its casual variety in interdependent indoor and outdoor spaces, and its powerful connection to a rugged coastal site, functioned as a late twentieth- century regionalist icon that substantiated Mumford’s argument for the Bay Region school as a continuous, vital, and important parallel development in modern architecture.54

The architects of the various Bay Region phases developed a distinct, modern and regional architectural language. They were strongly influenced by Modernism, local and global vernacular forms and the British Arts and Crafts movement. This diverse combination of influences perfectly suited the Californian climate, and the unburdened newness of the culture. Open- minded, wealthy and educated clients gave commissions to the University of California’s stock of young, locally-trained Modernist architects, allowing contemporary, global architectural innovations to continuously augment this unique regional form.

The Japanese influence There is much evidence of the influence of California’s architectural history on the Bay Region’s architects, however a further distinguishing feature of the region’s architecture is a very clear reference to Japanese vernacular forms. Mumford had argued in his 1947 ‘Sky Line’ article that “the [Bay Region] style is actually a product of the meeting of Oriental and Occidental architectural traditions, and is far more truly a universal style than the so-called international style of the nineteen thirties, since it permits regional adaptations and modifications.”55 This Oriental influence is evident not only in the architect-designed buildings of the region, but in buildings of all types throughout the Bay Area. Some pockets, such as around Codornices Park in the Berkeley Hills, are made up of architecture and topography particularly reminiscent of Japan, and throughout the area many mundane, builder- or owner-designed suburban houses contain some juxtaposed timber references

CHAPTER THREE | THE BAY REGION STYLE Page 72 to the simple and elegant spaces and construction of Japanese houses (Figure 12). The climate and topography of Japan and San Francisco are similar and promote the sharing of methods and ideas. Bay Region architect Clarence Mayhew, in his contribution to the catalogue of the 1949 Domestic Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Region exhibition ‘The Japanese Influence’ he observed “The Japanese have been designing for these conditions for so long a time that they have reached many admirable solutions which are easily adaptable to our local conditions.”56

Figure 12: Japanese influences in Berkeley 1. Los Altos Drive fence detail 2. Charles Callister: Flowers House (1952) seen from below in Tamalpais Road near Codornices Park 3. Japanese style timber joinery, suburban house, Berkeley (photos Jane Castle)

Several cultural and environmental features may be identified, which connect San Francisco’s and Japan’s architectural design. Perhaps most importantly, timber is the basic building material in Japanese domestic architecture. In the early twentieth century it was the most suitable and available material in earthquake-prone San Francisco and it remains so for much domestic architecture. The clearly-expressed structural elements and avoidance of ornamentation in Japanese vernacular architecture allowed natural materials to “decorate” built structures, also a feature of the early Bay Region architects’ work. Maybeck, in particular, insisted that structure rather than façade should be the ornament of a building: Keeler noted Maybeck’s belief that “everything that concealed the construction should be done away

CHAPTER THREE | THE BAY REGION STYLE Page 73 with. There should be no shams, no false fronts.”57 Japanese buildings also have an inclusive view of the garden, just as the integrated relationship of internal and external living had been part of the consciousness of Berkeley’s Arts and Crafts-inspired designers since the late nineteenth century.58 The Bay Region’s architects were also inspired by the Japanese use of screens for spatial flexibility, promoting maximum ventilation and natural lighting.

Figure 13: Charles Callister designs 1. View from balcony, Flowers House (1952), Berkeley 2. Entry from Rose St, Flowers House 3. Dwight Way residence (1948), Berkeley (photos Jane Castle)

During the 1950s several prominent Bay Region architects, including George Rockise and partners Charles Callister and Jack Hillmer, replicated and reinterpreted Japanese form and methods. The latter two showed the most literal interpretation of Japanese architecture, their designs emphasising a use of timber common to Japanese dwellings, both in structure and joinery. Callister’s houses in particular consciously incorporated several traditional Japanese methods and qualities, most evident in the Flowers House (1952) and Dwight Way residence (1948) in Berkeley (Figure 13). In both houses Callister has used heavy unpainted timber members to suggest a geometrical pattern of spatial and structural division, which is repeated on smaller scales throughout the building in the same timber.

CHAPTER THREE | THE BAY REGION STYLE Page 74 As in many Japanese buildings, structure, doorways, window frames, balustrades and screens in Callister’s work are related to each other by material choice, colour and scale. Landscaping, paving and fenestration all

Figure 14: Charles and Henry Greene: (1909-1910) | Thorsen have qualities House, Berkeley characteristic of Japanese vernacular architecture. Callister deliberately sought to initiate the evolution of a new architectural language in the region. He wrote in 1950: “Rather than reform the architecture of San Francisco, I would wish to find the inspiration which is in the traditions of the area. I will use the new techniques within the traditional sense as I am now using prevailing techniques. My concern is not with recreating the old, but rather with creating our own unique eclecticism.”59 He hoped that by synthesising California’s vernacular past with Japanese and Modernist techniques, a new architectural language could emerge that would unify architecture with its landscape. Japanese influences have also been introduced to Bay Region design indirectly through the influence of other American designers. Kenneth Frampton discussed the “neo-Japanese manner of Greene and Greene,”60 the turn-of-the-century Californian architects who were influential upon the Bay Region and designed the prominent Thorsen House (1909-1910) (Figure 14), now student accommodation at the University of California, Berkeley. Another prominent example of Oriental-influenced design is Maybeck’s First Church of Christ, Scientist, one of Berkeley’s most influential buildings. Maybeck’s innovative use of Japanese themes, perhaps a product of turn-of- the-century Orientalism, can be seen throughout the church. A key element of Japanese architecture is the use of nature as an originating element, a theme that had been present in Arts and Crafts architecture extending from Ruskin through to Maybeck and into the work of the Bay Region architects of the mid-

CHAPTER THREE | THE BAY REGION STYLE Page 75 twentieth century. Wright’s work was also of great significance to the development of the Bay Region’s innovative and organic forms.61 Despite his vehement claims to the contrary, Wright’s work has been consistently described as having been influenced by and even derived from Japanese principles.62 The Bay Region’s Pacific-rim location and generations of Japanese immigration have introduced many Japanese themes to the area. The “blend of Oriental and Occidental”63 that Mumford noted in Bay Region architecture extends throughout the phases and building types of the Californian West Coast, and for Mumford it represented another example of how the universal plays a role in authentic regional development.

The legacy of the Bay Region Style The Bay Region Style complemented Mumford’s notion of regional development in which architecture should be positioned in the tension between universal and local influences. For Mumford, contemporary relevance, historical continuity and fitness to environmental and social conditions were important generators of architectural form. He believed American Modernism as represented by the International Style offered clichéd motifs, little better than those of revival styles. Perhaps most germane to Mumford’s attitude to Bay Region architecture and its universal importance was his definition of it in his ‘Sky Line’ article as a “native and humane form of Modernism.”64 The term deliberately set Bay Region Style architecture in opposition to other forms of Modernism and more directly, in this context, to the International Style. The word “native” implied not only that Bay Region architecture was regionally appropriate and had local vernacular origins, but that International Style architecture was without these qualities. Mumford’s choice of the word “humane” pointed to his belief that in the Bay Region Style non-positivist, or humanist values, were celebrated. That something identifiable as Bay Region Style existed is clear from the architectural and critical record. Various theorists have dismissed it, as Breuer and Gropius did, calling it redwood cottage style. Others, like Fenske, praised it as a “vital, modern, regional architecture…with a lasting intergenerational identity.”65 Yet Bay Region architecture has had limited direct influence on architectural education and academic discourse beyond

CHAPTER THREE | THE BAY REGION STYLE Page 76 the mid-twentieth century. This is not necessarily unexpected, as the loosely affiliated Bay Region architects were, unashamedly, designers of houses for clients rather than theorists or designers of monuments. In 1949 Mumford noted the omission of the Bay Region’s buildings from all existing histories of American architecture, attributing this largely to the literary reticence of the region’s architects. He chided them for their reluctance to give their ideas the literary expression which may have increased national consciousness of their work and argued that while labels of theory and style may seem restrictive, “there comes a point, in every human development…where further growth is impossible without achieving a certain degree of self-consciousness.”66 Wurster wrote of the subdued nature of his own architecture: “It is therefore a truly popular architecture, in a sense that much of the internationalists is not, it is an architecture of everyday use rather than form or intellectual theory. Viewed as sculpture it may disappoint, but if in a democratic society architecture is a social art, it may have some validity.”67 It was never the intention of its practitioners that Bay Region architecture should be made academic and it seems natural therefore that there was no organised, vigorous fight to defend the theoretical basis of the style through the rigours of academic interrogation, as there was for instance for the International Style. Mumford championed the Bay Region Style for several years against opposition from both International Style Modernists and, ironically, from the Bay Region’s architects themselves.68 He had analysed Bay Region architecture and had discerned a dwelling type that blended Modernism with regionalism, believing Bay Region architects had produced recognisably modern structures that were nevertheless dwellings rather than sculptures, or in Mumford’s words “factories or museums.”69 These dwellings incorporated the universal themes of Modernist design while solving present and future regional needs and remaining thematically linked to the historical architecture of their region. In the scheme of Mumford’s broader study of regionalism the Bay Region Style was a case study of how authentic regional design may develop in a modern urban setting. Ironically though, the controversy and self- consciousness that followed Mumford’s identification of the Bay Region architects was perhaps enough to upset the pattern of development that had

CHAPTER THREE | THE BAY REGION STYLE Page 77 occurred. Fenske called the Bay Region School itself the unfortunate “historical casualty”70 of the debate over its own existence. Practitioners became cautious, wishing to avoid being labelled as part of the Bay Region Style, and the notion of an identifiable school largely disintegrated. The theoretical argument also diminished as Mumford became more preoccupied with technology and less concerned with writing about architecture.71 Bay Region architects continued to practice, but arguments about the existence of a recognisable Bay Region Style were not revived until the mid-1970s when Sally Woodbridge and her contemporaries began to research the architects Mumford had identified. In Moore’s essay ‘The End of Arcadia’ (1976), he questioned what happened to the Bay Region Style after its third and perhaps final period. He suggested that it is “incontrovertible that there was a series of impulses that produced a number of modest but memorable houses according to a set of principles generally shared, and now that impulse has gone.”72 He placed much of the blame for its disappearance on pragmatic issues like increased fees and legislation that made it expensive and difficult to be structurally adventurous. Furthermore clients who were once happy with Wurster’s “large small house” now usually desired the “small great house.”73 Empty land once in cheap abundance in the Bay Region was by the 1970s a rare commodity and architects themselves became less interested in designing domestic buildings. Twentieth century Western culture’s homogeneity had also affected the uniqueness of the area. At the beginning of the twenty-first century there is still evidence of a distinct Bay Region architecture, but it is increasingly distinguished by historical artefacts rather than contemporary architectural innovations. Superficially, Bay Region Style architecture endures because many of its stylistic features were copied, evident for instance in the worldwide development of California bungalows and ranch houses in the mid-twentieth century (particularly after Wurster’s early work was published). It is also evidenced by the profusion of open-plan domestic designs that appeared in the decades following the modifications to traditional internal planning in the work of the Bay Region and Prairie School architects in the first half of the twentieth century. However beyond the stylistic copying of particular types or

CHAPTER THREE | THE BAY REGION STYLE Page 78 features there was a raised awareness globally (Robin Boyd’s article discussed above is a good example) of new ways to approach domestic design to suit regional conditions. The Bay Region’s architects used the mild West Coast climate, new patterns of living and new building technologies to develop domestic dwellings with indeterminate transitions between interior and exterior spaces, often in the form of largely removable external glass walls. Original innovations developed in the Bay Region were firstly the recognition that the West Coast’s climate allowed operable glass, passive solar design and ambiguity between the house and garden, and, more importantly, that these new technologies were applicable to otherwise ordinary, middle class housing in suburban locations. Gebhard commented on the legacy of the style: the national and international impact of houses such as these [Maybeck’s and Wurster’s work] has—since 1945—been immense and long lasting. On the popular level, features of this tradition were amalgamated in the turn-of-the-century California craftsman bungalow, one of the first “great” exports from the West Coast, and later in that second resounding export, the post-World War II California Ranch House. Among architects the products of the Bay Area Tradition have served as a source of borrowing for almost three-quarters of a century.74

These design features were not incorporated for the sake of architecture as art, rather for the simplest, most mundane, “human” and functional reasons. Wurster even described the importance of providing an outdoor area near the house for the making of mud-pies.75 In his ‘Sky Line’ article Mumford observed another important legacy of the architects of the Bay Region, arguing that they showed “the good young architects today are familiar enough with the machine and its products and processes to take them for granted, and so they are ready to relax and enjoy themselves a little. That will be better for all of us.”76 This was also a criticism of the machine-like functionalism Mumford believed was endemic in International Style architecture. For Mumford, the emergence of the Modernist Bay Region architects represented the point in history where technology was no longer a meaningful end in itself for architecture, and showed that the formulaic design of the International Style was an experiment that had run to its conclusion. Treib proffered a similar argument in his 1995 book: “…perhaps William

CHAPTER THREE | THE BAY REGION STYLE Page 79 Wilson Wurster’s ultimate contribution was to further the architectural campaign to domesticate the machine, to particularize the design of houses, and to bring feeling to function.”77 The Bay Region Style has not been eulogized by history so much as absorbed into it. Robin Boyd wrote of the 1948 travelling exhibition of Bay Region architecture that it was “one of the most instructive and entertaining exhibitions of architecture ever held in Melbourne.”78 This point illustrates how highly regarded these simple design innovations from the Bay Region were by the architectural community in Australia. Architects may not readily recall the names or buildings of Wurster, Maybeck, Polk and Gill and yet these designers’ contributions to domestic architecture are as significant as those of Aalto, Le Corbusier or Wright. The Bay Region architects developed a Regional Modern architecture for America and were early innovators in basic elements of modern housing, such as open planning, rooms with no name, indoor/outdoor spaces and removable glazed walls.79 Many of these contributions were Wurster’s, and the following chapter investigates his development of them from regional and vernacular sources, and argues that he pioneered some of the now ubiquitous devices in contemporary Western domestic architecture.

