4:00 P.M.

January 7, 1999

The Romance of Architecture

by Dale Bauer

Assembly Room, A. K. Smiley Public Library

Biography of Dale Bauer

Born June 2, 1923, at Garden Grove, California

Wife: Gene

Education

• B.S. in Physics, Occidental College

• Graduate Univ of So. Cal School of Architecture

Professional or occupational activities

• Architectural design with Clare Day & Leon Armantrout

• Furniture design 10 years with Charles Eames of Venice, CA

• Designed Methodist Church, Redlands, CA

• Designed Post Office, New York Street, Redlands, CA 1962-1988

Civic Activities

• Designed the renovation of the old carriage house in Prospect Park

• Centennial Committee for history of Fredalba & Smiley Park; co-authored the published history

• Three years in U.S. Navy, officer on a minesweeper in W.W.II.

• Redlands Horticultural Society: designs the annual flower shows & provides all of the graphics

• Co-producer of the largest and most spectacular daffodil garden on the planet, probably.

THE ROMANCE OF ARCHITECTURE

This paper is a collection of writings which I offer to you as an exploration of varied facets of architecture which you may not have had an opportunity to examine previously.

CONTENT:

1. What is architecture/Architects?

2. What is the measure of architecture in History?
   Are buildings a measure of a civilization?

3. The romance of Architectural Design.
   A philosophy of residential design for the American republic in 1850 by A.J. Downing.

4. The Romance of the Architectural Process.
   What goes on in the head of an architect to produce a design for a client's need?

5. The Romance of the Horizontal.
   The development of an architectural concept based on the prairie of Midwestern United States.

6. The Romance of the Gamble House.
   What is it like to live in this Pasadena, California Arts and Craft house by Greene and Greened

7. The Romance of Style.
   Is Style in architecture a frivolous add-on?

8. The Romance of the Bungalow. 
   Much of America can call a bungalow their home. How did it get there? By mail-order?

WHAT IS ARCHITECTURE?

What is the scope of architecture? I would answer: It is man's total physical surroundings, outdoors and indoors. Now, what is the purpose of architecture? Here again I would stake out the most ambitious claim. r think architecture is much more than its utilitarian meaning---to provide shelter for man's activities on earth. Is is certainly that, but I believe it has a much more fundamental role to play for man, almost a religious one. Man is on earth for a very short time and he is not quite sure what his purpose is. Religion gives him his primary purpose. The permanence and beauty and meaningfulness of his surroundings give him confidence and a sense of continuity. So, to the question, what is the purpose of architecture, I would answer: To shelter and enhance man's life on earth and to fulfill.his belief in the nobility of his existence. (Remarks of Eero Saarinen at Dickinson College 1959)

(From The Most Beautiful House in the World, Witold Rybczynski, p9,10,67): It would be convenient if architecture could be defined as any building designed by an architect. But who is an architect? Although the Academie Royale d'Architecture in Paris was founded in 1671, formal architectural schooling did not appear until the nineteenth century. The famous Ecole des Beaux-Arts was founded in 1816; the first English language school, in London, in 1847; and the first North American university program, at MIT, was established in 1868. Despite the existence of professional schools, for a long time the relationship between schooling and practice remained ambiguous. Not one of the three best-known architects of the twentieth century---Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier---received a formal architectural  education The great Renaissance buildings, for example, were designed by a variety of non-architects: Brunelleschi was trained as a goldsmith, Michelangelo as a sculptor, Leonardo da Vince as a painter, and Alberti as a lawyer; only Bramante, who was also a painter, had formally studied building. These men are termed architects because, among other things, they created architecture---a tautology that explains nothing.

Unlike sculpture and painting, which produce objects in space, buildings contain space. Moreover, it is space that is intended not only to be experienced and admired but also to be inhabited. Making space is a social art; and although architecture consists of individual works, these are always parts of a larger context---of a landscape, of other buildings, of a street, and, finally, of our everyday lives.

Sir Henry Wotton, an English diplomat who had spent almost twenty years in Venice and who in 1624 published The Elements of Architecture. Wotton, who is best remembered as an angler and as the friend and biographer of Izaak Walton, was not an architect, made no claim to originality. Instead , he summarized the views of the most notable Italian treatise writers---Vasari, Palladio, Alberti, and of course, Vitruvius. (Vitruvius, 90-20 BC, Roman architect wrote the oldest extant Western treatise on Architecture covering the Greek and Roman era.) He stated, to build well required: Commodity, Firmness and Delight. Commodity dictated planning useful, comfortable and agreeable spaces---to judge rightly what is fit and decent. Firmness required that the building stand up and resist the elements over a long period of time---and accomplished without waste... Delight meant beauty, giving pleasure to the mind as well as to the eye. The classic ideal was one of balance---the art of architecture consisted in doing this in such a way that the three became indistinguishable.*

Architecture as History

(From Architecture, David Jacobs, p 14-17): Architecture is a badge of civilization. According to prevailing historical viewpoints in recent centuries, it is the requisite sign, the certain credential without which a society cannot be called civilized. The vaguely known and dimly differentiated nomads who crossed the steppes of Eurasia, overran the crumbling Roman Empire, and settled Western Europe had languages and laws, a social structure that had evolved over centuries, some political institutions, and a long artistic tradition. What they did not have was architecture....In contrast, societies with less structure, few institutions, and even backward technology are likely to be given the hat of the doubt if they created an architecture. The Maya had no wheel, and the Incas had no written language, but both cultures produced great architectural complexes, and therefore both are entitled to be called civilizations. Architecture...proclaims the society expects to survive, progress, and prosper beyond the present. The barbarians made fine weaponry, utensils, and garments with care and a real aesthetic sense: the :- decorative patterns had been handed down and refined for scores of generations. But however fine their art, it was a portable art: where was their monumental art? ....they were nomads, and nomads do not build monuments because tomorrow they will be on their way.

