My review of “Bay Area Houses.”. Sally Woodbridge’s well-received…

Sally Woodbridge’s well-received compendium on Bay Regional houses has been reissued, with a new chapter, by Gibbs Smith. First published by Oxford in the mid-seventies, the book includes essays by Woodbridge, historians David Gebhard and the late John Beach, architects Charles Moore and Richard C. Peters, and planner Roger Montgomery. It provides both a history of “the Bay Regional style” in its residential incarnation and specific coverage of, for example, the seminal work of William Wurster and the “mass production” of Bay Area housing by Joseph Eichler and others. Photographs by Morley Baer, the late Roger Sturtevant, and many other well-known West Coast photographers, accompanied in some cases by plans and other drawings, effectively illustrate the text.

The book uses the same plates as the earlier edition, and Woodbridge’s new chapter, “Arcadia Revisited,” hews faithfully to the black-and-white format. The classic photos of Bay Area houses of the forties, fifties, and sixties are mostly in black and white anyway, so for that period color would not have made much difference. In the new chapter, which takes us into the eighties, the use of color in the work increases — and its absence in the photographs is more noticeable. There is also a sameness to the layout reminiscent of that venerable recorder of Bay Area houses, Sunset magazine, and equally soporific.

Woodbridge’s concluding chapter is broad in its choice of examples, but one misses the work of — among others — Stanley Saitowitz, a thoughtful interpreter of this and other regions; and Lars Lerup, who, despite the paucity of his built work, has been increasingly influential over the last decade.

Moore’s chapter concludes with the observation that a house by Daniel Solomon in San Francisco

gets its excitement from the increasingly arduous requirements about holding houses up. Here steel bents do that for an old house, and their collision with the old frame provides the occasion for some high art. It’s probably not the Third Phase of the Bay Area Tradition anymore, but it points the way to what we hope will come next.

It was pointing, I think, to Los Angeles. Just as that city in the last decade has eclipsed San Francisco in finance and trade, so has it emerged, residentially speaking, as the West Coast’s more vital regional style. Not that the Bay Area lacks a style or practitioners equal to their L.A. counterparts, but the action has shifted to other building types, with restaurants and retail emerging as the new “entry projects.” In terms of housing, some of the Bay Area’s most influential contributions exist as planning and design guidelines, such as Solomon’s for residential districts in San Francisco and San Jose; as critiques of housing, such as Lerup’s Planned Assaults; or as counterproposals like those of Christopher Alexander and his collaborators.

As far as Bay Regionalism is concerned, there seem to be two schools. One passes a variety of influences through the sieve of a regional sensibility, creating a body of work that is palpably “within the tradition” but with a sea of metaphysical content. George Homsey’s remarkable projects, Garfield Elementary School (San Francisco) and Silver Lake Lodge (at Deer Valley, near Park City, Utah), are examples. The other is that school of architect-flâneurs, of which Lerup is the purest example, who bring their hybrid, only partially regional sensibility to bear on projects (real and imagined) across the planet.

For the younger practitioners of both schools, regionalism, particularly regionalism as style, is a crime. That they might be part of a region, contributing to its tradition, is possible but increasingly incidental. According to Richard Fernau, regionalism

is an instrument. To see it as a goal or end in itself is fairly specious. We don’t see ourselves as “Bay Regionalists,” but we are aware of being here and building here, of entering into a dialogue with the region.

Or, according to Stanley Saitowitz,

I see my work as the antithesis of Bay Regionalism, which is predicated on an aesthetic that the immediate problem is then boxed into. For me, the aesthetic is a result, not a determinant. My work is involved with the nature of a place — about giving concrete expression to the qualities that exist in a place. In Bay Regionalism, the architecture is often the same — in Berkeley, in San Francisco, and at Sea Ranch. It shouldn’t be: the light, topography, and views are all different. The objective of my work is to be as responsive to those things as possible.

George Homsey started practice (he told me in the late seventies) ambitious to carry the traditions of Bay Regionalism forward and give them the stamp of a new generation. As Charles Moore documents so well in Bay Area Houses, Homsey and his contemporaries — Moore and William Turnbull among them — moved solidly out of the shadow of their elders — William Wurster, Gardner Dailey, and Joseph Esherick — in the late fifties and early sixties. At least at the time, they were not embarrassed to think of themselves as regionalists, or to regard their work as extending that of their immediate predecessors (with whom Homsey, for example, remains a collaborator). In other respects, though, they echo the same sentiments that Saitowitz and Fernau express: of wanting to respond to the region, and to see it reflected in their work.

