The Spanish Revival Wave

The Spanish Revival Wave
in the San Gabriel Valley.

The wave of Spanish and Mediterranean building that swept Southern California after the 1915 Panama California Exposition. Between roughly 1915 and 1945 it gave the San Gabriel Valley Wallace Neff's houses, Bertram Goodhue's Caltech campus, Pasadena City Hall, and La Casa Nueva.

A style that arrived by exposition

On the last day of 1914, San Diego opened the Panama California Exposition, and Southern California architecture changed course. The fair’s lead designer, the New York architect Bertram Goodhue, rejected the plain stucco of the earlier Mission Revival and reached instead for the rich Spanish Baroque of Mexico and Spain: carved Churrigueresque ornament against bare white walls, domes glazed in blue and gold, arcades and courtyard gardens. Visitors had never seen an American fair like it. The buildings were meant to be temporary. The style they carried was not. Within a decade it had become the dominant language of new construction across the region, and the San Gabriel Valley became one of the places it spoke most fluently. The surviving exposition grounds in Balboa Park still hold Goodhue’s permanent California Quadrangle, and the movement they launched is cataloged today as Spanish Colonial Revival.

The valley already spoke Spanish

The wave did not land on neutral ground here. San Gabriel holds the building that gives the whole valley its name: Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, founded September 8, 1771, fourth of the twenty one California missions, its fortress like stone church completed in 1805. The state recognizes it as California Historical Landmark number 158. For a century the mission sat as the valley’s oldest architecture while American settlers built in wood. When the Mission Revival appeared in the 1890s, it borrowed the mission’s arches and curved gables directly. The Spanish Revival wave that followed the 1915 exposition went further back and further abroad, past the missions to Andalusia, Mexico, and the Mediterranean. But in this valley the new style always read as a homecoming. The oldest walls in the region had been speaking the language all along.

What the wave looked like

The vocabulary is easy to name and hard to fake. Thick walls finished in hand troweled stucco, the texture laid on in irregular passes that catch low sun. Roofs of true barrel clay tile, low pitched, with shallow eaves or none. Arches that carry real weight over doors, windows, and arcades. Deep window reveals that prove the wall’s thickness. Wrought iron at balconies, grilles, gates, and lanterns. Carved or heavily planked wood doors. And the plan itself turned inward: rooms wrapped around courtyards and patios, fountains at their centers, the garden treated as a room. The street face stayed quiet and private. The life of the house faced its own enclosed sunlight. It was architecture built for this exact climate, and that practicality, as much as romance, is why it swept the region.

Goodhue comes to Pasadena

The exposition’s architect did not stay a visitor. The astronomer George Ellery Hale, who knew Goodhue’s San Diego work, brought him to Pasadena to master plan the campus of what became Caltech. Goodhue gave the campus a Spanish theme drawn from the Renaissance architecture of central and southern Spain, joined to the adobe forms of the Southwest: arcades, courtyards, tile, and shaded walks that still organize the campus today. His firm carried the plan forward long after his death in 1924. As the twenties closed, Gordon Kaufmann added the campus its social heart, the Athenaeum, a Mediterranean Revival club building whose early guests included Albert Einstein. Through Bertram Goodhue, the man who lit the fuse in San Diego drew the plan for the valley’s most famous grounds.

Neff and the domestic wave

Public buildings announced the style. Houses made it a way of life, and no one built more of them here than Wallace Neff. Raised partly in Altadena on his grandfather’s estate, trained under Ralph Adams Cram, and seasoned in 1919 in the Santa Barbara office of George Washington Smith, Neff opened his own practice in Pasadena in 1922, at the exact moment the valley’s orange money wanted Spanish houses. He gave Altadena its parish church, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, dedicated in 1926 in a Spanish manner with a watchtower bell tower. He filled Pasadena, San Marino, and the foothill towns with white walled, tile roofed houses of unusual grace. In 1932, Arthur K. Bourne, heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune, commissioned Neff to design his family home on a Glendora citrus ranch, a commission recorded in the federal register nomination for the neighboring Rubel Castle district. Neff called what he built California houses for California people. The valley still agrees.

The valley’s own casa

The wave’s most personal San Gabriel Valley monument was built not by a Hollywood client but by a local family spending oil money on memory. Walter P. Temple, whose son found oil on the family’s Montebello land, bought back his grandfather Workman’s homestead near La Puente in 1917. With his wife, Laura González Temple, he then raised La Casa Nueva between 1922 and 1927: a Spanish Colonial Revival mansion of handmade adobe shaped by artisans brought from Guadalajara under the master builder Pablo Urzua, finished with stained glass, carved plaster, and tile that told the family’s own history. The National Park Service records the house on the National Register of Historic Places. Temple spent those same years founding the town that became Temple City in 1923. Then the wave’s undertow arrived. Failed investments met the Depression, and in 1932 the family lost the Homestead to foreclosure. The house survives as a museum, the fullest single expression of the style the valley ever produced for itself.

