Bernard Maybeck

The club's minutes do show Annie reporting on the pamphlet's progress.

In any event, it succinctly presents thoughts he repeatedly expressed.

Maybeck apprenticed in France under Jules Andre, the architect quoted in the fourth paragraph.

It was distributed to hillside lot buyers by the Berkeley Hillside club in 1905.

Much of its advice is still valid. We will be influenced by it as we build in Harbor Hills.

The ideas are particularly interesting in contrast with that subset of prewar design advocated by some attempting to revive pre-war town planning. Maybeck's houses are oriented toward the garden rather than the street and provide much privacy. It seems an architecture of freedom and tolerance, rather than of social control. It is a uniquely west-coast architecture, and attempt to build the west but do it right, celebrating rather than destroying its natural beauty.

The illustrations in the only copy we could find were illegible. We've now located a pristine copy , but we don't yet have reproductions. When we do we'll add them to the page. The black and white sketches of hillside houses we do have are from some of the original drawings that were reproduced in the booklet.

The original illustrations are now shown here. The cover is to the right.

Illustration, not used, possibly, the cover illustration referred to in the text. From the original sketch. Documents Collection CED UC Berkeley

Hillside Building

Berkeley is a distinctly hillside city, its hills so near to the bay giving an unexcelled opportunity to see and be seen.

The shape of these hills is the result of nature's forces working on natural material for ages.

It is the aim of the Berkeley Hillside Club (1) to prevent interference with these natural conditions, (2) to discourage additions to the natural hills which may detract from their beauty.

Andre, the great Landscape Architect says, 'The fundamental law of Landscape Architecture is; in laying out a landscape, never take away what is there, but group it in with what you add to it.'

In obeying this law we accommodate our needs to the natural contours of the hills and thus work in harmony with nature's laws.

To explain,-

The water in its way from the heights to the Bay has made the present shapes. Following them all it has chosen certain main channels and made the valleys. These waterways with their accompanying trees which hold the soil and break the draught up the canyons should be preserved. It is the only logical thing to do. The canyons should be bridged when crossed, for if filled they will give trouble sometime,- when the culvert below is clogged up or worn out the water will go its old way and take the fill along. By using the sides of these ravines for roads (Fig. 1) and reserving the canyons for semi-public parks their value and beauty can be preserved and their use as building sites made impossible. Filled land is never safe for building.

Between the canyons the water has molded the hills,- rocky steeps, earthen slopes. Roads to be stable, economical and usable should follow contour lines,- this prevents sliding of land, minimizes expense of retaining walls, and, because of curves, discourages wind. The roads should be of normal width on levels but narrower on steeper hillsides to avoid heavy fills.

The steep parts can be handled in various ways,- terraced on two levels as on Hearst Ave., divided into narrow ways for driving with foot paths above and below and connecting steps for pedestrians, as in Claremont.

To hold the soil and act as wind-breaks there is nothing so cheap or so good as trees. The few native trees that have survived centuries of fire and flood lived because they had chosen the best places. They should be jealously preserved. Bend the road, divide the lots, place the houses to accommodate them.

With waterways, natural hill contours and native trees preserved and incorporated in the finished landscape, the Hillside club next urges extensive tree planting, preferably in masses for effect from afar and to break up the panorama into plane views where objectionable foregrounds are to be hidden. (Fig. 4)

With neighborhood cooperation the roadside banks, terraces etc. can be planted systematically in blocks instead of lots,- not fifty feet of pink geraniums, twenty-five of nasturtiums, fifty of purple verbenas, but long restful lines, big, quiet masses,- here a roadside of gray olive topped with purple plum, there a line of trailing willows dipped in flame of ivy covered walls,- long avenues of trees with houses back from roads, hidden behind foregrounds of shrubbery. (Fig. 2) Bushnell place is such a one. Grass on a hillside looks bare; the same strength and water put on trees and bushes will be more effective.

The irregularities of the hillside dictate the shape of the blocks and make rectangular lots undesirable. Hill lots should have their long dimension horizontal.

The irregular shape and elevation of the lots are the result of natural causes. By studying these conditions in placing the houses it will it will be possible to build in groups at varying distances from the roads so that no one need interfere with the view from the other, (Fig. 2), while, if the houses are stepped against the hillside and the neighborhoods cooperate in planning and planting, each house will be invisible to the other. (Fig. 5) Hedges, bushes, trellises, pergolas can give privacy and indicate surveyors' lines and still leave something to the maps and deeds.

Anything that should be kept at all among hill homes can be kept out or in as well by the invisible wire fence as by the disfiguring solid board fence which can be seen from the Golden Gate and only frames glaringly what it was built to hide.

Hillside Architecture is Landscape Gardening around a few rooms for use in case of rain,- a dining porch on the southeast, a sleeping porch on the northeast, a play ground court on the east and an observation porch on the west, but room to move and to breathe. (Fig. 7)

If it is a possible thing to do choose wide lots. Do without something else, but do not come fifteen miles and climb six hundred feet to live on a slice of land against your neighbor's fence.

Once the land is bought, use what is there. Avoid cutting into the hill; avoid filling up the hollow. The man who wants a square house on one floor on a flat lot does not belong on the hillside.

Figure 8 from the original. Documents Collection CED

Build around the hill on contour lines (Fig, 8) or step the house up against the hill, one story above and back of the other. (see cover) The correctly planned hillside house is parallel not perpendicular to the slope. It avoids the wind by hugging the hill, is firm and enduring because braced against it.

California climate demands a certain style of building. The roofs are to shed rain, but not snow; the windows are to let in all the sunlight possible, not to keep out the heat,- large openings, roofs of low pitch for Berkeley,- and the roofs made to look well from above.

Houses simply built, depending on the natural projections and their shadows for the ornamental effect, show a variety of light and shade when seen from a distance and need no paint or artificial covering to call attention to their details. (Fig 8)

The artificially finished house must be denuded and repainted often or look shabby, and, unless a work of art, its brilliancy only advertises its weaknesses.

A house of natural material repeats the colors of the rocks; made of plaster or concrete, stone, brick, terra-cotta, rough wood, shingles or shakes, stained or natural, it absorbs the light, and, with the help of trellises and vines, hides among the browns and greens of the hill and is finished for all time. We have, 'taken nothing away from the hill,- have grouped with what is there what we add to it.'

Thus with the help of the hill buyer, the Hillside Club can lay out on the Berkeley hills a perfect landscape, connecting green canyons with piling green forests, making of the barren places a park with only here and there a tower or glimpse of roof to tell of the city underneath, a city of homes in an immense garden with nothing to show that it is not all one owned by each.

Our other Maybeck pages:

School for Brookings
Rendering and Elevation

Brookings Community Hall
Section and Plan

Brookings Town Plan: the design's development
Various drawings.

Maybeck on Civic Design: Canberra

Maybeck on Architecture: The Palace of Fine Arts

Brookings, General Information

Brookings Property

The Harbor Hills

Cape Ferrelo Ranch

 Oregon Coast Net Home
(frames)

Coast Land Mailing List
(to receive occasional updates on land available and on the progress of the Harbor Hills project)

Site Map
(frames)

Site Map
(for navigation without frames or javascript, and for small monitors)

copyright 1998 Bill Buchanan