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1 Mock, E. 1944, Built in USA: 1932-1944, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, p.14 2 The Bay Region is a strip of land about 200 kilometres long on the West Coast of the U.S.A. centred on San Francisco Bay. It lies between the Pacific Ocean and the Coast Ranges, which run parallel to the coast, about 60 kilometres inland. The region is loosely bounded to the north by the canyons just beyond Berkeley and to the south by the Big Sur coastline beyond Santa Cruz, and rises into the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the east. Much of the region’s coastal areas were marshy and inhospitable to early settlers and poorly suited to crop production and the areas between the marshes and the nearby forested hills were used for grazing cattle. The San Francisco Bay was not known to Europeans until relatively late in the European history of America. Despite continual searches by European vessels for a safe harbour on the West Coast of the North American continent, the continual fog, which sits in the bowl of mountains surrounding the San Francisco Bay, kept the bay hidden for two centuries, until Juan Manuel de Ayala finally navigated through the narrow Golden Gate in 1775. 3 Mumford 1949, unpaginated 4 This building is discussed in more detail below in this chapter. 5 Keeler, C. c1920, unpublished essay ‘Bernard Maybeck: A Gothic man in the 20th Century’, one chapter of Friends Bearing Torches an unpublished manuscript made up of sketches of the lives of early Californians, unpaginated, Charles Augustus Keeler Papers, The Bancroft Library, BANC MSS C-H 105, Berkeley, California 6 Freudenheim, L. & Sussman, E. 1974, Building With Nature: Roots of the San Francisco Bay Region Tradition, Peregrine Smith, Santa Barbara, p.10 7 Mumford 1949, unpaginated 8 Tzonis & Lefaivre 2003, p.25 9 Woodbridge (ed.) 1976, preface 10 These concepts are discussed in detail in the following chapter. 11 Tzonis & Lefaivre 2003, pp.25-26 12 For an analysis of the domestic reaction see Fenske 1997, p.78 (note 5), or Tzonis & Lefaivre 2002 13 Wurster et al. 1949, p.92 14 Boyd, R. 1948, The Age, Melbourne, October 9, 1948, p.2 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. (Echoes of Fergusson may again be perceived here.) 17 Boyd, R. 1947, Victorian Modern, Architectural Students' Society, Royal Victorian Institute of Architects, Melbourne, p.67 18 The nine were: William Wurster, Albert Hill, John Dinwiddie, Gardner Dailey, Frederick Langhorst, Francis McCarthy, Robert Royston, Francis Violich and Edward Williams 19 Mumford 1949, unpaginated 20 Mumford 1949, unpaginated; The full quote was “…a few years ago by some unfortunate slip, I characterised the buildings that have been assembled for this exhibition as examples of the “Bay Region Style” and contrasted it with the restrictive and arid formulas of the so-called ‘International Style.’ That reference conjured up the proverbial (tea-with-lemon) tempest: chiefly because its basis and its applications were misunderstood.” It is not entirely clear whether he though the slip was the use of the term Bay Region Style, or the contrast made with the International Style. 21 quoted in Steif, W. 1957, ‘San Francisco News’, held in Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley: William Wurster / WBE 1976-2, Biographical, MSS II.28 22 Wurster et al. 1949, p.92 23 Ibid. p.93 24 Ibid. p.94 25 Ibid. p.95 26 Ibid. p.96 27 Ibid. p.95 28 Ibid. 29 Kendall Thompson, E. 1949, ‘Backgrounds and Beginnings’ in Domestic Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Region, San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, unpaginated 30 Kendall Thompson 1949, unpaginated

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31 Keeler, C. 1906 The Simple Home, Paul Elder, San Francisco, p.18 (republished in 1979 by Peregrine Smith, Santa Barbara). Both editions are out of print. 32 Winter, R. (ed.) 1997, Towards a Simpler Way of Life, University of California Press, Berkeley, p.1 33 The dedication in Keeler’s The Simple Home is to Maybeck “…friend and counsellor…” 34 Maybeck 1906, unpaginated 35 Keeler c1920, unpaginated 36 Ibid. Keeler’s is the only house still extant of this group of Maybeck buildings. 37 Keeler c1920, unpaginated 38 This building was also later to influence Wurster and clients the Gregorys in Wurster’s design for the Gregory Farmhouse. 39 Keeler c1920, unpaginated 40 Wong, R. & Lawrence, J. undated pamphlet, A Brief History of the San Francisco Swedenborgian Church, San Francisco Swedenborgian Church Publications, San Francisco; See also Keeler, c1920 41 The two churches still stand in remarkably original condition; even the bark of the madrones saplings (which were used in unmilled form straight from the tree as part of the roofing truss) is intact. 42 Freudenheim & Sussman, p.3 43 Ibid. p.11 44 Mumford 1949, unpaginated 45 Keeler c1920, unpaginated 46 Gebhard, D. 1976, ‘Introduction: The Bay Area Tradition’ in Woodbridge (ed.) 1976, p.8 47 Midas-like, since it was this study itself which precipitated the third Bay Region phase. 48 See Woodbridge (ed.) 1976 49 The Gregory Farmhouse is discussed and photographed in detail in a following chapter 50 James-Chakraborty, K. 1999, ‘Beyond Provincialism and Place’ in Line Magazine, American Institute of Architects, San Francisco, Fall 1999 51 The influence of Veblen’s work is discussed in more detail in Chapter Five 52 Woodbridge (ed.) 1976, preface 53 Sea Ranch’s distinctiveness is emphasised by a friend of the architect’s affectionate description of it as “a large, wooden rock”; mentioned in Woodbridge (ed.) 1976, p.254 54 Fenske 1997, p.75 55 Mumford 1947, p.99 56 Mayhew, C. 1949, ‘The Japanese Influence’ in Domestic Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Region, San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, unpaginated; The 1949 exhibition was opened by Mumford, and effectively consolidated the Regionalist position after the International Style’s domination of the 1948 MoMA symposium. 57 Quoted in Keeler c1920; Maybeck’s hatred of sham was so strong that his odd habit of dressing only in flowing robes, according to Keeler, arose because the men’s clothing of the period invariably called for a waistcoat, a garment that has the appearance of a small coat but is made with a “false” satin back. Consequently, Maybeck refused to wear one. 58 The garden was a key factor in design for The Hillside Club, the powerful resident’s group, of which Maybeck was a member, that attempted to persuade development toward “Maybeckian” architecture throughout the Berkeley hills, for instance through the distribution of pamphlets prescribing how new landowners should build. Their residential design philosophy was: “Hillside Architecture is landscape gardening around a few rooms for use in case of rain”; Maybeck 1906, unpaginated 59 quoted in Woodbridge 1976, p.220 60 Frampton, K. 1991, ‘Foreword’, in Germany, 1991, p.xi 61 Italian architectural historian Bruno Zevi wrote that organic architects of the mid twentieth century “had a God and a couple of prophets…the God was the real, true, living one, Frank Lloyd Wright. The prophets…were Harwell Hamilton Harris and William Wilson Wurster.” (Zevi, B. ‘Introduction’ in Germany 1991, p.xvi) 62 For a summary of critical assessments of Japanese influences and Wright’s increasingly heated responses, see Nute, K. 2000, Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan: The Role of Traditional Japanese Art and Architecture in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Routledge, UK, pp.2-10 63 Mumford 1947, p.99 64 Mumford 1947, p.99

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65 Fenske 1997, p.75 66 Mumford 1949, unpaginated 67 Burchard, J. & Bush-Brown, A. 1966, The Architecture of America, Little, Brown & Co, p.395; cited in Michelson 1993, pp.5-6 68 Wurster et al. 1949 69 Mumford 1947, p.99 70 Fenske 1997, p.75 71 Tzonis & Lefaivre outline Mumford’s movement away from architectural writing in Tzonis and Lefaivre 2002; For an account of the disintegration of the Bay Region school see Charles Moore’s essay ‘The End of Arcadia’ in Woodbridge (ed.) 1976. 72 Moore, C. 1976, ‘The End of Arcadia’ in Woodbridge (ed.) 1976, p.265 73 Ibid. p.266. The Large Small House was the title of R. Thomas Hille’s 1994 book on Wurster and a term that had colloquial currency throughout Wurster’s career describing his ability to create a sense of spaciousness in small, unadorned dwellings. The “small great house” describes the low-ceilinged and low-budget modern dwellings designed to evoke mansions and squeezed onto suburban subdivisions. 74 Gebhard 1976, p.8 75 Wurster, W. 1949, ‘The Outdoors in Residential Design’ in Architectural Forum, September 1949, p.68 76 Mumford 1947, p.99 77 Treib 1999, p.75 78 Boyd 1948, p.2 79 The “room with no name” is a design feature attributed to Wurster – a usually large and central space within the dwelling that had no predetermined use and could change function depending on the occupants’ needs; at various times it may be called a rumpus room, sunroom, den, TV room, workroom, music room etc.

CHAPTER THREE | THE BAY REGION STYLE Page 83 CHAPTER FOUR | WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM

As an architect, he contributed to the liberation of architecture in the United States with a free and creative approach to design—undogmatic, non-doctrinaire, forthright in its response to local and regional conditions—demonstrated in his own work through buildings which, confident today, will in the future seem inevitable. - A.I.A. Gold Medal Citation awarded to Wurster in 1969

Wurster was born in 1895 in Stockton, California, inland from San Francisco. He was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and for most of his life he lived in the Bay Region. His designs have been built almost exclusively in California. When explaining his reluctance to accept commissions in other places he said simply, “there’s something about getting a feel for your area.”1 Wurster grew up aware of Stockton’s vernacular timber barns and he also studied Monterey’s adobe structures. His first experience of Figure 1: William Wurster in the late 1950s architectural practice was working as a (photo: Moss Photography) teenager for E.B. Brown in Stockton. Browne participated in Mission Revival style architecture, which was popular at the turn of the century. Like Mumford, Wurster sought to understand history rather than mimic it, and he commented that while travelling in Europe he gave up guide books for history books to understand “the why of what I was seeing.”2 Architectural theorist Daniel Gregory believed that this subtle incorporation of the historical was evident in Wurster’s architecture: “…Wurster reworked the old and the ordinary helping us see familiar things as if for the first time.”3 There are important parallels between Wurster and Mumford throughout their professional and private lives, although in contrast to Mumford’s voluminous and well-publicised three decades of correspondence with Frank Lloyd Wright, his relationship with Wurster is far less overt and may appear

CHAPTER FOUR | WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM Page 84 deceptively inconsequential. In their private lives Mumford and Wurster were strongly connected, most overtly by their relationships with Catherine Bauer (1905-1964) an academic, advocate for public housing, and the author of Modern Housing (1934) who had been Mumford’s collaborator and mistress between 1929 and 1933. Later, in 1940 after taking a position at The University of California, Berkeley she married Wurster, profoundly influencing his politics (a lifelong Republican he became a Democrat after his marriage) and broadening his appreciation of architecture as a part of urban design, rather than just building design. In Mumford’s controversial Skyline article in 1947 Wurster was the only modern architect mentioned by name, aligning Mumford and Wurster in the public eye, and they were also both harshly criticised by leading Modernists; Wurster for his “cottage style” architecture, Mumford for his defence of it. This forced Wurster into a difficult position in the ensuing bitter theoretical debate. To take Mumford’s side against America’s leading Modernists would have meant agreeing that the International Style was largely without merit, a view he did not adhere to, but to argue against Mumford would have been to agree that the International Style was a complete modern architectural language that adequately theorised all Modernist architectural forms. While both Wurster and Mumford were Modernists, they were aligned in their distrust of any doctrine that imposed rules or stylistic conventions upon architecture. The professional connection between the two men may be distilled to a belief in the importance of regionalism. Fenske commented: “what Mumford appreciated most about Wurster was his vision of architecture as a complex and culturally entrenched art, its forms and spaces respectfully woven into the prevailing contextual totality…what truly mattered most to Mumford was Wurster’s refinement of sensibility about the region.”4 Wurster’s architecture exemplified the essential connection between regional and universal that was the cornerstone of Mumford’s regionalism. Wurster was at once an international modernist influenced by global architectural trends, and an unmistakable regionalist, whose work synthesised local, vernacular and modern forms. Fenske also described the importance to Mumford of discovering Wurster’s architecture:

CHAPTER FOUR | WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM Page 85 Mumford found in Wurster’s architecture the simple, unostentatious and highly contextual buildings he had praised earlier in Sticks and Stones. It had a studied tension between the vernacular and the formal, and so seemed to capture the proper balance of the native with the universal, and to render explicit the 50-year-old tradition behind such a balance. It was embedded in its surroundings yet assertive of a powerful local character.5

For Mumford, Wurster symbolised the possibility of meaningful modernist architecture that reflected its past and helped forge its future, both distinguishing and contextualising the region in which it was placed. On the occasions that Wurster expressed his ideas in writing (rather than through building) his theme was generally the Bay Region. He wrote expertly about designing for the area, demonstrating an intricate knowledge of all facets of the region’s topography, people and climate, which all informed his design. In a 1954 article, ‘California Architecture For Living’, he wrote: In San Francisco you want the sun at times but if you are over on the west slopes in the sun there is often too much wind. San Francisco is the same latitude as Washington DC but has two great factors that change the climate. First there is the ocean that warms the air so that sea level has no snow or freezing point. Second, San Francisco Bay is the only low-level inlet for the air to the [hot] central valleys of San Joaquin and Sacramento … as the hot air rises the air is pulled in at water level and places San Francisco in a great air conditioning duct…San Francisco can be truly said to have no summer. We can wear an overcoat almost any evening and have a fire in the fireplace 350 days of the 365. As the winds are westerly (except during rain) and these come from over the ocean, there is no dust.6

Wurster went on to explain in detail the effects the region had on design: sites only a few miles from each other may have had different requirements for flyscreens, insulation, heating systems or sound insulation from neighbours. He also described great variations between areas of the Bay Region, sometimes only a few hundred feet apart given the topography, but also between the coastal and desert areas: “In the large central valleys large glass areas must be placed under deep overhangs lest you roast the occupants, although less than 100 miles away in San Francisco you are trying to coax the sun in.”7

CHAPTER FOUR | WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM Page 86 Use of historical precedents Like Mumford, Wurster believed building forms should be developed to suit a region or an area and that these forms were not transplantable as they responded to specific opportunities and limitations, site, climate, client, budget etc. in each case.8 Gregory articulated the development of this regional architectural language in the Bay Area, suggesting that the decisions made by early Bay Region architects had created the conditions for the regional architecture in Wurster’s generation: Such early California architects as Ernest Coxhead, Bernard Maybeck, Julia Morgan and John Galen Howard had produced a regional architecture by using redwood and incorporating vernacular elements into their residential work. But it was really the next generation of Bay Area architects – led by Bill Wurster and including Gardner Daily, Hervey Clark and others – that consciously articulated a regional point of view.9

During the public debates in the aftermath of Mumford’s 1947 Skyline article, Bay Region architects, including Wurster, had publicly distanced themselves from Mumford’s analysis of their work.10 However later in his career, and particularly after his marriage to Catherine Bauer, Wurster began to speak more explicitly about the important influences upon his work. And just as Mumford had used Wurster as an exemplar to modern architects in his Skyline article, Wurster, who generally avoided references to particular architectural theorists, explicitly aligned himself with Mumford during a public lecture in Sacramento in 1942, on his modular designs for temporary war housing. Wurster prefaced his talk with reference to Mumford’s writing on architecture, recommending that his audience should read Mumford’s Sticks and Stones, and quoting from the text. The timing is significant, as the lecture coincided with the second year of Wurster’s marriage to Bauer, and it is perhaps evidence of her influence that he had become involved in large-scale public housing developments, and was quoting Mumford, whose work had owed much to Bauer’s intellectual influence. In the Temporary War Housing lecture, as an introduction to his own parallel position on stylistic and historical influences in architecture, Wurster invoked Mumford’s aversion to the practice of learning about architecture only through photographs, or regarding its aesthetic properties alone:

CHAPTER FOUR | WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM Page 87 The visual aspect is so over-touted – the “I like” or “I don’t like” so over- emphasized that I wish to keep firm hold of the aspects of use – not of taste. Therefore when I speak of historical basis I mean economics, customs, materials and climate. These are as simple and direct as the slave labor of the south which permitted size; - the lack of easy transportation which brought guests who stayed; - the stone house of Pennsylvania and the wood house of Scandinavia; - the open hut of Hawaii and the igloo of the Eskimo.11

