Hewn and Hammered

A Visit with Randell L. Makinson

the following interview with Randell L. Makinson, by Linda Arntzenius, was originally published in Autumn 1998 issue of USC's Trojan Family Magazine.

If there is a Greene & Greene cult abroad in Southern California, USC architecture alumnus Randell L. Makinson can take most of the credit.

Imagine yourself a keen student of architecture. Eager to assist a visiting professor by bringing him slides for his architectural history class, you approach a large, wooden house on a quiet residential street in an upscale Pasadena neighborhood. No sound save birdsong breaks the late morning silence. Lawns are perfectly cropped, hedges trimmed. No one is about as you set up camera and tripod for a carefully composed shot of the magnificent building. Framed in your viewfinder, the portal is a symphony of oiled teakwood and leaded glass.

Then, just as you are about to click the shutter, the door opens. A gentleman, tall and imposing in a dark suit, steps out. You watch as, unsmiling, he makes he way across the wide, private lawn and asks you to explain yourself.

This is precisely what happened to Randell L. Makinson in 1954 in front of 4 Westmoreland Place. But instead of being sent about his business, Makinson founds himself treated to a tour of the house and garden. Three and a half hourse later, he was seated on the living room floor with Cecil and Louise Gamble, pouring over their home's original blueprints.

much more after the jump, below

An Arts & Crafts Haven, Intact but in Peril

From the June 22 New York Times article, which also includes a short slideshow:

SOMEWHERE close to New York City — but far, far away, up a narrow driveway and into the woods — lies Crow House, a rambling Arts and Crafts mix of architectural styles: an eccentric "not to everyone's taste" kind of stone house designed and built in the 1920's by Henry Varnum Poor, for many decades one of the country's most famous painters and potters.

Although Poor, who died in 1970, is largely forgotten, his house now stands at the center of a complicated round robin of conflict that involves preservationists who have formed a group to save it; his son, who vows not to watch the house deteriorate and has just signed a contract to sell it to a local entrepreneur; Poor's granddaughter, who opposes her father's decision to sell but feels powerless to prevent it; and town officials who had begged in vain for more time to consider making the house into a museum.

Preservation advocates say they fear that the prospective owner, who has already shown the site to an architect, will tear down the house or substantially alter it. Land values are high in this part of Rockland County: Crow House is only a 45-minute drive from Midtown Manhattan.

The photograph of potter Henry Varnum Poore's home, Crow House, is by New York Times photographer Fred R. Conrad.

Classic Seattle Bungalows the new Spotted Owl?

Seattle Weekly Editor-in-Chief Knute Berger, in The 'Just Right' People (click for full article), writes on the Craftsman aesthetic and the relation of the bungalow to a true, working middle class:

Some years ago, my then-grade-school-aged daughter was trying to figure out where our family fit in the grand scheme of things. "Dad, are we rich?" she asked. No, I answered. "Are we poor?" No. Her face brightened, and she said happily, "Then we're the 'just right' people!"

That's social-class theory according to Goldilocks. In my daughter's eyes, we had attained a kind of secure just-rightness that offers comfort. That kind of value used to personify Seattle, a city that prided itself as being a middle-class, democratic, populist alternative to big Eastern metropolises or sprawling Western ones.

Rich people showed up in Seattle pretty late. The first millionaires were made by the Alaskan Gold Rush, which ushered in a rum, retail, and real-estate boom. Early labor activism added resistance to the growing influence of the robber barons, and the clash between upper and lower classes evolved a city in which there was little economic difference between union blue-collar workers and Boeing white collars.

Arts and Crafts in Boston

Architecture Radio is a wonderful online lecture series and covers an enormous range of topics - and I am ashamed to write that I did not know about this terrific resource until today. A relatively recent lecture (mp3; recorded at the Boston Public Library on 05.05, published 09.05) by Maureen Meister, author of Architecture and the Arts & Crafts Movement in Boston: Harvard's H. Langford Warren (the first full-length study of this very important turn-of-the-century architect, educator and movement leader) and editor of H. H. Richardson: The Architect, His Peers and Their Era is devoted to the Arts & Crafts Movement in Boston.

Old House Interiors writes of her book on H. Langford Warren that “(she) makes the point that some architects are influential because they have a lot of clients, while others exert their influence less directly - but more widely - through students… Warren's own blend of Gothic, Georgian, and Colonial forms was perceived as the proper New England style long after his death in 1917. In serving the Society of Arts and Crafts for longer than anyone else, Warren further imprinted area taste.”

Paraphrased the jacket of her most recent book: 'Maureen Meister has taught art history courses at the Art Institute of Boston, Lesley University, Northeastern University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston since 1982. In recent years she has lectured on American architecture at Tufts University.' And she has a very nice voice, too.

How Much is it Worth?

I get a lot of emails asking me to identify or otherwise evaluate various pieces of Arts and Crafts antique furniture - something I am completely unqualified to do. However, now that I've discovered the Chicago Antiques Guide, I have somewhere to turn when I get these requests.

