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Presenting Nature
MENU
Design Ethic Origins
(1916-1927)
Design Policy & Process
(1916-1927)
Western Field Office
(1927-1932)
Decade of Expansion
(1933-1942)
State Parks
(1933-1942)
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Presenting Nature:
The Historic Landscape Design of the National Park Service, 1916-1942 |
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II. ORIGINS OF A DESIGN ETHIC FOR NATURAL PARKS (continued)
SOURCES OF RUSTIC ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN (continued)
THE PRAIRIE STYLE OF ARCHITECTURE
At the beginning of the twentieth century emerged the Prairie style of architecture, which made radical advances in the construction of houses and similar buildings. Prairie style architects built upon the tenets of the Shingle style and applied a design process in which structure followed function and conformed to the contours of a site. They perfected and simplified residential design by using the conventions of landscape architecture, including stairways, terraces, walls, patios, and mantles of vines, to unify site and structure and to integrate indoor and outdoor spaces. Prairie style architects also explored the use of low-pitched overhanging roofs and other features to emphasize horizontality, the predominant characteristic of the midwestern landscape. The collaboration of landscape architect Jens Jensen and architect Frank Lloyd Wright and the work of Walter Burley Griffin, who was trained in both areas, led to important advances in adjusting manmade structures to natural landforms and in creating a gradual transition between structure and setting. Although these advances were applied most often to structures in suburban settings, they had underlying principles based on naturalism that would be readily applied by others to natural settings, such as parks, mountains, and seaside.
The principles and characteristics of the Prairie style were immediately embraced by the Arts and Crafts movement and were diffused through the publication of pattern books such as Hermann Valentin von Holst's Modern American Honies (1913), which featured Prairie style homes alongside works by California architects. Von Holst acknowledged that the back-to-nature movement called for country homes that were part of the scenery and were built of local materials. [147]
THE WEST COAST WORK OF GREENE AND GREENE
The work of Charles and Henry Greene in southern California provided another essential link between the Shingle style and the design of buildings in national and state parks. Through their influence, the lessons of the Shingle style found their way into the mainstream of the Arts and Crafts movement in America and blended with indigenous West Coast building forms, materials, and ideas. They also drew inspiration from the architecture and landscape design of Japan, which they had seen at the Columbian Exposition in 1893, the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco, and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition at Saint Louis in 1904. Like the Prairie style architects, they aimed to integrate structure and setting and used terraces, walls, and outdoor features, including plantings, to blend the two and to create a gentle transition between inside and outside spaces. They also adopted the vernacular forms of the Southwest and gave modern expression to traditional styles drawn from the Spanish haciendas and missions. As a result, their work infused the bungalow craze of the first two decades of the twentieth century with innumerable prototypes and design details. The work of Greene and Greene and the many references to their work in the publications and work of others were important sources for the designers of state and national parks through the 1930s. [148]
The Greenes experienced the Shingle style firsthand during their studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where they graduated in 1891, and their subsequent employment in several Boston firms, including that of Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge, which had taken over Richardson's practice in 1886. Returning to California, they introduced many innovations in keeping with the burgeoning Arts and Crafts movement. They drew heavily on native rock, particularly the boulders of Arroyo Seco, the natural canyon that passed through Pasadena, to fashion battered piers, raised and battered stone foundations, massive bold fireplaces, and undulating retaining walls. The brothers made great use of undulating stone walls in their efforts to ease the transition of each house with its site. Aged gnarled oaks and walls of cobblestone and clinker brick lined Arroyo Terrace, which traversed the steep canyon walls and was being developed for homes and studios in the Craftsman style. Walls supporting terraces enabled them to adjust buildings to sloping or even hillside sites. Their affinity for working with the natural topography of each site, their understanding of Prairie style innovations, and their admiration for Japanese landscape design led them to create terraces on gradual slopes with walls that were low and followed naturalistic undulating lines, such as those at the Gamble, Blacker, and Pratt Houses. [149]
In keeping with the Arts and Crafts movement's interest in the past, the Greenes reinterpreted the traditional southwestern hacienda by introducing the U-shaped Bandini House in 1903. The one-story house centered on open informally landscaped court. A veranda having simple squared posts, shingle roofs, and exposed beams extended around the court and provided a transition from the interior rooms to the out-of-doors. The U-shaped plan was well suited to California's climate and casual style of living. Distinctive were the vertical board-and-batten walls made of native redwood and the large projecting boulders that formed seats to each side of the living room and dining room fireplaces. The house interpreted the indigenous adobe houses with tile roofs in native materials of redwood and cobblestone. The combination of redwood siding and cobblestone construction was a synthesis that occurred for the first time in the work of Greene and Greene about 1903. These materials and their use would figure prominently in the bungalow movement and would be used in the residences and other buildings built at Yosemite Village in the 1930s. The courtyard plan with its inner veranda would be readapted years later in a number of park service buildings in the Southwest, including the regional headquarters building in Santa Fe. [150]