In an article on Wurster, architectural writer Esther McCoy described the Bay Region style as “regional in that it used the materials at hand, carried forward an indigenous usage and took advantage of the mild climate.”12 Wurster certainly emulated historical vernacular forms in many of his own designs; Michelson observed “as a young man Wurster would study the vernacular farmhouses of early California and adapt them to contemporary usage.”13 Such adaptation led to Wurster’s most iconic early buildings: the Gregory Farmhouse, the Pasatiempo developments and the many rural holiday houses he subsequently designed in the districts south of San Francisco. This apparent contradiction, the Modernist architect reviving historical styles, is best explained using Mumford’s concept of restoring continuity with a living tradition.14 Wurster’s references to the vernacular could be seen as a deliberate and studied experiment in Modernist design, where a vernacular precedent may be evoked if it suited the context and function. It was not a distinguishing feature of all of his work to copy vernacular forms, however Wurster’s regional and historical knowledge gave him access to regional solutions which he readily reused, often giving his work stylistic resonance with historical architecture. Conspicuously Spanish motifs appear in many Wurster designs; however these were not included through any conscious desire to evoke Spain or the Spanish missions. Rather, as Wurster explained it was because “we have no summer rain…all gardens must be watered…this of course forces us into terraces in the Spanish garden tradition.”15 Architect Lawrence Anderson also noted the resemblance of the entry forecourt to the Gregory Farmhouse to the layout of feudal European farm structures: “The manor house…typically had an enclosed forecourt serving many uses. It clustered and controlled the various non-residential structures needed for farm

CHAPTER FOUR | WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM Page 88 management; it stored machines and tools and formed a sheltered outdoor workshop for their repair.”16 Wurster may have been consciously referencing buildings he would have witnessed in Europe: the Spanish and Portuguese adobe style having enclosed gardens, rectilinear forms and other features similar to those Californian houses they had inspired over a century earlier. Regional and historical precedents also influenced Wurster’s choice of timber as a building material: the climate was mild enough for timber’s thermal qualities; the region was heavily timbered so its builders were predominantly carpenters and, importantly, brick performed poorly in earthquakes.17 Wurster explained also that the Bay Region had no stock of easily available stone: “sandstone does not weather well and granite is too expensive.”18 The option of steel and reinforced concrete was not well known to the region’s builders, therefore was something of an anomaly and an expensive choice for residential work. So for a remote modern weekender like the Gregory Farmhouse it made sense to build predominantly in timber, for much the same reasons as vernacular buildings were often timber. The simple timber vernacular ranch house with external corridors and unadorned whitewashed walls was a sensible prototype.19 Also useful in the Gregory Farmhouse was Wurster’s knowledge of the protective enclosed gardens typical of the region’s adobe structures, as they helped to designate where the wilderness stopped and the garden began. Yet despite his application of historical precedents Wurster argued that his work, and that of the other modern Bay Region architects, was “definitely not influenced by historic traditions.”20 This seems incongruous given that he was well-known for his reinterpretations of regional vernacular barns, missions and adobe houses. This incongruity may be explained partly by Wurster’s awareness of the ease by which an architect can be pigeonholed by stylistic descriptions, and partly by the deliberate inconsistency and experimentation in Wurster’s work: any generalisation breaks down when more than a few of his designs are considered together. Fenske described the combination of qualities within Wurster’s work that she believed Mumford found so compelling: It was Wurster’s architecture, nonetheless, that epitomized for Mumford the spirit of the Bay Region – an environment whose unique

CHAPTER FOUR | WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM Page 89 geography, climate, and vegetation combined to stamp it with a powerful physical identity. It exemplified Mumford’s ideal modern regional idiom: it was not consciously or iconoclastically modern, nor obsessed with the theoretical debates of Europe, but rather straightforward and simple in its expression, and intimately adapted to human use; to precipitation, breeze, views, and to the landscape; and to the local vernacular craft traditions in wood and masonry.

The predominant quality that Mumford discerned as regional in Wurster’s work was his responsiveness to particular conditions rather than to principles dictated by theory or style. However, a difficulty Mumford encountered in his attempt to define a Bay Region Style lay in the tendency of its architects to ignore or deny whatever conventions were applied to it. McCoy described this as “a tradition of disobedience established by Maybeck and others in the Bay Region.”21 Wurster overtly denied that his work was governed by anything, except perhaps a style he described as “relaxed” and “adapted to an outdoor life.”22 Yet while it may be true that no style, movement or historical source was overtly the generator of Wurster’s architecture, his Modernism was infused with historical and regional knowledge, and he happily took from any source if it was appropriate and offered the right solution to a problem.

Wurster’s architectural influences Throughout Wurster’s life, a series of interconnected influences can be identified, from which emerge the regional architecture for which he is remembered. His childhood is significant, since it was in the area around Stockton that he became accustomed to the shapes and materials of the Californian rural vernacular. Even today these pragmatic timber farm buildings, sheds, water towers and houses gain iconic significance through their solitary positions on the vast plains beside the Californian highways (Figure 2, p.91). Their angles and masses evidently stayed with Wurster when he began architectural practice. His work as a teenager with architect E.B. Brown had introduced him to mission revival architecture, and the buildings he saw in Berkeley as a student were predominantly those of the first phase Bay Region architects. These architects had combined European Romanticism with builder’s vernacular structures, leaving a unique legacy particularly in the

CHAPTER FOUR | WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM Page 90 area surrounding the Berkeley campus. Wurster often cited the region itself, and its people, as his major influences; writing in 1949, he outlined what he considered had shaped Bay Region architecture as a whole: take-a-chance clients, mild, even climate, no insects or bugs, a long dry season and, above and over all, the immensity of the scene – all have had their share in shaping the design. Is it small wonder to find the vitality of architecture with these as the starting point?23

There were also more pragmatic forces shaping Wurster’s architectural development. He was a student during a period when European Modernism was beginning to dominate architectural discourse around the world, and yet his architectural education at Berkeley was based on a Beaux Arts model, strengthened by his post- graduation “grand tour” through Europe after some early commissions. Ironically, some of Figure 2: Timber barn, San Simeon, his strongest influences came quite late in his California (photo Jane Castle) career: most significantly his marriage to Catherine Bauer, but also movements in regional Modernism in Northern Europe and his important friendships with Lewis Mumford and, particularly, Alvar Aalto, both of whom he remained in contact with until his death in 1973. The Arts and Crafts-inspired legacy of the Hillside and Ruskin clubs in Berkeley was a powerful force on Wurster as a student. He studied Keeler’s The Simple Home and adopted many of its plainly-spoken suggestions for design sympathetic to regional environments. Both Maybeck and Keeler had been opposed to any notion of style guiding architecture, a position Wurster adopted for his entire career. The reinterpretation of vernacular precedents was one method of grounding a style-less approach to architecture, and was

CHAPTER FOUR | WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM Page 91 employed by both Maybeck and Wurster. Michelson said of Wurster’s relationship to Maybeck and Keeler, that Wurster “shared their preferences for simple vernacular models, which blended well with nature. He admired Maybeck’s innovative attitude toward such precedent, noting the elder architect’s motto: ‘Let’s use the past, yet be free.’”24 Wurster was rarely explicit about his relationship with earlier Bay Region architects, however in the catalogue to the 1949 ‘Domestic Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Region’ exhibition he described at length an experience that greatly influenced him as a university student. He wrote of a room in the Berkeley hills that had struck him in its absolute simplicity; essentially it was a redwood timber box of unfinished timber with a glass wall and four-foot-wide timber panelling. He said he had recognised then the “great skill [it took] to bring about this room: It meant giving up the idea of windows as holes in the wall, of competing with the view with the triviality of fabric, color or pattern. It meant steering free of the ruffles of existence.”25 It was designed “so a person could not only see the out-of-doors but could walk into it and become part of it.”26 The room looked out over San Francisco, but didn’t simply have a view of the city below: Wurster said it defied photography or explanation, yet he seemed to be suggesting that he had suddenly realised that room and view could be the same thing. This simple experience became a constant theme throughout his career, as Wurster conceived each design as a synthesis of site and human experience. The Jensen House (1937) (Figure 12, p.106) for instance is designed with a defensive back to the street, and a “front” facing the sun and view, almost all in glass, with large liveable decks opening into the house on both ground and first floors. He collaborated on many of his designs with landscape architect Thomas Church to ensure that garden and building worked as one. As a young man about to study architecture Wurster had been struck in the room above Berkeley by the beauty of simple functionalism; it seemed merely a roof over a garden, but it had captured in its honesty “a way of living…a frame for such a life.”27 Although he described it in great detail he did not identify the dwelling’s architect, concurring with Mumford that this early phase of Bay Region architecture “was almost an anonymous one.”28 However he added that rooms of this sort could be found in much of the work

CHAPTER FOUR | WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM Page 92 of Schweinfurth, Coxhead, the Greenes, Polk, Howard and Maybeck. Many of Wurster’s subsequent buildings contained similar features: ambiguous thresholds in glazed or removable walls; built-in seating around fireplaces with raised hearths, unfinished panelling and extensive use of simple and undisguised timber joinery throughout. Maybeck was also an extremely important influence on Wurster. During the first phase of Bay Region architecture a large number of significant dwellings around Berkeley were designed by Maybeck, and nearly all had been influenced by the guidelines he had written for the Berkeley Hillside Club. Treib described the importance of Maybeck on Wurster’s work: Thus, in their regard for the climate, materials, and site, and in their free interpretation of history and precedent, Maybeck’s houses were the direct precursor of those by William Wurster. It took the young architect a remarkably short time before he, too, discarded the doctrine of period styles and looked more closely at the vernacular architecture of California rather than the great houses of Europe and the East Coast.29

Mumford, too, noted Maybeck’s influence: he described standing with Wurster outside Maybeck’s Christian Science Church in Berkeley, where he learned “from William Wurster’s lips the direct effect of Maybeck’s poetic architectural imagination on his own work while still a student at Berkeley.”30 Mumford lamented that Maybeck’s significance was not more widely felt: “…but for Bernard Maybeck’s fine reticence he would have been hailed long ago as the West Coast counterpart to Wright’s prairie architecture.” 31 And Wurster himself was no less forthright in affirming Maybeck’s influence upon his own generation of architects, stating: “our Mr. Maybeck in Berkeley might be said to have started a trend of freedom some 45 years ago, and his houses stand as landmarks.”32 Wurster was instrumental in reacquainting architects and the public with Maybeck’s work, describing him as the greatest of the individual architects of the early twentieth century Bay Region.33 In 1944 Wurster said of Maybeck that: For more than fifty years he has been using materials imaginatively…and forms far in advance of the custom of the day. His Christian Science Church in Berkeley, difficult to photograph like many great romantic structures, shows a use of growing things and spatial effects, an anti-facadism often thought to emanate solely from Frank Lloyd Wright.34

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Much of Wurster’s experimentation in his early career owes a debt to elements he admired in Maybeck’s work. For instance the use of planting, like the wisteria-covered pergola of the John Gregory House in the Scotts Valley is reminiscent of many Maybeck buildings, including the First Church of Christ, Scientist. So too is Wurster’s use of unadorned timber, and his tendency towards discrete pavilions and courtyards, rather than facades, in the Gregory Farmhouse and Pasatiempo houses, (particularly the Butler House, 1935) (Figure 20, p.113 and Figure 21, p.114). Later in Wurster’s career Bauer greatly influenced his architecture and politics. They married in 1940 when he was 45 and one of America’s most well-known architects. Bauer had moved to California in 1940 to take up the position of Rosenberg Professor of Public Social Service at The University of California, Berkeley. Michelson said of their relationship: “Catherine Bauer Wurster, a vigorous and opinionated woman…influenced him with her devout interests in social issues…She helped to broaden her husband’s focus outside domestic architecture in Northern California.”35 In the years immediately following their marriage Wurster undertook several large community housing projects, including Carquinez Heights, a 1,700 unit development for shipyard worker housing in 1941 and in 1945 a 43 acre community housing development in San Francisco’s Sunset district. Architectural historian Gwendolyn Wright argued that Wurster had also greatly influenced Bauer. In Treib’s An Everyday Modernism she wrote of Bauer’s work “At least three aspects of the built environment gained prominence: a call for the preservation of natural environments, a vision of coordinated urban and suburban development, and a fuller recognition of architectural aesthetics.”36 It is an interesting comment on the philosophical similarity between Wurster and Mumford that Gwendolyn Wright described Bauer’s emphasis in this period as a reiteration of themes she had last worked on during her time living with Mumford in New York a decade previously. Wright also discussed the strong regionalism that guided much of Wurster’s work, but noted that after his marriage it was more correctly “the regionalism of Wurster and Bauer,”37 implying the extent of their involvement in each other’s work and influence on each other’s ideas. After his marriage to

CHAPTER FOUR | WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM Page 94 Bauer, Wurster became far more readily a theorist of architecture, and he discussed regionalism in a less abstract and more confident and personal way in his later career. Despite his commitment to regionalism in design, the International Style was also important to Wurster’s architectural development and he particularly appreciated the simplicity of its form. As Wurster’s practice grew there was pressure from the younger architects through the 1930s to concentrate on the International Style, which Wurster wasn’t opposed to, and its influence is evident in many of his public buildings, particularly the United Nations Centre for San Francisco (1945). However his acceptance of International Style architecture was never overwhelming, and while he liked it to the extent that it was honest and straightforward, he was resolutely against working in any style for its own sake. In 1936 Architectural Forum quoted Wurster: “always do a thing from the positive side – never do so-called modern merely to be against what has been – to have sloping roofs if it comes naturally and there be no need of use – to have decks where it seems desirable.”38 After examining Modernist design during visits to Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, and particularly after his marriage, Wurster became increasingly sceptical of International Style architecture, and began to speak out against it. He was quite shocked to hear that Le Corbusier had threatened to sue his client (the Salvation Army) should they ever open the windows of the Cite de Refuge (1937) in Paris, as this it would cast aspersions on the adequacy of his air-conditioning system.39 Of Le Corbusier’s Unité d'habitation (1947- 1953) Wurster said “it is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, as a total sculpture, with its colour and its roof, but it’s a miserable place to live, with dark halls, narrow rooms, and so forth…”40 He concluded that Le Corbusier was “…not an architect; he is one of the gifted sculptors in the world and uses architecture as sculpture. It has nothing to do with the human being.”41 While the International Style and other Modernist schools certainly had an influence on Wurster, the European contemporary who was most important to his understanding of architecture was fellow regional Modernist, Alvar Aalto. So important was Aalto to Wurster’s later architectural development that he said of him in 1964: “if I have an architectural god, it is he.”42 In 1937

CHAPTER FOUR | WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM Page 95 Wurster travelled to Finland, which Treib described as having then been “for a decade regarded as the locus of a humane modernism.”43 Here he encountered Aalto’s built work, visiting many of his buildings, including Aalto’s own house at Munkkiniemi (1934). The influence of the Finnish architect’s work is obvious in Figure 3: William Wurster: Lyman House (1941), Tiburon (photo Roger Sturtevant) Wurster’s architecture in that period and subsequently. Wurster’s Timby House (1940) and particularly the Lyman House (1941) in Tiburon (Figure 3) reveal an aesthetic as well as theoretical connection with Finnish architecture of the 1930s and 1940s (Figure 4), for instance in the use of unpainted timber, hinged windows, material choices and relationship of building to site. More generally the architectural influence was an emulation of the Scandinavian tendency to design Modernist spaces around comfort and enjoyment of life. Whereas much architectural Modernism often produced clean lines in modern materials, the Finnish response called for natural materials: plants, leather, wood, cane, stone etc. The emphasis was on craftsmanship, joinery and attention to detail, and timber panelling was used extensively in private and public buildings. Finnish design did not prompt any radical change in Wurster’s approach. Rather it affirmed his belief in his own design philosophy; it was in Finland that he recognised that his own work fitted within a global context. The period around 1940 saw both his marriage to Bauer (herself a devotee of

