Page 31 - 2014 Travel Guide to California

missions, as is the splendid 1927 San
Gabriel Mission Playhouse.
By the 1860s, long, deep, narrow, high-
ceilinged wooden row houses populated
boomtowns like San Francisco. The Victo-
rians were built from the 1860s to the
1910s. In the 1970s, the once-modest
houses were reborn as gentrified, vibrantly
hued Painted Ladies. Surviving California
Victorians are especially numerous in San
Francisco, clustered on Alamo Square and
in the Haight-Ashbury, Western Addition
and Mission districts. Urban eye candy,
they are featured on City Guides San Fran-
cisco walking tours.
By the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
other, newer styles began catching on in
California.
Beaux Arts architecture lent grandeur to
citadels of commerce and government
buildings, bequeathing to San Francisco its
majestic, domed 1915 City Hall, and the
classically graceful, open-air Palace of Fine
Arts. But Beaux Arts was a European
import, not essentially Californian.
Arts & Crafts to Computer Contemporary
American Arts and Crafts became closely
associated with California at the turn of
the 20th century. The use of natural mate-
rials such as warm, burnished wood panels
and beams, glass and stone reflected Cali-
fornians’ deep feeling for nature. Such
buildings, exemplified by the 1908 Gamble
House in Pasadena, seemed to grow organ-
ically out of the earth. The cedar brown
shingle wooden homes of Berkeley, fea-
tured on Berkeley Architecture Heritage
Association walking tours, are pleasing
examples of the American Arts and Crafts
style. Berkeley affords glimpses of the Bay
Region style, a version of Arts and Crafts
practiced by Bay Area architects Bernard
Maybeck and Julia Morgan.
The streamlined power of early 20th
-
century technology found mesmerizing
form in the Art Deco style of the 1920s and
1930s. Perhaps the noblest example of Art
Deco in North America is the 1937 Golden
Gate Bridge. With its taut suspension
cables, thrusting towers and trademark
International Orange color, the Golden
Gate Bridge dramatizes the energy, ambi-
tion and power of Art Deco.
The next breakthrough for architecture
in California came around the turn of the
new millennium with what could be called
Computer Contemporary style. Here, too,
the Golden State shines.
Frank Gehry’s brilliantly realized 2003
Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles,
with its swooping roofs and shining metallic
exterior, is a fantasia that couldn’t have been
designed without sophisticated computers
or built without modern alloys. The perfo-
rated copper exterior of San Francisco’s 2005
de Young Museum is of a piece with the con-
temporary, cutting edge work inside. For an
artful fusion of modern technique and nat-
uralism, the environmentally attuned 2008
home of the California Academy of Sciences
in Golden Gate Park is a must-see.
GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE details
dramatize the energy, ambition and power
of Art Deco, above and right; Walt Disney
Concert Hall features Frank Gehry’s iconic
architecture, Los Angeles, top; Hakone
Gardens, opposite.
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