Compare the nomads with the Romans, who no sooner conquered a land than they built a monument on it--a triumphal arch, or perhaps a whole Roman city ....The Romans took themselves seriously, and their architecture symbolized their confidence that Rome would prevail forever.

Architecture....reveals information about the society that built it with unequivocal directness. Unlike painting, sculpture, literature, the dramatic arts, theology, politics, and historical discourse, architecture almost never minces words. ....It comes right to the point and defines, most significantly, the main source of power in the society: and it also explains what the central cultural concern of the society was.

Fifteenth-century Florence has been proclaimed--and proclaimed itself-the heart of a great new age, characterized by the spirit of humanism. The humanistic literature of the ancient Greeks and Romans was revived: sculptors celebrated the beauty of the human body: and painters depicted the saints in homely terms so that all would know that the holiest souls and simplest folk were cast of the same flesh and blood. The arts and letters, then, boldly asserted that here was an age and a society with only the highest aspirations.

Now look at the architecture. In form it was Neoclassical, and that seemed to fit. But what were these new structures rising in Florence? They were primarily palaces and banking houses, but they were built like fortresses; no windows or only very tiny windows at the ground floor: central courts to provide for a breath of air without exposure to the rabble. Apparently there was a broad gap between aspirations and reality in Renaissance Florence: the arts other than architecture expressed the former, architecture the latter. It almost always does.

The fundamental question that the architecture of any culture answers is: who's in charge here? If we knew nothing whatever about Western history except the information revealed by its architecture, we would know a great deal. ....(W)e could discern that Egypt was an extremely rigid society, incredibly slow to change, and ruled by a powerful authority.who was thought to be a deity. We would be able to trace the rise of the Church as the prevailing power in medieval Europe: and if we looked carefully enough we could also see---contained in the very cathedrals that proclaimed the power of the Church---evidence of the decline of the Church's power and the rise of secularism. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are defined conspicuously through architecture as an age of kings and courtiers. Entering the epoch of the republican revolutions we can look for signs that at least the people had become the ones in charge---and find fewer indications than we might have expected. And in our own time we can keep the inquiry alive: who's in charge here, we ask, and for an answer name the names of the most notable ten or fifteen buildings of the present generation. (1974) Lever Brothers, Seagram, CBS' John Hancock in Chicago; Transamerica in San Francisco.

In addition to supplying basic information about individual cultures, the history of architecture, viewed overall, provides a picture of the continuous processes that have shaped the history of civilization....Its history has a greater continuity than that of the other arts. There are two main reasons for this continuity: one is function and the other is cost.

Architecture is, of course, and art, but it is also an eminently useful, practical science. As opposed to sculpture, which occupies space, architecture encloses space: and in the practical sense it is the enclosed space, the volume that is of primary importance....The creative process of the architect is always circumscribed by the requirements of the space volume. If he is designing a palace, the architect must begin by calculating the number and size of the rooms required by the patron. Such specifications do not change very radically, even though the demands of the patrons may.

Architecture is not only functional: it is expensive. In all of the arts the artist is affected by the tastes of his patrons, and in all of the arts the artist functions as an influential tastemaker. Although the architect is no exception, he has more limitations than the sculptor or the painter, and his influence must be exerted much more slowly....Since the age of Raphael, painters have been able to satisfy their patrons and themselves at the same time. While giving their patrons the sort of work they wanted, the painters could work in the studio, experimenting, making revolutions

The architect has had no such opportunity, simply because buildings cost so much money. The best an architect can do to make waves in his profession is to make and display visionary models or drawing of revolutionary architecture, but models and drawings do not make revolutions. Indeed the only revolutions that have occurred in the history of architecture are those forced by technology: and even those have been introduced so gradually that ''revolution' hardly seems an appropriate word. From ancient times until the nineteenth century there really had been only two overall architectural styles---or master styles--and virtually all other styles were either departures from one or combinations of both. men the elevator was invented, just in time to lend itself to the perfect new architecture for an urban-industrial age, the skyscraper. And yet when the skyscraper appeared it was cloaked with Classical, Gothic, or Eclectic decor, or topped with a Lombardian villa or Greek temple. Not until after World War II did the camouflage come off to stay and a truly new idiom take over. This process may be exasperating for the most visionary architects, but it has given architecture its historical continuity and its documentary value as a gauge of civilization.

