Bernard Ralph Maybeck was born on February 7, 1862 in New York City and was the son of Bernhardt Maybeck and Elisa Kern, both of whom had emigrated from Germany during the political unrest of 1849-1850. His mother died when he was three years old, and his father later married Elizabeth Weiss.
Education
Maybeck attended a German-American school in New York City and then a public high school. He entered the College of the City of New York to study languages and science, but the science courses were not to his liking. He therefore left school to follow his father's trade as a cabinetmaker, starting as an apprentice in the New York City firm of Pottier and Stymus, which specialized in custom furniture design and architectural interiors. His experiences in the shop kindled a desire to become a designer, so his father sent him to Paris to study.
Career
Maybeck passed the examinations in architecture at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in the spring of 1882 and began his work in the atelier of Jules André. He developed a strong admiration for his patron and the teaching at the school that remained undiminished throughout his career. In 1886 Maybeck returned to New York to work with John M. Carrere and Thomas Hastings (the latter had been his roommate in Paris) on their first commissioned works for Henry Morrison Flagler: the Ponce de Leon and Alcazar hotels in St. Augustine, Fla. Maybeck supervised the construction of the buildings. By 1888, though, he had decided to start an independent practice. He spent an unproductive year in Kansas City before moving to San Francisco, where he eventually found work in the office of A. Page Brown.
Three young architects in Brown's office Willis Polk, A. C. Schweinfurth, and Maybeck are credited with initiating an architectural renaissance in the San Francisco Bay region. They introduced an unpretentious style of residential architecture directly expressive of its wooden construction. In 1894, Maybeck began to teach drawing at the University of California. He gathered about him a group of engineering students, primarily interested in architecture, who later became leading practitioners in the area, among them John Bakewell, Arthur Brown, Harvey Wiley Corbett, Albert Landsburgh, and Julia Morgan. Maybeck was instrumental in the formation of the international competition for the Phoebe Hearst Architectural Plan for the University of California, and as its professional adviser he traveled throughout Europe in 1897 and 1898. Mrs. Hearst also commissioned Maybeck to design a large reception pavilion, Hearst Hall (1899), which he built as a demountable structure, employing large laminated wooden arches so that it could be moved to the campus when the university plan had been determined. Maybeck resigned from the university in 1903 to devote full time to his practice. In the ensuing three decades he designed more than 200 projects. He worked with a small staff of which the principal members were his brothers-in-law Mark White, an engineer, and John White, an architect. In the First Church of Christ Scientist, Berkeley (1910), stenciled ornament, carved wood beams, and custom-forged fixtures harmonize with industrial steel sash, Transite facing, and reinforced concrete piers. Maybeck, unlike his contemporaries raised in the shadow of the Ecole des Beaux Arts, was able to respect tradition and individuality without sham. He could turn the pomp of his time to winning fantasy in structures such as the Palace of Fine Arts (1915) in San Francisco and the Earle C. Anthony Packard Building (1928) in Oakland. He died in Berkeley, California.
Achievements
Personality
Outstanding among Maybeck's work were simple residential designs that employed open planning and direct structural expression and those using new materials such as reinforced concrete. But his treatment of large, expensive residences was equally distinctive. Maybeck was an eclectic architect; he could use the vocabulary of the Gothic, Roman, baroque, or Tudor styles as an inspiration for unique formulation of space, light, and textures in contexts sensitively suited to modern life. He knew how to combine a traditional respect for individual craftsmanship with an adventurous use of the latest technological developments. Costly craftsmanship was not essential to Maybeck's work because his inventiveness in the use of materials enabled him to design economically. He experimented with low-cost bungalows (1924) sheathed with gunny sacks dipped in lightweight concrete. His more modest work has, in fact, proved to be the most significant for architects of succeeding generations. In his simple houses and community projects he demonstrated how the individualism and human scale of the preindustrial age could be preserved without denying the economic and technical imperatives of modern society. Maybeck's most significant work belongs to the time before World War I when a handful of visionaries Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Henry Mather Greene, and Charles Sumner Greene were trying to stem the engulfing tide of architectural superficiality. This lonely and unrewarded struggle kept alive a spirit that could be rekindled in a later and more adventuresome generation.
Connections
He married Annie White on October 29, 1890. They had two children.