Bernard Maybeck

Bernard Maybeck's First Church of Christ, Scientist

Bernard Maybeck (1862-1957), raised on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village and trained as an architect at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, settled in Berkeley with his wife Annie in 1982. Though Maybeck's 1915 design for San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts is more widely known, the First Church of Christ, Scientist is his masterpiece.

(A new book surveying architectural historians names it one of the 150 most important buildings in the Western world, placing it between Greene and Greene's Gamble House and Wright's Taliesen.) Finished in 1911, it draws from a long list of architectural influences: Byzantine, Romanesque, and Japanese elements are piled one on top of the other. Its interior wood paneling and handmade details are typical of the Arts and Crafts style. But the building is modern, too -- much more than it appears to 21st-century eyes. For the windows, Maybeck picked sturdy metal frames designed for factories, a suprising choice for a church. (In fact, their Detroit-based manufacturer, more puzzled than sacandalized to hear that the architect planned to use the windows in a sacred building, was at first reluctant to send them west.) The huge wooden supports that intersect directly above the pews are another industrial touch: they're based on something called the Platt Truss, which was invented in the 1850s to prop up railroad bridges. The use of pured concrete for the floors and columns is also a sign of a modern sensibility at work. In part Maybeck made these choices to save money, but they also reflected his desire to build simply and with a kind of structural candor, even in a highly ornate ecclesiastical setting; he was aiming, he said, for

"sincerity and honest exemplified in the use of genuine construction materials which are what they claim to be and are not imitations." The genius of the building is that despite its unusual blend of contemporary touches and historical allusions -- not to mention its periodic eruptions of ornament -- it comes together as a serene whole, somehow pragmatic and ethereal at the same time. The Faculty Club, where we'll meet up next for the reception, is another Maybeck design; it has been extended since it opened in 1902, but the building's neo-Gothic Great Hall, with its steeply pitched ceiling and gaping mouth of a fireplace, remains one of the architects's best known rooms.

-- Christopher Hawthorne