• Bernard R. Maybeck house (#3), "Sack house"
• Phoebe A. Hearst Memorial Gymnasium
• L. F. de Angulo house
• E. C. Anthony [Guest] house (#1)
• Warren P. Staniford house
• Packard Automobile showrooms, Earle C. Anthony
• E. C. Anthony [Playroom] house (#2)
• Associated Charities building
• R. I. Woolsey house
• Harrison Memorial Library
• Abbreviations

Made of sacks dipped in Bubblecrete, a lightweight concrete, and hung on chicken wire Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 212).

The disastrous fire in Berkeley in 1923 destroyed many of Maybeck's houses, and he turned again to concrete. However, he did not use monolithic construction as in the 1907 Lawson house. In search of a cheap fireproof surfacing material, he tried coating burlap sacks with a foamy concrete mixture called "Bubble Stone." This material, invented by a Berkeley man [John A. Rice], was produced by mixing chemicals with cement; it was so light in weight that a mass the size of a bale of hay could be lifted by one man.

Maybeck's production of Bubble Stone has been described by Jack Hillmer, San Francisco architect, who, in 1959, with Roy Flamm, photographer, prepared the first large exhibition of Maybeck's work. The water and chemicals were mixed in an old washing machine, then Maybeck folded cement and sand mortar (without aggregate) into the froth "like adding sugar to whipped cream." Wet burlap sacks dipped into the mixture came out with about an inch of foamy concrete adhering to them.

The coated sacks were then nailed to the studs and sheathing of a cottage, in which factory sash served as windows and as French doors to the garden. The total cost of the cottage was $600. It is still in use today, although the cement is chipping away from the sacks (McCoy 1975: 50).

Since the war, the rise in construction costs had made the simple, well-designed house more difficult to obtain. In 1923 Sunset Magazine published an article entitled "The Maybeck One-Room House," in which he proposed the incorporation of house and garden into one entity, concentrating time and effort as well as cost on one handsomely proportioned and beautifully furnished space (cf. M.A. Maclay, "The Maybeck One-Room House," Sunset Magazine, 51, (July 1923), pp. 64-66). Service rooms were to be reduced to such a minimal size that they would become mere alcoves. Maybeck had no fixed ideas concerning materials or style to be used, preferring to put the personal tastes and preferences of the owner foremost in the hopes of achieving an individual expression. The kitchen of his one-room house was to be equipped with the best labor-saving devices to take the place of a hired girl. Both the McMurray and the Geisler designs were servantless houses; but it was the studio built on the site of his own burned house which initiated the pattern of his one-room designs.

The Maybeck studio (1924) on Buena Vista Way had no fine finishes. In fact it was an experimental structure, as much a laboratory as it was a house. Three large, glazed industrial doors opened its one room to the surrounding garden. There was neither kitchen nor dining room, and the open sleeping loft over the low entryway filled one side of the room's one-and-one-half-story height. The house has undergone many modifications which have obscured its original form, so that today it is better known for its use of lightweight concrete as a wall surface than it is for its planning.

In his own one-room studio Maybeck experimented with new material, producing a unique, low cost, fire resistive construction system. His friend, John A. Rice, had been trying for several years to clear patent rights to a light-weight, air-entrained concrete named "Bubblestone." Maybeck, prophesying its broad use in low-cost housing, had interested a newly formed cement company in marketing Rice's product, once his right to patent was settled (cf. B.R. Maybeck MSS, "J.A. Rice," C.E.D. Docs). Maybeck tested the material in the building in his studio. His method of utilizing the "Bubblestone" was a simple one. On a conventional wood stud frame, strung horizontally with wire, burlap bags that had been saturated in the light-weight concrete mixture were hung shingle-fashion over the wires and left to harden into a serviceable, fire-resistant exterior. Window openings, corners, and flarings were easily negotiated with shears or by modeling the material in its plastic state. It was a technique that required no skilled labor and one that produced an interesting textural finish (Cardwell 1977: 214).

The lightweight "Bubblestone" concrete provided a uniquely rustic finish enlivened by the industrial sash of the doors and windows (Cardwell 1977: 215).

