New California Architecture

Here you will see a Pekinese pagoda made of fresh and crackly peanut brittle --there a snow-white marshmallow igloo --there a toothsome pink nougat in the Florentine manner, rich and delicious with embedded nuts. Yonder rears a clean pocket-size replica of heraldic Warwick Castle-yonder drowses a nausey old nance. . . . And there a hot little hacienda, a regular enchilada conqueso with a roof made of rich red tomato sauce, barely lifts her long-lashed lavender shades on the soul of old Spanish days. . . .

Thus the impression of Southern California architecture gained by a sharp-eyed Easterner (Critic Edmund Wilson) in 1931. In 1942 he would have to acknowledge another side of the picture. In the past decade, particularly, California hillsides have been burgeoning with more up-to-the-minute architectural neatness than any comparable area in the U.S.

Last week the San Francisco Museum of Art recognized this architectural trend by putting on show models and plans by five of California's ace modern architects. The exhibition proved three things: 1) that California has developed its own brand-new style of domestic architecture; 2) that this style is perhaps the most advanced and progressive in the world today; 3) that California architects have succeeded in evolving a type of house that is modern and homelike at the same time.

Light, airy, cheap (under $7,500), the houses in the museum's exhibition were pleasantly unconventional, individual, beautifully suited to their California settings. Walls and sliding partitions of transparent glass catered to the Californian's desire to spend half his life out of doors and made adjacent woods and gardens an intimate part of the interior decoration. Built to cling to steep slopes, many of the houses stepped gracefully down terraced levels, with front entrances and garages on their top floors.

Interiors, simply decorated with matted floors and modern furniture, recalled-similar interiors in Japanese houses. Like Japanese interiors, some were fitted with sliding panels and partitions which could convert big rooms into little ones.

The new California architects are mostly as young as their ideas. Oldest of them, and acknowledged as leader of the group, is 50-year-old, Viennese-born Richard Neutra, a former lecturer at Germany's famed Bauhaus, who went to Los Angeles 16 years ago to build houses in the stark international style, but whose ideas have since thawed out in the California sunshine. The others represented in San Francisco's exhibition were nearly all in their 30s or early 40s; Harwell Hamilton Harris, who used to be a sculptor, has been building houses for only seven years; his paper-paneled sliding doors, hip roofs and mat-floored interiors are strongly influenced by Japanese architecture and the work of Architect Frank Lloyd Wright. William Wilson Wurster, who gets much of his inspiration from rambling, old-style California ranch-house architecture, has been building houses in the San Francisco Bay area for the past 16 years. Hervey Parke Clark is a San Franciscan who took up architecture after a spell at Yale and with Manhattan's Hood & Fouilhoux. John Ekin Dinwiddie, a pupil of famed Finnish Architect Eliel Saarinen, has very unconventional ideas. He sometimes builds houses that are not units at all, but chains of completely separated rooms, strung on intervening porticos and passageways.

One important influence, acknowledged with particular reverence by Architects Clark, Wurster and Dinwiddie, is that of an 80-year-old pioneer named Bernard Ralph Maybeck, Brooklyn-born son of a German woodcarver. who went to California in 1894 and later became the founder and director of the University of California's School of Architecture. A romanticist like Frank Lloyd Wright, he was the first architect to use unfinished California redwood as a decorative element in beautiful building, the first to wed his free, unconventional designs to the mountainous beauty of the California landscape. Maybeck is principally remembered for his dreamlike Palace of Fine Arts at San Francisco's Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915.

Most important of all influences on the new California style, however, is probably that of California itself. Use of native materials like redwood, dictated by economy, has become a distinguishing feature. A climate whose temperature seldom falls below freezing simplifies heating problems, allows greater freedom in window and wall structure, permits shallow foundations which need penetrate the ground only a foot or so to get below the frost line.

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