Maybeck:

School for Brookings Oregon

1915

"Maybeck's drawings of the town's school called for a wooden framed assembly hall with two wings of clerestory lighted classrooms enclosing an open court– a variant from his Randolph School." - Kenneth Cardwell, "Bernard Maybeck"

According to the specifications, the interior finish was to be entirely in natural wood. The framing members and the underside of the exterior sheathing planks were to be exposed to the inside. The floor was to be plank.

The passageways between the assembly hall and the class rooms were to be open to the air, but covered.

The rendering suggests the presence of roof-top planter boxes, which Maybeck had used previously on his First Church of Christ, Scientist.

Maybeck took great care both with the sequence of spaces through which one passed as one approached, and entered, a building and with the "negative spaces" or exterior rooms formed by the buildings. The courtyard is an example of both. You would nearly come up against the dramatic glass wall of the assembly hall before the courtyard opens out, with entrances on either side.

From Cardwell's discussion of the plan for the Randolf School:

"The project, a small private school for Miss Flora Randolf, was built in 1909 on Berkeley's Belrose Avenue. In later years Maybeck tried without success to obtain a commission for a public school building, and during his effort he set down his ideas about school design, which are of more than passing interest. In his notes Maybeck advocates 'small houses' with separate outdoor spaces for individual classes to be added to as the community grew. These classroom buildings were to be connected by outdoor covered corridors (in California) and heated by radiant heating in their concrete floors. Interestingly, the proposals when read today define recent California school design...."

"These ideas grew out of his design for the Randolf school. In this building there were no isolated circulation elements, but there was an attempt to give each classroom its own expression and its own garden space. As a private institution serving a limited number of pupils, it must have had a special delight to children as they studied in one of the individual 'houses' or made their way through the general assembly to the special purpose areas.... Maybeck used steep shingle roofs to cover his classrooms and, through standard dormer framing, introduced clerestory windows. The utter simplicity of the shingle walls, roofs without overhangs, and plain board and batten interiors is naive and refreshing."

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