Maybeck also experimented with "Bubblestone" as a roofing material on the 1927 residence of Dr. R. I. Woolsey (20 Sunset Drive, Kensington, Contra Costa County). The concrete was colored a deep plum; however, its rough surface encouraged the growth of creepers and vines which accelerated its cracking and made it permeable. How long the concrete roofing material was effective is difficult to determine; it is now surfaced with an aluminized waterproofing coat. The roof form recalls an image of the thatch on an English cottage, yet it is not contrived. Its shapes developed out of the method of construction and the nature of the material, and its recall of the hominess of a vernacular architecture illustrates why Maybeck believed in the associative values of older architectural forms.

The finish of Maybeck's own cement sack studio has survived the exposure of forty years, even though there has been some rotting of the jute fabric where moisture has been able to penetrate the surface [Annie also chided Ben for his habit of tearing off sample pieces which he gave to many of their visitors during their years in retirement]. Maybeck had searched as far as China and Japan for a suitable netted fabric to replace the low quality jute of the gunny sack material. He experimented with grass cloths and woven paper products, proposing to use his sack system for some structures in Glen Alpine. He even thought of experimenting with it in the construction of The Principia; but his experimentation ceased when Rice was unable to establish exclusive rights to his "Bubblestone" [cf. B.R. Maybeck MSS, "J.A. Rice," C.E.D. Docs] (Cardwell 1977: 217).

That Bubblestone building, called the Studio by the family but popularly known as the Sack House, evolved slowly during the year after the fire (plates 186-89). The Maybecks' twenty-three-year-old son, Wallen, began the process by camping on the concrete slab that had been the garage floor. Soon the rest of the family decided to join him there, and Maybeck and Rice devised a procudure for making huge shingles of Bubblestone: they dipped burlap sacks into the foamy mixture that resulted when the ingredients were beaten like cake batter in a huge mixing vat. The coated sacks were draped over wires or slats nailed to the wall studs. When wet, the sacks were easy to mold; when dry, they were stiff, and openings could be cut where desired. The result was a handmade house in the best Arts and Crafts tradition (plate 190). Inside, it is a one-room house of the genre that Maclay had lauded in Early Sunset magazine. The entrance doors and other openings have metal industrial sash that runs up to the roof eaves. The wooden ceiling has a simple truss with shaped wood brackets of the kind that Maybeck had often used before (plate 191); their members were doubled so that the light catches them in lively ways. The hearth with its rough concrete mantel has rudimentary concrete seats called "hobs" extending from the base on either side (plate 192). Sleeping lofts on the east and west ends of the house were for the Maybeck children and their friends. After Ben and Annie returned to Berkeley in 1930 from their stay in the Anthonys' guesthouse, they moved into another Bubblestone building, the Cottage--north of the Studio and similar to it--which was built about 1925; they went to the Studio for family gatherings and meals.

The family, particularly the younger generation, continued to use the Studio/Sack House for parties (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 191-93, 199, 234).

[Julia] Morgan planned the building and Maybeck created the romantic architectural elements. The building was intended to be part of a larger complex with an auditorium, art gallery, and museum that was never built (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 209).

The only Maybeck buildings on the [University of California at Berkeley] campus now are the Men's Faculty Club, built before [John Galen] Howard's arrival, and the Hearst Memorial Gymnasium for Women; the gymnasium was designed by Maybeck in association with Julia Morgan, the architect of San Simeon, in 1927, the year [John Galen] Howard resigned (McCoy 1975: 6).

In 1927 Maybeck worked in association with Julia Morgan on the Hearst Memorial Gymnasium for Women, and in 1929 with Henry Gutterson on a Sunday School for the Christian Science Church (McCoy 1975: 54).

Hearst Memorial Gymnasium for Women, University of California, Berkeley, 1927, designed by Maybeck in association with Julia Morgan, a graduate of the Beaux Arts. The monumental building lacked the light airy touch of pergola or trellis, typical of Maybeck (McCoy 1975: 57).

Hearst authorized Maybeck to prepare a second set of preliminaries to include not only a gymnasium and auditorium, but also an art gallery and a museum that would house the extensive collections aleady in possession of the University from the Hearst family bequests. Maybeck designed buildings in the image of his Palace of Fine Arts and proposed a large domed auditorium placed near Strawberry Creek on the north-south axis of the Campinile esplanade. A women's gymnasium was located at the south as its forecourt; colonaded paths led to museums and art galleries to the east. The project stalled with delays created by Hearst's indecision as to whether he desired to construct the whole, or only a portion, or Maybeck's expanded proposal. In addition, Maybeck's delay in completing drawings of the scheme allowed Hearst's interest to cool substantially. But in 1925 the University administration secured agreement for the construction of the women's gymnasium. (Note 12: University of California, President's Report (1925).) In order to expedite the design drawings, Maybeck entered into an arrangement by which Julia Morgan would be responsible for the construction drawings and functional details while he concentrated on the overall planning and design.

