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Bernard Maybeck (1862-1957),
1924
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Commission
Well-Documented
The Principia College commission is exceptionally
well-documented because it grew out of an association between Maybeck
and Frederic E. Morgan, the director of Principia in the 1920s and
1930s.  They
originally met in Montecito, California, where Maybeck designed
a home for Morgan's future father-in-law, A. E. Bingham. After conferences
in the Bohemian Grove of the redwoods north of San Francisco, Morgan
and Maybeck developed a remarkable architect-client relationship.
The physical distance between St. Louis and San Francisco meant
that the two men had an extensive correspondence about all aspects
of this commission. The files at Principia College include 32 years
of letters, a number of transcripts of taped interviews with Frederic
Morgan and the architects who worked in Maybeck's office, many working
drawings and pastel renderings representing all stages of planning
the buildings, field reports, and hundreds of photographs of the
construction process. In 1973 Robert M. Craig, who now teaches architectural
history at Georgia Institute of Technology, wrote a 700-page dissertation
at Cornell University entitled "Maybeck at Principia."
 During
the construction phase at Elsah, Maybeck was assisted by Edward
Hussey, a graduate of the University of California School of Architecture,
who worked for nearly ten years with Berkeley architect Julia Morgan.
Hussey communicated regularly with Maybeck during the middle 1930s
as the architect's representative in Illinois. Hussey had a considerable
influence on the construction and design phases of Morey Field House.
He also designed the Writer's Cabin and a number of faculty houses,
including Knolltop, Gamble, Gertsch, and Morgan Cottage.
In 1940 when Maybeck retired from the supervision
of the Principia College project, he turned over much of the latter
work to a Berkeley architect he knew and trusted, Henry Higby Gutterson,
a graduate of the University of  California
who also attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Gutterson reworked
Maybeck's design for Sylvester House, and also designed a number
of the smaller buildings on the west side of campus: Cox Cottage,
the Duplex, Beeman, Williams, and Hitchcock, in particular. His
work was not as bold as that of Maybeck, but it maintained the scale
and English atmosphere of the older buildings.
Often Maybeck referred to himself as an artist
and a lover of beauty. He believed the rolling hills of Elsah gave
him a site that rivaled Heidelberg in Germany and West Point in
the United States. He consciously selected an
English village as the design model embodying the ideas he associated
with Principia's educational system, intending the architecture
to contribute to Principia's goal of producing constructive thinkers.
Most of the executed buildings are dormitories, and they do indeed
appear to have a positive effect on the students who live in them.
These large buildings are located in such a way that they appear
to have grown into position. A careful reading of the Craig dissertation,
combined with a visit to the Principia campus, reveals the way in
which a romantic architect and his sympathetic client were able
to design and locate buildings that were intended to embody and
transmit ideals.
Charles B. Hosmer, Jr.
(1932-1993)
Professor Emeritus of History
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