The Maybeck collection consists of correspondence, office records, project records, photographs, drawings, and artifacts documenting Maybeck's design work. Significant residential projects included in the collection are for Charles Keeler, Guy Chick, Leon Roos, and Earle Anthony, as well as numerous others. The larger projects documented include the Packard dealerships for Earle Anthony, the Panama Pacific International Exposition's Palace of Fine Arts, the University of California, Berkeley's Phoebe Hearst Memorial Complex, the campus plan for Principia College, Elsah, Illinois, First Church of Christ, Scientist, Berkeley, and the Golden Gate International Exposition.
Few architects sustain the popular affection Bernard Maybeck enjoys almost a quarter century after his death. Arthur Brown, Jr., may have been more tasteful, Frank Lloyd Wright more revolutionary, but Maybeck's eccentric work and personality continue to inspire love. Locally, having "a Maybeck" is equivalent to living in a Monet. Trained at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, Maybeck often contorted its precise and rigorous teachings to create effects that teetered on the edge of romantic vulgarity. Shocked, and perhaps a bit envious, his colleagues considered him an errant genius or simply silly. Consequently, he was seldom mentioned in the local professional press; when Architect and Engineer ran a feature on new Christian Science churches, it ignored his Berkeley masterpiece of 1910 for comparatively humdrum structures. Maybeck came to California in the early 1890's after short stints in Florida and Kansas City. Although he lived in bohemian Berkeley, close to the stimulus of the University and the patronage of its faculty to hangers-on, he commuted daily to a long series of offices in San Francisco. With the young Willis Polk, Ernest Coxhead, and A. C. Schweinfurth, he helped create what has become known as the First Bay Tradition of residential architecture. Certainly, Maybeck's most popular work was and remains the Palace of Fine Arts, built for the Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915 — when Maybeck was 50 years old. The building, meant to evoke ancient Roman ruins redolent of melancholy, was so successful that it was left standing long after the fair's other plaster palaces had been razed, and it was eventually rebuilt in tinted concrete.
Residential work in Berkeley of Bernard Maybeck
Can a woman be an architect? The question was frequently asked in architectural periodicals in the first few decades of this century, and the answer was generally affirmative—as long as the ladies stuck to bungalows. Several women in Berkeley established small residential practices. Only Julia Morgan broke all the rules to become a major California architect. Daughter of a prosperous Oakland mining engineer, Morgan was the first woman to graduate with a degree in engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, in 1894. With the encouragement of her teacher, Bernard Maybeck, she became the first woman to enter the revered Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1897, receiving her diploma in 1901. From the moment she opened her own practice in 1905 until she retired in 1950, she was seldom without work, producing an estimated 1,000 buildings and consistently working 14-hour days. She demonstrated her multi-faceted talents in 1906 when she was chosen by the Law Brothers to restore their gutted Fairmont Hotel (after Stanford White was eliminated, permanently by Harry Thaw in one of the century's most celebrated crimes). A gushing woman reporter sent from the Call to interview the young architect complimented her on the fine interior decoration and was sternly informed that Morgan was in charge of structural renovation. This was only part of the truth, as she also designed a splendid terrace, staircase, and gardens at the back of the hotel sloping toward Powell Street. Morgan is usually given credit for the superb trading hall in the Merchant's Exchange, although conclusive proof has be unavailable to historians. She did, however, for many decades maintain handsome offices in the building, where her staff of up to 16 functioned as a surrogate family. Morgan drew on a wide range of traditional stylistic sources for her buildings. The Chinatown YWCA on Clay Street is, of course, Chinese, while the nearby Donaldina Cameron house of 1907 is a utilitarian structure of dark clinker brick showing strong Craftsman influence. Miss Burke's School of 1917-18 on Jackson Street and the 1922 Emmanuel Sisterhood Building (now the Zen Center) at Page and Laguna are Mediterranean in inspiration, though the latter is finished in dark brick. For Morgan, the exterior appearance of a building was secondary to the commodity and convenience of the interior. Her plans and spaces are simple, direct and graceful, no matter how richly detailed. They avoid the spatial eccentricities of Maybeck's buildings, or Willis Polk's, or Ernest Coxhead's. In the 1920's and 1930's, Morgan collaborated with her old mentor, Maybeck, on a number of monumental projects; though the nature of their relationship is unclear, it appears that Maybeck concocted scenographic exterior effects while Morgan devised the efficient plans, structures and utilities that Maybeck didn't want to bother with. Without doubt, Morgan's greatest patrons were the Hearst family. For Phoebe Apperson Hearst, she designed an addition to the great Hacienda at Pleasanton and received innumerable commissions for YWCAs and women's buildings. Though best remembered for work on the castle (www.hearstcastle.org) at San Simeon for Phoebe's son, she designed "Bavarian village" for Hearst at his Wyntoon estate near Shasta and supervised the dismantling and redesign of an entire Spanish monastery, which was intended for the same property but eventually was donated to San Francisco. (Its remains lie behind the deYoung Museum and scattered throughout Golden Gate Park.) Julia Morgan was both conservative and extraordinarily competent. In turn, she attracted a steady stream of conservative clients. Grace, refinement, and understatement, rather than innovation and personal eccentricity, distinguish her works; it is her very self-effacement in favor of the wishes of her clients that caused her buildings to please rather than to thrill. However, in certain projects, like the camp she designed for the YWCA at Asilomar, one cannot help but respect and admire the exquisite attention to detail, to plan and, especially, to siting, and acknowledge that Morgan ranks with the best of Bay Area architects, despite the ostensible handicap of her sex. California Polytechnic State University, Julia Morgan Collection.
The Berkeley Hills neighborhood offers spectacular vistas of the San Francisco Bay, scenic wooden enclaves, famous residential architecture (notably by Bernard Maybeck), a lush and gorgeous network of curving streets, pedestrian shortcuts, and secret routes, and a vibrant intellectual community.
Collection Number: 1982-1. Extent: 1 half box, 6 flat file drawers. The William Raymond Yelland collection consists primarily of project records, arranged alphabetically by project. These include specifications, drawings, correspondence, notes, and a clipping. Drawings, which form the bulk of the collection, largely relate to residential work, although some commercial and apartment buildings, including Normandy Village, are also included. The collection also includes an attendance book and other materials from a technical drawing class that Yelland taught at night for adults through the Oakland Public Schools in 1933. Link to online finding aid: :/13030/tf538nb14j 2ff7e9595c
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