CALIFORNIA HOUSES OF GORDON DRAKE
Douglas Baylis and Joan Parry
Douglas Baylis and Joan Parry: CALIFORNIA HOUSES OF GORDON DRAKE. New York: Reinhold Publishing Corp., 1956. First edition. Square Octavo. Emerald cloth titled in gold. Photo illustrated dust jacket. 92 pp. 2 color plates. 100+ black and white photographs, drawings, diagrams and text illustrations. Text contributions by George A. Sanderson, CArl Birger Troedsson, Harwell Hamilton Harris, and Walter L. Doty. Textblock lightly and randomly spotted. Price clipped jacket lightly rubbed with a short, closed tear to top edge and a chip to the front lower edge. Interior unmarked and clean. A very good or better copy in a very good or better dust jacket.
9 x 9 hardcover book with 92 pages and over 100 black and white photographs, diagrams and site plans and 2 color plates. Principal photography by Julius Shulman, including a color plate of Esther McCoy sitting on the seafront terrace of the the Robert S. Berns House at Malibu.
This volume provides the most comprehensive visual record of Drake’s tragically truncated output, including his early Competition entries, the Drake House in Beverly Glen, the Spillman House, the David Presley House, the Tom Dammann House, the Edward Kennedy House, the Carmel Vacation House, the Mesa House, Oakland’s Unit House, the Malibu Robert S. Berns House, and the Douglas Baylis San Francisco remodel.
Had Gordon Drake not died aged 35 while skiing in the Sierras in 1952, he might have become one of the great names of post-war Californian architecture. As it was, he had not yet finished taking his California architectural licensing exams. Drake suffered the mixed blessing of achieving early fame by winning, in 1946, Progressive Architecture’s First Annual Award with his very first house and then winning, with his next two buildings, second place in the House and Gardens 1947 Awards in Architecture and a Mention in Progressive Architecture’s Second Annual Award. His architecture was strongly influenced by Harwell Hamilton Harris who had taught him at the University of Southern California and for whom he had worked before and after the war.
Drake conceived his Beverly Glen house while serving in the Pacific as a major in the U.S. Marines and, on coming home, built it with a group of war veterans who, as Progressive Architecture noted, ‘felt responsible for more than the labor they were performing.’ This was the same altruistic intent which John Entenza expressed in promoting Art and Architecture's contemporary Case Study House program: an attempt to provide well-designed and affordable housing for the post-war years. Surprisingly, Drake never built a Case Study House. Perhaps he died too soon or was too faithfully wedded to timber, for from 1949 to 1960 the eight Case Study Houses which Entenza published had steel frames.
Gordon Drake completed his last two buildings in 1951. The Unit House, designed with Douglas Baylis and built in the East Bay near Oakland, was a combination of his own first house and a river cabin he designed for Walter Doty's Sunset, the Magazine of Western Living. For the Robert S Berns House at Malibu, a variety of terraced spaces combined to form a gentle and progressive entrance sequence, and the glare of the ocean was softened by screens of stretched muslin, burlap and rice paper. When Drake's friend Julius Shulman photographed the house in 1953, he caught Esther McCoy, who was to write so much about modern Californian architecture, sitting on the seafront terrace.
Early the next year Drake took a few days' holiday to go skiing near Lake Tahoe with a New Zealand architect, Warren Radcliff, and another friend, Betsy Roeth, whom he might have married had he lived longer. On 15 January he went out on his own after a heavy lunch and, not being a very good skier, fell heavily in the fresh snow and, vomiting, choked to death. In his wallet was a half-sheet of writing paper with a few pencilled lines copied from John Donne’s Devotions. ‘No man is an island, entire of it self;’ he had written, ‘Every man is a peace of the continent, a part of the main.’ The quotation continued with words which could have been his epitaph: ‘Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.’
Gordon Drake, well ahead of his time, understood the structural relationship between architectural design, construction methods, and the environmental impact of building. Drake anticipated sixty years ago the environmental threats we are facing in our time. His sensitive attitude regarding the rhythms of nature and the necessity of making human values and concerns the central concern for good design make his work profoundly relevant even today today.
Author Douglas Baylis (1915-1971) was a West Coast landscape architect who was associated with Gordon Drake from 1950 to 1952. Gordon Drake did his only remodeling job for Douglas and Maggie Baylis on their home in San Francisco. Baylis lectured at several universities and was Supervising Landscape Architect to the University of California.
Coauthor Joan Parry was a young free-lance English writer. She researched and wrote the original material about Gordon Drake for this book. Educated in Great Britain and France, she came to America in 1949 and spent three years traveling throughout the country before settling in San Francisco.