Woodbridge’s new essay does not go very far in trying to distinguish the new from the old. She notes changed circumstances (dearer land, controls on growth, more stringent energy-use requirements), and adds:

The Tradition’s elitist quality… is increasingly based on wealth alone. An educated preference for the simple life rooted in the land is much less likely to influence current taste in the design of houses than it did in previous generations.

Most of her essay describes the individual houses, which generally fall stylistically in the first school — that is, are recognizably “of the Bay Region” in outward appearance. Visually, at least, this leaves the impression that the underlying traditions have not really changed. Nor is Woodbridge’s essay unique in that respect; its title notwithstanding, Daniel Gregory’s 1986 show, “Radical Regionalism,” which featured many of the same architects, left much the same impression.

Today, however, the second school is starting to supplant the first, and also to find its own particular voice. Stylistically, the work breaks ranks with the tradition, and its deliberately “global” focus reflects the same attitude that led Lerup to comment to me that Berkeley “is closer to New York than San Francisco.” The originality of this work is noteworthy. It was also hard won: Lerup’s conquest of Berlin, for example, has its roots in a meticulous, decade-long exploration of the American house. Others combined practice, teaching, and polemics for the same purpose: to stake out an original position in relation to global and seemingly hegemonic architecture and culture, and then to assert this position on the same global stage.

The masters of the first school, like Turnbull or Homsey, have perhaps gone through a similar process. Their best work is no less assertive or original for being more visibly within the Bay Region’s stylistic traditions. One of their masters — Joseph Esherick — has written:

Ordinary buildings grow out of an intelligent, regional approach — usually in the face of all sorts of forces set against regionalism: worldwide industries, the homogenization of materials, the standardization of approaches, magazines preoccupied with selling a product. Architects are bombarded with all of this, and if they take it seriously, it makes regionalism — and the achievement of ordinary buildings — very difficult.

Esherick’s “ordinary,” by the way, should be understood in the same sense as a recent ad that read “It’s just a cigarette like a Porsche is just a car.” I think his point is correct, however. Except for novelty-seekers like the Japanese, who use creative assimilation as a bridge to originality, most people either succumb to the overwhelming presence of the outer world or attempt to shut it out altogether. Facing it, making sense of it, carving out one’s own position in relation to it, and — most audacious of all — trying to redefine it in one’s own terms are acts “against the tide.” They are also the only means by which regionalism can maintain its vitality, and the originality of its vision.

Notes

The first two quotes are taken from John Parman and Jocelyn Kwei, “Design and the Teaching of Design,” CED News, College of Environmental Design, University of California, Berkeley (Spring 1987), page 6 and 12. The third quote is from Joseph Esherick and John Parman, “The Pursuit of the Ordinary,” Space & Society (June 1983), page 56. My comment on Esherick’s use of “ordinary” refers to a 1984 ad campaign for Sterling cigarettes. The line finds echos in Princess Chelsea’s 2011 song, “The Cigarette Duet.”

The review appeared originally in Design Book Review 16, Summer 1989, pp. 55–57. I came across it while looking for something else. Woodbridge’s second edition of Bay Area Houses was published by Gibbs Smith in 1988.

After I posted this, I came across a letter to Design Book Review from Daniel Gregory, whose exhibit is mentioned in my review:

I enjoyed DBR 16 with John Parman’s review of Sally Woodbridge’s new edition of Bay Area Houses, and I was delighted to see the mention of the “Radical Regionalism” exhibition of 1987. As I understand it, the Bay Region Tradition was not so much a style or single set of forms and conditions as it was a flexible attitude toward building that attempted to derive design solutions from particular requirements of program and site. william wurster certainly (and Joseph Esherick after him) was against style for its own sake. I think they would agree with Richard Fernau and Stanley Saitowitz, which makes me wonder what Femau and Saitowitz mean when they speak of distancing themselves from “Bay Re- gionalism.” Fernau likes to use the phrase “reluctant regionalism,” which, in my view, is redundant. In short, a good, thought-provoking review. I am eager to see if Jim Shay and Christopher lrion’s book New Architecture San Francisco (Chronicle Books, November 1989) will broaden the debate.

Style pertains to Bay Regional design, despite the denials, as does regional. Otherwise, we wouldn’t trace its history in terms of the recognized masters of each generation, an odd lineage that takes in Chuck Bassett and Joe Esherick, Chuck Davis and Stanley Saitowitz, Bill Turnbull and David Baker, and tricksters like George Homsey, Dan Solomon, and Bobbie Stauffacher.