The mountain house designed for Edgar W. Camp in the Sierra Madre, California, in 1904 probably exerted more influence on park architecture than any other work by Greene and Greene. The Craftsman featured the house in December of 1909 as "a mountain bungalow whose appearance of crude construction is the result of skillful design." Although its plan was similar to that of the Bandini House, the Camp House was unique in its low, rambling character that adjusted to the site's sloping topography and boulder-strewn setting. The building's silhouette was created by a series of intersecting and overlapping roofs with broad gables and projecting eaves. The exterior walls were sheathed by vertical boards and battens of native wood. Inside, a massive fireplace with "an appearance of great strength and ruggedness," was formed by piling up giant boulders around an unusually large fire opening with a capacity for huge logs. A heavy board formed a shelf above, and to either side of the fire opening, two boulders projected naturalistically to form two fireside seats. Interior beams of Oregon pine were roughly hewn, undressed, and left exposed. Outside, the chimney rose from the ground battered and constructed of stone "as if it were part of nature's magnificent rockpile."It formed a naturalistic surface continuous with the boulder foundation made of rough fieldstone. The east wing of the house extended out at an angle to form a terrace off the dining room that provided views of the valley below, departing from the U-shaped plan. [151]
The article described the location as "deep and restful, rugged with frequent masses of richly-toned stone" and pointed out the native materials and features that helped the building adapt so successfully to its site. These included the low-pitched roof with projecting eaves, the foundations and chimneys built of rough fieldstone, and the rough and undressed timbers. The colors of the finished house blended with the ruddy brown of the hills, and the stonework echoed the large boulders scattered across the grounds. The roughness and random quality of the stone materials echoed the ruggedness and irregularity of the site. Particularly striking was the chimney, which seemed "hardly more than a great heap of rock" and which was planted with ivy that was destined to become "a startling beautiful bit of natural decoration" when in autumn the red foliage contrasted with the gray-brown rock. [152]
The Greenes' chimney and fireplace had many characteristics of those of the Adirondack camps but with greatly exaggerated proportions. The exterior treatment of the stone chimney at the refectory at Palmetto State Park bears a striking similarity in both its massing of stone and its irregular, random, and battered naturalistic appearance. This suggests that New Deal park designers not only revived an interest in Arts and Crafts traditions, but also drew strongly from the actual examples that had been published in The Craftsman in the first two decades of the twentieth century. [153]
Smaller structures designed by Greene and Greene would also influence park architecture. The entrance portals and waiting station designed in 1905 for the South Pasadena Realty and Improvement Company at Oaklawn Park were constructed of massive boulders fashioned into battered stone foundations and walls. In the walls of the waiting station, small stones were nested into the crevices formed by huge boulders, which decreased in size as they emerged upward and inward from the ground. The waiting station and the entry gate and pier were capped with overhanging tile roofs with exposed beams. The adjoining concrete walls of the reinforced-concrete Oaklawn Bridge were masked by a profusion of climbing vines. This portal with a massive battered pier on one side provided the prototype that would evolve from a pergola-inspired form with support piers of unequal size into a single battered pier with a hanging entry sign by the end of the 1920s. Such entry signs were built to mark the entrances to parks such as Lassen and Crater Lake well into the 1930s. [154]
The Shelter for Viewlovers built atop Monks Hill, Pasadena, in 1907 provided an even more exaggerated version of the Oaklawn waiting station, one intended for viewing. Here massive battered piers and exposed beams supported a greatly exaggerated overhanging roof. Both these structures provided a precedent for the open-air shelter that would first be directly adapted to the needs of the National Park Service in the scaled-down Glacier Point Lookout in Yosemite in 1924. [155]
Herbert Maier, more than any other park designer, was indebted to the influence of Greene and Greene. This influence was most strongly expressed in his own preference for battered random masonry walls of local fieldstone. He worked with Hull and Vint in 1924 on the design for the Glacier Point Lookout and may have drawn their attention to stone shelters designed by the Greenes. The flexible floor plans of Greene and Greene's designs greatly influenced Maier, particularly the multiangled design of the Rudd and Pratt houses of 1909, which he adopted for the museum at Norris Geyser Basin in Yellowstone. He freely incorporated terraces around his museums to create a transition between the natural site and the building, and he ingeniously adopted pergolas and a porte-cochère to create a dramatic walk-through entry at the Norris museum. The influence of the Oaklawn portal clearly influenced several designs for entrance signs drawn in 1934 by his district office of the Civilian Conservation Corps. [156]
