Spanish Colonial Or Adobe Architecture Of California

Photographs, measured drawings of Spanish colonial houses built for comfort and convenience.

In California, authentic Spanish colonial houses were built with local materials for comfort and convenience, with both construction and ornamentation traditional of Spanish and New England settlers. This book gives architects, home builders and historians a chance to view photos, sketches, and twenty-six full pages of measured drawings of interior and exterior doorways, paneling, balconies, wrought-iron, and mantels—most from houses that are no longer standing.

The aura and romance of Old California lives on in this treasury of inviting homes. The California House presents the magic of the "golden state," that land of infinite promise and dreams, the most tangible expression of which can be found in the homes built by early California dreamers. Here domestic visions of tranquility and repose were inventively realized—in stucco or stone, wood and wrought iron, plaster, and glass and tile. Spanish Colonial Revival–style homes with elaborate wrought-iron window grilles, romantic, shadowy interiors, and lush courtyard gardens stand beside other particularly Californian architectural wonders such as the San Francisco Victorian Painted Lady, the Monterey Colonial, Eurekan Queen Anne, and the homey California Arts & Crafts. Including houses designed by luminaries George Washington Smith, Stanford White, Greene & Greene, and Reginald Johnson, this book will fascinate both the architecture aficionado and interior design enthusiasts, as well as the everyday lover of homes. Including, but going beyond, the much-adored Spanish style (in its many manifestations) and Mission Revival, the book features as well the Victorian of San Francisco's Painted Lady and Eureka's Queen Anne, Monterey Colonial, California Arts & Crafts, French Chateau, classic Colonial farm house, and more. All new color photography of 25 houses in California ranging in style from Spanish Colonial Revival, Mission, Victorian, Queen Anne, California Arts & Crafts, Monterey, French Chateau, Colonial Farm House. The book includes little known California work by well known architect Stanford White, known primarily for his East Coast work (designer of the original Penn Station with McKim, Mead & White, and original Madison Square Garden, and many others); as well as the Magdelena Zanone House (Queen Anne late Victorian style home in Eureka, CA); the Murphy House, San Francisco (Classic French Chateau); a Gothic Victorian 1860s home in Sonoma; Casa Amesti (Monterey style home); "El Cerrito" designed by Russel Ray and Winsor Soule and built in 1913 in Santa Barbara (an amalgam of Mission and Spanish Colonial Revival); the Frothingham House designed by George Washington Smith in 1922 (Spanish Colonial Rev.); Cuartro Ventos House by Reginald Johnson, 1929 in Santa Barbara; William Edwards House by Roland E. Coate, Sr. in San Marino, 1926; Robinson House by Greene and Greene in Pasadena, 1905; Sack House in Berkeley (California Arts & Crafts) Brune-Reutlinger House in San Francisco (classic Painted Lady Victorian); a colonial mid-19th cent farm house in Sonoma; "Mariposa," classic Spanish style in Montecito; The Marston House in San Diego (Arts & Crafts/Tudoresque); Rancho Los Alamos De Santa Elena in Los Alamos (Span. Col. Rev.); Pepper Hill Farm in Balard.

Surveys the work of the father of the Spanish-Colonial Revival style ofrchitecture that can be found throughout the warm, dry climate of Southernalifornia and is identified by enclosed courtyards, white stucco walls,rought-iron window grilles, and shady balconies.

Classic study by noted authority traces Spanish architectural influence in Florida, the Gulf Coast, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. 195 photographs and 50 measured drawings.

The drama and beauty of historic homes in California are studied and displayed here in a deeply researched text and over 350 stunning colour and over 50 black and white photographs. Southern California's Spanish Revival monuments are pictured here-such as Hearst Castle at San Simeon, the Adamson House in Malibu, Casa del Herrero in Montecito. You will enjoy Rancho Revival landmarks like the Lummis House on Pasadena's arroyo, and Will Rogers' ranch near Pacific Palisades. These are all different portrayals of the California Colonial, its romantic past and its manner of settling into California's climate and landscape. Vernacular and religious structures built between 1769 and 1848, during the Spanish Mission and Mexican Rancho eras, gave California its unique character; a look that was subsequently fictionalised in the revival architecture produced since those colonial days. Particularly influential on residential work, the colonial styles have indulged in the rich associations with Spain's culture-employing styles and ornament from the country's provincial Andalusian, Plateresco, Churrigueresco, and Desornamentado styles and its ever-present Mudéjar crafts -- or burrowed into its rustic pioneer roots and depicted as individual visions of earthy rancho haciendas.

Alluring adobe-brick houses of California here hint at the charms of a bygone age while offering, at the same time, a vision for home today. Adobe residences from the Spanish and Mexican eras were the original California houses. Architects, designers, builders, and homeowners today, as in the past, look to their simple, utilitarian features—such as plain, whitewashed walls, beamed ceilings, and intimate open-air courtyards—and try to emulate their forms to capture the charm of a romanticized past. Leading architects of style movements such as the Spanish Colonial Revival traveled to California and studied its extensive eighteenth and nineteenth century adobes firsthand as the foundation of their education in California architecture. Made of earth and organic matter, such as straw, adobe is among the oldest of building materials and has been used throughout the world. From the 1770s to the present, adobe buildings such as churches, forts (presidios), mills, residences, warehouses, and stores have been a most important and informative part of California’s architectural heritage. Adobe Houses presents twenty-three homes, made from adobe, showing interiors and gardens from these often quiet masterworks, ranging from Casa Boronda of 1817 in Monterey to Casa del Oso, a contemporary manifestation, built in Santa Barbara in 2000 that reveals the intriguing range of possibilities available to us when building in this traditional form today.

"The use of earth as a building material is as old as civilization. For the twentieth-century American, the process is most familiar in the sun-dried brick called adobe and the architectural style characteristic of the desert Southwest and the mission buildings of California." "Here, in more than two hundred pictures and a lucid, informed text, is the story of building and living with earth - from North and West Africa to the Iberian Peninsula, from the centuries-old Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe to the modern homes of the wealthy in the hills near Taos." "Essential to the story of adobe is the experience of construction itself, which is a communal act - families and friends engaged in the making of bricks and the raising of walls and rafters (called vigas), and the unique skill of applying the protective and beautifying plaster, a task often left to the talented women known as enjaradoras." "Adobe describes the wide variety of earthen architecture: the stark grandeur of the Taos pueblo; light-filled artists' studios; the typical hacienda with its living spaces surrounding a sunlit courtyard; and new houses designed to maintain a tradition yet providing abundant comfort and pleasure."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved