architecture

• Berkeley Brown Shingle

  

  I’ve probably mentioned the houses I grew up in before – Spanish revival stucco bungalows, mostly – but I recently found a few online resources devoted to a particularly popular style of Craftsman home in my hometown: the brown-shingle craftsman. After my parents separated, my father lived (and still lives) in a brown-shingle home built by James Plachek, a contemporary of Julia Morgan and Bernard Maybeck, a specialist in churches and libraries (and who experimented with some early techniques for improving energy efficiency), who as a young man was a student of Morgan’s or perhaps an apprentice of some sort.

  Berkeley’s mild weather fades the shingles from a hearty golden hue to, over time, a beautiful deep red-brown, a very specific color that I grew up associating with comfort and security. These houses dapple Berkeley’s neighborhoods, from West Berkeley all the way up into the top of the hills, usually getting larger (due to the income of their owners / builders) and more integrated with the landscape (due to Berkeley’s steep hills, rocky outcroppings and dense Eucalyptus, pine and redwood thickets) the further up you go. You don’t often find too many in one place (although there are a few concentrated little pockets of them here and there) – they seem to be arranged almost artistically throughout the city and its neighbors, Oakland, El Cerrito, Piedmont, Kensington and Albany. Some haven’t been changed in a generation, and others have been updated with modern floorplans and accessories. And even one of my favorite restaurants is a brown shingle! I suppose once I win the lottery …

• Frank Lloyd Wright newsblog

  Douglas Anders’ new Frank Lloyd Wright newsblog will keep you up-to-date on the minutiae of FLW restoration issues as well as news on the foundation, sales of important properties, book reviews, short essays and much more. I look forward to all kinds of interesting news from Douglas, and will try to share some if it here with you.

• Ennis-Brown House at Risk

  FLW’s Ennis-Brown house, one of his pre-Columbian motif masterpieces, has been damaged by shifting soil as a result of recent rainstorms. The house remains at risk, although work is being done to stave off further damage. The structure has been used in a number of famous films (inc. Blade Runner, the House on Haunted Hill, and many others) and is generally considered one of Wright’s masterpieces. Unfortunately, it has turned out to be much less stable than Fallingwater, the house built upon a stream and waterfall, which critics and some engineers said could not last. The structural damage – which will be quite expensive to repair – are one more thing for the Frank Lloyd Wright foundation, recently in turmoil due to a wide variety of legal and financial problems, to worry about.

• Preserve California’s Missions

  The California Missions Foundation is "dedicated to the preservation, protection and maintenance of California’s 21 historic missions." The Foundation gives out mini-grants to help preserve and maintain the structures, which are often in a state of delayed decomposition due to their age, the original materials used, and sometimes disuse and elemental damage. What? You didn’t realize there were 21 of these (mostly quite) beautiful buildings scattered up and down the state? It’s true. A trip to one or more of California’s missions is a great idea for a road trip for anyone interested in architecture. Many have small museums and interesting gardens and grounds, and a number of them are nestled in architecturally interesting areas and small towns. By visiting the missions and giving to each site’s own restoration fund, or giving to the Foundation through their web page, you help mantain one of California’s most important architectural traditions.

  Photograph of Mission San Juan Capistrano in Orange County courtesy of ocbook.com.

• Frank Lloyd Wright on the Auction Block

  

  I guess it’s Frank Lloyd Wright week here at Hewn & Hammered. It seems it’s getting more and more difficult to sell the iconographic works of one of America’s most creative modern architects:

  After several months on the market, a 1915 Frank Lloyd Wright house on Chicago’s North Side is going on the auction block, with bids starting at $750,000 — less than a third of the original $2.5 million asking price.

