CALIFORNIA HOUSES OF GORDON DRAKE

Douglas Baylis and Joan Parry

9 x 9 hardcover book with 92 pages and over 100 b/w 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 Drake¹s 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, Oakland¹s 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 Architecture¹s 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 Architecture¹s 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.'

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