Another influential work was the oceanside house Charles Greene designed for Dr. D. L. James in Carmel, California, in 1918. Randell Makinson, the foremost authority on the work of Greene and Greene, has called this the most "creative and ambitious work" of Charles Greene's late career and the most significant structure apart from the Greenes' wooden bungalows. Makinson described its effect: "The stone structure seems to have grown out of its site atop the rocky cliffs south of Carmel. At places it is difficult to ascertain just where nature's rock has ended and man s masonry genius has begun." [157]
Here, Charles Greene used a flexible system of stonemasonry to adjust the house to a highly irregular and rocky site. Predominantly Mission Revival in style, the house was built of roughly cut quarried stone and accented with sandstone from nearby beaches and limestone from Carmel Valley. Greene opened up the U-shape in dramatic angles to follow the natural contours of the rocky cliff. Entry was through a single stone arch, and the stone walls imitated the indigenous adobe construction. Curving stairways and a circular overlook of lichen-encrusted rocks were built into the stone walls on the seaside and blended with the natural cliff walls. The site required the setting of walls some forty-five feet down the cliff to secure an adequate footing; this contributed to the sense that the house was integral with the cliff itself.
Greene supervised the stonework to ensure that the courses would begin and end at random and follow irregular horizontal lines. The joints of the stonework were irregular in thickness and deeply incised to create deep shadows and heighten the textural quality of the walls so that they had the same worn and weathered appearance as the cliffs. The splitting of the stone and exposure of cut edges and the horizontal bands in which it was laid gave it a stratified appearance not unlike the limestone masonry of the Midwest. The plasticity and irregularity of the walls were repeated in a tile roof that had undulating lines. [158]
Greene's achievement in integrating structure and site was analogous to that of Peabody and Stearns in their Shingle style masterpiece, Kragsyde, built forty years earlier and three thousand miles away at Manchester-by-the-Sea. The park structures most indebted to the James House are Maier's Yavapai Observation Building and the Fred Harvey Company buildings by Mary Colter at Grand Canyon National Park and the lodge at Palo Duro State Park in Texas. The house designed in 1929 for Walter L. Richardson in Porterville, California, was Henry Greene's last major work. It followed the U-shaped plan of the Bandini House and was built with adobe made on site from natural materials. Natural stone matching that of the surrounding bedrock formed battered foundation walls; the roof was of rough timber and had exposed beams and overhanging eaves. The building also had reinforced concrete headers between stories and above windows. It was built into a gently sloping, rocky hillside. The combined use of concrete and adobe materials was attracting interest from the National Park Service about the same time and would be used increasingly in its parks in the 1930s. [159]
The legacy of Greene and Greene to the designers of national and state parks consisted of techniques to integrate indoor and out-of-door spaces, to adjust structures to natural topography, and to achieve a unified design using native materials for both structural and decorative details. Their use of a design vocabulary that drew from traditions in landscape architecture as well as architecture further added to the appeal of their work and the suitability of their solutions for building in a natural area.
THE WORK OF BERNARD MAYBECK AND THE BAY AREA ARCHITECTS
The distinctive style of architecture that emerged in the Bay Area around San Francisco in the first two decades of the twentieth century also had a lasting influence on the design of park buildings. Bernard Maybeck was the leader of this style, which was characterized by indigenous materials of wood and stone, accommodation of buildings into natural hillsides and forests, use of exposed (and often stained) beams and trusses to vault interior spaces and support steeply pitched roofs, and tall vertical window walls to integrate indoor and outdoor spaces. Maybeck used laminated trusses to vault large interior spaces in his schools, churches, and clubhouses. Although this style drew directly from the English Arts and Crafts movement, it used American materials and followed principles of siting, hand craftsmanship, harmonizing nature and structure, and presenting scenic views that aligned it with the American movement. [160]
While Maybeck is best known for the Beaux Arts-inspired Palace of Fine Arts built for the Panama Pacific International Exposition in 1915, his versatility and creative expression in a rustic idiom were also demonstrated in his many hillside homes in Berkeley and in his lesser-known exposition exhibit for the Pacific Lumberman's Association, called the House of Hoo-Hoo. This humorous building was a vine-draped Parthenon-like structure whose columns were unpeeled logs of fir, cedar, and pine and whose front portico was flanked by artificial columns, sixteen feet in diameter, that imitated the massive trunks of native redwood trees. [161]
The influence of the Bay Area style was expressed in three Yosemite buildings: LeConte Memorial Lodge (1903 and 1919), Parsons Memorial Lodge (1915), and the Rangers' Clubhouse (1921). These buildings reflected the fusion of Bay Area sources and other influences of the Arts and Crafts movement. Built for the Sierra Club, the LeConte Memorial Lodge in Yosemite Valley was designed by Maybeck's brother- in-law John White, built in 1903, and rebuilt on a new site according to the original plans in 1919. The Tudor Revival building assumed a compact form inspired by the natural setting of the granite-walled valley. Distinctive features were the irregularly coursed ashlar masonry of roughly cut granite, an entry porch in the form of a hexagonal raised terrace paved with flagstone and surrounded by a stonemasonry parapet, a Y-shaped plan, and a steep overhanging wood-shingled roof.