Figure 4: Alvar Aalto: House (1934), Muratsalo; Villa Maeria (1941), Noormarkku (photos Jane Castle)

CHAPTER FOUR | WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM Page 96 Scandinavian design for most of the previous decade) and the beginning of his mutual friendship with Aalto. Aalto’s work embodied an overt regard for context and an implicit understanding of traditional typology, helping to create a Finnish regional architectural response, similar to Wurster’s approach in the Bay Region. Treib argued that overall the experience of studying Aalto’s buildings confirmed to Wurster that it was “possible to be modern without being insensitive to the client and site or the local vernacular.”44

Wurster’s use of vernacular architecture Wurster’s use of regional elements gave his buildings a recognisably local character. Speaking in Istanbul in 1957 he showed examples of his own firm’s work to Turkish architectural students in what he called a “plea to use the local vernacular and not to slavishly copy the old or new masters of architecture.”45 In 1976 Gebhard wrote of Wurster’s own use of the local vernacular, arguing that “Wurster was not rural and untutored – he simply used the visual language of the rural vernacular to create his specifically American forms of the thirties.”46 That the Californian vernacular had European lineage (rather than native American for instance) did not detract from the fact that it had been built from locally occurring materials in response to the climate, to suit the immediate needs of people with no choice but to build protective structures where no structures existed. This honesty appealed to Wurster; he believed that the vernacular arose from a truthful architectural solution to social, economic and technical issues, claiming this “would produce an architecture that is indigenous to our life and times.”47 Mumford’s description of Wurster’s “native and humane form of modernism”48 suggests a Modernist practice that addressed the region and the needs of its people, themes expanded upon by Bauer who argued that Wurster’s continuation of regional traditions and his use of ready-to-hand solutions together made his work a modern vernacular architecture: I suppose more than anyone in the country he is actually doing what I have always screamed for – a natural unforced “vernacular”, using all the things that come logically to hand, from big new ideas to sensible local materials and the particular needs and even style, honesty and not a trace of prima donna tour-de-force. I like his conception of his role as an architect as a good responsible imaginative craftsman…rather than a Messiah who Knows All…I like the fact that, although they’re

CHAPTER FOUR | WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM Page 97 modern in every detail … they’re essentially more a part of the local building tradition out here (which carries right along from the mining town kind of functionalism through Willis Polk and Maybeck) and contemporary western living habits, than they are of the good old ‘international style.’49

In suggesting that architecture may be modern in every detail and yet be vernacular and part of the local building tradition, Bauer is essentially summarising Mumford’s regionalism: the universal influence of Modernism, far from competing with the local and historical, may become an integral part of it. In his 1994 book on Wurster Inside the Large Small House: The Residential Design Legacy of William W. Wurster, R. Thomas Hille suggested that the vernacular qualities in Wurster’s work came from motivations in common with earlier builders: “Many elements already present in both the formal and vernacular design traditions of California reflected Wurster’s own design goals. The California ranch and Spanish colonial traditions had a simplicity and directness, responsiveness to climate and expressive use of indigenous materials, which Wurster sought to capture in his houses.”50 Wurster is attributed with modernising and popularising the vernacular California ranch house, largely due to the exposure he gained from the publication of the Gregory Farmhouse, however it is clear from his views on architecture that he would not have intended to give momentum to revivalist schools.51 In this building, according to Woodbridge, Wurster “took the body of Modern architecture and gave it a regional soul.”52 The building cannot be said to be a copy of a previous style, yet the Farmhouse’s configuration, aesthetic qualities and materiality echo elements of California’s ranch houses, timber farm buildings and Anglo Spanish adobe buildings, which were all forms that Wurster knew well by the time he designed the Scott’s Valley dwelling. The continuous veranda, courtyard plan, enclosed garden, external corridors, redwood construction and whitewashed façades can all be seen as direct or symbolic embodiments of vernacular traditions and regional forms. These forms were subsequently revisited and refined by Wurster throughout the 1930s particularly in the Pasatiempo development and Sloss House (Figure 5) and Voss House (1931) (Figure 16, p.110).

CHAPTER FOUR | WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM Page 98 Treib also referred to Wurster’s work on the Pasatiempo golf course in this period as Wurster’s “evolving essays in the modern vernacular.”53 The Pasatiempo houses consist of more than a dozen detached dwellings of simple timber Figure 5: William Wurster: Sloss House (1931), construction and while there is Woodside (photo Roger Sturtevant) no conspicuous influence of either adobe or ranch houses, there is certainly an evocation of rural timber structures (barns and outbuildings rather than dwellings) that Wurster would have known from farms around Stockton in his youth. Michelson commented that “at Pasatiempo he [Wurster] depended largely on local vernacular sources, utilizing the region’s architectural heritage in a straightforward way, without romanticizing it.”54 Wurster’s designs for this cluster of buildings at Pasatiempo gave him the scope to explore and reinterpret the architectural principles of these local timber forms on the undeveloped land surrounding the Pasatiempo golf course. The resultant dwellings have innovative and sensitive relationships with their sites and show Wurster’s interest in the ambiguity between house and garden, through the incorporation of design devices such as terraces, patios and courtyards. In Bay Area Houses (1976) architect and academic Richard Peters, in his essay on Wurster, commented upon the importance of vernacular precedents in such devices: “Wurster reused and refined a set of architectural elements – the living porch, the glazed gallery, the screened verandah and the garden-living room. These he derived from vernacular sources and adapted to contemporary situations with such skill and understanding that they continued and strengthened a regional architectural tradition.”55 The “glazed gallery” mentioned by Peters functioned as a passage between rooms or pavilions, creating a light source and hallway as well as connecting a purely functional space to the outside. The external corridor of the Gregory Farmhouse functioned similarly although without the

CHAPTER FOUR | WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM Page 99 protection of glazing. Another example may be seen in the Kaplansky Howes House (1931) at Pasatiempo. Wurster had the opportunity to adapt some of these emerging ideas to a coastal site in the design of the Voss House (Figure 16, p.110). This vacation house in Big Sur also used traditional Californian barn typology with simple timber frame construction. All rooms within the house were focussed around centralised communal facilities; the big porch and kitchen cave were oriented towards the rural landscape and dramatic view. The kitchen cave, discussed below, was the first of Wurster’s experiments with inside/outside dining spaces. These spaces he developed in several experiments, for instance as the room-with-no-name in many designs or the “living porch” of the Butler House at Pasatiempo (Figure 20, p.113 and Figure 21, p.114) which, when closed, created a large, bounded central courtyard with corridors around it. The Voss House, an informal building with a vernacular appearance, attracted international attention from people who admired its response to context, simple materiality (unpainted exposed wooden boards) and modern configuration and aspect. The Sloss House (1931) (Figure 5, p.99) also replicated many vernacular devices. As Treib outlined: “the 1931 Sloss House…bears a striking affinity, if not direct resemblance, to the Sherwood Ranch near Salinas that Wurster also described…the enclosed courtyard, contrasting textures and materials, and bridged entrance all suggest ideas drawn somewhat overtly – and enthusiastically – from Early Californian”56 In the 1954 article ‘California Architecture for Living’, Wurster documented some of the underlying design principles within local vernacular monuments which had influenced his own use of Figure 6: Fort Ross Chapel c1825 (reconstructed 1973), localised elements. He cited Jenner, California the Fort Ross Chapel (Figure 6,

CHAPTER FOUR | WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM Page 100 p.100), a distinctive timber building commissioned by Russian colonists in 1825. He also mentioned Fort Winfield Scott (Figure 7) in the San Francisco Presidio, which includes Fort Point, an immense and heavily-fortified masonry structure under the southern pylon of the Golden Gate Bridge, built in the 1860s to defend the city as well as the military fort built during the first decades of the twentieth century on the hill above. The fort is laid out in a sweeping J Figure 7: Building within Fort Winfield Scott (1860s), San shape (rather than the more Francisco usual fort design of a rectangle surrounding a quadrangle) and the influence of Californian adobe structures is evident in the wide eaves, whitewashed walls and recessed, shaded arcade punctuated by archways at ground level. In the same article Wurster particularly noted the contextual architectonic features of Mariano Vallejo’s adobe ranch in Petaluma (1838) (Figure 8). Its deep, protected corridors are reminiscent of the external passageways found in many of Wurster’s early designs. He wrote of the Petaluma ranch: the sense of fitness to site and purpose is impressive. The broad flowing balconies, the protective shadows of wide protecting roofs, the scale of the building and its fine proportions, the distinguished use of crude and simple materials at hand – all reflect intuitive understanding of architectural techniques and objectives with awareness of 57 tradition in the broad sense. Figure 8: Salvador Vallejo (architect): General Mariano Vallejo's Adobe Ranch, 1838, Petaluma

CHAPTER FOUR | WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM Page 101 The influence of early Californian buildings became less overtly apparent in Wurster’s work over the decades after the 1930s. However in his later career Wurster returned to these elemental forms, in his designs for buildings such as the George Pope House (1956) (Figure 9) in Madera, an adobe building with a continuous perimeter veranda, strongly reminiscent of the Larkin House (1834) (Figure 10) a significant adobe structure in Monterey. In this later period of his career the vernacular influence in his work was at its most literal, and his use of Monterey adobe and Spanish Mission vernacular prototypes Figure 9: William Wurster: George Pope House (1956), Madera (photo Roger Sturtevant) became almost purely iconic. Few of the designs of this period are representative of Wurster’s great skill in using the regional and historical within a universal paradigm, and many exhibited stylistic tendencies typical of the revival architecture he had reviled in his early work. Michelson claimed Wurster referred to his own work of the period as “Monterey styled”58 suggesting a marked retreat from his earlier trenchant refusal to accept stylistic interpretations of his work. For the most part however, the vernacular, for Wurster, did not represent motifs or reproducible architectural devices, yet the many stylistic elements of local Figure 10: Larkin House (1835), Monterey, architect unknown vernacular architecture that appear within Wurster’s designs do provide valuable evidence of his attentiveness to his region. More important to him was the vernacular’s simple

CHAPTER FOUR | WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM Page 102 reminder of regional tradition; it represented a link in a cultural and historical chain from which he believed modern architecture should never be isolated.

Innovation in domestic design Although during his career Wurster designed and built many commercial buildings, notably the United Nations Centre for San Francisco (1945) and community housing projects including Chabot Terrace (1941-42), it was in his prolific contribution to residential dwellings that his work has had the most impact, arguably influencing not just his contemporaries but aspects of Western domestic architectural form. In a departure from the formal emphasis of the Modernist era, Wurster concentrated his design methodology on the relationship between the dwelling and his clients’ family lives. He designed to suit local and cultural needs, rather than attempting to create sculptural forms. His designs were in keeping with earlier Bay Region architects’ insistence on a blurred distinction between inside and outside, making the dwelling a part of the site rather than an object upon it. Wurster frequently worked with landscape architect Thomas Church, in a collaboration that ensured that when Wurster designed a dwelling to reference the garden, the garden would be similarly designed to reference the house. The dwelling and its environment were seen as a single object of study (a relationship Wurster had first noted as a student in the glazed room above Berkeley) and Wurster achieved a more seamless transition from inside to outside through the development of the “Wurster footing”, a simple variation to the foundation of a building, which avoided the need for a level change from inside to outside. 59 Wurster’s skill as a designer was better expressed in detailing and innovation than sculpture or monument. Also evident is his sensitive approach to planning, which responded to the living patterns of inhabitants while maximising site opportunities within the budget. In a 1956 article in the New York Times, Wurster explained that he favoured designing “up from the log cabin instead of desperately trying to compress a mansion.”60 This statement indicates not only Wurster’s recognition of the importance of well-designed space, in which proportion rather than size could define grandeur or intimacy. It also hints at his own perception of his starting point: the log cabin is a rustic, vernacular structure which depends upon innovative use of space, since

CHAPTER FOUR | WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM Page 103 rarely would a log cabin have more than one room, which must share all household functions. Nothing in a log cabin is included for the sake of ornament, materials are rough and limited, and by definition the cabin evokes not only natural materials, but a direct connection to the natural environment. The compressed mansion suggests the opposite, an attempt, compromised by budget or land, to create grandeur by replicating large spaces at smaller scales, forcing many small rooms to compete for space to fulfil functions that one larger room may serve if well designed. Wurster wrote of his Gregory Farmhouse: “there was a definite attempt to keep the building free from so-called ‘decoration’ – relying for interest upon the proportioning of the necessary elements.”61 Gregory described Wurster’s unique skill as the ability to seize “on the concept of simplicity and make it into a conscious aesthetic.”62 This ability not only gave Wurster’s work its signature applicability to the relaxed Californian lifestyle, but made it especially well-suited to its time, coinciding with both the ideals of Modernism and with the aspirations of relatively wealthy Californians during the depression, who shunned overtly grand housing that may have seemed ostentatious. This simplicity also tied in well with Wurster’s appreciation of the local vernacular, much of which consisted of rural shacks and non-residential farm buildings. Responding to such factors as the Bay Region’s steep topography, decreasing subdivision sizes and a desire not to turn away clients on the basis of their budget, Wurster became increasingly expert in the design of small houses.63 He strove to create spaciousness in small dwellings (as discussed in relation to his Jensen House below) to the extent that his characteristic domestic form became known as the large-small house.64 Treib discussed the importance of this small dwelling type: One reason for the success of the Wurster office was its ability to address the needs of both wealthy clients and those with modest resources. For the latter, there was the quest for the “large-small house”: an economical scheme yielding the greatest amount of quality usable space even in projects with highly restricted budgets. The invention of such elements as the glazed corridor, the room without a name and the linked living-dining space cannot be attributed to Wurster alone, but these architectural strategies allowed him to create houses that felt spacious, even if limited in total volume.65

CHAPTER FOUR | WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM Page 104 Wurster developed important and pioneering spatial devices that characterised the large-small house and gave to dense, urban living a perception of expansiveness. These included flexible-use rooms and connecting spaces, carefully-considered incorporation of the outdoors and taking advantage of any available view, for instance by orientation, or utilising the roof as a deck. Many of these devices are utilised in the Doble House (Figure 11) which is squeezed into a row of urban terraces, but uses glass, open planning and decks to create a sense of expansiveness. Wurster’s extensive use of glass enhanced natural light and improved visual access throughout spaces and, importantly the absence of ornamentation reduced cluttering and allowed the occupant to choose the function of each room. Hille described five major features of Wurster’s small houses which he believed evoked “the quality and liveability of much larger houses.” These five elements were “controlled outside space, indoor-outdoor rooms, large windows and high ceilings, multi- use rooms, common materials and simplified detailing.”66 Wurster’s commonsense solutions and distaste for pretension led to economical designs and a community of satisfied clients. Wide publication of his work as well as its popularity and timeliness, helped advance the regional and social ideals Figure 11: William Wurster: Doble House (1939), San Francisco (photo Roger Sturtevant implicit in his designs.67 McCoy noted his apparent serendipity as a designer: “there are few men who have continued for so many years to create in a style that is both human and timely”68 suggesting his ideals were either acutely in tune with his period, or were guiding it. These ideals were straightforward, calling for some degree of

CHAPTER FOUR | WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM Page 105 historical and cultural relevance in Modernist design, and for living spaces that suited the living patterns of his clients, giving them access to the outdoors, to fresh air, to natural heating and cooling, to well-lit, serviceable rooms and to a degree of grandeur, especially in relatively small spaces. While Wurster was not alone in designing this type of space, its development as a domestic architectural type is almost exactly coincidental with his emergence as a published architect around 1930. In 1949 Gardner Dailey documented the appearance of the large-small house in the Bay Region: In comparing this exhibition to one which we might have seen here two decades ago, we note the disappearance of the Large House and in its place the appearance of what may be termed “The Large-Small House”. The Large-Small House has one very large room, and the balance of the house has been compressed wherever possible to eliminate waste space, long halls, and stairs. The elimination of space has been accomplished by reducing the service section to a one-maid or no-maid unit. The basement has disappeared. The garage, as such, is usually but a roof. Almost all of the houses shown use what has become popularly known as the dual-purpose room. By this we mean the Playroom-Garden Room, the Study-Guest Room, the Living-Dining Room, the Dining-Kitchen Room; the Pantry has become only a vestige, and it is only man’s basic instinct to worship fire, which still keeps the fireplace intact in the living room.

