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Bernard Ralph Maybeck (February 7, 1862 – October 3, 1957) was an American architect. He worked primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area, designing public buildings, including the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, and also private houses, especially in Berkeley, where he lived and taught at the University of California. A number of his works are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Maybeck was equally comfortable producing works in the American Craftsman, Mission Revival, Gothic revival, Arts and Crafts, and Beaux-Arts styles, believing that each architectural problem required development of an entirely new solution.
While working in the office of A. Page Brown in San Francisco, Maybeck probably contributed to the Mission Style California Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and was one of the designers of the San Francisco Swedenborgian Church, which included the first Mission Style chair.
For the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, he designed the domed Palace of Fine Arts and also the "House of Hoo Hoo", a "lumberman's lodge" made of rough-barked tree trunks. The Palace of Fine Arts was seen as the embodiment of Maybeck's elaboration of how Roman architecture could fit within a California context. Maybeck said that the popular success of the Palace was due to the absence of a roof connecting the rotunda to the art gallery building, along with the absence of windows in the gallery walls and the presence near the rotunda of trees, flowers and a water feature.
In 1928, he designed the Harrison Memorial Library in Carmel in a Spanish Eclectic style.
In his long-time home city of Berkeley, the 1910 First Church of Christ, Scientist, Berkeley is designated a National Historic Landmark and is considered one of his masterpieces. In 1914, he oversaw the building of the Maybeck Recital Hall in Berkeley.
On flatter sites, such as the city of San Francisco, the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, and the Loch Lin General Plan for Principia College in Illinois, his proposals were guided by more formal Beaux Arts planning principles. One of Maybeck's most interesting office buildings is the home of the Family Service Agency of San Francisco at 1010 Gough Street, from 1928, which is on the city's Historic Building Register. Some of his larger residential projects, particularly those in the Berkeley hills such as La Loma Park, have been compared to the ultimate bungalows of the architects Greene and Greene.
Maybeck had many ideas about town planning that he elaborated throughout his career. As a citizen of Berkeley from the 1890s, he was intimately involved in the Hillside Club. His associations and work there helped evolve ideas about hillside communities. Maybeck developed a number of firm beliefs in how civilization and the land should relate to each other. Two overriding principles guided his approach:
There were other principles he would elucidate, such as a shared public landscape, but these were key, and helped Berkeley evolve into a paradigm for hillside living that was organic and unique. (1993). 9781558593930, Abbeville Press. ISBN 9781558593930
Maybeck's visions for communities in the East Bay were also a conscientious counterpoint to across the bay where in San Francisco city planning was much more conventional, forced, and regimented into expansive grids of streets. Its grids, imposed in places on very steep grades, resulted in extremely steep streets, sidewalks, and urban transitions, some of which were almost comically so. He also developed a comprehensive town plan for the company town of Brookings, Oregon, a clubhouse at the Bohemian Grove, and many of the buildings on the campus of The Principia in Elsah, Illinois.
Bernard Maybeck died on October 3, 1957, aged 95, and is buried in the Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, California.
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