1907, East Bay, Ivan M. Linforth house
2742 Derby St., Berkeley
Julia Morgan
No comment (Boutelle 1988: 250).
1907, East Bay, Eleanor L. Moore house
2908 Channing St., Berkeley
Julia Morgan
No comment (Boutelle 1988: 250).
1907, East Bay, Charlotte Playter house
612 Mountain Ave., Piedmont
Julia Morgan
Since the Arts and Crafts movement had originated in England, it is not surprising that American architects working in that style became familiar with English architecture of the Renaissance and Tudor periods, which William Morris and his followers had studied with such interest. Late English Gothic, Tudor, and Jacobean forms were part of a design vocabulary that was almost as familiar to Americans as the archaic prose of the King James Bible. In approaching the buildings that Morgan designed in an English manner, it is important to recognize that there is no such thing as a unified "English style." Her eclecticism, with its free blending of diverse architectural precedents, is comparable to that of Edwardian English architects, whose building in the "Free style" was widely published in architectural magazines available in Paris, New York, and San Francisco.
A house built on a hillside in Piedmont for the mayor's daughter, Charlotte Playter, in 1907, blends equal elements of Crafts and English styles. The plan is L-shaped, with a pergola enclosing an interior patio that can be entered from the dining room, the living room, and the glazed terrace at the end of the cross axis. The two-story bay windowe of the staircase is the chief decorative feature on one side, while the downstairs bay of the hall alternates with an upstairs bay under a smaller gable, forming a rhythm continued under the low-pitched main roof. Eyebrow windows on each side carry out the curves of the windows on the two floors below. The chief decoration inside the rooms comes from structural elements such as windows, ceilings, and doorways. Gardens (now supplanted by a tennis court and pool) originally sloped away toward a brilliant view of the East Bay, which constituted a primary part of the setting and provided the reason for the extensive glazing. Size, site, and unusual style made this an important Californian house. It was reproduced in the Portland [Oregon] Architectural Club Yearbook in 1909 and was part of the club's second annual exhibition; it also appeared in the Architect and Engineer of April 1909-atypically wide exposure for work from the Morgan office. The house compares with C. F. A. Voysey's own house in Herefordshire (1901), while the entrance recalls that of Farmer's House (1898), in Perthshire, by James MacLaren. (note 2:) (Boutelle 1988: 144-45, 147, 250).
1907, East Bay, Walter Powell house
2836 Derby St., Berkeley
Julia Morgan
Originally at N. Blake, 317 feet east of Dana St. Moved to 2836 Derby St., 1911-12 (Boutelle 1988: 250).
1907, Santa Clara Valley, Lucretia (Mrs. Grant) Taylor house
14221 Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road, Saratoga
Julia Morgan
No comment (Boutelle 1988: 250-51).
1908, Chinatown, Donaldina Cameron house
920 Sacramento St., San Francisco
Julia Morgan
In 1873 the Presbyterian Church set up a foreign mission to serve San Francisco's Chinese. After the original hall burned in 1906, a new one was built on the present site and officially named for its famous director in 1942. The architect was rightly favored by many eleemosynary institutions; she knew how to design practical buildings that had dignity and presence (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 43).
Some of Morgan's San Francisco school buildings were for clients involved in missionary work. The Methodist Chinese Mission School (1907-10) and the Chinese Presbyterian Mission School (1908)--both built in Chinatown just after the earthquake--are examples. Both still flourish as Chinese centers.
The Chinese Presbyterian Mission School was started in 1894, but its building was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake. Morgan's new center was known as Donaldina Cameron House in honor of a Scottish missionary who rescued young Chinese girls from the brothels and sweatshops of the flourishing child-slave trade. Cameron later moved the school to a farm in Oakland, which seemed a safer environment for her young charges (Boutelle 1988: 64).
1908, Presidio Heights, Aurora Stull house
3377 Pacific Ave., San Francisco
Julia Morgan; remodeled after WWII by George Livermore
(Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 39; Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 97).