A quintessential large-small house is Wurster’s Jensen House (1937) (Figure 12, Figure 13, p.107) in the hills not far above the University of California, Berkeley campus. Despite its small footprint, the house has a sense of spaciousness, owing to a combination of the features described above: all

Figure 12: William Wurster: Street elevation of Jensen House (1937), Berkeley; Back of Jensen House (photos Jane Castle, Roger Sturtevant)

CHAPTER FOUR | WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM Page 106 service areas are well placed against the northern wall, leaving a relative abundance of well-lit, well-ventilated, open spaces inside. Situated on a small, sloping block, the house incorporates the garden and view, both at ground level (through floor to ceiling glass walls and a small protected deck) and again on the first-floor, by means of a balcony that sits among tree-branches, accessible from both of the bedrooms. The house was designed to maximise internal solar access and its orientation takes advantage of the view, enhancing the perception of spaciousness for the occupants and reinforcing a design principle of Wurster’s: “small matter in what you live; of great importance is what you look at.”69 The few rooms have high ceilings, recessed stairs, open circulation, little ornamentation and over-scaled windows on all south-facing walls. Furthermore, unlike the neighbouring houses, the street frontage of the Jensen house, while ostensibly a public face addressing the street and containing a front door, is actually the back of the house, since it faces north and away from the view. The focus of the dwelling is toward the back of the site, vastly increasing privacy for the occupants while giving access to an expansive view over Berkeley and the San Francisco Bay. While Wurster’s contributions are seldom monumental in scale or function, he nevertheless continually sought to improve the quality of residential design through inexpensive, site specific and regionally appropriate Figure 13: William Wurster: floor plans of Jensen House, Berkeley, (1937) innovations. One particular device that he developed throughout his career was his room-with- no-name, versions of which appeared in houses of all scales. Treib described

CHAPTER FOUR | WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM Page 107 the rooms-with-no-name in Wurster’s designs as those “without a specific functional assignment… essentially a sizeable room to which were appended alcoves for such activities as study and cooking. In place of numerous small spaces, each with a single function, the new open plan allowed for uses changing over time or according to the presence of various family members.”70 This variation on open-planning was a simple spatial device to reclaim space otherwise lost to circulation, but it also represented Wurster’s astute recognition that the traditional layout of well- delineated rooms with discrete functions no longer served the needs of California’s middle classes, who were more likely to entertain at home, eat informally, and intertwine household duties, like cooking, with leisure and family life. Figure 14: William Wurster: Room-with-no-name" in Chickering House, (1941) Woodside, (photo Roger Sturtevant) Peters described an example of the room-with-no-name in Wurster’s Chickering House (Figure 14): Wurster spoke or wrote a great deal about the “room with no name”. The 1941 Chickering house has such a space – a large, central loggia which is a link or connector between two rooms. The room is a multi- purpose space, either open or closed, freely relating with terraces or gardens which connects functionally different areas. Formal, yet informal; elegant, yet casual, it is indicative of the effort necessary to understand the specificity of an individual room designed to meet diverse needs.71

Wurster’s frequent designs for a room-with-no-name reflected a relaxation of internal planning in response to the changing use of domestic space, which called for large informal spaces to be used variously for entertaining, family meals, children’s rumpus-room, watching television etc; however precursors to these spaces are evident from Wurster’s earliest designs, where experiments with multi-function circulation rooms are

CHAPTER FOUR | WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM Page 108 common. Examples include the outdoor corridor of the Gregory Farmhouse (discussed in detail in Chapter Five) or the glazed gallery of the Kaplansky Howes House, in which a glazed indoor/outdoor link referencing the garden is also usable as a small and well-lit office. The early device perhaps most indicative of the later room-with-no- name was the kitchen cave. Kitchen caves were incorporated into two early designs, the Marion Hollins House (1931) and Voss House. Wurster first developed the kitchen cave for the Hollins House (Figure 15) in the Pasatiempo Golf Course development, just south of the Scotts Valley where the Gregory Farmhouse had recently been completed. This kitchen cave was essentially a long room within the footprint of the house, approximately three metres deep, with one external wall removed, leaving a cave-like opening, not unlike a larger version of the sleeping porch that existed in the Gregory Farmhouse, but exactly at ground level, with a paved floor that extended beyond the under- croft to form a terrace beside the house. The kitchen cave provided an area for open, covered entertaining and dining and Peters commented that it Figure 15: William Wurster: Kitchen cave of Hollins House (1931), was “perhaps his first Pasatiempo; (photos Roger Sturtevant) inside-outside dining room space and the forerunner of what later becomes Wurster’s ‘room with no name.’”72 While the kitchen cave did adjoin the house’s kitchen and was a natural extension to it, it was also a pseudo kitchen itself, containing a built-in brick barbeque, which suited the leisurely Californian lifestyle. Michelson wrote of the cave that the “innovative space…was perfect for informal cookouts, an activity pioneered in the West and unheard of amongst high

CHAPTER FOUR | WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM Page 109 society in the east.”73 Wurster continued to develop the kitchen cave in the Voss House (Figure 16). In this design the cave extended further into the house, about five metres and was conceptually the reverse of the Hollins cave, in that it was an internal space with internal finishes that became part of the outside via a removable wall, while the Hollins cave was more correctly an external space extending into the house. The Voss House also contained a similar device on the top floor. Large bi-fold doors created a removable wall in the main bedroom and opened onto an expansive, covered veranda with a view along the Big Sur coastline. These two spatial devices (removable walls onto ground level in the kitchen cave and bi-fold doors to an upstairs balcony from the bedroom) focussed the internal spaces of the house towards a dramatic view and signified a maturity in Wurster’s ability to incorporate the outdoors without compromising the

Figure 16: William Wurster: North elevation and kitchen cave of Voss House (1931), Big Sur (photos Roger Sturtevant)

comfort of internal spaces. While not uncommon in modern domestic design (in the form of bi-fold doors) the folding external wall was a rarity in Western architecture in the 1930s, and Michelson claims that Wurster “pioneered ground-level outdoor rooms, which merged experience of indoors and out.”74 This development is an important one for Wurster, marking a transition from his experimentation with rural and vernacular forms such as the external corridors, sleeping porches and walled courtyards apparent in his early designs, to a more explicit recognition that these transitional spaces could be reconfigured to fit within more overtly Modernist designs and could be the unifying elements between different functions of the dwelling and between the building and its site.

CHAPTER FOUR | WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM Page 110 After the Hollins House and Voss House the kitchen cave does not reappear explicitly in Wurster’s architecture, however its effects can be seen in many of his subsequent designs. The Clark Beach House (1937) (Figure 17), located on a coastal site, is centrally organised around a living-room designed to function exactly as the kitchen cave of the Voss House. Wurster flanked the house with timber and glass wings to create an external living porch and to protect the entry from the wind experienced on the beach site. The living room opens through a glazed, folding wall several metres wide to Figure 17: William Wurster: Clark Beach House (1937), this protected zone but, as Aptos (photo Roger Sturtevant) in the Voss House, it functions as an indoor room when the wall is pulled shut (the wide entry to this space is visible as the dark opening at ground level in Figure 17). Wurster’s inspiration for the inclusion of indoor/outdoor rooms was grounded entirely in his commitment to creating spaces that suited the use of the building for its occupants. For Wurster, ensuring that the garden was an accessible living space within a design was crucial to enhancing the quality of life of his clients. In an article in Architectural Forum, ‘The Outdoors in Residential Design’ (1949), Wurster documented his observations about the need for private, usable outdoor space in all residential design: “But probably the predominant single desire is for personally controlled out-of-door space, where the family can have a flower or vegetable garden at its door, where the baby can be put out in a play pen or where the younger children can make mud pies.”75 Importantly, this commitment to uniting inside and outside was not simply a device incorporated in luxury or vacation houses, but extended through all types of design and all budgets. Although this relationship is perhaps most overt in Wurster’s coastal houses, it can also be seen in cottage-like dwellings such as the Jensen House, urban dwellings, and even in Wurster’s public housing developments. Wurster and landscape architect Thomas Church worked together on the Vallejo Housing Development in San

CHAPTER FOUR | WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM Page 111 Francisco to create public housing where private and communal outdoor spaces were either connected to the dwelling or visible from floor-to-ceiling windows in the kitchens and living areas, for the specific purpose of giving families an external living space particularly where young children could spend time but always remain visible from within the house. Wurster also developed a similar project in upper-middle class housing when, with business partners Theodore Bernadi and Donn Emmons he purchased land on Greenwood Terrace in the Berkeley Hills, which was divided into twelve lots to create the Greenwood Common project (Figure 18). This gave Wurster the opportunity to further develop his ideas for domestic planning, by subdividing to provide one large central common area instead of a medium-sized suburban backyard for each house. Wurster commissioned his contemporaries to design the houses on Greenwood Common, which provided residents with three things that he considered absent from contemporary residential development: “An outdoor space for residents and children, free of traffic…one reasonably big outdoor area instead of twelve unreasonably small lawns and…a focal point for their neighbourhood.”76

Figure 18: Wurster, Bernardi, and Emmons: Greenwood Common (1954), Berkeley (photos: Jane Castle)

CHAPTER FOUR | WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM Page 112 In larger dwellings, particularly those in rural areas, Wurster developed more formalised outdoor spaces inspired, at least in his early designs, by

Californian vernacular Figure 19: William Wurster: Gregory Farmhouse (1928), Scotts Valley buildings. After (photos Thomas Church | Sunset Magazine cover 1930) studying the adobe houses in Monterey Wurster developed a protected and formal entry courtyard that he called “the California yard.”77 This courtyard, usually enclosed by building on three sides and gated on the fourth, served as an entry point to the house, helping to create a protected external zone related to both building and site. Used in the Gregory Farmhouse (1928) (Figure 19) it takes the form of the “motor court” (just visible through the gate in Figure 19 but photographed in detail in Chapter Five). The prosaic name belies a welcoming courtyard that relates every room in the dwelling to an important central space directly referencing both the entry gate and the front door. It is still external to the dwelling however, and is separated from the family’s private outdoor spaces. The effect is a large, intimate outdoor room, confined within a compound of walls and Figure 20: William Wurster, courtyard of Butler House buildings: formal and semi-public, (1935) Pasatiempo, (photo Roger Sturtevant) yet still relaxed and welcoming. Another variation on the California Yard was incorporated into the Butler House at Pasatiempo (Figure 20 and Figure 21, p.114). Here, Wurster used four pavilions to demarcate the corners of a square internal courtyard that could be closed for intimacy, but with one wall that could be folded away

CHAPTER FOUR | WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM Page 113 leaving a series of masonry arches, to create an expansive space open to the world. Another example of Wurster’s pioneering use of flexible indoor/outdoor spaces can be seen in the Saxton Pope House #2 at Orinda (1939) (Figure 22), a more overtly modern concrete block structure that incorporated an expansive, semi-roofed central courtyard with a circular portion open to the sky. Again this entire space Figure 21: William Wurster: Butler House (1935), Pasatiempo, could be internal (when Plan showing the four pavilions around a central courtyard. closed to serve as a central hallway) or external (when opened to focus on the surrounding landscape). Wurster’s architectural approach was concentrated on how to best design for the San Francisco Bay Region and the rapidly changing lifestyles of its people. Local vernacular architecture was an important influence yet, although his earliest work does contain identifiable elements of early

Californian precedents, it was the Figure 22: William Wurster: Saxton Pope House experiential, rather than stylistic, #2, Orinda (photo Roger Sturtevant)

CHAPTER FOUR | WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM Page 114 qualities of vernacular prototypes that most influenced the important themes in his work. We can trace the development of innovative open planning and ambiguous indoor / outdoor transitions in his work back to simple vernacular precedents like the sleeping porch, adobe walled garden and ranch house corridor, but it was his sensitive adaptation of such elements within a Modernist framework that marks his work as an original contribution to modern domestic architecture, a contribution Treib explicitly expounded: [Wurster] left a lexicon of architectonic elements that have been absorbed into the California home of today. Although in some instances we cannot establish with certainty Wurster’s invention of any of the features, their widespread popularity can be traced to Wurster’s houses of the 1930s and 1940s. The terrace, the direct connection between indoors and outdoors, and the glazed corridor were already critical elements of the Wurster house by the early 1930s; the linked- kitchen-living room and the “room without a name” recurred in numerous projects, as did the “Kitchen cave” and the heroically-scaled porch. An elegant simplicity and honesty paired with a use of balanced lighting – skylights in the kitchen to reduce glare, for example – all quietly introduced features that would be promulgated by popular home magazines and adopted by concerned home builders such as Joseph Eichler.78

Wurster appreciated the importance of understanding historical precedents but recognised the inauthenticity inherent in simply reproducing them. The uniqueness of his approach lay in his ability to remain true to the Modernist realities of his own time, while recognising that historical elements—vernacular dwellings, or Arts and Crafts precedents from the first phase of Bay Region architects—gave cultural context and meaning to the new technologies and spatial arrangements appearing in Modernist architecture internationally. That he found a way for these to coexist within urban domestic dwellings, and was rewarded with a clientele who were at once progressive and yet nostalgic about the brief historical legacy of the Bay Area, allowed him to transform his passion for the region into a body of architectural work that was unique, relevant and influential.