Architecture, then, has had a conservative evolution; so has civilization. They grew up together, the art and the acculturation, one not only symbolizing the other but expressing it. It has been that way from the start. *

THE ROMANCE OF ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN

(From The Architecture of Country Houses, A.J. Downing, Introduction, by J. Stewart Johnson, 1968 p x-xii:): In the Mall in Washington, not far from James Renwick's Smithsonian Institution building, stands a marble urn, richly carved in the antique manner. it seems destined for a garden and out of place in the bland monotony of its surroundings, just as the exuberant Smithsonian seems at odds with the formal bureaucratic architecture ranged beyond it. The urn is a memorial to Andrew Jackson Downing, the building a monument to the romantic taste he espoused throughout his short life..

When Downing died in 1852, he was thirty six years old and at the height of his career. He was supervising the execution of a comprehensive landscape gardening design of the park area connecting the Capitol and the White House. Sylvan and irregular, had it been completed, its meandering paths, wooded hillocks, streams, and pools, would have admirably set off the red-brick turrets and crenellations of the Smithsonian. His landscape design, however, would have had little in common with the smooth, white, regular facades that more and more came to dominate the Washington scene.

In time, the fragments of Downing's scheme were swept away and replaced with the rigid plan of the Mall we see today. The Smithsonian building is a solitary survivor, strandee among unsympathetic neighbors, of that war of styles, at the end of which the romantic was so thoroughly defeated by the classical. But though Downing was not able to put his lasting stamp on his nation's capitol, through his writings he did manage of influence greatly the taste of mid-nineteenth-century America....Downing was born in Newburgh, a town on the steep west banks of New York's Hudson River, 1815....Ambitious, talented, charming, Downing moved from success to success. He was not content merely to remain a nurseryman, however prosperous, and soon began to publish what was 9 to become a string of highly influential books. The first, published in 1841 when he was twenty-six years old. (Subjects included theory and practice of gardening)....The last book Downing lived to see published was The Architecture of Country Houses. First published in 1850, it was to go through nine printings and sell well over sixteen thousand copies by the end of the Civil War. In it Downing set forth his philosophy of what seemed to him the ideal American way of life and prescribed the most appropriate and satisfactory houses and furnishings in and with which he felt his fellow Americans should best live it. ....He seems to have felt that his great task was to find a suitable domestic architectural style for his fellow Americans....His own prejudice was strongly in favor of the Gothic Revival, which by the 1840's had largely replaced the Greek Revival so popular during the 1820's and 30's....He had no use for the Greek Revival and "those architects who give us copies of the temple of Theseus, with its high, severe, colonnades, for dwellings....In the neighborhood of some of our cities, we still occasionally see houses which are pretty close imitations of Greek temples; as these buildings have sometimes as much space devoted to porticoes and colonnades as to rooms."*

In the Preface to his book Downing wrote in detail about his philosophy of housing. It is as applicable to the twenty-first century as it was in his time. His text (Preface, p ix-xx): There are three excellent reasons why my countrymen should have good houses.

• The FIRST is because a good house (an by this I mean a fitting, tasteful, and significant dwelling) is a powerful means of civilization....With the perception of proportion, symmetry, order, and beauty, awakens the desire for possession, and with them comes that refinement of manners which distinguishes a civilized from a coarse and brutal people The interest manifested in the Rural Architecture of a country like this, has much to do with the progress of its civilization

• The SECOND reason is because the individual home has a great social value for a people....In America, not only is the distinct family the best social form but those elementary forces which give rise to the highest genius and the finest character may, for the most part, be traced back to the farm-house and the rural cottage. It is the solitude and freedom of the family home which constantly preserves the purity of the nation, and invigorates its intellectual powers.

• The THIRD reason is, because there is a moral influence in a country home which is more powerful than any mere oral teaching of virtue and morality. ....Much of that feverish unrest and want of balance between the desires and the fulfillment of life, is calmed and adjusted by the pursuit of tastes which result in making a little world of the family home, where truthfulness, beauty, and order have the largest dominion *

Downing, in his manner and for his time, proceeded to produce an aesthetic "How-To" book of 480 pages demonstrating 34 designs for cottages, farm houses and villas; full discussion of aesthetic concerns of architecture, adjustment to locality, materials, costs, roofing, painting, chimneys, heating decoration, furnishings and landscaping. He endeavored to engage his countrymen in the romance of architectural design.

THE ROMANCE OF THE ARCHITECTURAL PROCESS

This section draws upon the text of  The Most Beautiful House in the World by World Rybczynski; New York, Viking Penguin, 1989. p38ff.:

The psychologist Bruno Bettelheim once described children's play activity Characterized by freedom from all but personally imposed rules by free-wheeling fantasy involvement, and by the absence of any goals outside the activity itself." This is a very good description of the designer at his drafting table....The solitary building game is a definitely a fun game---there is no opponent. In the present context fun does not imply folly, or any lack of seriousness---quite the opposite. To say that design is fun goes a long way toward explaining the continued attraction of a profession that is characterized by relative low pay and far from secure employment. It also explains the intense absorption of the architectural student the countless hours spent at the drawing table, the long nights. What keeps him involved for such long periods of time is that the outcome of the design process is unpredictable: it is the result of chance, as in play. He does not know ahead of time exactly what the result will be. He could save himself a lot of time and look for a similar building to reproduce exactly; but this would make as little sense as building the same house of cards over and over again, or solving the same crossword puzzle. The issue here is not only originality but fun. (Page 39). .Writers write, painters paint, and sculptors sculpt. Nothing comes between them and their medium. Composers make abstract signs that symbolize music, but they can at least whistle the melody. But when the architect creates, it is always at one step removed. He builds, but not on the building site, not with bricks and mortar but with card and balsa wood, with modeling clay and wood blocks, in a make-believe universe of people three-quarters of an inch high.

