ESSAY: CALIFORNIA NEW SPANISH COLONIAL REVIVAL ARCHITECTURE IN SANTA BARBARA
ANTA.ND.EDU
New Spanish Colonial Revival Architecture in Santa Barbara: A Continuing Tradition or Rebirth?
Opposite page: Figure 1. Mission style architecture. This page, top: Figure 2. Mediterranean Revival architecture. Below left: Figure 3. El Paseo Arcade 1922–23). Below right: Figure 4. Meridian Studios (1923).
MARC APPLETON
Spanish Colonial Revival architecture in Southern California had its beginning at the dawn of the twentieth century and quickly grew to become a major trend by the 1920s. It was a unique phenomenon, as the late historian David Gebhard observed: In the twentieth century American architectural scene, there has been only one brief period of time and only one restricted geographic area in which there existed anything approaching a unanimity of architectural form. This was the period, from approximately 1920 through the early 1930s, when the Spanish Colonial or Mediterranean Revival was virtually the accepted norm in Southern California.1 The reasons for the appeal of this development are several, but they can perhaps be best explained by looking at the social, economic, political, and cultural context of Southern California’s rapidly increasing population and
phenomenal entrepreneurial growth at the time. Inventing the Dream by the late Kevin Starr, California’s state librarian, is a good primer for understanding the period.2 In the quote above, Gebhard doesn’t differentiate between “Spanish Colonial“ and “Mediterranean.” For current purposes it is important to distinguish Spanish Colonial Revival architecture from both “Mission” style architecture and “Mediterranean Revival” architecture. The Mission style obviously referenced architectural elements that were typical of the California mission buildings of the Spanish Conquest and Mexico that inspired it (Fig. 1). Mediterranean Revival architecture, although it included Spanish Colonial Revival, was a broader category that included influences from many regions bordering the Mediterranean Sea, including not just Spain but Southern France, Italy, Sicily, Majorca, Morocco, and Greece. Examples based on the Renaissance-era Italian villas are perhaps the most notable (Fig. 2). Spanish Colonial Revival architecture more specifically references the architecture of Andalusia in southern Spain and can also exhibit Islamic characteristics influenced by the Moorish culture that was dominant there prior to the sixteenth century and the Christian reconquest. Also worth mentioning is that Gebhard’s “Southern California” is a very large territory, even for a topic as specific as Spanish Colonial Revival architecture. For this reason it seems appropriate to focus on one of its epicenters, the City of Santa Barbara, California, which also coincidentally has had a significantly greater number of Spanish Colonial than Mediterranean Revival or Mission buildings. Doing so also dovetails nicely with Professor Dennis
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Doordan’s essay for this same publication.3 Doordan gives a fairly comprehensive explanation of why Santa Barbara became such a rich repository of Spanish Colonial Revival architecture and how a group of local concerned citizens was formed in the wake of the disastrous 1925 earthquake to not only inspire the rebuilding of the city as a Spanish town but institute a bureaucratic process to enforce it. They formed the Plans and Planning Committee, which eventually evolved into the city’s Board of Architectural Review. The push to rebuild Santa Barbara as a Spanish town was actually underway before 1925; the quake simply provided a cleaner slate for it be
realized. Family residential architecture at the time had tended to follow many Spanish Colonial Revival houses that in fact predated the earthquake and its subsequent bureaucracy. Much of the work of local architects such as Reginald Johnson, George Washington Smith, Carlton Winslow Sr., and Soule, Hastings and Murphy was actually designed well before 1925, not by civic mandate but by their aesthetic choice and that of their clients. Even in the downtown commercial area, buildings such as James Osborn Craig’s El Paseo Arcade (1922– 1923) (Fig. 3), and Smith’s Meridian Studios (1923) (Fig. 4), along with many of the early nineteenth-century adobes that survived the quake, were undoubtedly important touch-
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