Articles

Although the history of modern architecture in Pebble Beach and adjoining communities on and about the Monterey Peninsula has yet to be written, a broad outline can be traced with some confidence. In 1933 the distinguished Modern architect William Wurster, dean of the University of California, Berkeley, from 1950 to 1963 and one of the principal figures associated with the Bay Area Tradition, designed a Carmel house for E. C. Converse. The abstract design reinterpreted features of the then popular Colonial Revival style, for which Wurster received an Honor Award from the northern California Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Far removed from the hard-edge International Style associated with Neutra and its reinterpretation by his countryman Rudolph Schindler, the Converse house nonetheless embodied a new architectural sensibility associated with the Bay Area, a “gentle modernism,” to use the evocative phrase of the architectural historian David Gebhard. (31)

Other expressions of this design outlook arose in Carmel prior to World War II, including the Sand and Sea complex, comprising five houses and a garage with a studio above, at the corner of San Antonio Avenue and 4th Street. This development was the work of Jon Konigshofer, a prominent Carmel designer and builder who played a large role in bringing West Coast regionalism and the Bay Area Tradition to his adopted hometown and the surrounding area. His design was a handsome example of “everyday modernism,” interpreted as that mediation between the stark rationalism of the International Style and the regional climate, conditions, and concerns that animated the architecture of other figures associated with the Bay Area Tradition who worked in and about the Monterey Peninsula, including Gardner Dailey, Henry Hill, and Clarence Tantau Within this context, it should be noted that in 1939 Neutra himself produced a handsome redwood-clad house for William and Alice Davey (now significantly altered) on Jacks Peak, outside Monterey, that was thoughtfully integrated into the surrounding landscape of grassland and Monterey pines.

In contrast to Carmel and Monterey, Pebble Beach did not see the introduction of Modernism until some years after World War II, though the lack of a comprehensive local architectural history, together with the difficulty of viewing many of the community’s residences from public thoroughfares, makes a definitive assertion on this point impossible. (32) In 1940 Frank Lloyd Wright designed a spacious house for John Nesbitt on 17 Mile Drive, but it was never constructed. Seven or eight years later Jon Konigsberger designed a notable Modern residence for the Robert Buckner family in Pebble Beach, which was one of fifty-three houses featured in the 1949 San Francisco Museum of Art exhibition, “Domestic Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Region.” In 1952 he designed a Modern house for Macdonald and Margaret Booze on Signal Hill Road, just down the street from where Neutra would build. Throughout the mid-century a significant number of other architects associated with Mid-Century Modernism produced handsome homes in Pebble Beach. Within this context, the Connell House is clearly significant as an extremely important example of residential design, exemplifying both the rational approach associated with Modern architecture generally and the character-defining features associated with the International Style specifically.

Richard Neutra’s hundreds of award-winning properties are primarily found in Southern California. As an accomplished and rare example of the work of this master architect in northern California, with a superb setting in which Neutra could fully realize his beliefs about human well-being, the Connell House is unequivocally an important example of the International Style, perfectly illustrating this design aesthetic within the context of the development of Modern architecture in Pebble Beach.

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31 David Gebhard, “William Wurster and His California Contemporaries: The Idea of Regionalism and Soft Modernism,” in Marc Treib, ed., An Everyday Modernism: The Houses of William Wurster (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 169.

32 The relatively late appearance of Modernist architecture in Pebble Beach can be traced to the building restrictions Del Monte Properties Company introduced into its real estate deeds in the 1920s. The restrictions, as the company took pains to explain to prospective purchasers, were intended to create communities “harmonious within themselves” and to “prevent the erection of undesirable and unharmonious buildings that would depreciate those of their neighbors.” The type of residential design Del Monte Properties believed “best suited” to the area was founded on the traditions” brought to California “by the first Spanish settlers. It has the general  characteristics of the architecture of those countries along the north shores of the Mediterranean from Gibralter [sic] to the Dardanelles, where the climate and topography are so similar to ours.” Although the restrictions were relaxed as the Depression wore on, as late as 1940 Fortune magazine, reported that when submitting architectural plans for approval, “it will be better, no matter what the size of your purse, if you plan a Spanish-Colonial (Monterey) type of house.” Del Monte Properties Company, Bulletin, December 1, 1927, Pebble Beach Company Archives, Pebble Beach; “Del Monte,” Fortune 21 (January 1940): 106.