The following is an unpublished biographical essay. It is one chapter of "Friends Bearing Torches" a manuscript made up of sketches of the lives of great early Californians written by Charles Keeler.

Back in 1891, or thereabouts, I was working at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco and generally returned to Berkeley on the 05:00 commuters' ferry. My attention had been attracted by a man of unusual appearance, often encountered on this boat. I was about 20 at the time and he was perhaps 9 or 10 years older. He was of a solid build with a round face and chin more or less covered with whiskers. His complexion was ruddy, like an outdoor man's, although he evidently worked in an office. His eyes were dark and his expression was benign. He seemed to me it like a European rather than an American; and for some reason I imagined he might be Italian. Instead of a vest he wore a sash, and his suit seemed like homespun of a dark brown color.
I cannot remember who introduced us, if indeed anyone did, but presently we began to meet and converse on the ferry. Perhaps we were both sufficiently unusual in appearance to attract one another. In those days I used to wear an old-fashioned black broadcloth cape which had belonged to my stepfather, and I carried his gold-headed cane. For a long time after these ferry boat conversations began, I did not know the name of my chance friend. I do not recall when I first learned that he was not Italian, and that his name was Maybeck.
Such strange ideas this man seem to hold! He was provocative in his talk, and would make challenging statements for me to combat. Despite the fact that I was a impetuous and argumentative youth, the serenity and self possession of his manner was disarming. He was especially interested in art, but his unique point of view, so confidently upheld, was at once irritating and stimulating. Here was a benign young Socrates on the ferry boat-another gadfly in another world.
A year or more passed-with these chance meetings on the Southern Pacific Ferry, which I was getting educated by this unusual preceptor in the field of art. Then one day he told me that he had heard I owned a lot up in the hills north of the university grounds. How he had found this out I have no idea but it was truth that I had bought a lot there with a beautiful old live-oak tree upon it. It was near the rim of a charming little canyon, and commanded a superb view of San Francisco Bay. Mr. Maybeck told me that when I was ready to build a home there, he would like to design it. He told me that he would make no charge for his services as he was interested in me and wanted to see me in a home that suited my personality.
"But I have no idea of building", I explained. "I bought a lot only as an investment." "Well," he persisted, "You may change your mind. If you do, let me know. I want to design a home for you."
Mr. Maybeck is a very persistent man, and in his quiet fashion generally managed to have his own way. But this time fate seemed to have intervened. In 1893 I married Louise Bunnel of San Francisco. We were both in frail health, and spent our first winter on a remote cattle ranch in the mountains of Mendocino County. A year after returning to Berkeley, our friends, Mrs. Llewellyn Jones and her talented daughter, Grace, offered us their little Venetian palace for our temporary home. We accepted this kind offer with enthusiasm, and were persuaded by Professor and Mrs. Harold Whiting to accompany them to New York by steamer via Panama instead of taking the overland train. He was professor of physics at the University of California and in the summer of 1895 resigned to accept a professorship at Harvard. We had made arrangements to go with them on the steamer Colima when we suddenly changed our plans and decided us to remain in Berkeley and to build a home.
We were shocked indeed, on picking up the paper a week or more after Prof. and Mrs. Whiting had sailed with their four children, to learn that a deck load of lumber on the Colima had shifted in a storm, giving the boat a list so that when the huge wave struck her she turned turtle. Only a few of the officers and crew who happened to be on deck and who were able to cling to wreckage until picked up by a passing boat, were saved. The Whiting family were all lost as we would have been had we accompanied them.
I sought out Mr. Maybeck at his home in northwest Berkeley and told him I had come to accept his offer to design our house. I really had no idea what I was getting into when I put myself in his hands. I found his own home was not yet complete and that he was working on it at odd times, with the assistance of Julia Morgan's brothers. His house was something like a Swiss chalet. The timbers showed on the inside and the walls were of knotted yellow pine planks. There was no finish to the interior, for the carpenter work finished it. There was a sheet iron, hand built stove, open in front and with brass andirons. Most of the furniture was designed and made by Mr. Maybeck himself. It was a distinctly hand-made home.

