View of Utopia From the Ground Up : Architecture: Southland’s early years are reviewed at Laguna Art Museum in a lecture related to ‘Morphosis’ exhibit.

Visions of a new Garden of Eden lured thousands of Americans to Southern California in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Aptly enough, the buildings in their new home were fanciful blends of the Spanish missions and imported styles from exotic places, laced with idealized notions of life in a balmy utopia with a mythical past and a gloriously health-conscious future.

Kenneth Breisch, an architectural historian at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, offered a breezy, hourlong tour of those early years in a Thursday night lecture at the Laguna Art Museum, the first of a series of talks related to the exhibit “Morphosis: Making Architecture.”

Breisch, who sports a long ponytail, has an energetic style suited to covering a large chunk of material in a hurry.

He sketched in the basics of a city built in a desert and turned into a garden created by machinery (with the construction of the Los Angeles aqueduct in 1913). First the railroad and then--decades later--the automobile linked this Shangri-La with the rest of the United States. Lured by dreamy advertisements and enticing postcards touting such visions as a red-roofed mansion nestled within a citrus grove, people flocked to buy a piece of the dream. In 1887, during the first land boom, 2,000 real estate agents were doing $1 million each in land sales.

The suburbs, Breisch said, were always intended to be “an escape from the reality of technology,” even though they were accessible only by the Pacific Electric Railroad (known as the “red cars”) and by automobile.

The Green Hotel in Pasadena was built in 1898 as a Moorish fantasy, with turrets and balconies and wide, swaggering arches. Southern Pacific Station in Riverside, from 1904, was one of many buildings that showed how the harsh and austere Spanish missionary period was transformed into a pastoral myth. Towers, arcades and the ubiquitous red-tile roof spoke of a gentle time in which, Breisch said, “man and woman were one with the land.”

In 1884, Helen Jackson Hunt’s novel, “Ramona,” was a bestseller, prompting caravans of tourists in automobiles to gawk at buildings where the Indian princess supposedly once set foot, each designed in someone’s idea of early pueblo style, with lush indigenous and transplanted landscaping.

Breisch quoted a disparaging commentator of the era who noted that all stucco buildings were considered “Spanish,” but if the stucco was “trowelled to resemble a waffle iron,” a building would be “more Spanish.” A tiled roof supplied even more Spanish character. Add the ornamental touch of windows supported on spears, and your building would attain “the zenith” of Spanish design.

Early in the 1900s, architect Irving Gill came up with a way of retaining a memory of the Spanish Mission style but modifying it into a more abstract silhouette related to the modern designs of some of his European colleagues. Gill’s technologically advanced method of “tilt slab” construction employed concrete rather than wood or stucco and eliminated most ornament.

The California bungalow was synonymous with the good life, from the architectural heights of Greene and Greene’s “Craftsman” style to the mass-produced basics of a $721 Sears model that could be ordered through the mail. One bungalow company even advertised a picture of its product whipped by a blizzard in Moose Jaw, Canada--showing that you could buy a piece of the California dream even in the frozen North.

David Gebhard, professor of art history at UC Santa Barbara and author of “Architecture in Los Angeles: A Complete Guide,” will give the next lecture in the Laguna Art Museum architecture series, on Thursday at 7:30 p.m. Gebhard will speak on the work of Rudolf Schindler and Richard Neutra, the European-born architects who transformed Southern California architecture in the 1920s and ‘30s. Tickets are $10. Reservations are required: Call the museum’s education department at (714) 494-8971.