The Parsons Memorial Lodge, built more than a decade later in the harsher mountain environment of Yosemite's Tuolumne Meadows, was built of reinforced concrete with a masonry veneer of rough granite and feldspar gathered from the Sierra high country and set with deeply raked mortar joints. In contrast to the steep roof of the earlier lodge, the Parsons Memorial had a low-lying gable roof with broad overhanging eaves supported on exposed rafters and diagonal braces fashioned from peeled logs. The design for Parsons Memorial Lodge is believed to be the result of the collaboration of architect Mark White, construction engineer Walter Huber, and Bernard Maybeck. The Rangers' Club (1921) in Yosemite Valley was designed for National Park Service Director Stephen Mather by San Francisco architect Charles Sumner. Made of redwood shingles, boards, and battens, this clubhouse had a U-shaped plan and entry courtyard; a steeply pitched, wood-shingled roof pierced by dormers of varying lengths; and Swiss-inspired second-story balconies with jigsawn railings. [162]
Several features that distinguished the work of the Bay Area architects from their Pasadena contemporaries Greene and Greene were the steep roofs and the floor-to-ceiling windows, which often became part of the plastic form by creating bays and glazed alcoves. The Japanese and Southern California traditional influences were replaced by an almost Nordic expressionism drawn from English, German, and Scandinavian sources. Maybeck explored the use of trusses to support steep roofs and create soaring interior spaces and developed a technique for laminating trusses using native wood materials. The exploration of truss systems and use of large windows with small panes opened up new possibilities for the design of national park buildings. The adaptation of the horizontal ribbon windows of Shingle style to a vertical format to provide large expansive views and light-filled interiors influenced and would be further developed by Gilbert Stanley Underwood in his national park lodges of the 1920s.
In 1921, Maybeck redesigned the Glen Alpine Springs resort near Lake Tahoe, which had been destroyed by fire the previous year. Maybeck used natural materials and industrial products to produce an efficient and fire-proof structure that blended with its setting in the high Sierras. His design incorporated battered piers and walls of heavy stonemasonry construction and native timber trusses with industrial sash and corrugated iron roofing. Although the building's rough stone walls shared much of the character of the Parsons Memorial Lodge, they took the bolder and more dynamic form of battered buttresses. The pattern of separating buildings in the Adirondacks because of the threat of fire may have influenced Maybeck to design a connected group of low-lying pavilions. The Glen Alpine Springs resort broke new ground in rustic design through its use of modern building materials and its advances in the structural use of stone. Years later when the national park designers were faced with the problem of building harmonious structures for Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, where fire was an everpresent concern and timber scarce, the combination of local stone and corrugated iron provided a satisfactory solution. Corrugated iron, industrial sash, and concrete would be used extensively in the garages, shops, and sheds of maintenance facilities. In the late 1920s, Gilbert Stanley Underwood drew heavily from Maybeck's structural system of timber trusses supported on massive battered and buttressed piers in his designs for the Ahwahnee Hotel at Yosemite and the North Rim Lodge at Grand Canyon. [163]
National park designers, those working for concessionaires as well as those working for the government, knew the work of Greene and Greene, Maybeck, and other California architects from published sources and from the works themselves. Certainly the LeConte and Parsons lodges that the Sierra Club had built at Yosemite were inspirational forms. The work of Maybeck and other Bay Area architects were an important link between the Shingle style and national park architecture. These practitioners used forms such as the octagon and hexagon and explored the relationships of space, site, view, and native materials that were in keeping with the Shingle style principles. Maybeck made significant advances in the relationship of interior space, external setting, structural design, and light— advances that would influence national park design.
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Last Modified: Mon, Oct 31, 2002 10:00:00 pm PDT
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