The experience of having Mr. Maybeck design a home for us was a liberal education in architecture--not in conventional architecture, but in the underlying and eternal principles. It was never the letter of the art that concerned this man, but the spirit. He is always going back to first principles-- going back to fundamentals that have been forgotten. He detests shams, veneers, imitations that are done for mere effect. When he designs a building, it is not stage scenery, but life, reality, construction that he is seeking to embody. And because the conception is that of an unusual person, it has originality, novelty and charm.

A. Page Brown came from New York to San Francisco to open an architectural office and soon imported the number of talented young architects to assist him. Most of them had studied in Paris and had been exposed to European architectural influences. Mr. Maybeck was one of the number who had studied at the Beaux Arts. He had worked on the designs for the St. Augustine Hotel in Florida, and when he first came here he was put to work on the drawings for the Crocker building on Market Street in San Francisco.

There came to Mr. Maybeck in his early California days an experience that profoundly affected his whole artistic outlook. He found a cottage in the hills back of Oakland, and next door to him the Reverend Joseph Worcester had a little summer retreat. Looking into Mr. Worcesters's windows, he saw the interior of the cottage was all of unpainted redwood boards. It was a revelation. He became acquainted with Mr. Worcester and in time designed for him the famous Swedenborgian Church in San Francisco. It had a fireplace. The big overhead timbers were braced with madrono "ship's knees". There were large symbolic landscapes which William Keith painted for his friend Joseph Worcester. There was a new note in this church, a combination of church and home, an intimate, subdued, aesthetic something that with all its simplicity set it apart from anything that had been built before in the west. It was the result of Mr. Worcester's influence on Mr. Maybeck.

When we went to the Maybeck home to talk over the design for our house we met Mrs. Maybeck. They had no children then and we found Mrs. Maybeck was the invaluable companion, business manager and agent for her gifted and visionary husband. She was from Kansas City and had two brothers who were architects.

We soon learned that with the exception of his own home, ours was the first that Mr. Maybeck and undertaken to design, but he knew very well what he wanted to do. And first of all, he wanted to educate us to his conception of architecture. And what fascinating things he had to teach us!

Back of all was the design, of course, but this, he pointed out was in large measure determined by the materials of which the structure was to be built. If wood were to be used, then it should look like a wooden house. He abhorred shams. A wooden house should bring out all the character and virtue of wood--straight lines, wooden joinery, exposed rafters, and the wooden surface visible and left in its natural state. "A house should fit into the landscape as if it were a part of it," he declared, and then added:
"It should also be an expression of the life and spirit which is to be lived with that it. "Back of all this," he continued, "is the simplicity, the sincerity and the naturalness of the expression."

A log cabin, he pointed out to us, is picturesque because simple materials are put together in the strongest way to produce the necessary results. In its construction nothing is done merely for effect, and the beauty comes from good proportions and honest workmanship. In most of the conventional houses of the later 19th century wood is the material used. But the builders cover it all up on the inside with lath and plaster and figured wallpaper, and on the outside with oil paint. The greatest aesthetic offense of all is committed when the design imitates stonework, and white painted fluted columns and millwork ornament and arches, all of wood, give a cheap sham imitation of a marble palace.

So Mr. Maybeck proposed to build wooden houses in which the beauty of the natural wood was to be given its full value on both the inside and outside. His next principal was that whatever was of structural importance should be emphasized as a feature of ornament. He called attention to the fact that, in the old Gothic cathedrals the rafters which upheld the pointed arches, the succession of pillars which gave strength to the walls, the flying buttresses that helped hold them firmwere all necessary to the solidity and stability of the building. The repetition of exposed columns and rafters were like the beats in music or the metrical emphasis that gives accents to poetry. That is why Ruskin speaks of architecture as frozen music. But a room with smooth plastered walls creates no sense of rhythm and its machine stamps wallpaper is applied to relieve the barrenness of its boxlike effect. Mr. Maybeck proposed to restore the handcrafts to their proper place in life and art. Two boards might be glued together, edge to edge, to give the effect of one wide board. But if dove tail joints were let in to hold them, these dove-tailings made the fastening more secure and at the same time added a note of ornamental design. Wooden pegs and wedges driven in slots to hold boards tightly in place, are also ornamental features to be emphasized. No doubt Mr. Maybeck had learned much from William Morris, but he was by no means a slavish imitator of anyone. He was interested in the simple life which is naturally expressive and consequently beautiful. He believed in handmade things and that all ornament should be designed to fit the place and the need. He did not mind how crude it was, provided it was sincere and expressed something personal.

