Bernard Maybeck

Mark Anthony Wilson

• Publisher: Gibbs Smith
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781423611813
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Ensayos y monografías sobre arquitectura

The work of Bernard Maybeck has influenced generations of architects. His landmark buildings include the Palace of Fine Arts and First Church of Christ, Scientist. His emphasis on an open use of natural materials marks him as a pioneer in sustainable architecture, or "green design." Maybeck's work achieves that delicate balance between historicism and modernism, and his buildings are still in use throughout several states on the West Coast and the Midwest. This book includes more than two dozen Maybeck buildings that have never been photographed in color in any other book, as well as several of his buildings that were never documented before. Architect of Elegance not only encompasses his most memorable works but also includes letters and drawings from the family archives never before seen by the general public. The foreward is written by Maybeck's granddaugther, Cherry Maybeck Nittler. Author Mark Wilson's 22-year friendship with Bernard Maybeck's daughter-in-law, Jacomena Maybeck, gave him unique insights into the life and work of one of America's most important architects.

Chapter 1: Old World Roots

“I was never an architect. I just liked one line better than another.”

—Bernard Maybeck, 1953

It is one of the many ironies of history that Bernard Maybeck’s father, Bernhardt, left Europe for America because of his family’s support for a political revolution in his native Germany. Years later, his son would leave America for Europe so he could be in the forefront of an architectural revolution in the United States. Bernard Ralph Maybeck was born in the Greenwich Village section of New York City on February 7, 1862, one of three children in a family of German immigrants whose father had left Germany just “one jump ahead of Bismarck’s men,” as his father liked to say.^[1]Bernhardt was a furniture maker at the time of Bernard’s birth, and he eventually apprenticed his son as a wood-carver in New York City, in hopes that he would want to follow in his footsteps. Bernard’s mother Elizabeth died when he was only three, but her influence on him must have taken root in those few years, since she had often said she wanted her son to be an artist.^[2] Bernhardt remarried a few years later, and his son would soon have two half-sisters. Theirs was a highly educated household, one in which all the latest cultural and political developments were given a good deal of attention, and the children were exposed to the history and art of the Old World at an early age.

Bernard Maybeck age three, 1865 (collection of Cherry Maybeck Nittler).

By the time he finished high school in 1879, Bernard had learned the skill of freehand drawing from his father, as well as becoming fairly fluent in German and French, and gaining a knowledge of philosophy, mathematics, and history.^[3] His father had been appointed a foreman at the prestigious wood-carving firm of Pottier and Stymus in 1875, where he oversaw the making of custom-designed furniture and architectural woodwork. Bernard briefly attended the College of the City of New York, but he soon dropped out because he loathed having to memorize the formulas required to pass a chemistry class. Maybeck then became an apprentice in woodworking at Pottier and Stymus. But here, too, he resisted the limited opportunities to pursue his own creative direction, and he quit the apprenticeship after less than two years. In 1881, at the age of 19, Bernard’s father agreed to let his son move to Paris to work in the design studio of Mr. Pottier’s brother, where Bernard felt he could have more creative freedom. It was a fateful decision—one that would change the course of architecture in America.

Maybeck watercolor of unidentified chalet-style house, c. 1900 (collection of Cherry Maybeck Nittler).

Paris in the early 1880s was the most exciting place on earth for a young man with a keen interest in history, culture, and the arts. The Impressionist School of painters, which included such giants as Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Paul Gauguin, Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, and Auguste Renoir, were exhibiting their revolutionary new style of paintings in their alternative galleries. Many of these artists were soon to push the boundaries of painting even further with their own experimental Post-Impressionist styles. In architecture, the ideas of men like the Gothic Revivalist Viollet-le-Duc and the Structuralist Emmanuel Brune were challenging the prevailing Classicism that was being taught then at the architecture schools in Paris. And in urban planning, the city of Paris itself was undergoing a massive redesigning as part of the huge master plan of the first modern city planner, Baron Eugène Haussmann. All these new ideas had an invigorating effect on the mind of young Bernard Maybeck, eager as he was to learn about the latest trends in art, architecture, and design and incorporate them into his own future work.

