The Great Romantic

San Francisco, a city that cherishes its eccentrics, has never had a greater one than the late Architect Bernard Ralph Maybeck. Until his death a year and a half ago at 95 (TIME, Oct. 14, 1957), scrag-bearded Bernard Maybeck cheerfully held court in the house he built for himself of gunny sacks dipped in pink cement in the Berkeley hills, delighted his visitors by ripping off hunks of the wall to prove that they were light enough to float. Barely 5 ft. tall in his home-knitted tam-o'-shanter, Maybeck was a sartorial seventh wonder. He blueprinted the clothes for his wife Annie (whom he courted by emblazoning her initial A all over the floral motifs of the Crocker Building), designed his own smock and high-rise pants, so constructed that they did away with the need for a vest.

For all his puckish ways, Maybeck was one of the truly great originals of U.S. architecture. At the turn of the century, along with Frank Lloyd Wright (seven years Maybeck's junior) and a few others, he pioneered the beginnings of a native U.S. architecture. Maybeck not only introduced California redwood as an artistic building material, but insisted that wood and stone alike be left natural. Like Wright, Maybeck broke up living spaces, combined dining and living areas, opened up the house to the outdoors, incorporated whole walls of glass into his buildings. Last week the California Palace of the Legion of Honor had the best of Maybeck on view in a large photo exhibit, which Californians hope will spread Maybeck's fame as an architect, and one of the great romantics. Wrote Critic Lewis Mumford: "But for Bernard Maybeck's fine reticence, his work would have been hailed long ago as the West Coast's counterpart to Wright's prairie architecture."

Born the son of a German wood carver in Manhattan's Greenwich Village in 1862, young Maybeck made his way to Paris, studied at the Beaux Arts, developed a deep and abiding love for all the great traditional styles. He treated them as a huge treasure-trove, to be dipped into as the artist's imagination dictated. He returned to the U.S. and moved to San Francisco, where he founded the University of California's architectural department.

The First Church of Christ Scientist in Berkeley, built to Maybeck's design in 1910, today ranks as a historical masterpiece. Within, it is a massive square room, spanned by two colossal, diagonal, arched timber beams. Outside, broad overhanging eaves, reminiscent of a Japanese temple, project over glass screen walls decorated with exuberant Gothic motifs. It might have proved a nightmare of clashing styles. But Maybeck took his cue from his materials and kept his eye on the site. As a result, the church appears to float from the surrounding hedges, ornamented by its own shadows and highlights and finished for all time.

Maybeck populated the Bay Area with houses, but his best-loved work is the largest pink elephant ever built, San Francisco's towering Palace of Fine Arts. Erected for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 and conceived as a mighty Roman ruin, the palace's lofty dome and far-flung colonnades set above a reflecting lagoon are meant to convey, in Maybeck's words, "sadness, modified by the feeling that beauty has a soothing effect." Seen by 10 million visitors over the years, it has become the most popular public monument in California. Today its plaster is crumbling, the paint is flaking, and the roof leaks. But it still does what great architecture is meant to do: touch the heart and enlarge the vision.

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