Everything that concealed the construction should be done away with. There should be no shams, no false fronts. At last the mystery of why Mr. Maybeck wore sash instead of a vest was revealed. To be sure, a vest has a front to match the suit, but its back, hidden under the coat, is of cambric, merely to hold that sham exposed part in place. Mr. Maybeck was seeking honest expression in all life.

In those days of the last decade of the 19th century, the reaction against wooden boards for the exteriors of houses painted white or some light color and ornamented with columns and millwork scrolls, took the form of unpainted shingles. They weathered to a dull, grayish-brown color, with subtle variations in tone and texture that no oil-painted a flat surface could have. They blended with the landscape, and when trellised vines were grown about them, they gave an unobtrusive background that made the house melt into the landscape and become a part of it. And so it was that all of Mr. Maybeck's early houses were of shingles or shakes entirely unpainted. Indeed, such shingled exteriors, left to weather naturally, came to be the first evidence of houses by architects of taste.

However, the vogue of the shingle was comparatively short lived. Firemen and insurance companies discovered that sparks from chimneys are so often blown into crevasses between shingle laps, and that there they are fanned into life by draughts. A smooth surface, or one of some fire resistant or fireproof material accordingly came into general use. All of Mr. Maybeck's latter houses have plaster on wire lath for the exterior and tile for the roof.

So our home, which was his first, created much attention and comment. All the timbers were exposed on the inside, and upon them on the outside were nailed redwood planks which made the inside finished. The living room library was designed like a little chapel, opened into the peak. It was only one story, jutting out from the two-story part of the house back of it. The windows were all hinged French windows opening out and the doors were all specially made in single panel redwood design. One fireplace was of rough purplish clinker bricks, the other of buff colored tile. The ground plan of the house was in the form of a cross; the elevation rose with the ascending hill. When it was done, with a green dome of the live oak back of it, we thought we'd never seen so simple and yet so uniquely charming a home, blending with the landscape.

"But", I said to Mr. Maybeck, "it's effect will become completely ruined when others come and build stupid white-painted boxes all about us".

"You must see to it", he replied in his quiet, earnest tones that carried conviction, "that all the houses about you are in keeping with your own."

That was no easy task to put up to a young couple who had just pioneered in a new district and had found themselves with a young daughter to bring up. Nevertheless, Mr. Maybeck expected us to make good, and had so much confidence and our ability that we had to justify it. It was not long before we found families to agree to buy the lots surrounding us and have Mr. Maybeck design their homes. So instead of one Maybeck house there, a group of four was clustered on the hillside. And finally, Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson came and bought the old-fashioned house which stood just back of us on the canyon rim and made it over with a shingled exterior to conform to the group. And William Keith bought the corner lot below us, separated by one Maybeck house. He intended to build there, but not until after his death did Mrs. Keith build upon the lot.

Mr. Moody, a retired banker of Oakland, came with his son-in-law to see our home and we persuaded them to join our group. They had already picked another architect, Mr. Schweinfurth, to design a Dutch house for them. So they built a beautiful home in the canyon a block below us, and the two daughters of the house with a few other ladies in the neighborhood, organized the Hillside Club to carry out through a formal club what we had been attempting to do informally in persuading a neighborhood to adopt the Maybeck principles in architecture. This group of women succeeded in getting a little wooden schoolhouse built for the Hillside School, the first time a note of artistic simplicity had been incorporated in a Berkeley school building. In course of time a few of these ladies came to our home to talk over what to do next. We proposed to reorganize as a men's and women's club, as a result, the Hillside Club that has carried on its activities for over 30 years, is still an active power and the civic and cultural life of Berkeley.