I have noticed that visitors to the design studio are unfailingly drawn to these models. They stoop down and peer in, enchanted by the ingenious miniature replicas. .The tiny buildings peopled with pocket-sized figures recall the doll's houses and lead soldiers of our childhood. We have all spent hours sprawled on the floor playing with toy blocks and built little houses with

Lego bricks or some other construction toy. We have all been little architects. (pages 24, 25)

Much of the work of design goes on in the imagination. I do not mean inspiration but rather the act of imagining, playing ''lets pretend". The architect grasps a special image of the functional relationships and the various areas required by the project. He tries to imagine how the building will look when it is finished: and, more important, he tries to imagine himself inside the finished building concepts collapse and have to be rebuilt: one thing suggests another, eventually developing a variety of solutions.... All architects must be able to visualize space. It can be taught, or at least learned, although the extent to which it develops in different individuals is probably a function of natural talent. (page 48). (Author Rybczynski recounts an example of visualization as related to the work of Frank Lloyd Wright:) Part of Wright's appeal was his outrageousness. Whenever anyone asked him how he was able to produce his designs for rapidly, he would answer: "I simply shake them out of my sleeve." This was said only half-jokingly---Wright never let his listeners, or readers, forget that they were in the presence of a Great Man. But like many of his boastful statements, it was not wholly untrue. There is a record of how he designed what many consider to be his masterpiece---the house he built for Edgar J. Kaufmann on Bear Run in Pennsylvania. Kaufmann had engaged Wright several months earlier and, having received no news from the architect, he telephoned to ask if he could visit the office to review progress made on his house. Wright agreed. With his assistants watching, he "sat down at the table set with the plot plan, and started to draw. First-floor plan. Second floor. Section, elevation. Side Sketches of details, talking sotto voce all the while. The design just poured out of him. 'Liliane and E.J. will have tea on the balconythey~ll cross the bridge to walk into the woods'

Pencils being used up as fast as we could sharpen them when broken---H's, HB's, colored Castell's, again and again being worn down and broken. Erasures, over-drawing, modifying. Flipping sheets back and forth. Then, the bold title across the bottom: 'Fallingwater.~' According to Edgar Tafel, who witnessed this scene, Wright had visited the site once and had a topographic plan to work with, but he had not previously prepared any drawings. The whole process took about two hours. (page 46)

Wright used the traditional method of executing a design concept; three specific types of representation: floor plans, cross sections and fascades or elevations. A fourth category of drawing, the perspective view, was also used by Wright to great benefit---his beautiful colored sketches are much prized by collectors today. But accurate perspectives have to be geometrically constructed and take a longer time to prepare; they are used by most architects as a way of convincing clients, not as a design technique. Currently computers, as a tool of design, can be loaded with two dimensional data which can be combined internally produce multiple three-dimensional views on demand.

THE ROMANCE OF THE HORIZONTAL

The romance of the Prairie

(From Frank Lloyd Wright, Brooks, (Foreward by Lisa Taylor) p 7)

*During a career that spanned more than seven decades, Wright displayed a capacity for formal invention without parallel in the history of American architecture. The scope of his production was truly remarkable, ranging from immense visionary schemes, such as the project for the Mile High Skyscraper and the constantly evolving plan for Broadacre City, to his innumerable essays on the theme of the single-family house, which Wright continued to recast in new and highly original forms. In all of this can be seen Wright's insistence upon a completely unified approach to design: the intimate relation between building and site; the clear expression of materials, structure, and plan; and the total integration of furnishing and ornament within the architectural setting One cannot fully appreciate his legacy without an understanding of the context in which he matured as an artist or without some knowledge of his mid-western contemporaries, collectively known as the Prairie School, who participated with him in the creation of a new and uniquely American architecture What is most striking about their work is its optimism and genuine sense of purpose---a spirit which is characteristic of much of the new architecture at the turn of the century---and its earnest moral tone, perhaps best described by the dual imperative that their work be both '~simple'' and "honest".

Equally American was the emphasis these architects placed upon a close relation between building and landscape, permitting the house to blend comfortably into its setting whether it be the flat horizontal prairie, a hillside or even a dramatic cliff. Their use of natural materials, especially ones found in the Midwest t fine, oak, limestone), the practice of leaving the exterior woodwork unplaned, unpainted but stained, as well as their preference for staining and waxing the interior woodwork to reveal the texture and grain also contributed to the building's intimate relation to its setting. The innate characteristics of the materials became a principal medium of expression, and even ornament---art glass, friezes, architectural sculpture---was based upon stylized, regional flora, further contributing to the regionalism of these designs.

It was from Louis Sullivan, the architect he most respected other than himself, that Frank Lloyd Wright gained for his art its purpose and its probity; Three things: an undiluted concept of the architect as an artist, a high intellectual regard for nature and a fervent desire to create for America an architecture of its own.

