If you had to name a quintessential Bay Area style of building, you might go with an elegant Victorian or a cute Arts and Crafts bungalow. You might pick something from the past such as Mission Santa Clara, or something modern, with lots of wood and glass, set amid redwoods or along the waterfront.
Those architectural styles may seem wildly different, but they are all an integral part of the landscape. If you want to understand the origins and diversity of the Bay Area’s architecture, historians say you have to first consider that it developed in response to the region’s natural beauty and mild, Mediterranean climate, which allows people to be outdoors year-round.
But other factors have influenced architecture here. From the Gold Rush through World War II and into the 21st century, the region has been a magnet for people streaming in from other parts of the United States and around the world. Seeking a better life, these migrants helped create a world-class metropolitan region of 7.3 million people that has long been known for its diverse communities and its corresponding variety in architectural styles, from traditional to modern to international.
What’s less considered — but equally important — in the Bay Area’s architectural history is its location on the western edge of the continental U.S., according to architects, authors and historians Alan Hess and Mitchell Schwarzer.
For millennia, the Ohlone and Coast Miwok inhabitants pretty much had the place to themselves. They built conical-shaped homes out of tule reeds and other local materials, but spent most of their time outdoors, hunting and gathering food in accordance with the seasons. It could be said that these indigenous people pioneered the concept of California indoor-outdoor living.
Until the Gold Rush and the opening of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, the surrounding mountains, deserts and oceans kept the Bay Area and the rest of California pretty much isolated from world centers of power and culture. California’s early colonizers, starting with the Spanish in the late 1700s, found it could take months to get here, traveling by wagon over the Oregon trail or sailing down and around Cape Horn.
“It was much easier to get from Europe to Chile than to California,” said Schwarzer, author of “Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Area: A History and Guide.”
The people who made it to the Bay Area therefore had to be pretty adventurous and motivated by a fierce desire to “to start a new life, forget the past and to live the life the way they wanted. They had the freedom to do that in the Bay Area,” said Hess, the former architecture critic for Bay Area News Group.
For architects, this freedom meant that “no one’s looking over your shoulder,” Hess said. “The many talented architects, who were either born here or immigrated here from the East Coast or the Midwest or Europe, they came here because of that freedom to really do something new and different.”
There also was a blank-slate quality to the Bay Area, which fostered experimentation and variety. Architects could import familiar styles from the East Coast, Europe or Asia, then modify them to fit the local landscape or changing times. Likewise, new residents could choose the kind of home they would live in. “If they wanted a castle, they could build a castle,” Hess said. “If they wanted a rustic cabin in the forest, they could do that as well.”
Isolation of course is no longer an issue for the Bay Area. But pressures on the population and on the natural environment have pushed the region’s architecture in new directions, including a focus on creating new forms of multi-family housing to address the region’s dearth of affordable housing, Schwarzer said. After the COVID-19 pandemic emptied office towers in San Jose, San Francisco and Oakland, architects and urban planners also are having to rethink how they envision workplaces.
Meanwhile, engagement with the landscape remains the Bay Area’s “calling card,” Schwarzer said. But this landscape is affected by climate change, and earthquakes and wildfires remain a threat, leading to modes of residential and commercial construction that are environmentally sustainable and can survive calamities.
Still, Schwarzer and Hess are optimistic about the future. “Surely the beauty and dynamism of our natural environment encourages architects to strive for something similarly magnificent in the built environment,” Schwarzer wrote in his book, while Hess said: “Architects have a sense of continuing tradition that they can bring into current times, but it’s rooted in something solid.”
Here’s an overview of the eras and styles that have shaped the Bay Area landscape:
The Missions
The traditional architectural practices that Spanish missionaries brought from Southern Europe were easily adaptable to the Bay Area landscape. The abundance of clay, straw and other materials could be turned into adobe, used to build their missions, presidios, pueblos, and ranchos. The 21 California missions, from San Diego to Sonoma, still offer the best examples of the classic Spanish style. Because they needed to attract attention as religious centers, they incorporated many of the embellishments appreciated today – white-washed walls and red-tile roofs, bell towers and courtyards graced by fountains.
The Gold Rush and the Gilded Age
After gold was discovered in the Sierra foothills, California’s isolation ended. From 1847 to 1865, San Francisco’s population soared from 450 to more than 100,000, hastening its integration into the American and world economies, according to Schwarzer. The booming economy, which continued past the Civil War, created a new class of millionaires who wanted to flaunt their wealth. Some looked to the classical styles preferred by European royalty or Gilded Age barons for ideas on how to build grand mansions.
