|
Final Phase of Career
The Principia
College Historic District represents the final phase of the career
of Bernard Maybeck (1862-1957) as a designer of houses and public
buildings, and as an architect significantly involved in campus
planning and design for educational institutions. A recent poll
of the American Institute of Architects ranked Maybeck ninth on
a proposed list of the ten greatest architects this country has
produced. As early as 1949, Lewis Mumford said, "But for Bernard
Maybeck's fine reticence, his work would have been hailed long ago
as the West Coast counterpart of Wright's prairie architecture."
In 1983, Richard Longstreth summed up his
views on Maybeck's importance:
| Maybeck also had an impact on the future.
His individualism has been a major source of inspiration to
designers in the Bay Area from the early twentieth century to
the present. His rustic buildings in particular have fostered
a local tradition. At its best, this tendency has furthered
San Francisco's role as an architectural center. . . . San Francisco
has been one of the few places where several generations of
modernists have looked to a tradition-oriented architecture
from the recent past for ideas. (On the Edge of the World:
Four Architects in San Francisco at the Turn of the Century,
354) |
The Principia College commission was a principal
focus of Maybeck's career from 1923 to 1940 when his connection
with the College ended. Maybeck worked on three academic communities
during his long career. Early in his practice he administered
the international competition for the Phoebe A. Hearst Architectural
Plan for the University of California. He did not produce a master
plan himself, but he did design several buildings for the University
early in his career-most notably the faculty club-and he collaborated
with Julia Morgan on the Hearst Memorial Gymnasium. In the early
1920s, he sketched out a plan for Mills College in Oakland, but
few of his ideas were actually used.
The Principia College commission, on the other
hand, kept Maybeck's office functioning through the Great 
Depression, and the plan was substantially carried out in spite
of the change of site and other needed revisions. Maybeck designed
13 buildings that were constructed at Elsah, Illinois, between 1931
and 1946, and 11 of those structures are still standing. The concentration
of Maybeck buildings on the Elsah bluffs rivals the collection of
houses of his design still surviving in the Berkeley Hills.
Maybeck's active career spanned the years from
1885 to 1937, and he is best known today for his domestic work in
San Francisco, particularly the Roos House of 1909, and for his
work at the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915, including the Palace
of Fine Arts. His First Church of Christ, Scientist, Berkeley, completed
in 1910 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1977, is
considered by many to be his masterpiece in the craftsman style.
In the 1920s, Maybeck carried out several commissions for Earle
C. Anthony, including a large, theatrical house in Los Angeles in
1928.
 From
1923 onward, his career evolved around the Principia College commission;
and in the early 1930s, the work at Elsah was the mainstay of Maybeck's
office. He wrote ecstatic letters to Principia Director Frederic
Morgan about how important this commission was to him-a chance to
design a college where graduates could get the refinement that would
help them "save the pieces when the world seems to go to smash."
The archive at the College shows, through drawings and letters,
the evolution of Maybeck's thinking on the buildings, particularly
the Chapel. He convinced college administrators that an English
village would "express the spirit of home, of peace, and of absolute
harmony with [its] physical surroundings." Also, Principia College
was intended to foster the individuality of each student by offering
dormitory rooms that were different from each other, thus avoiding
the "institutional effect." 
Bernard Ralph Maybeck has been described as
an architect of "mood," and he also was a pioneer in bold construction
techniques. He believed in making the ideas of the past relevant
to the present. The executed buildings at Principia College show
all these facets of Maybeck's approach-from the classical Chapel
to the vernacular aspects of the little Mistake House on the Chapel
Green. He framed his campus buildings in modern materials-steel,
concrete, gunite, and even glass blocks-and then clothed them in
historical architectural dress.
next
>
|