(From Understanding Frank Lloyd Wright’s Architecture. Hoffman, p 5-8). ....If the products of nature presented exemplars of form, what lessons might reside in the landscape itself? Wright discovered the catalyst to new principles of architectural expression only after he chose to invoke the lost prairies of the Middle West. This was his finest moment with nature.

The prairies had been a strangely open land, devoid of human settlement and altogether lacking in trees or any other features by which to measure distance, scale or direction. Impressed by such vast expanses of grasses and wildflowers , early travelers often recalled the grandest parks in England. Some worried , however, about a soil that seemed unable to produce trees; but the prairie earth soon proved exceedingly rich. ....Settlers in Illinois used as many as eight oxen for a first plowing, and found that without sowing again they could harvest a second crop of wheat at forty bushels to the acre. ....The fate of the wild prairie landscape was unhappily forced by its very fertility; after the invention of the steel plow, what was once touched with the sublime gave way to banal economics of agriculture.

Wright was born in 1867 and for the most part raised at the edge of the prairies. He witnessed the very years when the virgin landscape disappeared. ....From that loss, came the birth of a prairie spirit: an afterglow of poetic nostalgia for such scenes of quiet beauty and broad significance as the image of freedom. In his project to redeem the lost landscape through an architecture conceived as its abstract equivalent, or analogue, he discovered the principles that would inform his art for the rest of his life.

Wright told his associates in 1903 he was "thoroughly saturated with the spirit of the prairie," and in the March 1908 issue of the Architectural Record published his classic statement: 't We of the Middle West are living on the prairie. The prairie has a beauty to its own and we should recognize and accentuate this natural beauty, its quiet level. Hence, gently sloping roofs, low proportions, quiet sky lines, suppressed heavy-set chimneys and sheltering overhangs, low terraces and out-reaching walls sequestering private gardens."

(From Understanding Frank Lloyd Wright's Architecture, Hoffman, p 50,54):   Wright found the architecture of his time to be a failed architecture, incoherent and an insult to the landscape. He advanced his own work only when he turned to an idea of the land and to aesthetic standards established by natural exemplars of organized form. He began at the ROOF, the elementary fact of shelter and its most poetic expression. From his feeling for the lost prairies he abstracted the lengthened horizontal as his dominant and recurring motif. To assert the horizontal by projecting the roof past the wall, he relied on THE CANTILEVER: his FIRST formative principle; He divided the wall into horizontal zones, and experimented with a frieze that began to express separation of the wall from the roof. When he changed the frieze into a continuous series of casements, or frieze of glass, he achieved a dramatic RIFT (opening): his SECOND formative principle. With the structural supports isolated and withdrawn from the perimeter of the roof, Wright heightened the visual tension between load and support by using pierlike shapes that stopped short of serving any structural function..He opened the wall by dividing it with narrow vertical rifts (openings) into segments, or wall-screens.... The DIVERSIFICATION OF THE WALL became his THIRD formative principle. fin practice Wright thus redefined the classical relationships as used on Greek temples.) ....He transposed the architrave, frieze and cornice into wall screen, frieze of glass and cantilevered roof: an opened, enlivened entablature that rested not on columns but directly on the grand table of the prairie.

THE ROMANCE OF THE GAMBLE HOUSE

(From Greene and Greene, Randell L. Makinson; Introduction by Reyner Banham, p 20-21): ...I have lived in the Gamble house, on and off, in fair weather and in foul, for longer and shorter periods over the last eight years.... Such intensely residential architecture is not truly to be known otherwise. That indeed, is the most compelling lesson I have learned from the Gamble house. Simply that you have to be there at all hours and in all weathers to know how and where it creaks when the weather changes or as it cools after dark in summer, and how it rattles in the rain, as the water cascades round the numerous sharp bends in the square-section downpipes that conduct it away from the seemingly innumerable roofs. To know how it smells in the morning, and to see one stupendous architectural vision that is only available to the early riser around six-thirty of a winter dawn, an hour when even the most assiduous visitor of national monuments is unlikely ever to be in the house.

At that hour, on a certain favoured morning, the early prowler will find the sun striking almost horizontally through the upstairs landing from front to back. That in itself is a rewarding sight, but if one then directs one's bare bedroom feet down the warm carpeted stairs to the entrance hall one will there find that same low sunlight, already dappled by its passage through the trees across the road opposite, blazing through that fantastic Tiffany glass in the entrance doors and filling the house from front to back with a luminance not to be found anywhere else. It is true that one may find it in small samples in Tiffany lamps, but they only serve as highlights, as Gustav Stickley said, among the mellow radiance of wood tones, while in that entrance hall at sun-up the wood itself is bathed in Tiffany tones from the broad swathes of gold and greenish light that pour through those doors and fall directly upon the panelling or are reflected on it from the floor. That rather formal central space of the house is transformed, for maybe an hour, into something so perfectly "cliche"---Aladdin’s cave or a sacred grove---that you know it must be a great work of art because it is so obviously right and complete.

....If I was asked to sum up the house as a whole it would be in those same two terms; it is a compelling close domestic experience, and it is about perfect of its kind. It is close and domestic in spite of its large horizontal dimensions---the living room is over thirty feet long but never looks it, largely because the embrasure of the fireplace, full of seats and cupboards and other fitments to which the parts of the human body conventionally relate, is over sixteen feet across Also, one finds, the lighting of the room, both day and by night, tends to keep its visual dimensions within bounds. Particularly by night, the artificial lighting works to reduce the room to smaller functional components and one attends to those areas of light where on has business or pleasure and not to the volume of the room as a whole.