The Painted Ladies
Everyday architecture in the late 1800s also “turned up the decorative heat” to bring on a proliferation of richly ornamented homes, with decorative columns, molding and other embellishments made possible by the availability of redwood, Schwarzer said. The Victorian era culminated with the storybook Queen Anne style, with dramatic corner towers, witches’ hat turrets and ornate porches, followed by the more streamlined aesthetic of Edwardian homes.
City Grandeur
The approach of the 20th century ushered in a taste for reviving all kinds of classic styles in the Bay Area, such as Tudor, Georgian, Colonial and Mission, the latter best represented by Leland Stanford’s grand scheme to build a prestigious new college in Palo Alto. Bay Area leaders meanwhile looked to bring “City Beautiful” concepts for their cities, especially following the1906 earthquake. The style thought to best convey this grandeur was Beaux-Arts, which draws on the principles of French neoclassicism and incorporates Italian Renaissance and Baroque elements. Architect Willis Polk helped develop a plan for San Francisco’s Civic Center, which included the 1915 Beaux-Arts City Hall, while other notable Beaux-Arts buildings include Bernard Maybeck’s Palace of Fine Arts and John Galen Howard’s Doe Library, Hearst Memorial Mining Building and the Greek Theatre on the UC Berkeley campus.
First Bay
Perhaps as a reaction to Beaux-Arts haughtiness, Polk, Maybeck and Julia Morgan also worked in the First Bay tradition, which shares similarities with the English Arts and Crafts’ emphasis on rusticity, simplicity and fidelity to natural materials. In the Bay Area, redwood also became the go-to material for the shingled-sided First Bay homes, churches and community centers that Maybeck and Morgan designed. Arts and Crafts also became the original style associated with Bay Area bungalows, those affordable, solid, working-class homes that became an “icon” of residential urban and suburban neighborhoods, starting in the early 1900s, wrote UC Berkeley geographer Richard Walker and urban planner Alex Schafran.
Art Deco
During the 1920s and 1930s, many prominent Bay Area builders chose Art Deco to celebrate the region’s growing economic and industrial power. Originating in Paris and flourishing in Europe and the United States, the style represented a belief in social and technological progress. Art Deco also became a preferred style for glamorous Bay Area entertainment venues, some of which still operate today as movie theaters or concert halls.
Modernism
By the 1950s, up-and-coming 20th-century Bay Area architects embraced the futuristic design philosophies championed by the Bauhaus and International Schools, which “cast off the conventions of the past,” Schwarzer wrote. Well-known Bay Area monuments of modernism include Frank Lloyd Wright’s Marin County Civic Center, the former San Jose City Hall and the Oakland Museum of California, the latter built with concrete and the bold, geometric forms of Brutalism.
Even before the turn of the century, the urban centers of San Jose, Oakland and San Francisco had begun to go vertical with the use of steel-reinforced concrete, though early skyscrapers tended to look to the past with Beaux-Arts, Romanesque or Gothic exteriors. Following World War II, office towers, with modernist-style glass curtain walls, began to rise, such as the 28-story Kaiser Building in Oakland.
The Suburban Ranch House
One of the leading Bay Area practitioners of modernism was Wiliam Wurster, the dean of UC Berkeley’s School of Architecture, who applied its principles to a signature kind of California construction – the suburban ranch house. Wurster’s usually small homes featured flowing interiors that opened up to the outdoors. To address the post-World War II population boom, Wurster also helped build innovative, affordable, mass-produced homes, similar to the efforts of developer Joseph Eichler, another modernist fanatic who built thousands of homes in new suburban tracts across the Bay Area.
The ranch house proved to be highly adaptable to a variety of settings and styles, with the Bay Area flatlands and hillside neighborhoods filled with rows of modernist split-levels or homes that emulated more traditional looks, from Cape Cod to Tudor Revival to the neo-Tuscan style that became “the rage” in the 1980s, with increasingly bloated footprints, according to Walker and Schafran.
The New Modernism
Even as historic preservationists strive to hold onto the character of Victorians, Art Deco movie theaters and Eichler neighborhoods, civic leaders, developers, tech billionaires and architects have been pushing design forward. Apple opened its $5 billion “spaceship” headquarters in Cupertino, while sleek, environmentally sustainable, ultramodern designs such as San Jose City Hall and the new M.H. de Young Museum have become de rigueur for any new government, corporate or cultural building that aspires to world-class status.