The crest: Spanish goes civic

By the late twenties the style was no longer a fashion. It was policy. Pasadena crowned its City Beautiful civic center with a City Hall by Bakewell and Brown, completed December 27, 1927, a domed blend of Mediterranean and Spanish Colonial Revival that remains the valley’s grandest public statement of the era. It stands today as the centerpiece of the Pasadena Civic Center District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places on July 28, 1980, reference number 80000813. Down the coast, Santa Barbara made the style law. After the June 1925 earthquake leveled its downtown, the city rebuilt under mandated Spanish Colonial Revival design review, urged along by Carleton Winslow, Goodhue’s exposition associate. The result was the Santa Barbara County Courthouse, begun in October 1926 and dedicated August 14, 1929, two months before the stock market crash. It became a National Historic Landmark in May 2005, and the architect Charles Willard Moore later judged it the grandest Spanish Colonial Revival building ever raised. The wave crested there, in white stucco and sandstone, just as the money that carried it ran out.

After the wave

The Depression did not kill the style outright. It quieted it. Budgets shrank, ornament fell away, and taste in the thirties drifted toward the plainer two story balconied manner cataloged here as Monterey Colonial, then toward the ranch house that conquered the postwar valley. By 1945 the wave was history. What it left behind is the point for anyone buying or selling in this valley today. A true wave era house declares itself in the details: stucco with the soft irregularity of the trowel rather than the uniform stipple of a sprayer, barrel tile with real weight and shadow, arches that spring from structure rather than foam, iron with hammer marks, deep reveals, and a plan that still turns toward its courtyard. The San Gabriel Valley holds one of the deepest surviving stocks of this architecture anywhere, from modest 1920s haciendas to landmark estates. The exposition closed a century ago. On block after block here, the wave never receded.

Sources

1. Wikidata, Spanish Colonial Revival architecture, Q3645460. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3645460
2. California Office of Historic Preservation, Listed Resources, Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, California Historical Landmark 158. https://ohp.parks.ca.gov/ListedResources/Detail/158
3. Wikipedia, Panama California Exposition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama%E2%80%93California_Exposition
4. Caltech Associates, About the Caltech Associates. https://associates.caltech.edu/about
5. Caltech News, Romy Wyllie on Bertram Goodhue and the Caltech campus. https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/romy-wyllie-expert-caltechs-architectural-heritage-writes-book-bertram-goodhue-1266
6. Wikipedia, Wallace Neff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Neff
7. Glendora Historical Society, Rubel Castle Historic District, National Register of Historic Places registration form. https://glendorahistoricalsociety.org/rubel_castle_historic_district.pdf
8. National Park Service, Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum. https://www.nps.gov/places/workman-and-temple-family-homestead-museum.htm
9. City of Pasadena, Combined Historic Designations list. https://www.cityofpasadena.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/30/Combined-Designations.pdf
10. Santa Barbara County Courthouse Docent Council, History of the Courthouse. https://sbcourthouse.org/history/

Identifying The Spanish Revival Wave.

• Hand troweled white stucco walls in irregular passes that catch low sun
• Low pitched barrel clay tile roofs with shallow eaves or none
• Load bearing arches at doors, windows, and arcades
• Deep window reveals that prove the true thickness of the wall
• Wrought iron at balconies, grilles, gates, and lanterns
• Carved or heavily planked wood doors
• Inward turning plans with rooms wrapped around courtyards and fountains

Notable The Spanish Revival Wave Architects in the San Gabriel Valley.

• Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue · Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue was the New York architect appointed supervisory architect of the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego, whose Spanish Colonial Revival work at the Exposition popularized the style across California, and whose direct Pasadena commissions across the last decade of his life include the 1917 master plan for the California Institute of Technology and its earliest buildings, the 1916 Herbert Coppell House at 1245 South Grand Avenue known as Mi Sueño, and the design for the Pasadena War Memorial Flagpole at Colorado Boulevard and Orange Grove that his successor firm and the sculptor Lee Lawrie completed and dedicated on February 12, 1927. He practiced from a New York office from 1914 until his death in 1924, after over two decades as a partner in the Boston firm of Cram, Wentworth and Goodhue and its successor Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson. His professional archive of drawings, photographs, business records, and correspondence dating from 1882 to 1980 is held at the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University in New York.
• Wallace Neff · Born on the McNally family ranch in La Mirada in 1895 and raised from childhood in Altadena, Wallace Neff opened his office in Pasadena in 1922 and kept the San Gabriel Valley at the center of a career that ran from 1919 to 1975. His surviving SGV work concentrates in Pasadena, San Marino, and Altadena, with landmark commissions in Sierra Madre (Villa del Sol d'Oro, 1928) and Glendora (Singer Mansion, 1932 to 1934). His papers are held at the Huntington Library in San Marino.
• Gordon B. Kaufmann · Pasadena resident 1916 through 1939, trained as draftsman in Reginald Johnson's Pasadena office 1916 to 1920, partner in Johnson, Kaufmann, and Coate from 1921 to 1924 at 100 East Colorado Boulevard in Old Pasadena, with Pasadena, San Marino, Arcadia, and Claremont commissions spanning Period Revival residential through monumental institutional Streamline Moderne.