CHAPTER FOUR | WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM Page 115 CHAPTER FOUR | NOTES

1 Wurster quoted in Steif 1957, unpaginated; Although Wurster’s designs are almost exclusively in the Bay Region, his firm, Wurster, Bernardi and Emmons took commissions from around the world. 2 Wurster, W. 1954, ‘California Architecture For Living’, in California Monthly April 1954, p.14; reprinted in Treib 1999, p.235 3 Gregory, D. 1990, ‘An Indigenous Thing: The Story of the Gregory Farmhouse’, Places Volume 7, No. 1, Fall 1990, p.92 4 Fenske 1997, pp.46-7 5 Fenske 1997, p.69 6 Wurster 1954, p.236 7 Ibid. 8 In response to several inquiries for copies of the plans of his design for The Voss House (1931) in Big Sur south of San Francisco, which was featured in House Beautiful, Wurster suggested that people take the photographs to a good local architect to use as a starting point: “He will design you a house to fit your needs and the site.” Wurster, W. 1937, letter to Mrs R. Paine, Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley: Voss, MSS III.718 9 Gregory 1990, p.91 10 Wurster et al, 1949 11 Ibid. 12 McCoy, E. 1964, ‘West Coast Architects II: William Wilson Wurster’, Arts and Architecture, July 1964, Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley: Biographical MSS II.28, unpaginated 13 Michelson 1993, pp.34-35 14 Mumford 1972, p.10 15 Wurster 1954, reprinted in Treib 1999, p.236 16 Anderson, L. 1990, ‘The Gregory Farmhouse Forecourt’ in Gregory 1990, p.82 17 See Breuer’s comments in MoMA 1948, p.15 18 Wurster 1954, reprinted in Treib 1999, p.236 19 There is of course a question over the legitimacy of the claim that the forms of the ranch house and the adobe house are “vernacular”. This question was raised, for instance, by Thomas Creighton in his article ‘Is Regionalism Disappearing?’ (Creighton, T. 1963, ‘Is Regionalism Disappearing?’ in San Francisco Magazine, July 1963). In this heavily ironic article he gave California’s regional architectural traditions all the credence of “sentimental nonsense…Monterey Colonial is surely an Eastern introduction of Thomas O. Larkin’s…” Adobe construction, he claimed, was more correctly an importation than a vernacular style, and he questioned the bona fides of Maybeck’s carved beam ends, thought vernacular in Berkeley but suggested simply “a Maybeck stylism” by Creighton. He further argued, sarcastically, that “the ‘ranch house’ makes just as much sense (or, should one say, is equally inappropriate) on Long Island as in San Bruno.” 20 Wurster interviewed in Creighton 1963 p.18 21 McCoy 1964, unpaginated 22 Ibid. 23 Wurster, W. 1949, ‘A Personal View’, in Domestic Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Region, San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, unpaginated 24 Michelson 1993, p.56 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Wurster 1949, ‘A Personal View’, unpaginated 28 Ibid. Even though Wurster does not mention the architect of this room, Michelson claims it was Ernest Coxhead’s Rieber House (1904) (Michelson 1993, p.58). 29 Treib 1999, p.17 30 Wurster 1949, ‘A Personal View’, unpaginated 31 Mumford 1949, unpaginated 32 Wurster quoted in Michelson 1993, p.36 33 Wurster W. 1944, ‘San Francisco Bay Portfolio’ in Magazine of Art, December 1944, Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley: William Wurster / WBE 1976-2, MSS I.7

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34 Ibid. 35 Michelson 1993, pp.316-17 36 Wright, G. 1999 ‘A Partnership: Catherine Bauer and William Wurster’, in Treib 1999, p.192 37 Ibid. p.199 38 Wurster, W. 1936, ‘Quoting Mr. Wurster’ in The Architectural Forum January 1936, p.378 39 Reiss, S. 1964, ‘College of Environmental Design, University of California campus planning, and architectural practice: an interview Berkeley’, Regional Cultural History Project, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, p.98-99 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. p.117 43 “Regional modernist” is the term used to describe architects whose work was broadly Modernist in its use of technology and central design themes, while remaining recognisably regional. For instance Treib uses the term in Treib 1999 (e.g. p.47) to describe Bay Region architects. See also for instance Evans, D. 2002, Centre and Periphery: Melbourne Regionalism and its Global Context in the 1950’s and 1960’s, published in proceedings of the International Conference on the Research of Modern Architecture, Jyväskylä, Finland, for his use of the phrase in connection with Wurster. 44 Treib, M. 1999, ‘The Feeling of Function’ in Treib 1999, p.47 45 Quoted in Michelson 1993, p.344; The quote was taken from a letter written to the Chancellor of the University of California, within Wurster’s unpublished travel notes 46 Gebhard 1976, p.6 47 Wurster 1945, p.230 48 Mumford 1947, p.99 49 From Bauer’s private notes published in Oberlander, H. & Newbrun, E. 1999, Houser: The Life and Work of Catherine Bauer, UBC Press, Vancouver, p.195 50 Hille, R. 1994, Inside the Large Small House: The Residential Design Legacy of William W. Wurster, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, p.6 51 The Gregory Farmhouse is examined in a detailed case study in Chapter Five of this thesis. In an influential publication by Sunset Magazine (May, C. in collaboration with Sunset Magazine staff, 1946, Sunset: Western Ranch Houses, Lane Publishing Co., San Francisco), Wurster is the only architect profiled and his work is given a chapter to itself, beginning “the three houses featured in the following pages cannot be omitted from any book on Western ranch houses. They are the work of architect William Wilson Wurster…” p.67 52 Woodbridge (ed.) 1976, p.157 53 Treib 1999, p.23 54 Michelson 1993, p.189 55 Peters, R. 1976, ‘William Wilson Wurster An Architect of Houses’ in Woodbridge (ed.) 1976, p.122. 56 Treib 1999, p.25 57 Wurster, cited in Treib 1999, p.25 58 Michelson 1993, p.351 59 For a discussion of the Wurster Footing see for example Peters in Woodbridge (ed.) 1976, p.124 60 Wurster, W. 1946, ‘From Log Cabin to Modern House: An Architect urges a return to Simple Fundamentals in Planning our New Homes’, New York Times Magazine, January 20, 1946, p.10 61 quoted in Gregory, D. 1999, ‘The Nature of Restraint’ in Treib 1999, p.102 62 Gregory 1990, p.251 63 See for instance a discussion of Wurster’s budget-minded designs during The Depression, in Michelson 1993, pp.208-212. 64 The label was applied to Wurster’s work during his career, and became the title of R. Thomas Hille’s 1994 book: Inside the Large Small House: The Residential Design Legacy of William W. Wurster 65 Treib 1999, p.53 66 Hille 1994, p.7 67 Wurster’s ability to attract and maintain a client base is well publicised; see for instance a discussion of the Gregory farmhouse in Treib 1999, pp.98-113 68 McCoy 1964, unpaginated

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69 Wurster W. 1944, ‘San Francisco Bay Portfolio’ in Magazine of Art, December 1944, Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley: William Wurster / WBE 1976-2, MSS I.7 70 Treib 1995 p.56 71 Peters in Woodbridge (ed.) 1976, p.140 72 Ibid. p.126 73 Michelson 1993, p.205 74 Michelson 1993, p.367 75 Wurster, W. 1949, ‘The Outdoors in Residential Design’ in Architectural Forum, September 1949, p.68 76 Wurster, quoted in Treib 1999, p.65 77 Gregory 1990, p.251; The Monterey houses are pictured and described in detail in Chapter Five. 78 Treib 1999, p.74

CHAPTER FOUR | WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM Page 118 CHAPTER FIVE | WILLIAM WURSTER’S GREGORY FARMHOUSE: A CASE STUDY OF REGIONAL MODERNISM

In the Gregory Farmhouse of 1926-1927, he took the body of Modern architecture and gave it a regional soul.1 – Sally Woodbridge, 1976

At the ‘What is Happening to Modern Architecture?’ symposium in 1948, it was the contention of Henry-Russell Hitchcock and the other proponents of European Modernism that all modern architecture within the San Francisco Bay region was classifiable as a variant of the International Style.2 Wurster’s Gregory Farmhouse, a defining and influential building of Bay Region architecture, could arguably be described this way. It certainly exhibits Modernist features, and references to the International Style are easily made: the precise lines of the building can be straightforwardly broken into volumes and planes, and it is unadorned by decorative features or colours.

Figure 1: Entry to Gregory Farmhouse (1928), Scotts Valley (photo Jane Castle)

Yet the building is also distinct from the International Style; Gregory wrote that “by the 1960s the house had become an emblem of regionalism used often to illustrate part of California’s contribution to the history of architecture. It represented an in-between stage in the evolution of Modernism: not traditional, not avant-garde, but free thinking and pragmatic.”3 Unlike International Style buildings the farmhouse is made up of recognisably regional elements, and as we shall see, was influenced not just by Modnernist

CHAPTER FIVE | WILLIAM WURSTER’S GREGORY FARMHOUSE Page 119 design principles, but also by historical precedents found in local vernacular structures. Whereas the architects of the International Style highly valued the formal and aesthetic qualities of their work, Wurster considered architecture as the frame for living; not as an artwork but as the setting for the life its inhabitants would create within it. “Architecture is not a goal,” he wrote, “Architecture is for life and pleasure and work and for people. The picture frame, and not the picture.”4 His approach made his architecture deeply anthropocentric—explicitly designed as environments for living. This set it in opposition to the sculptural forms he later expressed his dislike for in the International Style.5 As we have seen these concerns translated to all aspects his design: ensuring that his clients got the best for their money, concern that cooking and housework weren’t relegated to remote corners of a dwelling, incorporating experiences of the natural environment wherever possible, or taking care that children had a place for making mud pies. We have also seen Mumford’s interpretation of this humanism, comparing Wurster’s “native and humane form of Modernism” with the “restrictive and arid formulas”6 of the International Style. As the analysis of the Gregory Farmhouse below reveals, despite the recognisable use of certain vernacular elements, Wurster, as a practitioner, shared Mumford’s aversion to the imitation of past architectural types, a point he made explicitly in a 1954 article: “…that slavish copy of the old is a hollow affair. Buildings cannot and should not conjure up life in any terms but those of their own era – only thus can we pull together all the factors which surround the decisions and express them adequately for contemporary life.”7 In the design of the Gregory Farmhouse, Wurster demonstrated an acute working knowledge of the Bay Region’s architectural, environmental and cultural influences. While travelling in Europe he had learned to analyse buildings by studying their history rather than concentrating on their form. “Life”, Wurster commented “is immeasurably enriched for the traveller if he has some knowledge of the history of buildings and the life they express.”8 Although essentially a modern building, the Gregory Farmhouse reflects Wurster’s understanding of his region’s past. It references Monterey adobe dwellings, Californian ranch houses and rural timber vernacular

CHAPTER FIVE | WILLIAM WURSTER’S GREGORY FARMHOUSE Page 120 structures. Compare for instance the Gregory Farmhouse’s water tower (Figure 1, p.119) with a vernacular water tower in (Figure 2) typical of those built beside windmills on farms east of San Francisco. The Gregory Farmhouse is one of the first American structures from its period to acknowledge its modernity while embracing regional history. The result is paradoxically both highly derivative and yet unique; difficult to classify, yet unmistakably modern. Because he struggled with no self- imposed reliance on what either Modernist or historical styles suggested he should do, Wurster was able to incorporate the best elements of both. The Gregory Farmhouse’s regional and vernacular qualities are derived from its reliance on the Figure 2: Rural windmill and timber water tower east of ready-to-hand, both in design San Francisco (photo Jane Castle) and in material choices. Treib’s phrase describing Wurster’s work of the period as “essays in modern vernacular”9 indicates the way Wurster reconsidered and appropriated both immediate and historical sources without favouring either one, perhaps reminiscent of the process by which vernacular structures develop. Early Californian settlers who created the vernacular forms of the region initially built in need of shelter, creating new architectural forms from a mixture of remembered dwellings, local influences and available materials. The Gregory Farmhouse also solidified much of what Mumford had insisted that modern architecture should strive for in Sticks and Stones, published three years before the Gregory Farmhouse was completed. The design does not mimic the past nor force modernity upon the occupant. Its regional and historical references are often subtle, perhaps even at times subconscious, and yet they are the result of Wurster’s concerted commitment to both his own era and its place in history, to his own region and its place in

CHAPTER FIVE | WILLIAM WURSTER’S GREGORY FARMHOUSE Page 121 the world, and moreover to his belief that the purpose of these elements in architecture was to guide the architect to create a home for its inhabitants.

Background Architect John Galen Howard and subsequently his son, Henry Howard, were both commissioned by Warren and Sadie Gregory in 1926 to design a house on the site where the Gregory Farmhouse stands in the Scotts Valley just outside Santa Cruz. Neither design was realised: the clients had reservations about the elaborate schemes, due largely to Sadie Gregory’s close association with sociologist Thorstein Veblen, whose The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) had criticised the conspicuous consumption of the idle rich. Veblen’s work was of great importance to Sadie Gregory who had been a graduate student under his tutelage and he had collaborated on many of his papers. He analysed and documented the “leisure class” tendency toward demonstrating wealth through wasteful consumption and ostentation: From the foregoing survey of the growth of conspicuous leisure and consumption, it appears that the utility of both alike for the purposes of reputability lies in the element of waste that is common to both. In the one case it is a waste of time and effort, in the other it is a waste of goods. Both are methods of demonstrating the possession of wealth, and the two are conventionally accepted as equivalents.10

Veblen’s philosophical influence on Sadie Gregory is central to any understanding of her decision to hire Wurster as the architect, and indeed to Wurster’s success as an architect for the Gregory family’s social circle throughout the depression. Warren and Sadie Gregory thought the unadorned simplicity of Wurster’s earliest buildings, particularly his Gillespie House (1926) in Oakland, was well-suited to the project, and they asked him to analyse the site and Howard designs. After his initial site visit, Wurster noted his impressions, which were sympathetic with Sadie Gregory’s ideas for the project: “The farm is a place of peace and rest, of the realities rather than the formalities of life, and so it seemed imperative to make the house simple and direct, free from any distorted or overstudied look.”11 Shortly afterwards Warren Gregory died, however Sadie Gregory reinstated the project some months later with Wurster as the architect.