The sympathetic action of the two designers created a building of romantic beauty. Like the Palace of Fine Arts, the Hearst Memorial Gymnasium (1925) is Beaux-Arts design as Maybeck knew and practiced it, blending exterior and interior space into a unified composition. A number of large exercise rooms are joined to create courtyards which shelter one major and two minor outdoor swimming pools. California Live Oak trees planted in sculpturally ornamented boxes on the main floor and in open wells at the ground level complement the blocky massing of the individual elements of the gymnasium. The main pool, whose marble decks become terraces and promenades surrounding the exercise rooms, is built above the ground level, bulwarked by service and locker facilities.

Maybeck used the Water Gardens at Nimes as a prototype and, for the first time in his work, details are copied from that design without the usual adaptation and restudy that enabled him to transform historical details into his personal ornamental patterns. The interior of the building is generously daylighted with skylights and glazed walls that surround planted courts. Natural concrete interior surfaces were ornamented by stenciled patterns introducing color accents into the exercise rooms. Utilitarian incandescent fixtures are both protected and enriched by a framework of woven and bent rattan. The large rooms are linked by smaller ones and all open to the exterior galleries which adjoin the pool decks (Cardwell 1977: 199).

The pool terraces were planned to also serve as promenades and outdoor lobbies for the auditorium of the original scheme (Cardwell 1977: 200).

It should be remembered that Maybeck designed his terraces not only as surfaces for everyday swimming areas but also as parts of a forecourt to the large auditorium which was to be sited directly to the north. The pool decks, connected with the principal floor of the auditorium planned to be one story above the natural grade level, would have then served as outdoor lobbies for the concert-goers. Whether or not funds would every have been provided to erect the grandiose auditorium is quite dubious, but the location of a student union building by John Galen Howard blocking the access to the auditorium site from the central campus made the completion of Maybeck's scheme improbable. (Note 13: the General Development Plan for the University of California adopted in 1956 under the leadership of W. W. Wurster not only re-introduced the concept of planning around open spaces as in the Bénard Plan but also included the general development of buildings for art and architecture in the area proposed by Maybeck.)(Cardwell 1977: 201).

The gymnasium, successfully relating interior and exterior spaces, was Beaux-Arts design as Maybeck knew it, and became a building of romantic beauty (Cardwell 1977: 202).

While Maybeck rendered his visions [for a gymnasium, an auditorium, an art gallery, and a museum to house the art and anthropological collections that Mrs. Hearst had given to the university over the years] in beautiful impressionistic pastel drawings on large sheets of brown paper, the university administration pursued its practical goals, and in 1925 Hearst provided funds for the women's gymnasium. For this project Maybeck collaborated with Julia Morgan, and the construction drawings were prepared in her office. When the building was completed in 1927, it bore the unmistakable imprint of Maybeck's romantic imagination in the great urns set about its base (as on the Palace of Fine Arts) and in the huge planters embellished with reliefs of dancing women on the pool terrace. Under Morgan's direction, the interior of the building was designed in a frankly functional way. Indeed, Maybeck was so disconnected from the interior planning that, according to one story, when Hearst asked him where the bathroom was at the dedication ceremony, Maybeck did not know.

Maybeck's attention had been focused on the grand ensemble of the art gallery's loggia and the museum in its landscaped setting. In his drawings these structures have the qualities of ruins. The gymnasium was just a fragment of this composition, intended by Maybeck to serve as the frontispiece for the auditorium, to which it would have been connected by its terraces and other promenades. Alas, the gymnasium remained a fragment. Whether Hearst was too preoccupied with his building campaigns at San Simeon or whether Maybeck dallied too long over the drawings and lost his patron's attention is a mystery. In any event, the rest of the complex was never built, and Maybeck never received another Hearst commission (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 87, 235).

nm (Cardwell 1977: 245).