A clear example of an urban Crafts house is one in a distinguished area of Pacific Avenue on the Presidio in San Francisco, a neighborhood with houses by Bernard Maybeck, Willis Polk, Ernest Coxhead, and other prominent Bay Area architects. Morgan built a redwood-shingle house here in 1908 for Aurora Stull, whose daughter Florence had been a classmate of Morgan's at the university in 1894. Morgan created a geometric design that is symmetrical and ordered, composed to fit the streetscape and to take advantage of the site. With no sign of a pergola or any other facility for outdoor living, this is a restrained and decidedly urban townhouse, though profiting from a woodsy view of the Presidio. Central steps open to a hall leading to reception rooms at the front.
The interior of the house is paneled in walnut and gum, all quite formal and meticulously crafted, with fireplaces in the major rooms. Large windows with a window seat span the living room, which runs the entire width of the house, providing a spectacular view of the Golden Gate. The dining room is set off by sliding doors, usually left open, and it has a built-in china cabinet with leaded glass next to the fireplace. The rooms on the upper floor, originally four bedrooms and a bath, are also paneled, with built-in furniture in every room (additional bathrooms were added when the house was remodeled after World War II by architect George Livermore, the grandson of another Morgan client). The restrained discretion of Morgan's design means that it lacks the dash and drama of the asymmetrical windows, unorthodox details, and contrasting scales that Maybeck and Coxhead exploited only a few blocks away (Boutelle 1988: 135, 137, 251).
1908, North Bay, House
15 Prospect Ave., Ross
Julia Morgan
A carefully crafted house with a simple, rustic character (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 226).
1908, East Bay, Professor Clifton Price Apts.
9-17 Panoramic Way, Berkeley
Julia Morgan
In 1908 a commission came to the Morgan office from a newly organized Presbyterian group in Berkeley. One of its leaders was Professor Clifton Price, a classicist for whom Morgan built a Crafts-style apartment building and for whom she would design another larger and more urbane apartment building four years later (Boutelle 1988: 69).
Rear of lot; entrance on Orchard Lane. First of two buildings by Morgan on lot-see 1912 (Boutelle 1988: 9, 252).
1908-10, East Bay, Julia Morgan Center (orig. St. John's Presbyterian Church and Sunday School)
2640 College Ave., Berkeley
Julia Morgan
Designed to fit into this early neighborhood of brown-shingled houses, the building does not appear nearly as large as it is. The barnlike character of the interior was deliberate; its frankly expressed structural framework was enriched with handsome Craftsman lighting fixtures. Built at the same time as Maybeck's nearby [First] Church [of Christ, Scientist], it cost a quarter as much. The building is now used as a theater (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 213).
A straightforward yet sophisticated meeting hall church from the architect's Craftsman period (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 276).
St. John's Presbyterian Church, designed in 1910 and probably Morgan's best-known building after San Simeon, is a piece of lightly sheathed engineering, a glorious combination of barn and bungalow, utility and grace. The bare-bone budget allowed few frills, and the drama of the interior derives from the careful arrangement and display of structural elements: every functioning member is visible and every visible member functions. Even the Craftsman/constructivist lighting fixtures of the Social Hall seem extensions of the structural system. The nave roof is raised above the rest of the building, providing a clerestory which runs around all four sides of the space, creating a cage of light above the heads of worshippers (the clerestory above the altar end of the church has since been filled in). Lighting is handled quite subtly throughout the building, and it is chiefly this element that creates, in the passage from social hall to sanctuary, a transition from cheerful radiance to mystery.
Much of the credit for the accomplishment at St. John's, particularly the interior, belongs to Walter Steilberg, a resourceful designer/engineer who was Morgan's structure man for many years. Morgan's primary concern, characteristically, was that the exterior not be obtrusive; that the church fit quietly into the residential neighborhood which is its setting. Consequently both scale and imagery are residential; except for the cross perched on top of the primary roof structure, the building could be a rather extensive bungalow. The original intention was not to have even this reference to the building's religious function; instead, there is a cross outlined in the window dividers of the central section of the front clerestory. While this may have seemed adequate identification to Morgan, it did not seem so to the congregation, at whose continued insistence the rooftop cross was eventually added (Beach 1988: 73-76).