....In an age when carpentry was sophisticated enough to make a clean secret an invisible joint between any two pieces of wood meeting at any angle for any structural or functional purpose, the Greenes and their workmen made a major production number out of practically every joint in the house. Simple mortise joints are pinned with woods of other hues, there are wedges and dovetails and ties of metal and leather, pegs everywhere and a few metal bolt heads and a whole lot of wedging blocks between horizontal timbers of the staircase structure to stop them sliding one upon the other...no wonder the house cost fifty-five thousand dollars (1906 dollars).

THE ROMANCE OF STYLE

(From How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand, p 140 ). ....In matters of style, some elements seem to have lives of their own, like classical columns. A decorative Post-Modern column refers to the Beaux-Arts column, which referred to the Renaissance column, which referred to the classical Roman column, which referred to the classical Greek column of stone, which referred to the earlier wooden column made of a tree. They are all mostly nonfunctional and expensive to craft. Clem Labine, founder of Old House Journal, has commented, "While the popularity of classicism has certainly waxed and waned, there hasn't.been a period in over two millennia when someone in some part of the world hasn't been fitting architraves across column tops." Modernism swore it would get rid of these pagan temple ornaments forever, and the first thing Post-Modernism did was put them back.

Something evidently drives continuity between buildings at a mythical level. Masonry fireplaces and chimneys have been utterly obsolete since the popularization of the Franklin stove by the 1830's, yet 160 years later every house that can afford it still has at least a facsimile of a masonry fireplace and chimney. Some deep lullaby croons, "Hearth and home."

In some high-style buildings the architect decrees and the client accepts--a status battle lampooned in Tom Wolfe's From Banhaus to Our House---but in most buildings it is the other way around. And clients seldom innovate. They borrow. They see something they like, and they insist that their building be ''like that". *

From Home Sweet Home, Moore, Smith, Becker, p. 104-105: ''A dominant element in the growing popularity of Spanish architecture is the appeal which it so often makes to senses of the noble and the enduring its wrought iron grills and other details that recall the days of mystery." So wrote Margaret Craig in the December, 1922 issue of the widely read Keith's Home Magazine'' Over the years modernist architects of high seriousness and their apologists have been uneasy about the recurring popularity of the Spanish image. Paul Edgar Murphy writing in the April, 1928, American Mercury, summed up these reservations when he wrote of the current architectural scene in California: '.If a house has its exterior covered with stucco, it is Spanish. If its stucco appears to have been battered with an elephant's foot, or trowelled to resemble a waffle-iron, it is more Spanish. If it has a tile roof, or even a tile eyebrow along the coping, it is yet more Spanish. If the builder has added a window awning supported on spears, it has reached the zenith." ....Though no one would question that the most enduring image for speculative housing in America has been and is the Eastern Colonial, still no architectural image can compete with the Spanish for suggesting the romanticism of the far distant and far away in time.

So, what is the interest of the HOME client in 1999? Speculative builders are ever searching for, or creating demand for, the style of building which will appeal to the home buyer. The following is a report in the Los Angeles Times, January 3, 1999, by Caren Golden, p K7 and apply to the construction of several hundred houses in Orange County:

If you live in an old Pasadena community filled with Craftsman bungalows, don't be alarmed if you see someone walking up and down your street taking notes. It's probably a home builder or the builder's architect trying to identify that magical something about your neighborhood that's become so attractive to new home buyers....Craving homes that are both cozier and more individualized, these new buyers are looking backward to a tradition that embodies both these elements: the bungalow. But the new bungalow has a twist, reflecting the split personalities of the people who would live in them. These buyers want all of the bells and whistles of a new house, but packaged in the style of home they grew up in---or wished they had grown up in---a home evoking a sweeter, more peaceful era....The revival is a part of a larger movement called traditional neighborhood development, or TND. The car changed the way neighborhoods were designed, and we lost something very important, a comfortable pedestrian environment of the street. Then we lost a sense of community. You don't talk to neighbors when you are driving by in a car.

....Planners are going back to the old ways of building a neighborhood. With TND, they are returning residential streets to the residents with a Variety of amenities our parents once took for granted:

• Garages in the rear of the lot instead of dominating the front. . Sidewalks buffered from a narrower street by wide greenbelts with shade trees.

• ·Smaller but more numerous parks.

• An emphasis on traditional American housing design including the bungalow.*

Golden reports builders have their work cut out for them when it comes to melding the tradition of the bungalow style with contemporary demands of new-home buyers. People still want higher ceiling elevations, open doorways and more light than the old designs. The trick is not to lose the past and lose the essence, but bring modern design element into the home.

