6 Great Architectural Styles of Southern California
While California is most famous for its incredible (and incredibly diverse) mix of natural environments, the state is no slouch in the human-made scenery department. Architecture has long been a key element of California’s unique visual identity, and, over the intervening century and a half, it has helped shape a lot of the state’s iconic mythology. Whether it’s the classic adobe and tiled roof style of Spanish Colonial, or the Space Age futurism of Googie, California’s range of architectural styles are a quick identifier for the many faces and eras of the Golden State.
Part of this rich architectural diversity comes down to California’s relative youth as a state. Though officially achieving statehood in 1850, most of the contemporary elements of Southern California’s culture blossomed during the early and mid-20th century. Wealthy easterners and midwesterners built winter homes during the turn of the century in places like Riverside and Pasadena, importing Victorian and Arts & Crafts styles to the region, as well as relying on the Mission Revival and Spanish Colonial that were already popular here. In the 1920s, Hollywood’s film industry erupted, and wealthy movie stars, directors, and studio bosses built sprawling Tudor, Greek Revival, and Colonial Revival mansions in neighborhoods like Beverly Hills, Brentwood, and Bel Air. And then came the post-War population boom on the tails of Southern California’s nascent aerospace industry, launching the Ranch-Style, Googie, and Mid-century Modern architecture that has come to define the era.
Ultimately, looking at the architecture of Southern California is like examining the rings of a tree. You can date eras and population booms by where and how the stunning variety of buildings were built. Which is part of what makes the state such an inspired and inspiring place to visit. It’s a festival of different visions and different people bringing both complementing and competing ideas together over a compressed period of time. And while it would require an entire library to get into the nitty gritty of Southern California’s incredible variety of architecture, here’s a quick Cliff’s Notes version of its 6 most iconic styles.
American Craftsman
Though not born in California, the American offshoot of Britain’s 19th century Arts & Crafts movement owes much of its popularity to California’s enthusiastic embrace of the American Craftsman style. With its focus on nature, indoor-outdoor flow, and an incredible attention to handcrafted detail, it’s a style that’s ideally suited to both California’s temperate climate and its more rustic, stripped-back Western influence. Craftsman architecture was a reaction against both the opulent, over-decorated look of Victorian architecture, and the increasing influx of mass-production. Everything was clean lines, sturdiness, hand-crafting, and natural materials. In California, the most renowned purveyor of American Craftsman was the Pasadena-based firm Greene and Greene, who created some of the most iconic homes of the era, including the famous Gamble House (a.k.a. Doc Brown’s house in Back to the Future).
Victorian
If American Craftsman was the 19th century’s idea of minimalism, then Victorian architecture was its maximalist cousin. Born in the U.K. during the reign of Queen Victoria (hence the name), Victorian style eventually became a California stalwart thanks in part to an influx of wealthy midwestern and eastern transplants building opulent winter homes in that era’s most popular new money aesthetic. Bringing their upper class ideas of European taste and refinement (not to mention ostentation), these wealthy vacationers built highly ornate Victorian structures in variations like Queen Anne, Gothic Revival, and Stick-Eastlake. Some of the most beautiful examples of this architecture can be found in cities like Pasadena, Altadena (which tragically lost many to the recent fires), Santa Barbara, and Riverside. Eventually the Victorian aesthetic trickled down to more modest middle class homes, but without losing the highly ornate hallmarks of their mansion-sized counterparts. Elements like ornate woodwork, steep gabled roofs, stained leaded glass windows, ornate bargeboards, and multi-colored paint schemes are all hallmarks of this maximalist style.
Spanish Colonial Revival
Though Florida and Mexico share equal billing in terms of Spanish Colonial’s explosion in popularity during the early 20th century, it’s California’s version that really sticks in the cultural imagination. Based on a style of architecture used by the 16th century Spanish ahem “colonists” in California and Mexico, the architecture experienced a resurgence during the late 19th century on the heels of the Mediterranean Revival boom in St. Augustine, Florida (specifically with the Alcazar and Once De Leon hotels), and California’s Mission Revival Pavilion at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. With its smooth plaster walls, low-pitched clay tile roofs, tile floors, and terracotta accents, it’s an architectural style that perfectly suits California’s warm Mediterranean climate, both functionally and aesthetically. The thick white walls and clay tile roofs help keep interiors cool, while the overall look blends well with Southern California’s natural desert landscape. For some of the more impressive examples of the style, see the Arlington Theater and the County Courthouse in Santa Barbara, the Kelso Hotel and Depot in the Mojave Desert, and Pasadena’s city hall.
California Ranch-Style
In terms of ubiquity, it’s hard to beat California Ranch-Style architecture. Between the 1950s and 1970s, some version of Ranch-Style design was used for the majority of new home builds all across the American suburbs. But even though Ranch-Style’s watered-down mass-manufactured version can scream suburban blandness, in its purest form it represents a true gem of mid-century design. With its roots in the wide, low slung design of Spanish Colonial Revival architecture, Ranch-Style offers a perfect human-made compliment to the wide open spaces of the American West. Clean, rectangular, asymmetrical designs — often in L or U-shapes — create a satisfying visual texture without making things busy or complicated. And with the single-story layout, rooms can feel more spacious and open, especially when paired with vaulted ceilings of main living areas. When done right, it’s homey, unfussy mid-century California at its best.
Mid-century Modern
With its roots in the International and Bauhaus movements of early 20th century Europe, California can hardly lay claim to inventing Mid-century Modern architecture. But few regions embraced it as wholly and as effectively in the decades following the Second World War as Southern California did. Whether it’s the geometric Tetris styling of Richard Neutra, the post-and-beam glass houses of Ray Kappe, or the cantilevered aeronautical designs of Albert Frey, Southern California is a proper mecca of Mid-century Modernist style. Especially in Palm Springs, where Mid-century Modern is practically a religion. And though the style encompasses a mind-boggling array of different elements and approaches, it’s one of those architectural styles that falls easily under the category of “you know it when you see it.” Things like clean, geometric shapes and lines, wide, low footprints, flat (even if cantilevered) rooflines, and open beams are universal hallmarks of this eternally beloved style.
Googie
Easily one of the more eccentrically named architectural styles of recent history, Googie was an offshoot of Mid-century Modern design that tapped into the Atomic Age futurism of the 1950s. It was pioneered in California by architect John Lautner — a student of Frank Lloyd Wright’s — and was named after Googies Coffee Shop, a building that he designed in 1949 on West Hollywood’s famous Sunset Strip. Googie architecture is a style that people tend to either love or hate, but for anyone who grew up in and around Los Angeles, it’s an indelible part of the cultural landscape. It’s basically a Jetsons approach to what people in the 1950s assumed the future might look like, with dramatic upswept roofs, curvilinear lines, aggressive geometric shapes, and bright Easter egg colors. Googie buildings tend to look like spaceships, or boomerangs, or ray guns, or drawings of atoms more than actual buildings. It’s quirky and it’s weird, but it’s so uniquely Southern California that you can’t help but love it. Assuming, of course, that you love the quirks and the weirdness of Southern California.