Tag Archives: Bernard Maybeck
Landmark Bernard Maybeck home for sale in Berkeley
Chances to buy — or at a minimum see inside — a Bernard Maybeck designed home in Berkeley come along rarely. The Kennedy-Nixon house at 1537 Euclid Avenue in north Berkeley has just gone on the market.
The landmarked home, which was built in 1914 (and quickly rebuilt in 1923 after it burned down in the devastating Berkeley fire of that year), is priced at $1,995,000. The home has had only three owners since it was built, and it has stories to tell.
The Nixon family built it as a live-in studio for their daughter’s piano teacher, Alma Kennedy. It was designed to include a recital hall, a waiting area for students’ parents, a reception room with a small kitchen and an upstairs sleeping quarters. The recital hall, with its cathedral windows and clear-heart unfinished redwood paneling, is particularly arresting. … Continue reading »
Maybeck School celebrates namesake’s 150th birthday
More than 200 current students, faculty, staff, parents and alums gathered at Maybeck High School on College Avenue Wednesday to celebrate what would have been the 150th birthday of architect Bernard Maybeck who left an indelible mark on the architecture of Berkeley and the Bay Area.
Stan Cardinet, one of Maybeck High School’s founding teachers, delivered a lecture about Maybeck’s life as an artisan, architect and artist.
A selection of Bernard Maybeck’s original drawings were also hand to view, thanks to the generosity of art … Continue reading »
Pianist Dick Whittington back in Berkeley, his kinda’ town
If Berkeley had a hall of fame for musicians, pianist Dick Whittington would be inducted as part of the inaugural class. As an educator, presenter, and ebulliently swinging player, he left an indelible mark on the city’s jazz before decamping for the Monterey Peninsula in the mid-1990s.
In an all-too-rare return to Berkeley, he performs Saturday at the Jazzschool with his trio featuring bassist Robb Fisher, drummer Vince Lateano and special guest Andrew Speight on alto saxophone.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Whittington made his first major contribution to the Bay Area scene in the late 1960s when he and trumpeter Phil Hardymon helped found the Berkeley public school system’s innovative music program. By the time he retired in 1991, he had helped initiate several generations of musical visionaries into the art of improvisation, including Peter Apfelbaum, Rodney Franklin, Steven Bernstein, Jessica Jones, Joshua Redman and Benny Green. … Continue reading »
The Hanging Gardens of Berkeley
By Robert Trachtenberg
I have spent the last month observing and waiting to see what is blooming in Berkeley as we slowly come out of a long, cold winter. Berkeley the Garden City is an incredible place to live, especially if you have a passion for gardens and architecture. In my recent search for plants that are beautiful and distinct, a consistent theme began to emerge. From one end of Berkeley to the other there was an explosion of wisteria blossoming profusely everywhere. I am most captivated by this flowering vine when it is intertwined with history and, in particular, buildings designed by Berkeley architects like Bernard Maybeck.
Storied Pelican Building is considered for landmark status
The Pelican Building, situated on the UC Berkeley campus on Eshelman Road, was designed by architect Joseph Esherick, who taught at UC Berkeley for 40 years, designed Wurster Hall, co-founded Cal’s College of Environmental Design with William Wurster and Vernon DeMars, and was one of the founding designers of Sea Ranch on the Sonoma-Mendocino coast. But the design story of this pretty pavilion-style structure goes even deeper than that.
Venerable Bay Area architect Bernard Maybeck originally received the commission to design the building. In his nineties at the time, he passed the task along to Esherick who expressed his gratitude by blending some signature Maybeck touches with his own, more modernist ideas, into its design. That is why the building might bring to mind one of Maybeck’s most well-known creations, Berkeley’s First Church of Christ Scientist — and why the Pelican Building has been described as “a unique overlap of First and Third Bay Traditions”.
The client for the building is another big name in California history — Earle C. Anthony (1880-1961), whose wide range of interests included cars — he was California’s distributor of Packards and built three impressive showrooms, one of which, designed by Maybeck, still survives, on Van Ness in San Francisco – radio and television, journalism, song- and play-writing and promotion of the arts.
While an engineering student at UC Berkeley in 1903, Anthony founded the college humor magazine The California Pelican. More than 50 years later he would finance the creation of a building dedicated to the magazine — hence its name, and the pelican sculpture at its entrance. Today the building is known as Anthony Hall, or the Graduate Assembly.
Robert Johnson and Berkeley architect Gary Parsons have prepared the report supporting the application to Berkeley’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. … Continue reading »
Landmark north Berkeley property up for sale
Anyone wanting to get their hands on an architecturally distinctive property in Berkeley — and with $3,680,000 in their pockets — is in luck with the recent arrival on the market of this multi-unit complex on Codornices Road.
Designed by Henry Gutterson in 1924, the nine units are across the way from Bernard Maybeck’s Rose Walk. Four two-story duplexes face a garden. A separate cottage with a large deck faces Codornices Road near Rose Garden. Together they were designed as … Continue reading »