THE ROMANCE OF THE BUNGALOW

(From Greene and Greene, Randell Makinson, pl9): ...It would be callow indeed to pretend that the great patrons of Craftsman architecture in the United States were anything but Big Bourgeoisie! in the original sense of "burghers" or "Townfolk". Wright's prime clients were in manufacturing, mail-ordering, and other unmistakably urban businesses. Two of the Greenes' four most conspicuous domestic clients were retired lumbermen, appropriately enough; but the other two were in oil and soap respectively. The first qualification for commissioning and enjoying this kind of architecture was to have the money to pay for it, and the second was to have the cultivation to desire it. Any Craftsman-period architect worth the name could, in fact produce less expensive houses, and most of them occasionally went to some trouble to do so for clients whom they believed in, but the works on which their reputations depend....were made for "the filthy rich, God blast them!" *

In reaction to industrialism William Morris in 1861 started a decorating firm in England to revitalize the splendor of handcrafted medieval decorative arts.He made carvings, stained glass, tapestries and furniture. His interest in politics led to forming the Socialist League. In 1891 he stated mart is the expression of joy in labor rather than a luxury". He is considered the father of the Arts and Crafts movement and inspired such parallel activities as Gustiv Stickley's "Craftsman" magazine (1901-1916) and many other designers around the world. His message and products were taken up by the one stratum of society that could both understand and afford them. In time the communication of the objectives and examples of arts and crafts in housing permeated the thinking of the American public.

From American Bungalow Style, Robert Winter, p 13-15: The answer to the question of where the term bungalow came from is not at all complicated. Throughout the period in which bungalow building flourished authors of books and magazine articles traced the source to the Indian province of Bengal. There, the common native dwelling and the geographic area both had the same root word, bangle or bangala. Eighteenth-century huts of one story with thatched roofs were adapted by the British, who used them as houses for colonial administrators in summer retreats in the Himalayas and in compounds outside Indian cities. Also taking inspiration from the army tent, the English cottage, and sources as exotic as the Persian verandah, early bungalow designers clustered dining rooms, bedrooms, kitchens, and bathrooms around central living rooms and thereby created the essential floor plan of the bungalow, leaving only a few refinements to be worked out by later designers.

This house type spread to other parts of the British Empire and was copied by other turn-of-the-century imperial powers for use in their domains...Almost inevitably, this economical practical type of house invaded North America,... The bungalow craze actually took off after the turn of the century when Americans obsessed with the notion of health or simply attracted by the economic opportunity to be had in California began pouring into the state....Its success in California was paralleled in the rest of the United States, where developers and construction companies often identified the house type with the Golden State, calling it "the California Bungalow''....

The mania for bungalows marked a rare occasion in which serious architecture was found outside the realm of the rich. Bungalows allowed people of modest means to achieve something they had long fought: respectability. With its special features---style, convenience, simplicity, sound construction, and excellent plumbing---the bungalow filled more than a need for shelter. It provided fulfillment of the American dream...it symbolized the good life. On its own plot of land, with a garden, however small, and a car parked out front, a bungalow provided privacy and independence. To their owners and builders, bungalows meant living close to nature, but also with true style. *

The greatest stimulus for the spread of bungalows throughout the United States was business enterprise. Literally hundreds of books, and pamphlets were produced by salespeople eager to profit from bungalow mania.

From Houses by Mail, Stevenson. p9,10,19: From Pleasantville, N.Y. to Coldwater, Kansas, from Philadelphia, Pa. to Cowley, Wyo., and beyond, 100,000 families turned to Sears Roebuck and Company earlier in this century for one of their most important purchases: their homes. Between 1908 and 1940 Sears was the place to find not only everything to fill an American home; it also manufactured and sold the houses themselves--approximately 450 ready-to-assemble designs from mansions to bungalows and even summer cottages. Ordered by mail and sent by rail wherever a boxcar or two could pull up, these popular houses were meant to fill a need for sturdy, inexpensive and, especially, modern homes---complete with such desirable conveniences as indoor plumbing and electricity. Thousands of these well-built houses survive in small towns and big cities throughout the country. Most present owners, however, are unaware of the mail-order origins of their houses.... Sears was not the only American company to manufacture or sell houses through mail-order catalogs, nor was it the only company to sell house designs.... Sears, however, was the largest: Its sales reached 30,000 houses by 1925 and nearly 50,000 by 1930, more than any other company....One of the reasons for the popularity of their houses was that they consciously reflected popular American taste of the period: designs were selected for their broad appeal and acceptance. A 1918 Sears-produced history stated that ''the customer must be satisfied for a lifetime "'

(The authors of the Sears book researched many existing Sears houses in 1981 and collected comments of their present owners; evidence of the romance which even mail-order houses can create):

House A: My father J.S. Hogue, purchased our home---Modern Home NO. 146---from Sears, Roebuck in Chicago in late 1912 or early 1913. He saw the finished house on the firm's lot, liked it and had it shipped precut on the Frisco Railroad to Chelsea, Okla.

None but our immediate family has occupied this home. It was the first house in Chelsea to have electric lights. We are using the original plumbing and wiring. The redwood siding holds paint remarkably well. The floors and the woodwork including the ceiling beams, are all solid oak. There has been no change in the walls or floor plan; it is truly a compliment to Sears, Roebuck.

House B: Our home, the Cornell, was built in 1928. My Dad did the carpentry and subcontracted the masonry, electrical and plumbing work. I recall the times during my folks' later years when my mother suggested they sell and buy a retirement home at the Jersey shore. My Dad's reply was always the same: "I built this house. I know where every nail is. It's a good, solid house, and I'm not leaving it." And neither of them did.