CHAPTER FIVE | WILLIAM WURSTER’S GREGORY FARMHOUSE Page 122 Although retaining many of the basic features of the Howards’ designs, Wurster pared away the ornamentation and simplified the design (Figure 5, p.126) by including straightforward timber-board walls (without battens) and removing elements such as large entry bays and internal corridors. The only ornate feature of the design, a cast metal weather vane above the water tower, was brought back from Spain by Jack Gregory, Warren and Sadie Gregory’s son early in the twentieth century and was incorporated into the design as a decorative feature.12 Wurster was conscious of Sadie Gregory’s desire to minimise the costs of the project, and despite difficulties posed by the inaccessible site, the use of rough-finished lumber and simple construction methods meant the dwelling was completed for $10,000.13

Holiday house as artefact The property and farmhouse are still owned by the Gregory family and the continuation of ownership has emphasised its quality as a frame for living, as Wurster envisaged. As a holiday house it has had few periods of lengthy permanent occupancy, so renovations to suit modern interior designs have been minimal. One internal wall of the farmhouse displays hundreds of pencilled height marks charting the annual growth of four generations of the family. Various Gregory houses are now built on subdivided sections of the land and the family works to resolve the difficult task of sharing a physical legacy and maintaining a summer-house that is complicated by its status as an important piece of the nation’s architectural heritage. Paradoxically though, whatever neglect the building may suffer in its current form the essential nature and sprit of the dwelling are well preserved by the detritus of 80 years of holiday accommodation. Like many of Wurster’s rural buildings the Gregory Farmhouse was designed as a simple holiday house for occupation only during the summer months. Most of these holiday dwellings are now permanently occupied, and freeways have brought the rural land they sit on into commuting distance of large cities. The process of making them permanently habitable, for instance insulating walls and ceilings often involves the removal of and probable damage to the original cladding, often redwood timber boards, which are now prohibitively expensive to replace. Although the Gregory Farmhouse is in

CHAPTER FIVE | WILLIAM WURSTER’S GREGORY FARMHOUSE Page 123 “original” condition, this makes it less desirable as a residence and expensive to upkeep as an artefact.14 Ironically many of the features that contributed to the relatively inexpensive design of the late 1920s are the ones that make the Gregory Farmhouse difficult and expensive to upkeep in the present century. According to the Gregory family low Figure 3: Motor Court of Gregory Farmhouse c1928 showing “redwood quality lumber was used round” paving in motor court. (photo Roger Sturtevant) to keep the costs down; nevertheless all walls are comprised of an inside and outside layer of two-inch thick redwood boards nailed to a timber frame (Figure 10, p.131).15 Originally, redwood rounds (discs of unmilled redwood), visible in some of the early photographs of the farmhouse (Figure 3,), were used to pave the ground of the courtyard and driveway. Their replacement cost alone, even during the lifetime of the original owner, was found to be in excess of the cost of the original building and the area is currently covered in bitumen (Figure 4, p.125).16

Site narrative The dwelling is a farmhouse in name only; it stands on a small south-facing terrace on a steep, wooded hill on the side of the Scotts Valley and was designed as a weekender, not as a base for farming. The Gregory family owned the acreage around the house site and had often used the quiet, slightly secreted hollow where the house is sited as a picnic spot, as it formed a natural stopping-point on the side of the steep hill. Wurster mentioned his liking for the site in a letter to Warren Gregory: “…an air of intimacy is always gained when one descends into a forecourt. I was totally unprepared for this as I had conceived of it on a knoll in such a fashion that one always climbed.”17 This small descent ensures that no view of the dwelling is possible

CHAPTER FIVE | WILLIAM WURSTER’S GREGORY FARMHOUSE Page 124 until just before the entry gates, when the road reaches the last verge before dropping into the clearing on which the house is built. The first glimpse is a surprise, an almost aerial view of the tight cluster of structures surrounding the courtyard.

Figure 4: Looking out from motor court of Gregory Farmhouse (photo Jane Castle)

If anything, the site is smaller and less accessible than photographs of the farmhouse suggest. It is typical of Wurster’s ability to create simple grandeur that the buildings themselves give the clearing a more expansive sense by the manipulation of scale. The lack of reference points, approach to the site and the design of the dwelling all create the impression of a larger structure seen from further away. It is difficult to find a word to describe the overall design, which is more than just a house or collection of structures; unlike many of the sculptural forms of Modernism the site itself is integral to the dwelling. Treib said of this difficulty: “In many ways, the word “setting” seems more appropriate than the words “building”, “house” or “terrace”; one sees here for the first time Wurster’s synthetic integration of house and site in a completely unassuming manner.”18 The view on first glimpsing the setting of the Gregory Farmhouse is particularly anchored by the water tower, the farmhouse’s most iconic feature. By its asymmetry in both plan (Figure 5, p.126) and elevation, this tower, beside the front gate, offsets and extrapolates the long, dark roof and white-walled open courtyard of the rest of the house. The tower’s purpose was to provide water pressure to the farmhouse, although (in Wurster’s only overt concession

CHAPTER FIVE | WILLIAM WURSTER’S GREGORY FARMHOUSE Page 125 to form over function) he made it one storey taller than was necessary for that purpose. The setting has a slightly mythical quality, particularly evoked by the water tower with its incongruous high window and monumental scale in a medium-sized domestic setting.

Figure 5: Site plan, Gregory Farmhouse

Inside the gate the visitor is surrounded on all four sides by comforting white facades: two of these (the gateway and the left border fence) are open to the weather and the other two (one on each inside face of the L of the house proper) are covered by the deep shade of the overhanging roof. The main entry to the house is at the furthest point from the gate, near the inside apex of the L. While closed its wide door continues the unremarkable white timber façade; once opened it offers first an invitation into the large main room of the house with its high ceiling, comfortable built-in furniture and fireplace. If the companion door is also opened on the other side of that room, a corridor

CHAPTER FIVE | WILLIAM WURSTER’S GREGORY FARMHOUSE Page 126 is revealed that connects the outdoor spaces on either side of the house (Figure 6). The more intimate part of the garden only then becomes visible: a pergola-covered path (Figure 13, p.134) leading to the large, round lawn invisible from the road, above an open field that once contained a vineyard and apple orchard. The defensive walls at the entry to the Gregory Farmhouse continue right around the buildings and, in plan, give the impression of a compound as was their purpose in the vernacular structures that they reference. However in the case of the Farmhouse, the wall tapers to a long, low brick sitting-wall defining the circular “games” lawn behind the house. This outside area is the most private of the courtyards on the site; the family still uses it as the congregating place for special occasions (Figure 12, p.128).19 It is the one area in the design where the strict rectilinear geometry is broken. The Figure 6: North / south outdoor corridor beside large, circular sitting-wall, provides a motor court looking south toward main entry of Gregory Farmhouse, showing opened doors place for sitting with one’s back to the forming passage to private garden beyond house. (photo: Jane Castle) sun at any time of day. Looking south from the house, through the windows of the main room, or from the games area and sunny patio, there is no sense of the existence of a high wall, since it defines the level change between the hillside and the house site. What from below is a stark boundary to the garden is from above at most a brick seat and a comforting sense of elevation above the view. The farmhouse is still used by the Gregory family as a summer house and there is evidence of its informal, summer-season intentions: the kitchen is quite basic and, due to some shrinkage of timber boards over time, the uninsulated walls have exposed many rooms to drafts.20 The lack of permanent occupancy allows weathering to remain unattended for periods of

CHAPTER FIVE | WILLIAM WURSTER’S GREGORY FARMHOUSE Page 127 time. Despite these issues the house looks from the outside as it did in the earliest photographs: the solid timber construction is sound, much of the door and window hardware is of indestructible heavy black iron, which contrasts deeply and subtly with the whitewashed walls and provides simple relief on the blank facades.21 The house was undeniably designed as a holiday house and its major function was as a place for leisure, which could only have increased Sadie Gregory’s desire to have it remain as Figure 7: Gregory Farmhouse east elevation from games lawn showing large porch at left and open “sleeping porch” at right (photo: aesthetically Jane Castle) unadorned as possible. There is a sense that one could arrive very well stocked for a comfortable stay or otherwise turn up for a slightly more secure form of camping.22 In some ways the house is reminiscent of campground dormitories, since all rooms connect to the outside and there appears to be an expectation that much of the occupants’ time will be spent in the landscaped outdoor areas, relaxing in either of the two main courtyards or sitting in the sun in any of several places designed for the purpose.23 The fireplace is designed for evening congregation with two brick sitting-piers either side of it and a large ottoman nearby in the corner, out of draughts (Figure 11, p.131).24

Vernacular precedents The Gregory Farmhouse contains both implicit and deliberate references to various vernacular prototypes. Wurster had certainly been influenced by the exposed joinery and extensive use of timber in the vernacular barns that had been part of his landscape growing up in Stockton, a few hours inland from San Francisco.25 Furthermore the planning of the Gregory Farmhouse site may be read as a modernised version of the layout of the California ranch house, a vernacular style stemming from the building methods of Spanish

CHAPTER FIVE | WILLIAM WURSTER’S GREGORY FARMHOUSE Page 128 colonists. These began as modest adobe dwellings but by the 1820s wealthy settlers had created walled mansions in San Diego, which quickly propagated across California.26 Wurster had also studied the adobe courtyard buildings in Monterey just south of Santa Cruz, which defined their boundaries within high, white garden walls (Figure 8, Figure 9 & Figure 10 below) and were deliberately inclusive of indoor and outdoor space, blurring the distinction between them. While much previous European and American architecture had favoured grand entries and strict indoor/outdoor distinctions, Figure 8: David Wright: Adobe house gate early Californian settlers required physical into forecourt & walled garden of Pacific House (1847), Monterey (photo: Jane Castle) barriers at their garden boundaries for security, which effectively created outdoor “rooms” in the favourable climate of the Bay Region. The adobe houses of Monterey developed as a local vernacular building form after Spanish soldiers and padres introduced Spanish adobe construction (mud mixed with plant fibres, sun-dried into bricks) into Mexico and California in the eighteenth century, teaching the construction method to local Native Figure 9: David Wright: walled garden of Pacific House (1847), Monterey (photo: Jane Castle) Americans. The early nineteenth century settler families copied the building method and built their own simple one- or two-room dwellings from adobe, creating the California

CHAPTER FIVE | WILLIAM WURSTER’S GREGORY FARMHOUSE Page 129 Colonial style. This simple vernacular form developed, as towns grew and wealth increased, into the far grander Monterey Colonial, a style attributed widely to Thomas Larkin whose Larkin House (1835) (Figure

8, p.130) in Monterey is Figure 10: David Wright: Courtyard gallery of Pacific House (1847), Monterey (photo: Jane Castle) generally considered to be the first building in America to combine vernacular adobe construction with solid redwood framing.27 Larkin utilised the abilities of the newly immigrated tradesmen (without whose skills dwellings had been restricted to a single storey) to create a two-storey structure with wide verandahs and a walled, south-facing garden.28 A major drawback of the construction of the adobe buildings was poor internal lighting, since windows were generally small and barred for security. To compensate for this, wide doorways often led to south-facing gardens and courtyards, which were incorporated into the living areas of the houses. Monterey Colonial buildings continued to feature internal and external blank whitewashed walls, primarily as a way of increasing light penetration but also because, unlike paints, the whitewash ingredients (lime, water and salt) were readily available at 29 the time. Figure 11: Larkin House (1835) Monterey, architect unknown Many features within

CHAPTER FIVE | WILLIAM WURSTER’S GREGORY FARMHOUSE Page 130 the design of the Gregory Farmhouse can be traced to the Monterey adobe houses and vernacular ranch-houses that had developed to suit the region: timber shingle roofs, walled forecourts with external galleries, intimate enclosed gardens, double-hung windows, wide porches and the evocation of a walled compound facing the wilderness. The authors of Sunset: Western Ranch Houses (1948) described the open corridor, a central feature of the Gregory Farmhouse, as “a necessity” in the vernacular ranch house. “It served as the hall connecting the rooms of the house and as the outdoor living room.”30 In the Gregory Farmhouse this corridor runs around the motor court and forms the major circulation channel along both wings of the house meeting at the front door. Wurster and the Gregorys had also discussed mimicking the use of the raw madrones-tree-trunk structural members of the Swedenborgian Church (1894) in San Francisco designed by A. Page Brown, Worcester

and Maybeck. After Figure 12: Gregory Farmhouse, living room (compare the ceiling form experimenting and finding to the Larkin House above) (photo: Roger Sturtevant) this too untidy they settled on exposed white timber beams supporting a white timber ceiling (Figure 11), a ceiling form that was identical with many of the ceilings in the Larkin House and Custom House (1827, largely rebuilt in 1841), two of Monterey’s most celebrated adobe structures. 31 Revival of the unadorned Monterey vernacular (which in its original form had celebrated the Franciscan Missionaries’ ideals of poverty and abhorrence of wealth) suited depression-era America. If the simple, whitewashed walls throughout the Gregory Farmhouse worked well to reflect light into internal spaces, they also resonated with the desire for unostentatious design held by Sadie Gregory and the social circle around her who would become Wurster’s early clients. However, despite the fact that

CHAPTER FIVE | WILLIAM WURSTER’S GREGORY FARMHOUSE Page 131 certain vernacular motifs can be recognised in Wurster’s buildings and contributed to his popularity and commercial success, it is overly simplistic to suggest that Wurster deliberately revived vernacular architectural forms. Nor is it sensible to trace the influence of regional forms on Wurster’s work by reading off and comparing stylistic elements. Certainly the Gregory Farmhouse contains evocations of vernacular features, most explicitly in the water tower, boundary wall and ranch house typology, yet it is clear that Wurster had no interest in mimicry, nor in the revival of historical styles. To Wurster the vernacular did not represent an originary or pure form of architecture that was available for the modern architect to replicate. Historical and regional objectives in Wurster’s architecture did not exist for their own sake but were incorporated if they represented the best method of designing for the people of the region. That there were both historical and modern features (or in his words both “the familiar and the strange”32) recognisable in his work and in that of the other Bay Region architects, Wurster attributed simply to the way of life of the people on the West Coast: If there is a blend it is the result of forces, materials, and decisions which are related to basic factors, and is not a matter for choice. Failure to recognize this is the cause of much professional and lay confusion. This is all well illustrated by the success of free, contemporary architecture on the West Coast, which has frequently been attributed to the notion that here is a “blend” of the old and the new which attracted clients. This just isn’t true…It was sensible to base the design on the kind of life people wanted, and not on the basis of theoretical modernism. Few of the people who live in these houses have ever said to themselves, “This is modern.” The approach was not sophisticated or stylistic; so out of it has come – not individual masterpieces – but the nearest thing to a contemporary vernacular that this country has yet produced.33

This “contemporary vernacular” was the Bay Region Style; modern dwelling types that were as recognisably Modernist as they were regional, since they borrowed from whichever source offered regionally appropriate solutions. Treib noted that, for Wurster, such commitment to utility was distinct from functionalism: “Wurster’s appreciation of the vernacular architectures of California and southern Europe, his love of directness and suitability (which should be distinguished from the more purely functional arguments of the

CHAPTER FIVE | WILLIAM WURSTER’S GREGORY FARMHOUSE Page 132 European Modernists), furnished an Architectural idiom that comfortably accommodated the desires of his clients.”34 The design for the Gregory Farmhouse reflects Wurster’s unaffected design philosophy: “I like to work on direct, honest solutions avoiding exotic materials, using indigenous things so that there is no affectation and the best is obtained for the money.”35 If there was an ideological position behind the design it was perhaps less Wurster’s than his client’s. Given Sadie Gregory’s predilection against any form of ostentation, the white, unadorned façades of much of the local vernacular that had found resonance in Wurster’s earlier work were precisely what made his designs seem ideologically appropriate to her. Treib said of the Gregory Farmhouse that “it was a simple structure, or series of structures that fully embodied the values of a monied California society intent on living unostentatiously and close to the land.”36 There appears not to have been any strong ideological position (beyond plain directness) driving Wurster to use these particular vernacular features. Treib said of the Gregory Farmhouse that it “acquired canonical status as a design that straddled the modern and the vernacular”37; it did so because its architect studied and recognised the vital importance of both, but was careful not to attempt to achieve either. The Gregory Farmhouse succeeded as a regional design because of its timeliness. Certain ascetic regional vernacular traditions were evoked, which fitted perfectly with developing Modernist principles. The unadorned dwelling suited the subdued mood of the middle classes in depression-era America, and its publication created an icon that resonated with a maturing California anxious to look forward but retain a sense of its unique frontier heritage. Richard Peters wrote of the farmhouse that it “aped no traditional forms, rather, it embodied the region’s essential spirit in a rare moment of creative genius. If any single house can symbolise the Bay Area Tradition in residential design, the Gregory Farmhouse is that work.”38 Mumford saw in Wurster’s work a uniquely American way of representing America, but recognised (to borrow Lethaby’s concept) that his art was more than one man deep, extending at least to the America of the nineteenth century. This thesis argues that his influences extended significantly further. Wurster was magnanimous enough to understand that he

CHAPTER FIVE | WILLIAM WURSTER’S GREGORY FARMHOUSE Page 133 was a representative of ideas rather than a creator; part of a continuum that stretched well beyond his own constructs or those of Modernism. While vernacular features may be identifiable in the Gregory Farmhouse it was ultimately the experiential rather than formal qualities of the region’s vernacular building traditions and cultural history that inspired Wurster. The building’s deeper significance, and the reason for its continuing relevance, is that it produced such unexpected richness through the simplicity of combining the spirit of its time with the spirit of its region.

