Golden State in a golden age

The fact that “we have no tradition is our best hope.”

So wrote the great Pasadena designer, ceramicist and teacher Ernest A. Batchelder in an essay first published in a 1907 issue of Gustav Stickley’s influential Craftsman magazine. The plural pronoun in Batchelder’s bold, even paradoxical boast was meant to describe what was then occurring around him, as California’s astonishing natural beauty and absence of calcified social conventions combined to stimulate a unique aesthetic moment.

Up and down the state, artists, artisans and architects animated by the spirit of the international Arts and Crafts movement and responding to a natural setting that seemed, to them, exotic and moving created a renaissance of domestic architecture and decorative art.

On an even earlier visit to California, Stickley himself had found the landscape a “bewildering scene of color,” one he thought blessedly free from the “demoralizing influence of the classic formula of the art successes of other nations.”

A year after Batchelder’s essay was published, the internationally prominent English architect and designer Charles R. Ashbee traveled to Pasadena, where Charles Sumner Greene took him on a daylong tour of the houses he and his brother were constructing. Later they took tea on the family’s terrace overlooking the arroyo, and Ashbee watched the snowcapped San Gabriels turn “rose red.” As he later wrote, “California speaks. Here things were really alive.”

Batchelder notwithstanding, the expression of such sentiments is a California tradition. In his wonderfully propulsive new biography -- “Pathfinder: John Charles Fremont and the Course of American Empire,” published this month by Hill and Wang -- historian Tom Chaffin describes how the herald of Manifest Destiny experienced this place after his party’s savage winter crossing of the Sierra Nevada:

“By late March of 1844, spring lay robustly abloom down the length of California’s Central Valley ... a riot of orange California poppies, deep blue lupines, bird’s-eye gilia, and countless other wild flowers.” As Fremont himself wrote, “Our road was now one continued enjoyment; and it was pleasant riding among this assemblage of green pastures with varied flowers and scattered groves, and out of the warm green spring, to look at the rocky and snowy peaks where lately we had suffered so much.”

A little more than half a century later, in 1911, the Harvard philosopher George Santayana told a Berkeley audience that he saw emerging in California a new sort of American inspired by “your forest and your sierras” whose “nonhuman beauty and peace ... stir the subhuman depths and the superhuman possibilities of your own spirit.”

California was a place, Santayana mused, where open-minded Americans might follow the lead of his colleague William James and give “a sincerely respectful hearing to sentimentalists, mystics, spiritualists, wizards, cranks, quacks and impostors.”

And so they did.

And that, coupled with the global trauma of World War I, changed everything. High-mindedness and spirituality gave way to fantasy and spiritualism; the progressive taste for reform in politics and daily life was supplanted by an appetite for pleasure. This was the era in which Californians imagined an idyllic Hispano-Mediterranean past and “Spanish revival” architecture became the “regional style.”

Stockbroker-turned-architect George Washington Smith designed Santa Barbara’s great Casa del Herrero for St. Louis businessman George F. Steadman. The young Wallace Neff built a sprawling “Spanish Colonial” rancho in Calabasas for King C. Gillette, inventor of the disposable razor blade.

But nothing before or since trumped the collaboration among publisher William Randolph Hearst -- a kind of multimedia Medici, really -- the architect Julia Morgan and the young engineer and builder George Loorz. Their work together on the so-called castle at San Simeon, at Wintoon (the Hearst family compound in Northern California), along the Grand Canyon and in Mexico is illuminated as never before in a remarkable new book, “Building for Hearst and Morgan: Voices from the George Loorz Papers” by the independent scholar and archivist Taylor Coffman.

As the incisive introduction by Kevin Starr points out, this volume, available this week from Berkeley Hills Books, is really a 581-page work of social history in which the vast correspondence that passed between and among this trio is meticulously edited into a densely factual but engaging narrative. More important, the human voices of the great patron, the fascinating architect and the plain-spoken, likable young engineer who oversaw their sprawling construction projects emerge as they never quite have before.

Making that happen involved years of research through tens of thousands of documents in four major archives, including one still in private hands, and particularly through Loorz’s previously unpublished papers.

Coffman assembled all the material into chronological order, and “in doing that, all sorts of connections came out,” he said. “Somebody writes to somebody else, then here’s the answer. A whole story all to itself was there for the telling.”

Coffman describes himself as “frankly a Hearst partisan, though I am well aware of his personal failings and eccentricities. But he had a hugely expansive mind and the money to let it roam where it would. But what pleases me most about this book is that its technique allows Julia Morgan to emerge as a real person for the first time in print.”

This is particularly true, Coffman said, in the letters she wrote to Loorz’s children and in the correspondence Hearst, Morgan and their construction supervisor exchanged concerning the beauty of their Central Coast and Northern California sites. Morgan, in particular, wrote frequently to Hearst about San Simeon, saying, “This is a gorgeous place and we have to do right by it.”

Opinions differ on whether or not they did. San Simeon -- or Hearst’s Castle, as it is more frequently known -- is part pastiche, part historical collage, part act of recovery, part a work of extravagant imagination. Among its prime movers, Morgan was certainly the most enigmatic: She was, by turn, the only woman in her Berkeley class of 1894 to graduate with a degree in engineering, protegee to the great San Francisco architect Bernard Maybeck, the first woman ever to study architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the first woman licensed to practice architecture in California, and the designer of more than 800 buildings, who gave years of her life to the collaborations with Hearst.

Unlike her contemporaries, she published nothing, maintaining a deep reticence until her death in 1957. “My buildings will be my legacy,” she said in a rare public comment. “They will speak for me long after I’m gone.”

They do. But so too in a very unexpected way does “Building for Hearst and Morgan.”