Mr. Maybeck, out of whose artistic teachings it originated, has been one of its active life members. He still enjoys designing scenery for its plays and pageants. Especially in the early days of the club, its members took an active part in educating the community to an appreciation of what constituted artistic values in domestic art. It went further than this, and sent its leaflets and list of recommended books on architecture to improvement clubs, chambers of commerce and the other organizations throughout California.

Not long after our house was built, Mr. Maybeck was made instructor in architectural drawing at the University of California. He was so simple, so vital, so fundamental in his thinking and feeling that he exercised a profound influence on his students and on all who came in contact with him. His style was so novel and his personality so naive that some of his townspeople made fun of what they considered his eccentricities. They were but evidencing their own lack of artistic appreciation. But most of the architects took him very seriously and were greatly influenced by his thought and work.

He dared to dream magnificent dreams, and he was so trusting and childlike that it never occurred to him that any project was too great to be realized. When he began telling me that the campus of the University of California was one of the most magnificent sights and the world, and that we should straight way began to plan to build here a series of buildings to rival the Acropolis at Athens, that foolish question of all doubters came to my lips:

"Where are you going to get the money?"

Mr. Maybeck smiled indulgently and replied in his guileless way:

"When plans worthy of the site are made , the way will be found to carry them out."

He went on to say that no existing structure on the grounds was suitable to be left. They must all be wiped out, and the site must be studied as if it were all bare. That seemed a large order. There was old South Hall and North Hall, the Bacon Library, the Engineering Building and the Harmon Gymnasium. They involved hundreds of thousands of dollars investment. To be sure they were ugly and incongruous, but there they were. How could a mere instructor in architectural drawing dare propose to tear them all down and put up granite palaces in their place?

But that was exactly what this instructor suggested. Indeed he suggested it was such an air of quiet assurance that he seemed to actually believe it could be done. Of course, nobody believed it. Only one who was highly impractical can indulge in building such air castles. Yes, everybody agreed, that was the trouble with Maybeck, he was an impractical dreamer.

Undisturbed by the skeptics, he even made a great sketch of the University campus with all existing buildings eliminated, and in their place a beautiful series of tiled roof buildings connected by colonnades, just to show what might be done.

When the fall of 1895 I went to New York, Mrs. Maybeck who acted as her husband's secretary, business agent and manager, wrote me a long letter asking me a call on Professor William Ware, professor of architecture at Columbia University to endeavor to interest him in the project of an international competition for plans for the University of California. I called on Professor Ware and presented Mr. Maybeck's plan to him, but like all the others who had been approached, he appeared to look upon the proposal as visionary and impractical. They all thought it a beautiful dream, but that the chances of carrying it out were remote. Suddenly, before I had left New York, came news from home that put in new aspect upon the whole matter. At about that time an enthusiastic young lawyer, J.B. Reinstein, was appointed to the Board of Regents of the University of California. The university grounds at that period were in a somewhat rundown condition, so Mr. Reinstein proposed a Labor Day when men students would work with pick and shovel and wheelbarrow while the women students supplied their lunch.

Mr. Maybeck went to Mr. Reinstein with his ambitious proposal for an architectural competition and found an enthusiastic supporter in the newly appointed regent. Mr. Reinstein presented the plan to Mrs. Phoebe Apperson Hearst. With characteristic vision and generosity, Mrs. Hearst grasped the significance of the idea and offered to finance the competition. She was appointed a university regent and placed large funds at the disposal of the institution for securing these plans. Mr. Maybeck who had spent years abroad as a student at the Sorbonne and the Ecole des Beaux Arts, where he studied under Jules Andre, one of the 40 immortals and the man who discovered that the Greek architecture had been colored, was sent to Antwerp to supervise the international competition. Great interest was taken in the project and over a hundred architects entered the contest and submitted plans.

