Bernard Maybeck

Maybeck was born in New York City, the son of a German immigrant, and studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, France.^[a]

He moved to Berkeley, California, in 1892. He taught engineering drawing and architectural design at the University of California, Berkeley from 1894 to 1903, and acted as a mentor for some other important California architects, including Julia Morgan and William Wurster.^[3]

Maybeck was equally comfortable producing works in the American Craftsman, Mission Revival, Gothic revival, Arts and Crafts, and Beaux-Arts styles, believing that each architectural problem required development of an entirely new solution.

While working in the office of A. Page Brown in San Francisco, Maybeck probably contributed to the Mission Style California Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and was one of the designers of the San Francisco Swedenborgian Church, which included the first Mission Style chair.^[4][5]

For the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, he designed the domed Palace of Fine Arts^[6] and also the "House of Hoo Hoo", a "lumberman's lodge" made of rough-barked tree trunks. The Palace of Fine Arts was seen as the embodiment of Maybeck's elaboration of how Roman architecture could fit within a California context. Maybeck said that the popular success of the Palace was due to the absence of a roof connecting the rotunda to the art gallery building, along with the absence of windows in the gallery walls and the presence near the rotunda of trees, flowers and a water feature.^[7]

In 1928, he designed the Harrison Memorial Library in Carmel in a Spanish Eclectic style.^[8][9]

In his long-time home city of Berkeley, the 1910 First Church of Christ, Scientist, Berkeley is designated a National Historic Landmark and is considered one of his masterpieces.^[10][11] In 1914, he oversaw the building of the Maybeck Recital Hall in Berkeley.

On flatter sites, such as the city of San Francisco, the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, and the Loch Lin General Plan for Principia College in Illinois, his proposals were guided by more formal Beaux Arts planning principles.^[12] One of Maybeck's most interesting office buildings is the home of the Family Service Agency of San Francisco at 1010 Gough Street, from 1928, which is on the city's Historic Building Register. Some of his larger residential projects, particularly those in the Berkeley hills such as La Loma Park, have been compared to the ultimate bungalows of the architects Greene and Greene.^[13]

Maybeck had many ideas about town planning that he elaborated throughout his career. As a citizen of Berkeley from the 1890s, he was intimately involved in the Hillside Club. His associations and work there helped evolve ideas about hillside communities. Maybeck developed a number of firm beliefs in how civilization and the land should relate to each other.^[14] Two overriding principles guided his approach:

1. The primacy of the landscape - geology, flora, and fauna were not to be subdued by architecture so much as enhanced by architecture
2. Roads should pattern the existing grade and not be an imposition upon it

There were other principles he would elucidate, such as a shared public landscape, but these were key, and helped Berkeley evolve into a paradigm for hillside living that was organic and unique.^[15]

Maybeck's visions for communities in the East Bay were also a conscientious counterpoint to across the bay where in San Francisco city planning was much more conventional, forced, and regimented into expansive grids of streets. Its grids, imposed in places on very steep grades, resulted in extremely steep streets, sidewalks, and urban transitions, some of which were almost comically so. He also developed a comprehensive town plan for the company town of Brookings, Oregon, a clubhouse at the Bohemian Grove, and many of the buildings on the campus of Principia College in Elsah, Illinois.^[16][17]

A lifelong fascination with drama and the theater is evident in much of Maybeck's work. In his spare time, he was known to create costumes and also design sets for the amateur productions at the Hillside Club.^[18]

Bernard Maybeck died on October 3, 1957, aged 95, and is buried in the Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, California.^{[citation needed]}

In 1951, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects.^{[citation needed]}

• 
  Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco
• 
  First Church of Christ, Scientist (Berkeley, California)
• 
  Lynwood Pacific Electric Railway Depot, Los Angeles, California
• 
  Automobile dealership, San Francisco

Historic districts with Maybeck-designed works include

• Panoramic Hill Historic District — in the Berkeley Hills, in Berkeley and Oakland Hills, Oakland, California, NRHP-listed.

Maybeck designed residences include the Boke House (1902) at 23 Panoramic Way^[1]

• Principia College Historic District — River Road, Elsah, Illinois, NRHP-listed.^[1]

Maybeck designed the 'English village' campus master plan, and campus buildings including the Colonial Revival style Chapel (1931–34) at 1 Maybeck Place.^[51]

• Professorville Historic District — roughly bounded by Embarcadero Road, Addison Avenue, and Emerson and Cowper Streets, in Palo Alto, California, NRHP-listed.^[1][52]

Maybeck designed the "Sunbonnet House" (1899, restored 2004) for Emma Kellogg.^[53]

• Tahoe Meadows Historic District (founded 1924) — first planned open space community in Lake Tahoe region, on US 50 between Ski Run Boulevard and Park Avenue, South Lake Tahoe, El Dorado County, California, NRHP-listed.^[1][54][55]