House C: My Sears mail-order house--Modern Home No.167, later named the Maytown---was built in 1909. It is unabashedly American, the kind of house you see in movies about the good old days when virtue triumphed and the nice guy won the girl, usually while sitting in the front porch wing....Modern Home 167 is straightforward and unpretentious yet without dowdiness. Its turret and porch columns and spindles lend a certain elegance that easily matches the gingerbread and more elaborate architecture of its turn-of-the-century neighbors. There are high ceilings, protruding bays, paneled doors, soft pine floors and oddly shaped closets for children to hide in. ....My Sears house allows me to connect with the past, to a time when the century was new and the country was optimistic, idealistic and still innocent. Teddy Roosevelt was leaving the White House to William Howard Taft, and millions of 28 immigrants, including my grandparents, were pouring into the country Sometimes at night I "listen" to the house and try to imagine what life was like when the house was the new place in the block. Did the first owners notice how the rain tumbles from the turret onto the porch roof?. Did they see the circus train roll by on its way into Washington? Did they put their Halloween pumpkins on the porch? And did the window on the second-floor landing stick even then? *

Architecture is much more than style, but an important factor in the construction of bungalows was their ability to meet owners' functional requirements while giving them what had previously been limited to the wealthy few: the latest designs. High-style bungalows were created by Frank Lloyd Wright, Bernard Maybeck, William Gray Purcess and other notable American architects. Most bungalows were not high art, however. The humbler types were what people of moderate means could afford.

Houses in the neighborhood of the Smiley Library show the influence of the Arts and crafts and bungalow designs. The bungalow was basically a house of modest area, single floor, with a compact relationship of the room. Beyond the plan~the exterior can evolve into varied designs to satisfy the romantic inclinations of the owner or designer. Exterior designs reflected the whole range of architectural movements of their day: California 1900-1930, Prairie 1900-1920, Mission 1890-1915, Spanish Colonial 1915-1930, Tudor 1890-1930.

A prime example of the California Style in Redlands is located on the northeast corner of Brookside and San Mateo. "In its day the term California bungalow evoked both a type and an Arts and Crafts architectural style that merged elements from Japanese building and Swiss chalets....Brothers Greene were not the inventors of the style but were simply highly skilled practitioners of a well-worn tradition." (American Bungalow Style, Robert Winter, p31,32)

In Redlands at the intersection of Campbell Avenue and nestled in the landscape, is a Number 79 Pacific Ready-Cut Home, constructed in 1924. This is the company that served all of Southern California from its Los Angeles factory with Bungalows. (From the book Pacific's Book of Homes, Pacific Ready-cut Homes Inc. Los Angeles, 1925):

You are the best kind of an American citizen when you own your home! To be a contributing factor in your community and sponsor for your family's cherished realm of happiness you must be a builder. And the greatest of all builders---so it has been down through all the Ages---is the Home-builder....Nearly 25,000 Pacific Ready-Cut structures stand today throughout the West as a glowing tribute to our adherence to this advanced Principle...Select your home here, and assure yourself a lifetime of satisfaction.* And so, an unknown customer became a home-builder on Campbell Avenue in Redlands. In 1980 this California Bungalow acquired new owners: a family including three children and an architect with imagination. The house was sited in a built-up residential area with mature trees around the perimeter. The 900 square foot house had a secluded feeling and room for a modest expansion.

Maintaining the existing house form and extending the existing roof slopes over the site permitted new living-dining-kitchen areas to be created. These areas open to an adjacent patio. The original area of Plan 79 was modified to have more bedrooms and baths.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beny, Roloff. The Romance of Architecture. London" Thames and Hudon Ltd. 1985. Anthology drawn from letters of architectural writers accompanied by multiple photographs of the elements of buildings.

Brand, Stewart. How Buildings Learn. New York: Viking Penguin 1994 Buildings must be adaptable beyond their first occupants objectives. How they change. Photographic records of some buildings over time.

Downing, Andrew Johnson. Rural Architecture. (1850). New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1969 An 1850 how-to book suggesting style and design of houses suitable for the full development of American families.

Hoffman, Donald. Understanding Frank Lloyd Wright's Architecture. Toronto: General Publishing Company, 1995. Very complete discussion of the development of the architectural vocabulary which became his mark.

Makinson, Randell. Greene and Greene, Architecture as Fine Art. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, Inc., 1977. Greene brothers personal history, professional development with many plan/elevation presentations. Superb.

Moore, Charles (Smith, Kathryn; Becker, Peter). Home Sweet Home. New York: Rizzol International Publications, 1983. Eclectic collection of articles on various aspects of American domestic vernacular architecture

Pacific Ready-Cut Homes, Inc. Pacific's Book of Homes. Los Angeles Pacific Ready-Cut Homes, 1925. Promotional hard bound book of 120+ floor plans with pictures of each house. Cabinets, trim details and manufacturing methods described in great detail.

Rybczynski, Witold. The Most Beautiful House in The World. New York: Viking Penguin, 1989 What architects do, how they get it right. Development of a personal project with superb historical references and anecdotes.

Stevenson, Katherine; Jandl, H. Ward. Houses by Mail. New York: Preservation Press 1986.