Gebhard, David, and Robert Winter, A Guide to Architecture in Southern California, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1965, 164 pp., 1965, 1888
Architecture in Southern California
"'The health-seeker who, after suffering in both mind and body, after vainly trying the cold climate of Minnesota and the warm climate of Florida, after visiting Mentone, Cannes, and Nice, after traveling to Cuba and Algiers, and noticing that he is losing ounce upon ounce of his flesh, that his cheeks grow more sunken, his appetite more capricious, his breath more hurried, that his temperature is no longer normal . . . turns with a new gleam of hope toward the occident.' So wrote Walter Lindley and J.P. Widney in their popular California of the South, first published in 1888. . . .
"What is it which attracts a person to Southern California? . . . One suspects that the real, underlying attraction is the unreserved commitment to a material way of life, for Los Angeles certainly displays the fullest, most open embrace of materialism to be found in America, or for that matter, perhaps in any place in the world. It is this governing element of materialism; the acquisition of objects and the blatant display of them; which most offends visitors to the area. Probably the strong reaction which many have to Southern California is due to the internal conflict which the visitors themselves have between their desire to express the the same materialism and the equally strong urge to put on a pretense that there are other more significant values.
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"But an even more interesting development was the Mission Revival in domestic and public architecture. The Mission style, however phoney its origins and however naive and crude to the point of brutal its forms, was nonetheless of great importance in Southern California architecture. . . .
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"But the greatest contribution toward a movement for simplification was the Mission style itself. Although usually awkward and often highly ornamented, there was a hint, in the solid massing and mainly plain surfaces, of ideas curiously paralleling similar abstractions in Europe at the same time. As the historian, Talbot Hamlin, was to point out many years after the fact, the breadth and scale of Mission style buildings 'give to their simplicity a peculiar kind of quiet monumentality.' It was, indeed this quiet monumentality which Irving Gill, one of Southern California's most important and least influential architects, discovered in the Mission Revival and which he pursued in his essays in simplification and abstraction. Paring away detail and accenting the broad white surfaces with deep arches and other recesses, Gill developed a style which, in its contrast of light and shade, reflects the special potential of Southern California's climate and atmosphere for visual effect.
"While Gill was a prophet without honor and had little direct influence on California architecture, the message of simplicity inherent in the Mission style was not entirely lost in Southern California architecture.
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"Exactly contemporaneous with the bold experiments of Gill was the mixture primarily of Mission style, Oriental and Swiss Chalet forms which the brothers Charles and Henry Greene of Pasadena put together in a series of romantic essays, . . ."