The Anthony residence (1928) in Los Feliz Park was the last large house that Maybeck built. He had started its plan in 1924, and at that busy period had asked John White to be his associate architect for its design and construction. The house is situated on an eight-acre hilltop site and commands an unobstructed view in all directions. Prior to the construction of the main house, two smaller structures were built, one in 1925 for temporary living quarters and later guest house accommodations and the other in 1927 as a playroom with motion picture facilities (Cardwell 1977: 225).

Despite the size and importance of Anthony's commissions--Maybeck designed two other houses for his property in Los Feliz Park, in 1925 and 1927, that were sold, as well as the Los Angeles Packard showroom and office interiors in 1928--they spawned no other work for him in Los Angeles. If the Great Depression and World War II had not occupied the decade and a half following the completion of Anthony's house, things might have been different. As it was, the Maybecks packed up and returned to the Bay Area, where they settled back into family life in La Loma Park, which had been drastically changed by the destruction of their house in the Berkeley fire of 1923 (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 172, 173-77, 182-89, 235).

Maybeck designed several one-room houses. The first built was the Warren P. Staniford house (1925) on Ocean View Avenue in Oakland. While not completely contained in one room, it adhered to the principles Maybeck had prescribed in his Sunset article. The house consisted of a living space, one end of which was arranged with a large fireplace, view window, and dining area. Across the other end a low platform served as a sleeping alcove with beds and linens placed in a storage wall. The kitchen, bath, and dressing room were planned as a small lean-to addition along one side of the room. The kitchen served the main room through a large hatch. The room with its high-raftered ceiling is pleasant, but extensive additons have been made which make it difficult to sense its original scale and its relation to the garden setting (Cardwell 1977: 217, 223, 245).

In October 1991 another catastrophic fire occurred in the East Bay hills, this time in south Berkeley and Oakland; it destroyed Maybeck's Warren P. Staniford house of 1925 and the Edwin S. Pillsbury house of 1928 (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 225, 235).

The queen of the Van Ness Avenue automobile palaces, built for one of Maybeck's great clients. The red marble columns have unfortunately been painted white (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 115).

The Packard showrooms in San Francisco (1926) and Oakland (1928) were built in conjunction with the firm of John H. Powers and John H. Ahnden. Maybeck prepared schmatic drawings which his associates used to make preliminary structural, mechanical, and electrical drawings for his approval. Maybeck then concentrated on the decorative features of the design and charged Anthony a straight fee for his "art work." (Note 8: B. R. Maybeck MSS, "E. C. Anthony," C.E.D. Docs.) It was a system which left no give and take as the design progressed; and the decorative schemes, rather than growing out of the spatial order and the patterns of structures as they had in the Christian Science church, were restricted to surface treatments and added ornament. The showrooms became stage sets, where automobiles or "magic carpets" were sold "to carry one away to faraway placaes." In a decade that first brought wide ownership of individual vehicles, many people shared Maybeck's romantic vision. (Note 9: Advertisements for automobiles in magazines published contemporarily with the construction of the showrooms portray the same romantic image.)

The San Francisco showroom, on Van Ness Avenue, was opened in 1927 with a gala array of motion picture actresses and a special radio broadcast. Anthony also owned two broadcasting stations and the San Francisco building was designed to carry large steel towers for transmitting antennae on its roof. The building is a four-story rectangular block, its front third contains a two-story high showroom with mezzanine sales offices. Maybeck chose to design in the free, classical style he had learned in André's atelier. But his combination of the temple-like salesroom with the frankly utilitarian service section, and the brutal penetration of the overscaled frieze for service floor windows, combined with unorthodox unfluted Corinthian columns produced a mannerist design even less admired by his Beaux-Arts colleagues than his design for the Palace of Fine Arts (Cardwell 1977: 220).

Screen walls of black tiles lie between red columns and are penetrated by richly sculptured doorways. A large, sand-colored entablature crowns the salesroom. Color is carried into the interior with pigmented stains worked into the wood ceiling of the sales room. Maybeck had intended to use a waste cedar product for this ceiling--boards mottled with areas of unsound wood cut from trees infested with a fungus growth--but when this material was not available, a similar disfigured cypress shipped from Florida was substituted. Pigments were also worked into the crevices of ornamental plaster brackets and the moldings of the column capitals which housed colored spotlights illuminating the automobiles on the salesroom floor with theatrical effectiveness (Cardwell 1977: 221).

