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IN-PERSON: Cottages, Victorians, and Bungalows - Exploring Modest Housing of California   

**This course will be held In-Person**

Modest housing of the everyday is everywhere around us, especially in Northern California. Although many of these houses -- those of San Francisco's Sunset District are great examples -- may have been designed by trained professionals, they used local, traditional designs and materials. The course will show examples and describe their historical contexts. Houses included are cottages for Bay Area industrial workers, modest bungalows for working and middle-class households, mission and Spanish revival styles, industrially produced ranch houses, and the modernist visions of Joseph Eichler.

 

Week by Week Outline

 

Session 1: Worker Cottages in the Industrial Bay Area 

Industrial growth required workers; simple one-and-two story light wood frame cottages housed them. Housing need accelerated with post-Civil War industrial expansion and San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake and fires. Meeting this need, industrial production of cottages began at the end of the 19th century.

Session 2: Modest But Livable Victorians

From the Gothic Revival homes and Italianate flat fronts inspired by pattern book author, A.J. Downing to the slanted bays and richly embellished Queen Annes made possible by machine woodworking, Victorian homes were built of wood from California’s coastal forests of oak and redwood and benefitted from design/technology competence. Well-built homes were connected to city water and sewer systems by the end of the 19th century and were the first “modern” houses.

Session 3: Bungalows

Influenced by Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, bungalows captivated the California home buying public and then the nation. Industrially produced, they were low to ground, with overhanging eaves, and outdoor spaces integrated with interiors. Economy in construction cost was achieved by efficiency in space planning and by whole house kits and “built in” furnishings brought by rail from the Midwest.

Session 4: Period Revival Houses

By the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, classical revival styles as showcased by East Coast architects were in demand by Californians. When members of the Armed Forces returned home from the WW I battlefields of Europe, they brought ideas about Tudor and Norman buildings with them. Hollywood amplified and romanticized the design approaches. Community builders took advantage of expanding streetcar lines to develop greenfield acreage with period style homes for middle-class households.

Session 5: Ranch Houses

The California ranch house was a dwelling type whose form and massing captivated the nation. Influenced by 19th century adobes and rancheros, ranch houses were industrially built of industrially produced lumber and set down on concrete slabs in long rows on what had been farm and ranch land made accessible by new highways and automobile ownership.

Session 6: Post WW II Modernism

Population growth and roadway congestion led architects, planners, and “housers” to rethink detached houses in expanding suburbs. Southern California architects Irving Gill and Rudolph Schindler along with UC Berkeley’s William Wurster and Catherine Bauer reconsidered building forms, materials, and site plans. Bay Area designers translated the European International Style with its use of steel, glass, concrete, flat roofs, glass curtain walls, and cantilevers to fit northern California’s climate, landscape, and plentiful wood.

 

This class is not available at this time.  

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