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As with so
much else, the West Coast followed its own drummer in guidebook
production when David Gebhard and Robert Winter produced their first
"Guide to Architecture in Southern California" in 1965. First of all, it carried
the gloss of scholarly cachet, spurred by a 1964 College Art Association/Society of
Architectural Historians conference in Los Angeles--an architect by training,
Gebhard was also a sometime SAH president and scholar specializing in the Prairie
School and West Coast Modernism. In the grand Pevsnerian tradition, it was an attempt
torationalize and make sense of surroundings--which took on a brave new dimension in
the dispersed, auto-oriented environs of Los Angeles--and inevitably, the book reflected
the authors' biases (which, in the nuclear shadow of Esther McCoy, John Entenza, et al,
was not entirely adisadvantage). But the Gebhard-Winter touch was lighter than in the
typical AIA Guide; and moreover, the authors refused to rest on their laurels. By the
second (1977) edition, their once slightly rareified perspective had been thoroughly,
and in some ways even obsessively, imbued by a new breadth in architectural taste and
scholarship, self-consciously embracing on the one hand once-unfashionable (or ill-understood)
vernacular and Arts & Crafts and revivalist and Moderne styles, and on the other hand the
new perspectives on the "Pop" environment offered by Reyner Banham, Robert Venturi, and
others. If that wasn't enough, Gebhard also in this period co-authored a sister guide to
Northern California, and another to his home state of Minnesota, and his distinctive
motivating influence can be felt in other guides produced from the 70s onward--indeed,
the general Gebhard guidebook formula, a looser, less dense version of AIA-NYC's
key-entered-text-with-random-illustrations format (and venturing a stage further in its
coverage of rural and small-town America), became the most popular and versatile American
standard for the genre.
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In spite of
Gebhard's status as a veritable king of the architectural
guidebook in America, his own touch was, at least initially, less easy than
that of Pevsner or White & Willensky; the 70s Gebhard guides, especially,
tended to be strained and even sloppy (or perhaps, to be Californian, "laid
back"). Subsequent (1985, 1994) editions for LA and LA County (by now
scaled back from the original Southern California-wide scope) are much more
cohesive, though still marked by curious Gebhardian idiosyncracies such as
an almost fetishistic obsession with the idea of "High Art" (whatever that
is). In the end, even with their too-often clumsy writing, or vestigial
biases and lacunae that verged on the primitively anachronistic in the
Access era, they fulfilled that eternally Pevsnerian function--of providing
a legible, sophisticated matrix for generating (even among non-architects)
appreciation of and interest in the regional architectural milieu, wherever
the region might be. By the 90s Gebhard (who died in 1996) had earned his
due as the godfather of the Buildings of the United States series, the
long-awaited American counterpart to the Pevsner series.
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Introduction
Pevsner and WPA
America: the first wave
AIA Guide to New York City
David Gebhard: America's Pevsner
Goldberger, Banham, and Moore (and more).
Buffalo: Vindication
Chicago: Maturity
The Buildings of the United States series
London + Vienna + Berlin = Cartesian Europe
One Vancouver, many Montréals
Toronto: Opportunity
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