When he first arrived in Paris, Bernard had had little experience in designing. At his job as an apprentice at the firm of Pottier and Stymus in New York he had created an original design for a reversible Pullman railroad car seat, but his foreman discouraged such individual initiative, so he was never able to market his invention.^[4] Yet this experience had whetted his appetite for devising his own solutions to design problems and seeing his creative ideas take tangible form. After he arrived in Paris, he began working at the furniture design studio of Pottier and Stymus. Their shop was located on the left bank, within walking distance of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. The Ecole was a prestigious college of the arts, and it included a school of architecture that was considered the best in the world at that time. As he walked to work every day, Bernard would see young architecture students pushing carts with their large architectural drawings to the Ecole, to be evaluated by a panel of judges. These students, some of them Americans, wore tall silk hats and elegant clothes, and Maybeck thought they were “a vision of magnificence.”^[5] Bernard soon decided he wanted to be an architect, and with his father’s permission he decided to take the entrance exam for the architecture program at the Ecole.

Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris (photo by Mark A. Wilson).

The architecture program at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts was an extremely rigorous one. Besides displaying drawing and drafting skills, students were expected to be fluent in French and know the metric system, since the exams, lectures, and all student projects required such knowledge. In addition, the entrance examination required full familiarity with French history and philosophy. It was a daunting task to prepare for such a test, even for a French citizen. Yet, in a portent of the many remarkable achievements he was to attain throughout his career, Bernard placed 22nd out of the 250 applicants who took the entrance exam at the Ecole in March 1882.^[6] Since the top 50 were admitted, Bernard was accepted into the architecture program, on his first try, at the age of 20.

For the next four years, Bernard would immerse himself in the life of a student of architecture in Paris, the art capital of the world. To prepare for his student projects and oral examinations, he entered the atelier, or studio, of Louis-Jules André. André taught a new type of design philosophy in his atelier known as Free Classicism. This was essentially a more creative, less strict version of the Classical Revival style of architecture that had been taught at the Beaux-Arts since the early nineteenth century. Among André’s former students was the prominent American architect Henry H. Richardson, who had started the Romanesque Revival movement in the United States. André felt this proved his teaching about the virtues of applying Medieval structural integrity to the development of a new American architecture was taking root. The influence of Viollet-le-Duc’s lectures on the use of Gothic design principles in modern buildings had finally gained acceptance, 15 years after he was dismissed as an instructor at the Ecole. These ideas provided fertile ground for young Bernard, who would one day put these design concepts into practice on the West Coast of the United States, in a setting that was worlds apart from the grand boulevards of Paris, France.

One particular architectural gem in Paris would exert a powerful influence on young Bernard’s future design philosophy. This was the Church of St. Germain des Pres, an eleventh-century masterpiece of Romanesque architecture on the Boulevard St. Germain, in the heart of the Latin Quarter. Maybeck walked past this church almost every day on his way to the Pottier and Stymus workshop, and later after he was accepted to the Ecole. Jacomena recalled Bernard telling her how he often stopped to go inside the church and just sit for awhile, admiring the hand-hewn stonework along the nave and the ceiling, and listening to the music during services.^[7] The honest use of natural materials, the simple hand-crafted details, and the organic structure of St. Germain were features that were to figure prominently in Maybeck’s future buildings, such as the First Church of Christ, Scientist in Berkeley. Bernard felt that the beauty of the building itself blended with the sound of the choir and organ as they echoed off the walls, creating a harmonious aesthetic experience that reminded him of the well-known statement, made famous by the renowned nineteenth-century British architectural critic John Ruskin, that “architecture is frozen music.” This inspirational effect was something Maybeck would achieve brilliantly in his own designs throughout his career. While he studied at the Ecole, he would take the time to go visit many of the Romanesque and Gothic churches in Paris and its surroundings, and was moved by their sincerity of purpose and honesty of design.

Bernard’s work in the atelier of Jules André caught the eye of his instructor on one memorable occasion. In an interview Maybeck gave to KPFA Radio in Berkeley in 1953, he recalled how one day in André’s studio he was working on an assignment to design a base for a bust. This was a project that was supposed to take students about 20 hours. Maybeck laid his drafting paper out across his drawing board and glued down the edges, then carefully smoothed the sheet so he would have an even surface to work on. Next, he began drawing a series of straight, parallel lines with a pencil, using a T square and a ruler. In about two hours he had a finished drawing of which he was quite proud. It had clean lines, with no smudges anywhere on the page.

Bernard Maybeck age 20, as he entered Ecole des Beaux-Arts, c. 1882 (collection of Cherry Maybeck Nittler).

At that point Jules André came by...