The Guide is a weblog devoted to identifying and valuing antiques (specifically those in and around Chicago, IL). It's a great place to get advice about mystery items that have floated down the generations of your family, and  an even better way to learn about all sorts of makers' stamps and other identifying marks on furniture, ceramics, metalwork, glass and textiles.

The site also includes an extensive resources list of antique buying / pricing / selling / repairing agents throughout the Chicago area.

Berkeley's Panoramic Hill Gets Federal Status

Berkeley's Panoramic Hill neighborhood is now a designated Federal Historic District. This neighborhood, full of homes - large and tiny - overlooking the UC Berkeley campus, looks down (as the Berkeley Daily Planet notes in their article on the subject) on Berkeley's first entry on the National Registry of Historic Places, a tiny laboratory in room 307 of Gilman Hall where Wahl, Seaborg and Kennedy discovered plutonium.

The neighborhood boasts numerous well-maintained Craftsman homes, including a number of famous "Berkeley Brown Shingles." Local residents, under the aegis of the Panoramic Hill Association, applied to join the Register after they learned of the University's plan to add extremely bright night-time lighting to its stadium, which would have drowned out much of their expansive night-time view of the Golden Gate and San Francisco. UC Berkeley's plan must now be reconsidered in light (no pun intended) of its impact on nearby areas, specifically the new Historic District.

Homes in the neighborhood include structures by such architects as Bernard Maybeck, Ernest Coxhead, Julia Morgan, John Hudson Thomas and William Wurster. BAHA - the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association - held a house tour on Panoramic Hill last year, which took advantage of the hilly neighborhood's many hidden walking paths. Here are a few pictures and some press coverage from their 2005 tour ; more pictures - including some of a wonderful Walter Steilberg 1930 cottage - taken by Ron Sipherd, are up on his site.

note: We apologize to Daniella Thompson, whose photograph we used without permission.

Richland, Washington

Richland, WA sits along the Columbia River, on the historic Lews & Clark trail. The town, incorporated in 1910, was mostly razed by the US Army to make room for a new bedroom community for Manhattan Project workers at the nearby Hanford Nuclear Reservation. The population soared from 300 to 25,000 in July and August 1943; unfortunately, this runaway growth required the destruction of the vast majority of the town's existing structures, and almost all of its residences. The army knocked down the homes to make room for new, "modern" tract homes, but a very few of the original houses - mostly built between 1907 and 1935 - were saved from the wrecker's ball. Most of those that still stand are Craftsman or inspired by Craftsman and Prairie styles; Jeremy Wells of the East Benton County Historical Museum has put together photographs of and a bit of commentary on these structures.

The new planned community of Richland was designed in less than 90 days. Construction of new streets began on March 20, 1943, and the first house completed - a "B-house," one of the "letter houses" named in the convention used for the 26 new plans (A-Z) - was finished on April 28, 1943.

Glendale Cottages Threatened

Alan Leib is trying to save a small enclave of 17 homes near the intersection of Glendale Avenue and Mission Road in Glendale, California. The "Missionary Colony," as it was called, was built to house missionaries and their families while while on furlough from overseas assignments. It is one of the few completely intact 1920s neighborhoods in this town, which has embraced development over restoration for the last 50 years.

The small homes, an eclectic mix of Craftsman, Mission and Tudor styles, are for the most part in excellent  shape, but the enlargement of a nearby healthcare complex threatens the structures. Leib says that homes similar to the 17 still-standing missionary cottages frequently sell for close to $400,000, but Glendale property regulations require the owner to apply for historical structure status, so it looks like these may soon be razed.

A & C at the V & A

Fiona MacCarthy's wonderful short history of the Arts & Crafts Movement, as well as her notes on the Victoria & Albert museum's upcoming International Arts & Crafts exhibition is up on the Guardian newspaper's site. And MacCarthy knows what she's writing about: she is the author of William Morris: A Life for Our Time (and a number of other excellent books on English art movements), and is an authority on the political and social aspects of the Arts & Crafts movement. Her book on Eric Gill is especially good!

And make sure you visit the Victoria & Albert's Design a Tile page where you can make your own DeMorgan-inspired design!

The Battle for Taliesin

Fred Bernstein has written an excellent short article - more of a timeline, really - on a recent on-line battle for a set of tremendously important photographs of Taliesin, taken just before the original structure burned down in 1914. And unlike that story, this one ends happily, albeit quite expensively.

On Jan. 24, a Monday night, Jack Holzhueter learned that 32 photographs of Taliesin - Frank Lloyd Wright's home and studio in Spring Green, Wis. - were for sale on eBay. Mr. Holzhueter, on the board of curators of the Wisconsin Historical Society, looked at the Web site and realized that the photos were exceedingly rare. "They're a Rosetta stone for the building," he said: they were taken in 1911 and 1912; Taliesin burned in 1914 and was rebuilt in somewhat different form. Mr. Holzhueter, a retired writer and, he says, "full-time patsy," told his colleagues, "We've got to do something about this." The auction would end at 9:17, Central time, on Friday night, Jan. 28.