While Wright was continuing to employ in his houses of the late forties and early fifties a variety of modes of design that go back to the thirties, and also developing at Florida Southern and in Bartlesville ideas dating from his inactive period in the late twenties, he continued to strike out in other directions too. The Neils house at 2801 Burnham Boulevard on Cedar Lake in Minneapolis, Minn., completed in 1951, is all of coloured marble rubble provided by the client; the Walker house at Carmel, Cal., completed in 1952, is a glazed polygonal pavilion overhanging the sea. Where the Prairie Houses of the first decade of Wright’s mature career may all seem in retrospect to have come out of the same, or nearly identical, moulds, the many houses designed in his seventies and eighties are notable for the great variety of their siting, their materials, and the geometrical themes of their planning.
Nor was the domestic field anything like the sole area of his activity. In addition to the college buildings, the shop, the skyscraper, and the laboratory that have been mentioned, Wright built during the years 1947-52 a Unitarian church in Madison, Wis., of very original character. The products of his multifarious activity in these years include, moreover, many projects for all sorts of structures, some of which have been completed—notably the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (Plate [188]). A decade and more of designing and redesigning preceded the initiation of this remarkable helical concrete building in 1956. Of three other late projects, those for an opera-house in Baghdad and for an Arizona state capitol in Phoenix, dating from 1957, are unlikely to be built; but the county buildings for Marin County, Cal., are now well advanced.
In spite of so much late activity, greater than that of his early maturity, in spite (or perhaps, in part, because) of its kaleidoscopic variety, Wright’s actual influence was less significant than forty years before; at least it was of a very different order. He still outpaced his juniors both of the next generation and the one after; but few if any were able to follow with any success along the intensely personal paths he opened.[[413]] Like Perret to the end of his life, Wright continued at ninety to offer an inspiration to all architects, but there has risen no school of imitators to vulgarize his manner as there was long a school of imitators of Perret in France.
In creative power, in productivity, and, over the forty years and more since 1910, in influence, Wright overshadowed all the other American architects of his generation. Inspired by Wright as well as by Sullivan, there flourished for a while a sort of ‘Second Chicago School’ to which Purcell & Elmslie; George W. Maher (1864-1926); Schmidt, Garden & Martin, and several other architects who were active in the Middle West before the First World War may be considered to belong.[[414]] But this school flickered out in the twenties as most of its members succumbed to the dominant ‘traditionalism’ of the day or else ceased to find clients.[[415]] Four rather more vital and original architects appeared shortly after 1900 in California: the brothers Greene (Charles S., 1868-1957, and Henry M., 1867-1954), Irving Gill (1870-1936), and Bernard R. Maybeck (1862-1957).[[416]] But the productive careers of the Greenes, of Gill, and, to a lesser extent, that of Maybeck came pretty much to a close, like those of the Chicagoans, around 1915 with the resounding success of the ‘traditional’ buildings designed by Bertram G. Goodhue (1869-1924) for the San Diego Exhibition of that year.[[417]] These were in the most ornate sort of Spanish Baroque, quite archaeologically handled; and the emulation of them, which at once became endemic in California, turned most local architects away from innovation for almost twenty years.
Maybeck, who had been a graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts in the eighties, contributed to the San Francisco Exhibition[[418]] of the same year the still extant Fine Arts Building in an equally ‘traditional’ but more Classical vein. Partly ruined today, his tawny stucco columns and entablatures have the air of a painting by Pannini or Hubert Robert. For all its charm, this was a surprising work to come from a man who had earlier shown himself, in the Christian Science Church of 1910 in Berkeley, Cal., almost as bold an innovator as Wright even though he employed for that a fantastically eclectic vocabulary of reminiscent forms (Plate [146B]). Many Berkeley houses, moreover, ranging over several decades in date, also prove Maybeck to have been an architect of great originality and surprising versatility.
In Berkeley also are several houses by John Galen Howard (1864-1931) as well as his building for the University of California’s School of Architecture, of which he was for long the Dean. His building at the University (which has in addition a Faculty Club and one or two other things by Maybeck), the Gregory house of about 1904, and the architect’s own house of 1912 are also notable examples of free design dating from the first decades of the century. Howard’s informal work is more directly related than are Wright’s houses to the Shingle Style of the preceding period, though not specifically to that of Richardson, for whom, however, Howard had actually worked in the mid eighties before he came to California. Most of his work at the University, in fact, is in an Italianate vein, and the campus is dominated by his tall, campanile-like clock tower.
The production of the Greene brothers in this period, entirely domestic and largely in Pasadena, offers a more coherent corpus than that of any modern American architect of their generation except Wright. Related, like the work of Howard, to the Shingle Style, which had been brought to Pasadena and Los Angeles by Eastern architects in the eighties and nineties, the Greenes’ houses are most interesting for their successful assimilation of oriental influences. The best example is the Gamble house at 4 Westmorland Street in Pasadena of 1908-9 (Plate [147A]). But the Pitcairn house of 1906 and the Blacker house of 1907, at 289 West State Street and at 1157 Hillcrest respectively, as well as the later Thorsen house of 1909, at 2307 Piedmont Avenue in Berkeley, now a fraternity house, are also excellent.
Shingled walls, low-pitched and wide-spreading gables, and extensive porte-cochères and verandas of stick-work surpassing in virtuosity those of the Stick Style, were combined by the Greenes in rather loosely organized compositions. Less formal and regular than Wright’s Prairie Houses, theirs are executed throughout with a craftsmanship in wood rivalling that of the Japanese, whom they, like Wright, so much admired. The Greenes’ plans are less open than Wright’s, but they made more use of verandas and balconies than he. Superb woodwork and fine stained glass combine with the specially designed furniture in the interiors to produce ensembles of a sturdy elegance hardly matched by any of Wright’s. Those in the Blacker and Thorsen houses, whose clients were both in the lumber business, are especially rich.
Moreover, a ‘California Bungalow’ mode[[419]]—at worst but a parody at small scale of the Greenes’ expensive mansions, at best sharing many of their virtues of directness and simplicity if not of imaginative craftsmanship—became widely popular thanks to national magazines, pattern-books, and the activities of many builders. This was true not alone in the West but throughout the country in the very years after 1910 when ‘traditionalism’, usually in Neo-Colonial guise, closed in most completely on American domestic architecture.
The reputation of the Greenes today is less than that of the more articulate but less consistent Maybeck. But when modern architecture revived in California in the thirties the new men were fully aware of what the Greenes had accomplished. Thus their work provided, together with that of Maybeck and Howard, a background and a tradition for the local development of a largely autochthonous domestic architecture in the San Francisco Bay area. This was a truly living tradition[[420]] quite unlike the abortive revival of the architecture of the Spanish Missions, which it has now almost completely displaced. But the Mission influence was not altogether a negative one in early twentieth-century California, as the work of Irving Gill illustrates.