Southern Californian architect Arthur Kelly began his career working for the Greene Brothers in Pasadena, CA, and the Craftsman ethic of handmade work typifies this Spanish Colonial Revival house built for his own family in 1925... [more]
Richard Requa, an architect in the Arts and Crafts tradition, helped launch the Spanish Revival style at the landmark 1915 Panama-California International Exposition in San Diego, CA...[more]
El Bosque, located in Montecito, CA, was designed by George Washington Smith in 1925...[more]
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California Dreaming California Romantica
by D.J. Waldie
Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., New York, NY; 2007
320 pp.; hardcover; more than 200 color photographs; $65
ISBN 978-0-8478-2975-0
Reviewed by Nicole V. Gagné
The Spanish Colonial Revival style, justly beloved throughout the 20th century, is royally celebrated in the splendid new book California Romantica, just released by Rizzoli International Publications. Toward the end of this handsome study, author D.J. Waldie emphasizes an important sensibility that is all too often overlooked in examinations of this style. “The past is an ambiguous guide in the houses in the Spanish Revival style,” he writes. “Does the arrow of time point to the 18th century in Mexico or the 17th century in Spain or further back to the 11th century in Damascus? Surprisingly, the originators of the style said that the arrow pointed to the future, toward a cosmopolitan architecture made for California, freed from the rigidity of East Coast models, [which] would take from Mediterranean traditions and blend what was splendid and sheltering in them.” The inspiration of the past is of course writ all over these beautiful structures.
The homes’ forward-looking quality, equally vital to their existence, originated in the then new and provocative Mission style that had arisen in late-19th-century California. The Mission style embraced the Craftsman aesthetic and celebrated materials, designs and workmanship that were “simple, indigenous, traditional, and available,” thus it could easily become “Hispano-Moorish” in character. By the time of San Diego’s Panama-California International Exposition in 1915, architects had initiated a full-blown transition from Mission to Mediterranean, and called it the Spanish Revival style. Waldie notes the important slant architect Richard Requa gave this term, explaining that the climate, landscape and history of California could link it “to likely places in Spain, the Southern France, Italy, North Africa, and even Persia. But the Spanish Revival wasn’t really a revival of anything, since nothing like this architecture had ever existed in colonial California. Requa rightly called his synthesis ‘Southern California Architecture’ and left it at that.”
In his thoughtful Introduction to California Romantica, Waldie quickly outlines the history of the Spanish Colonial Revival and Mission styles, describes their salient characteristics and identifies the important players, including such essential architects as Requa, Wallace Neff, Lillian Rice, Paul Williams and George Washington Smith (all of whom are represented in the book by some of their most striking work). Above all, Waldie reminds his readers that “Californians at the turn of the 20th century were mythologizers and romanticizers,” who built houses of “utopian aspiration,” residences that looked ahead to the future as well as back to the designs of yesterday. Then he lets Lisa Hardaway and Paul Hester, two expert architectural photographers, take over and show why all this talk of romance and myth, invariably attendant upon discussions of Spanish Revival-style houses, is warranted. The book surveys 19 California homes, 15 of which were built in the 1920s, and in picture after picture, the reader is presented with a singular world of haunting stillness and simplicity and naturalness, whether looking at a hardware detail or a sun-dappled façade.
Yes, California Romantica has its share of overly familiar romantic twilight shots and cactus close-ups, but the bulk of its 200-plus photographs is devoted to mouth-watering evocations of exterior and interior Spanish Revival design. (The sections on the Graves House and Villa Aurora are especially useful as examples of furnishing and decorating in the style.) In their cumulative impact, these images shed real light on the mystery of how the simple and the majestic, the commonplace and the exotic, are complementary dynamics rather than opposing poles.
As you would expect from a book that keeps throwing around the words “California,” “romantic” and “imagination,” the movies are never very far away. Actor Peter Strauss is represented by the lovely exteriors of his 1925 Spanish Colonial Revival home in Ojai. Even more memorable is the elaborate Rancho de los Quiotes, designed in the 1930s by the Los Angeles-born actor Leo Carrillo (best remembered today as the lovable sidekick Pancho to Duncan Renaldo’s heroic “Cisco Kid” in early-1950s television). Located on the California coast near Carlsbad, Carrillo’s ranch employed a deliberately anachronistic look, emphasizing axe-cut beams, adobe walls, plank doors and handmade ironwork, and expressing what Waldie describes as Carrillo’s “longing for a lost place of romance.” The brief preface that accompanies California Romantica was written by actress Diane Keaton, a longtime enthusiast and promoter of Spanish California architecture.
One can only regret that the book is not as graceful as it is beautiful. The coffee-table impulse should have been held in some degree of check during its design, because as a 320-page oversized hardcover that weighs a couple of pounds, California Romantica provides a cumbersome and unwieldy read – leave this one lying down on the coffee table when you want to page through it.
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