  Bids for the Emil Bach house on Chicago’s North Side will probably end far below that $2.5 million figure. Ronald Scherubel, executive director of the Wright Building Conservancy, notes that this is partly because the structures themselves are so original and were constructed, for the most part, with a single client in mind; prospective buyers of historic Wright properties are scared off by the fact that they wouldn’t be able to make the slightest structural change – or even paint such a house – without government approval. photo: Associated Press

• Frank Lloyd Wright’s Westcott House

  FLW designed, completely redesigned at least once, and oversaw the building of Springfield’s Westcott House from 1904 to 1908. Wright himself saw Westcott as a particularly representative structure and a good example of his own style and skill; he included it in the two-volume Wasmuth Portfolios, or Studies and Executed Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright, the treatise that secured Wright’s tremendous reputation in Europe and Japan. The Westcott itself has, unfortunately, remained an unknown (or lesser-known) gem of Wright’s career. While it does not feature the iconographic pre-Columbian motifs of his southern California work, it is still a striking and original structure, and is not as well-known as it should be. It was recently restored, and has been open for tours since mid-2003.

  + Westcott House: 1340 East High Street, Springfield OH 45503

• The Battle for Taliesin

  Fred Bernstein has written an excellent short article – more of a timeline, really – on a recent on-line battle for a set of tremendously important photographs of Taliesin, taken just before the original structure burned down in 1914. And unlike that story, this one ends happily, albeit quite expensively.

  On Jan. 24, a Monday night, Jack Holzhueter learned that 32 photographs
  of Taliesin – Frank Lloyd Wright’s home and studio in Spring Green,
  Wis. – were for sale on eBay. Mr. Holzhueter, on the board of curators
  of the Wisconsin Historical Society, looked at the Web site and
  realized that the photos were exceedingly rare. "They’re a Rosetta
  stone for the building," he said: they were taken in 1911 and 1912;
  Taliesin burned in 1914 and was rebuilt in somewhat different form. Mr.
  Holzhueter, a retired writer and, he says, "full-time patsy," told his
  colleagues, "We’ve got to do something about this." The auction would
  end at 9:17, Central time, on Friday night, Jan. 28.

• the Bungalow Company

  The Bungalow Company creates new building plans – they’re not just a reseller of classic but not necessarily practical plans – based on the great works of the American Arts & Crafts movement. Thus, their plans specifically take into account modern building materials and techniques, the less-compartmentalized style favored today, and other features that were not possible or useful at the beginning of the 20th century. Their new-home building faq is also quite useful, as is their list of online resources (although why we aren’t listed is beyond me). There are also several nice images of new-built Craftsman homes in their portfolio section.

• Edwin Lutyens

  

  A greatly admired craftsman whose masterworks contrasted – at least in the public imagination of the time – with his somewhat unorthodox public persona and his terrific sense of humor, Edwin Lutyens was an architect, furniture designer, populist and great joke-teller. Often said to be the single person most responsible for the planning and construction of New Delhi’s entire city center (and the master plan that was followed in that city well into the 1970s), Lutyens is perhaps best known today for the Viceroy’s House, a particularly impressive landmark which is now the Rashtrapati Bhavan, the official residence of the President of India. Lutyens is also responsible for St. Jude’s, one of the prettiest churches in the UK . Dozens of his finest structures still stand today in London and elsewhere. His influence to the Arts & Crafts movement is, unfortunately, often under-reported. His skill at integrating monumental scale and classical motif with the simple and straightforward, and his tremendous respect for the craftspeople who worked under him and a very strong belief in the importance of craft and handwork frequently made its way into the details of his buildings. Candia Lutyens continues the family business with her design firm in London today; she specializes in building many items of furniture designed by her grandfather, work that was shadowed by his more well-known skill as architect.

• Palace of Fine Arts

  

  Bernard Maybeck, the great architect and designer who defined – along with Julia Morgan and a few others – the Craftsman ethos in Bay Area architecture, is responsible for this flight of fancy. Originally built for the 1915 Pacific International Exposition, it has graced San Francisco’s Marina District ever since. One of the best examples of the beaux-arts style anywhere, Maybeck’s Palace was designed to look like an overgrown, crumbling roman ruin, something that might be discovered by someone on the Grand Tour. Today, the exhibition hall is the home of a children’s museum, and the rotunda still stands (although it is, unfortunately, closed right now; the city is restoring it, and I expect it’ll be open again in a few months). It’s a weird and romantic place to visit, and the spotlights that illuminate particular details make it one of the more dramatic scenes in the city. pictured: I took this shot of the Rotunda a few weeks ago – click the thumbnail for a larger image