Julia Morgan's wooden St. John's Presbyterian Church (2640 College Avenue, Berkeley, 1908 and 1910) followed the Bay Region tradition of domestically scaled churches; it appeared modest from the outside, its mass low to the ground beneath wide spreading gables. Yet the interior vertical lines and uncarved open beams again suggested the rural, open-timbered barn (Freudenheim and Sussman 1974: 87).
In 1908 a commission came to the Morgan office from a newly organized Presbyterian group in Berkeley. One of its leaders was Professor Cliffton Price, a classicist for whom Morgan built a Crafts-style spartment building and for who she would design another larger and more urbane apartment building four years later. The Presbyterian group had a large double lot on College Avenue, not far sourth of the campus. They first wanted a simple and economical building for a Sunday school, with a main church to follow in the next year or so, to be called Saint John's Presbyterian Church. Ira Wilson Hoover's name appears on the 1908 building permit for the Sunday school, but by the time the church was under way in 1910 he had left Morgan's office, and Walter Steilberg joined her on the project.
The Sunday school is a small, single-wall frame structure with a side entrance recessed on the north side of a bay; the modified Tudor arch lines of the large five-part window parallel the rooflines of both the bay and the basic structure. A parlor with fireplace was originally at the rear, and the bay area was labeled "Infant Class." When it came time to design the church, the congregation was without adequate funds. Morgan, mindful of Maybeck's conviction that drawbacks could be transformed into opportunities, focused her skills on designing a minimal structure as sanctuary. Her early training at the Ecole had led her to examine and to love Romanesque architecture, which was also minimal. Saint John's may appear to derive from the California barn tradition, but in fact it relates more closely to the Romanesque and to the Tudor English style, to which the British Arts and Crafts movement looked back so fondly.
Saint John's is an extraordinary small building of large significance. It was designed to be a modest addition to a residential block, low to the ground and with its gable linked by a glazed corridor to the Sunday school. Like the music of Bach, the building reveals a play of repetition and variation. The angles of the roof and bargeboards, the timbers beneath the clerestory windows, and the gable over the main entrance parallel the modified Tudor form of the main church doorway and of the Sunday school roofs and window. The horizontality of the upper cross members of the window frames is carried across the face of church and Sunday school. Verticals also play a role in this harmony: narrow sections of wall punctuate the clerestory windows, which have a modified Gothic form that reinforces the subdued verticality. This verticality is continued by the bands of long, narrow windows below. The rich complexity evolving from such simple forms is powerful testimony to the architect's geometric imagination.
The interior of Saint John's was originally lighted from all four sides by a diffused glow through clerestory windows of smoked glass common to industrial buildings; one end has since been blocked in. The sloping floor and simple wood pews give visual access from everywhere in the building, but the visitor's eyes are inevitably drawn to the overhead beams and supports. All hardware is exposed. The warm, rich color of the wood reflects the changing light and takes away any sense of cool austerity that such economy of material and design might have created. Although the natural lighting is perfectly suited to the space, artificial light was also provided by the Morgan office in the form of wood and iron "electroliers," with bare bulbs pointed down. The acoustics are remarkable, which has helped to make the church an admirable performing-arts center since the expanded congregation built a large modern church down the street in 1970.
A variety of spatial treatments leads a visitor from the main interior of the curch through a narrow redwood-paneled and glazed passage to the open-timbered hall of the former Sunday school building and the lower-ceilinged offices at either end of it. The hall is lit by wood fixtures holding bare bulbs set into cross-shaped electroliers. Early light bulbs gave a softer light than their glaring contemporary counterparts, but it is not difficult even now to imagine the effectiveness of the original light.
Saint John's interior can be compared with Morgan's earlier First Baptist of Oakland, as both derive from the Crafts style. Both use native redwood, both are geometric, both are original in composition and in execution. But the effect of the two is quite different. The Oakland church is impressive and moving in the sweeping curves of its pews and supports, while Saint John's has a kind of harmony that looks simpler but is in fact more sophisticated. The ingenious play between the inside and outside and the relation of details to the whole at Saint John's have rarely been equaled in American urban architecture (Boutelle 1988: 69-70,72).