There was a characteristic Maybeckian touch to the arrangements proposed by the originator. It was a matter of course that Mr. Maybeck was eliminated from participation in the contest, but he went farther than this. He provided in his scheme that the first prize winner should be made professor of architecture in the University of California. That was the device by which he eliminated himself from the architectural department which was just in its incipiency at the time. Instead of planning for his own advancement, he proposed that one of the foremost architects of the world should be secured to head the department. Perhaps he made a mistake here, but if so he was looking in the most altruistic mood toward the aggrandizement of the university.

Following the first competition abroad, several architects were invited to come to Berkeley at Mrs. Hearst's expense and study the project on the site. A second competition was then held in Berkeley, again conducted by Mr. Maybeck, at which the final awards were made. The first prize went to the eminent French architect M. Benard. His plans, however, were on a scale of grandeur that made them impractical, and he himself could not be persuaded to come to California as professor of architecture at the University.

What finally determined the Regents in the selection of John Galen Howard to the post of Professor of Architecture and Architect of the University Buildings was not made public. His plans were among those winning prizes, but he was not second in line. Mr. Howard came from New York with much prestige as an architect. Nevertheless to many of us, who had fallen under the spell of Maybeck and a number of others of the young architects of California--the Coxheads, Willis Polk, Schweinfurth, Julia Morgan, Matthews and others--Howard's work seemed cold and formal, even though his personality was gracious and charming.

It was not long however, before even Mr. Howard, in the designing of homes at least, fell under the spell of Maybeck's genius. The charm of open timber interiors, with redwood surfaces, once discovered was too enticing to be resisted. When Mr. Howard built a home for himself on a hill in North Berkeley, it had many qualities suggestive of a Maybeckian influence. Maybeck was not without a quiet sense of humor. He used to tell of hearing two old ladies commenting on Mr. Howard's house as they walked past.
"Who lives in that funny house?" One asked the other.

"Oh," exclaimed her companion, "that's the home of Mr. Maybeck. He's the architect that plans all those freak houses, you know."


When it came to planning the university buildings, the ground plan and the building plans were Howard's rather than Benard's. Before Mr. Howard was brought into the project, however, the Greek Theater was built. Ben Weed, a student at the University, who is interested in and pageantry and drama, had discovered a hollow on the hillside, overgrown with eucalyptus trees, that seems suitable for an open air theater. And here amid the grove of trees, Ben Weed and Gelett Burgess, who had preceded Maybeck as instructor in architectural drawing at the University, put on a German festival pagent. Then, after Mrs. Hearst had become sponsor for the University plans, she interested her son, William Randolph Hearst, in donating the funds for building an open air Greek Theater on this site. The plans were made by Julia Morgan, then a young architect who had been a protege of Mr. Maybeck. This Greek Theater, apparently the first to be built in America, has been the setting for some of the most notable dramatic performances of recent times. There Sarah Bernhardt gave Phaedre to a rapt and enthralled audience immediately following the San Francisco earthquake and fire in 1906.

Mrs. Hearst became so absorbed in the University of California, following the architectural competitions which she financed, that she decided to come to Berkeley to live. The Pennoyer home, on Piedmont Avenue, was leased for Mrs. Hearst's residence, and Mr. Maybeck was engaged plan a huge annex to the rear, which would serve as a temporary hall of entertainment and which could later on be moved to the campus for a woman's gymnasium.

The building which Mr. Maybeck designed was as unique as are all of his conceptions. It was all of wood and also planned that it could be taken apart in three sections and moved to the university grounds, only about two blocks away. It was Gothic in style, with a succession of exposed heavy timber arches reaching from the ground to the peak. A lower floor supported by mass of timbers, was designed for refreshment rooms, while the upper floor, with its lofty arched ceiling, served as a concert hall. The interior was all of unpainted wooden shakes, giving it a primitive affect. When hung with Mrs. Hearst's priceless Oriental rugs and European tapestries it looked like some baronial hall of the Middle Ages. The hall on the second floor was connected with the Pennoyer home by a covered bridge. Here Mrs. Hearst entertained in queenly fashion, inviting about a thousand guests each Sunday to a concert by Henry Holmes' string quartet, followed by refreshments on the lower floor.

