Bernard Maybeck’s is one of those names that float somewhere below the surface of American architectural greatness occupied by the likes of Henry Hobson Richardson, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Born the son of a master woodcarver in 1862 in New York City, Maybeck studied at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, and worked in New York and Kansas City before settling in San Francisco in 1890. There he designed a wide variety of picturesque eclectic buildings, some of the most distinguished of which were private houses (although the finest of which was the stylistically unclassifiable First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Berkeley), and established a reputation as a thoroughly eccentric romantic. Nevertheless, his work had sufficient quality in the eyes of his colleagues that he was awarded the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects in 1951, and was listed as ninth out this country’s all-time top ten designers in an AIA poll of its members taken only last year.
As a visual introduction to Maybeck’s work, Bernard Maybeck: Visionary Architectwould be difficult to improve upon. Richard Barnes’s photographs, most of them reproduced in full color, are nothing short of luscious, showing to advantage the inviting tones and textures of the wood and stone that were among Maybeck’s favorite materials. The text, however, falls well short of the images. Sally B. Woodbridge labors dutifully to establish Maybeck as the “visionary architect” of the title, but the record doesn’t really bear her out. She documents his debts