Design for living Wurster clearly understood how human scale should be represented in design, imbuing his buildings with features that, at little or no extra cost, greatly increased the amenity of the spaces.39 Evey Gregory, Wurster client and daughter-in-law of the Gregory Farmhouse clients, remembers he would “have a fit if a window had been built so that the framing interfered with the view of a person 40 Figure 13: South terrace of Gregory Farmhouse: sitting or standing by it.” Walls (photo: Jane Castle) that were suitable for sitting in the Gregory Farmhouse were designed with either built-in furniture, like the seats along the south terrace (Figure 13), or extra brick courses at sitting height. Such built-in benches are visible at the base of the southern wall of the water tower and along the lower parts of the garden wall. Fireplaces in Wurster’s buildings were situated where people could congregate comfortably around them out of draughts, and expanses of walls and flooring (both internal and external) were broken, by material choices, into medium-sized discernable parts. Examples in the Gregory Farmhouse include short, wide floorboards, wide redwood boards for wall panels, unmilled timber discs for the motor court and large pebbles for the southern terrace (Figure 14, p. 135).

CHAPTER FIVE | WILLIAM WURSTER’S GREGORY FARMHOUSE Page 134 All elements of the design were considered for comfort and habitation: floorboard design, ceiling heights, door placements and spatial sequencing. In 1938 the journal Pencil Points described the Gregory Farmhouse as simple, as if built by “a carpenter endowed with good taste.”41 This simplicity is evident in the reaction of visitors to the farmhouse who have asked “so where’s the architecture?”42 The linear wings of the dwelling ensure that no space is more than one room deep, giving each room natural light on two sides and an aspect in either direction; however despite this, there is no loss of privacy nor is there any sense of detached linearity. The window shutters (white outside, dark inside) form invisible parts of the white facades when

Figure 14: Gregory Farmhouse: door latch | south terrace paving | living room floorboard pattern (photo: Jane Castle)

closed yet create simple redwood frames around windows when opened (visible in Figure 6, p.127 and Figure 13, p.134). For an informal dwelling the forecourt is deliberately ceremonial, providing a formal location for all arrivals and departures. In addition the intersecting corridors, higher roof over the centrally located entry and raised ceiling in the main room of the house are subtle visual cues to the entry and gathering spaces. The house remains structurally sound, although issues symptomatic of infrequent occupancy, such as leaking roof-shingles and loose shutters make maintenance rather than restoration the primary and more immediate focus for its owners. The setting was never designed as a sculpture and its essential

CHAPTER FIVE | WILLIAM WURSTER’S GREGORY FARMHOUSE Page 135 character has not been diminished by several minor modifications made to the original house over 70 years: garage doors have been added to the originally open carport; sections of the external boundary walls were rebuilt after an earthquake demolished them in 1989; the main chimney was also damaged in the earthquake and replaced; the shingle roof has been replaced several times. The original oak tree in the forecourt recently died and has been replaced by a young pin oak; the redwood round log driveway has been bitumen coated; the water tank has been removed (although its tower has not been affected); a kitchen wall has been removed to incorporate the pantry into the room; a modern kitchen flue extrudes through the roof; some trees, planted for sun protection, have begun destroying the sitting wall around the games lawn. The daughter of the original client, who permanently occupied the house for a period during the 1960s, did some fairly extensive but sensitive restoration on the southern side of the house and many new coats of whitewash have been applied. The wilderness surrounding the property is gradually becoming residential housing estates, although the Gregory family still owns the acreage around the house site. Wurster’s Gregory Farmhouse is generally considered to have been the first modern adaptation of the vernacular Californian ranch house. Its status as an architectural icon grew quickly and it had been celebrated in journals, newspapers and architecture courses within a few years of being built. Michelson commented that “the reuse of visually uncomplicated, local sources proved timely, for it preceded a broad reappraisal of regional vernacular architecture amongst American architects in the 1930s.”43 The building’s influence in reviving architectural and public interest in regional vernacular forms in the San Francisco Bay area and beyond has been considerable, and it continues to generate public and academic interest, as well as architectural debate. When architect Joseph Esherick visited the house in the late twentieth century his comment typified the familiar and informal regard in which this building is held, unlike many others with similar architectural status: “It had a wonderful, slightly beat-up look to it (I suspect it always had that) and a simplicity, which for all its power, did not get in the way…it is one hell of a good house.”44

CHAPTER FIVE | WILLIAM WURSTER’S GREGORY FARMHOUSE Page 136 The form and purpose of the building has remained unchanged: this famous building and model for regional Modernism is still simply a family holiday house. The Gregory Farmhouse showed that a building could be Modernist as well as regional and that history could be allowed to deeply influence design without making the result seem at all historical. Its architectural importance stems from the simplicity of the statement it makes: that Modernism was not a doctrine in opposition to regional, vernacular or historical influences.

Aerial view of part of the Gregory property in the Scotts Valley showing the Gregory Farmhouse at right. The Warren & Sadie Gregory house at left is also a Wurster building. The original house on the property (predating the Gregorys’ ownership) is the square structure adjoining the Warren & Sadie Gregory house.

CHAPTER FIVE | WILLIAM WURSTER’S GREGORY FARMHOUSE Page 137 CHAPTER FIVE | NOTES

1 Woodbridge (ed.) 1976, p.157 2 Barr 1948, pp.7-8 3 Gregory 1990, p.80 4 Wurster, quoted in Woodbridge (ed.) 1976, p.121 5 see Reiss 1964 6 Mumford 1949, unpaginated 7 Wurster 1954, reprinted in Treib 1999, p.235 8 Ibid. 9 Treib 1999, p.23 10 Veblen, T. 1970 (first published 1899), The Theory of the Leisure Class, Unwin Books, London, p.71 11 Wurster, W. 1930, ‘A House in the Hills’ in Sunset no. 65, July 1930, p.23 12 Gregory, E. interview, 21 Jan 2005. (Evey Gregory is the daughter-in-law of Warren and Sadie Gregory, the Gregory Farmhouse’s original owners). 13 Wurster estimated the total construction cost as US$10,000 in a letter to Don Gregory dated April 11, 1928 (Environmental Design Archives University of California, Berkeley). Depending on the method used to calculate, this is roughly equivalent to a US$100,000 to $200,000 house built today according to Williamson, S. 2004, ‘What is the Relative Value?’ in Economic History Services, April 2004, [online], Available http://www.eh.net/hmit/compare [2005, February 5]. 14 The Gregory Farmhouse is one of the very few Wurster buildings in anything like original condition. The Jensen House, a Wurster building in Berkeley (photographed in the previous section of this thesis), was the subject of significant debate at the time of writing as nearby residents battled the owner’s plan to add a small and quite subtle extension to what is currently a cottage in the Berkeley Hills. See for instance Rosen, R. & Adams, C. 2004, ‘Wurster’s Jensen Cottage Endangered’ in The Berkeley Daily Planet, November 5, 2004. Clark’s Beach House and the internal spaces of the Pasatiempo Golf Course houses have been substantially renovated. 15 Gregory, E. interview, 21 Jan 2005 16 Ibid. 17 Wurster, W. 1927, Letter to Warren Gregory, held in Environmental Design Archives University of California, Berkeley, Feb 11, 1927 18 Treib 1999, p.21 19 “Games” lawn is the name Wurster gave to this area on original plan for the site 20 Asked about the quality of light in Wurster’s design Daniel Gregory described the house as becoming “a parody of itself”, as slivers of daylight begin to appear between wall boards; Gregory, D. interview, 21 Jan 2005 21 Due to budgetary concerns, the door hardware arrived at the site untempered and were heat-treated in the living-room fireplace. Gregory, D. interview, 21 Jan 2005 22 Although the Gregory family employed a local cook for the periods they spent in the house; Gregory, E. interview, 21 Jan 2005 23 One photograph shows Alvar Aalto stretched out asleep in the sun along the path on the southern wall of the house. 24 The piers were designed by Sadie Gregory according to Daniel Gregory; Gregory, D. interview, 21 Jan 2005 25 A point made by Gregory, D. interview, 21 Jan 2005 26 May, C. in collaboration with Sunset Magazine staff 1946, p.13 27 Fink, A. & Elkinton, A. (largely pictorial, with photographs by M. Baer) 1972, Adobes in the Sun: Portraits of a Tranquil Era, Chronicle Books, San Francisco 28 However despite the claims that Larkin developed this building form, “Monterey” style houses were in existence elsewhere before Larkin’s house made the style famous. Sunset: Western Ranch Houses (May, C. in collaboration with Sunset Magazine staff, 1946) lists several two-storey adobe houses in various locations around California dating from 1824, more than a decade before Larkin built his dwelling. 29 Fink & Elkinton 1972, pp.9-14 30 May, C. in collaboration with Sunset Magazine staff 1946, p.17

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31 The intention to mimic the Swedenborgian ceiling was related by Daniel Gregory in an interview on 21 Jan, 2005 32 Wurster 1945, reprinted in Treib 1999, p.230 33 Ibid. 34 Treib 1999, p.22 35 Wurster 1936, p.378 36 Treib 1999, p.19 37 Ibid. p.21 38 Peters, R. 1976, ‘William Wilson Wurster: An Architect of Houses’ in Woodbridge (ed.) 1976, p.124 39 Daniel Gregory pointed that Wurster consistently placed ceilings at a height to add a sense of extra space and grandeur to smaller rooms, without the empty loftiness that accompanies too-high ceilings; Gregory, D. interview, 21 Jan 2005 40 Gregory, E. interview, 21 Jan 2005 41 Reid, K. 1938, ‘The Architect and The House: William Wilson Wurster of California’ in Pencil Points Vol. XIX, Reinhold Publishing Corporation, New York, August 1938, p.472 42 Gregory, D. interview, 21 Jan 2005 43 Michelson 1993, p.359 44 Esherick, J. 1990, ‘Image and Reality’ in Gregory 1990, p.86

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CONCLUSION

The Bay Region Style was first defined as a distinct school in 1947 when Lewis Mumford described the twentieth century buildings of William Wurster and other San Francisco Bay Region architects. Although America’s leading architectural Modernists claimed Bay Region domestic design was a simple variant of the International Style, this thesis has argued that analysing Bay Region architecture through Mumford’s regionalism shows that the school indeed existed as a distinct American regional form. By corollary, an analysis of Wurster’s work demonstrates an important element of Mumford’s regionalism: that architecture can acknowledge regional influences, historical precedents and vernacular sources and yet remain formally and technologically aligned with the Modernist movement. Important parallels between Mumford and Wurster existed in their private and professional lives. Author and public housing advocate Catherine Bauer had professional and romantic relationships with both men, and married Wurster in 1940. Mumford and Wurster were philosophically aligned by the importance they assigned to regionalism in architecture and both men greatly admired the work of architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Bernard Maybeck. A crucial aspect of Mumford’s writing on regionalism was authentic continuity between America’s regional vernacular buildings and its nineteenth and twentieth century architecture. In turn Wurster’s architecture was influenced by his specific interest in the San Francisco region and by the principals and prototypes of California’s vernacular buildings. This thesis has shown that the similarity of their theoretical positions is largely a consequence of influences upon them of a Romantic tradition of writers and social critics that can be attributed to the nineteenth century work of John Ruskin. Many of the ideas advanced in Mumford’s writing have been traced to Ruskin’s anti-rationalist position, which formed the theoretical basis for the Arts and Crafts movement. Figures in this movement, including William Morris and William Lethaby, greatly influenced Mumford, as did other followers of Ruskin, including Patrick Geddes (whose regionalist philosophy largely prefigured Mumford’s), Ebenezer Howard, writer Van Wyck Brooks and architects Frank Lloyd Wright and William Lethaby. Lethaby worked as an

CONCLUSION page 140

architect, writer and educator, and he represented a pivotal moment in architectural theory between the Romantic and Modernist eras, evidenced by his influence upon both Mumford and the Bauhaus school. That Mumford could reconcile this Romantic legacy with an enthusiasm for the Modernist movement was due to his belief that (although it came to be associated in America with the International Style) Modernism was more correctly a regional doctrine that had developed naturally from the Romantic period. Indeed many nascent theoretical arguments of Modernism can be discerned in Ruskin’s time, not only within the Ruskinian tradition but also through the pioneering study of world vernacular architecture made by architectural historian James Fergusson. This same philosophical tradition was also an important influence upon Wurster and other Bay Region architects. The historical background to the Bay Region Style can be traced to the confluence of domestic and global architectural ideas (European, Pacific and Oriental) that coalesced in the late nineteenth century on the relatively undeveloped West Coast of the U.S.A. The first-phase Bay Region architects, including Maybeck and Schweinfurth, were greatly influenced by Ruskin and the British Arts and Crafts movement and they subsequently developed a unique architecture from the application of this Arts and Crafts influence to precedents found in the owner-built vernacular of the San Francisco Bay area. This tendency to unproblematically maintain locally developed solutions while incorporating universal architectural ideas, carried through into the next generation of Bay Region architects, who applied tenets of emerging Modernism to the receptive palette of the unique regional architecture developed by the generation before them. While there was no sense of each generation copying the style of the last, there was a strong tendency in the Bay Area, unlike most other Modernist schools in Europe and the U.S.A., to intentionally synthesise historical precedents with modern design practices and technologies in the development of modern architecture. Both Mumford and Wurster have had lasting influence upon subsequent architecture and architectural theory. The regionalism underlying the work of Critical Regionalists Alexander Tzonis, Liane Lefaivre and Kenneth Frampton was a direct product of Mumford’s work. Tzonis and

CONCLUSION page 141

Lefaivre, as well as Gail Fenske, have recently revisited the conflict between Mumford and America’s International Style Modernists, analysing the political motivations that led to the International Style proponents’ undermining of regionalism in the mid- to late-twentieth century. Wurster was among the most publicised American architects of the mid-twentieth century and his innovations in domestic architecture have been influential upon architects and home-builders in America and around the world. Wurster’s work has also been influential in showing how Mumford’s regionalism may be applied in architectural practice. Modernist architects such as Wurster have seamlessly and unproblematically integrated the historical and regional into modern design, in spite of a generally accepted credo that Modernism presented the architect with a tabula rasa, distinct from historical reference. An important outcome of the study of vernacular architecture and Regionalism is that there is some evidence that the reverse of this credo must be true: that to survive, any ideology must necessarily embrace the regional, the historical and the universal. Regionalism shows us that any local vernacular culture has relevance to all regions. Cultural forms that are narrowly regional at the expense of outside influences, or universal at the expense of local influences and traditions are, ultimately, stagnant and unsustainable.

CONCLUSION page 142

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