Before construction began on the [Earle C. Anthony] house in 1929, two smaller buildings--one for temporary living quarters that later became a guest house and the other a studio with a movie theater--were built in 1925 and 1927 respectively. Their design seems not to have been of much concern to Anthony, who was preoccupied with building his Packard showroom in San Francisco, completed in 1926, and his Oakland Packard showroom of 1928--both designed by Maybeck in association with John H. Powers and John H. Ahnden. In addition, Maybeck designed interiors for Anthony's Packard showroom and offices in Los Angeles, also built in 1928, for which John and Donald B. Parkinson were the architects. For all of these commissions the office of Maybeck and White prepared preliminary structural, mechanical, and electrical drawings according to Maybeck's schematics, which he then approved and turned over to the associated architects to complete. Maybeck then did the "art work," for which he billed Anthony separately.

Each of the Packard buildings had a glamorous showroom in front where the cars were displayed and a practical backstage where they were stored and serviced. In San Francisco (the only one that survives), the showroom was a single space with a high ceiling backed up with four floors of utilitarian character, which were largely encased in glass for maximum daylight (plate 176). Anthony's clever use of show-business tactics to market his cars was evident in the opening-night gala, attended by movie stars and broadcast by means of the two radio towers on the Packard building. Special lighting effects mimicking the atmospherics of a movie palace continued every night: a motor-driven switchboard controlled colored lights that were programmed to follow the course of the day from dawn to moonlight in twenty minutes.

To honor the building Anthony published a slim booklet titled A Saga of Transportation in April 1927. A drawing of a figure on a flying carpet gliding past one of the showroom columns graces the gold cover. The text, some of which is signed by Anthony and some not, reveals the hold that the "aristocrat of motordom" (by which Anthony meant the Packard, not himself) had on the public imagination: "The history of the mental and physical growth of the nations of the earth is, in the final analysis," he wrote, "a Saga of Transportation." In praise of Maybeck's design, he continued:

Maybeck has vitalized with his own dynamic personality the exotic influences which drift in through the Golden Gate from the Seven Seas....Discarding the shackles of architectural convention [he used] rose marble from Numidia and black from Belgium, travertine in tawny foam and glittering scaggiola--lanterns from a Persian Hareem--Spanish doorways and Gothic doorways--columns crowned with Corinthian acanthus supporting Byzantine corbels [to create] an Aladdin's palace in which the gorgeous panoply of the Arabian Nights vies with the luxury of the Middle Ages.

Maybeck reiterated his concerns about time's effects on his buildings many times, but never more pointedly than in the following statement about the two Packard buildings: "The frieze on the San Francisco Packard [building] should be multicolored like the paintings of Raphael in the Vatican. It was made to be treated that way [and] it must never be allowed to look faded. Oakland can look old--San Francisco must look snappy." (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 177-80, 182, 235).

The Anthony residence (1928) in Los Feliz Park was the last large house that Maybeck built. He had started its plan in 1924, and at that busy period had asked John White to be his associate architect for its design and construction. The house is situated on an eight-acre hilltop site and commands an unobstructed view in all directions. Prior to the construction of the main house, two smaller structures were built, one in 1925 for temporary living quarters and later guest house accommodations and the other in 1927 as a playroom with motion picture facilities (Cardwell 1977: 225).

Maybeck's personal stamp on this Mediterranean-style building is evident in the handling of such elements as the spiral fire escape in its slot, the fenestration on the west facade, and the fence motif (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 115; Cardwell 1977: 245; Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 235).

Maybeck used "Bubblestone" as a roofing material, with results very reminiscent of an English thatch-roof cottage (Cardwell 1977: 216,217).

Maybeck also experimented with "Bubblestone" as a roofing material on the 1927 residence of Dr. R. I. Woolsey. The concrete was colored a deep plum; however, its rough surface encouraged the growth of creepers and vines which accelerated its cracking and made it permeable. How long the concrete roofing material was effective is difficult to determine; it is now surfaced with an aluminized waterproofing coat. The roof form recalls an image of the thatch on an English cottage, yet it is not contrived. Its shapes developed out of the method of construction and the nature of the material, and its recall of the hominess of a vernacular architecture illustrates why Maybeck believed in the associative values of older architectural forms (Cardwell 1977: 217; Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 235).

nm (Cardwell 1977: 245; Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 235).

Abbreviations