After Mrs. Hearst left Berkeley, her hall of entertainment was moved upon an extension of the campus, the land having been contributed by Mrs. Hearst's generosity. The three sections were put together again and the hall became the woman's gymnasium. It was some years after Mrs. Hearst's death that it was completely destroyed by fire. Her son immediately sent word to the University that he wished to replace it with a permanent fireproof building as a memorial to his mother. He express the desire that Mr. Maybeck should design it and that Miss Julia Morgan should collaborate on the details. The beautiful Women's Gymnasium with its outdoor swimming pool, which now stands at the south side of the University campus is the result of their combined work.

In the early days of Mr. Maybeck's architectural career, when his work was so novel and revolutionary that many people make fun of it, we were active propagandists of this man of genius. We were in a position to help to have him chosen to design the first women's club house of Berkeley--the Town and Gown Club. It was a charming redwood interior with exposed timbers, and a shingled exterior. There was much criticism and even ridicule of this delightful little club house. One of the University professors declared that his bicycle shied every time he rode past it.

But slowly people were coming to appreciate the creative genius of the man. When he came to design the First Christian Science Church of Berkeley, he made something entirely different from any of his previous work. The effect from the street is of massive concrete pillars and broad slabs of projecting eaves from a roof of low pitch. Within are striking designs in bold colors on the ceiling, the whole effect being suggestive of some primitive European chapel of the earliest Christian times.

Another of his unique designs was for the Faculty Club of the University of California. Set in a glade amidst beautiful old live oak trees, the quaint medieval-looking timbered hall looks as if it had stood there for centuries.

When in 1914 the Panama Pacific exposition was being designed by a combination of local and the Eastern architects, the supervisory committee was having difficulty in finding a suitable design for the Palace of Fine Arts. The story goes that one day when the planning committee was out at lunch, Mr. Maybeck went in and layed some plans on the table. On returning from their noon refreshment, some of the Eastern architects discovered these new plans, and one of them is reported to have asked:

"Where did these plants come from?"

Then, so the story runs, one of the local men recognized them and said:

"Oh, that's just one of Maybeck's dreams".

"But," persisted the other, "that's the best solution of the problem we've seen".

Whether this happened just so or not, Maybeck's plan for the Palace of Fine Arts was chosen and built. Despite the fact that there were many other beautiful and distinctive buildings at the 1915 exposition on the marina by the shores of the Golden Gate, the Palace of fine Arts was generally acclaimed not merely the most beautiful structure of the fair, but one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. It was spoken of as in the class with the Taj Mahal and the Parthenon. Whether time will justify such high praise, time only can tell. Unfortunately, the building was not made of permanent materials. It alone was left when all the rest of the fair was demolished. For a number of years it deteriorated rapidly, but public demand was so insistent for its preservation that it has been repaired and made into a Municipal Art gallery.

Like many prophets not without honor save in their own country, Mr. Maybeck's most important and and enduring work is the Principia, a Christian Science College in Illinois, which he planned and designed. A lady who had just then been at his office in San Francisco after looking at his plans for a proposed auditorium for the University of California, said it looked to her like a dream of heaven.

But Mr. Maybeck it is most intimately known for his homes in the San Francisco Bay region. You may know them from any other architect's work because each one is so individual, so creative, so poetical. In many of them there is a Spanish influence--wide eaves and tile roof, and that sense of being handmade--but there is ever the Maybeckian touch that stamps them as having been created by a craftsman to fit the particular lives of the people for whom they were designed. For this reason they are the very opposite of standardized houses, made to sell to the public.

But as an inspirer of the whole modern school of California architecture, Mr. Maybeck has played a much greater part than the world at large realizes. His self-effacing modesty has restrained him from asserting his own claims to recognition as a pioneer and restorer of the honorable ancient art of handcraft architecture.

A native of New York, married to a lady from Kansas City, he took his own fundamental downright independence to Paris where he was educated, and became imbued with the artistic spirit of the Middle ages. And bringing the spirit to the pliable culture of the Pacific Coast, he has succeeded in recapturing here some of the ancient sincerities of the hand worker, which machines had well nigh obliterated.