Traditional Homes Thread

Since I was over on Swiss Ave photographing a reputedly original Wright-office designed home for the Wright thread, thought I'd pick up a few pre-1925 traditional gems to start off a thread for Traditional Homes, old and new.

The Swiss Classical 1 pics are the same house, designed by famed Dallas Architect Hal Thompson. In both design and execution, the stonework, detailing, and overall composition of this house are exceptionally fine, as is typical of his other works..fortunately, most still survive.

The other pics are of large, expensive traditional styled homes common to that period...another Classical-revival home and one of what I'd call European country-house eclectic...national influence not exactly placeable.

Please excuse the poor photographic quality...640 x 480 plus subjects being on the shady side of the street.
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I like the first house, but the front stairway and hand rails are little tacky for me.

 

thanks, Scott - bring back memories - I got my M. Arch at UTA in 86 and then worked at HKS for about 2 years before heading back east to SOM DC. Swiss Ave is one of my favorite achitectural streets in the country.

 

I got a BS from UTA in '77, started grad school there, but was tired of school and didn't do any more after a couple of courses.

I've known several people who have been or are at at HKS...they stay big & busy.

Swiss is a great street...a one-stop education in traditional styles.

The ramps are temporary...this house is City property and rented out a lot for weddings and other social and club events.

I guess the railings come down to taste, but they are correctly designed and executed.

 

Berkeley has a lot of traditional homes. Many are quite typical of traditional houses elsewhere in the country. But quite a few are different. Three architects stood out in the San Francisco area at the beginning of the 20th century. They were Willis Polk, Ernest Coxhead and Bernard Maybeck. They were all quite exceptional architects. Polk was the most mainstream - particularly in the latter half of his career, when he was doing large projects. Coxhead had an innovative and refined shingle style aesthetic and other somewhat British classic styles.

Maybeck was another thing entirely. He was a sort of romantic maverick. While studying at the Ecole des Beaux Arts he embraced the theories of Viollet-le-duc with their combined emphasis on medievalism and technological advancement. He was drawn; he said, to the mysterious, mystical aspects of pre-gothic architecture. He was interested in poetry, music and drama and always seemed to have a playful streak.

Maybeck came to Berkeley in the 1880's and eventually became the head of the new Architecture Department at UC Berkeley. But he also kept up a lively architectural practice. Maybeck became deeply involved in Berkeley's burgeoning environmental movement and laid out a number of inter-connected pedestrian paths through the Berkeley Hills.

Among his earliest homes is the Boke House (1902). It sits on a slope and draws upon Swiss vernacular architecture for its style. No doubt Maybeck felt that the chalet style was appropriate for a hillside. Note the large overhangs, they will become a significant signature in later work. The house was built of old growth redwood (which was plentiful at the time) and designed to promote an informal lifestyle.

For more information see: http://www.maybeck.org/scholars.html
http://www.verlang.com/sfbay0004ref_bm_02.html#23_Panoramic
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Around 1916 Maybeck designed another, very small, house in the chalet style. The Mathewson housewas quite innovative - the whole house was originally one space. Just as in the 1902 Boke house he manipulated the plan to increase the sense of spaciousnesss. The house has no dining room nor even a nook pretending to be one; in addition, all of its esential service elements are minimized, sacrificing secondary areas in order to create a large, handsome living space. Maybeck designed an addition in 1919 which doubled the house size and removed its one-room character.

Built on a corner site, the house has a one-story living room and a two story service wing skillfully contained under a dog-leg gable roof which slopes off into minor gables over projecting forms of the plan. The living room is spanned longitudinally by two built-up beams which eliminate the necessity of horizontal ties for transverse framing members and end wall supports. A small shed roof over the large north window runs counter to the pitch of the main gable and becomes a visual statement of the resourceful and imaginative framing of the interior volume. The walls of the house are gray stucco, while their upper reaches are covered with boards and battens stained gray-green. Windows divided into small square lights by thick blue-green muntins--suggesting a grille set between the sill and the projecting eaves--fill the gable ends.
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Maybeck designed the Lawson house for a Berkeley geology professor in 1907 - the year after the San Francisco earthquake. Prof. Lawson discovered the San Andreas Fault, the cause of the quake. While exploring Lawson ascertained that the main trace of another fault ran right through the property on which he intended to build this house.

Needless to say, Lawson was adamant that the house be structurally sound. So the house was made of poured in place concrete - something unusual at the time. Maybeck, who was known for the decorative use of multi-colored walls boards, was at a loss with the blank walls. Always interested in threading a path from past to present, Maybeck became captivated by the idea of designing a contemporary Pompeian villa to link the 1906 earthquake to the destruction of ancient Pompeii by volcanic eruption. Since Pompeian houses were of masonry construction and had cubistic forms with tile roofs and plaster walls decorated with mural paintings, they offered an appropriate historical antecedent.

It is not clear in this and other works that Maybeck embedded in history, which came first: his own design or his awareness of the architectural prototype. In any case, for the Lawson house he designed a long rectangular volume with a small projecting room on the north side next to the entry and a shallow wing on the south side; the latter provided a sunny room on the lower floor, with a sleeping porch above.
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