Browse Items (856 total)

In this 1905 house in Texas, Cliff May creates privacy with an enclosed patio surrounded on three sides by the house and one side with a roofed porch. With the patio as the center of the house, windows surround the patio, and the house extends…

These two images of Hanson show him at different points in his career. The first one from circa 1927 shows him while he was working on his most famous project, the Harold Lloyd estate. The second image shows Hanson as a well established land…

The Harry Calendar garden, in the Windsor Square neighborhood in Los Angeles, was one of Hanson's first landscape architecture commissions. In the images above, the bird house holds a spotlight to highlight the lily pond. The colonial style pergola…

George Cochran, head of Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Company, commissioned Hanson to create a garden on his multi-lot estate between Hobart and Harvard streets in Los Angeles. A long, narrow garden was created, with fully-grown trees brought in to…

Hanson designed this landscape for the backyard of his own home in Westlake, Calif. The design shows how a sculpted landscape can fit into a smaller suburban yard.

For the Kirk Johnson landscaping project, Hanson was introduced to the Johnson's by the architect of the house, George Washington Smith. The 8-acre property already contained many mature oak and cypress trees; Hanson utilized the existing trees to…

The Harold Lloyd estate, also known as Green Acres, was a 15-acre property with golf course, swimming pool, 900 foot long canoe racing area, handball court, and many additional outbuildings and features. Hanson designed all of the landscape features,…

For the Mrs. Dan Murphy garden, Hanson worked with architect Lutah Maria Riggs on the overall design for the landscape. Hanson had worked with Riggs previously on the Johnson estate in Montecito. The garden design was based on an Italian garden,…

George Washington Smith designed the home for Archibald Young in the Andalusian style. Hanson complimented this style with a similar landscaping, by utilizing various fountains and water features to highlight the design.

The architect A. Lawrence Kocher was asked to design a house for the Architectural League of New York City and the Allied Arts of Industries bi-annual exhibition. Kocher hired Frey to help design a house that used new materials, like steel and glass…

The Bel Vista affordable housing tract was built in 1945 as housing for War workers. The subdivision of 15 homes was designed by Albert Frey and John Porter Clark for the developers Sallie Stevens and Culver Nichols. This was the first subdivision…

Albert Frey was in partnership with John Porter Clark from 1939 until 1957. This office building was the firm's office on North Palm Canyon Drive in downtown Palm Springs. The unassuming modern two-story building now houses retail stores on its first…

The Raymond Cree house was built on the border of Palm Springs and Cathedral City. Cree was a real estate developer who had originally wanted to build a luxury resort on the site; instead a two bedroom house with pool and valley views was…

This is an early rendering of the Palm Springs Desert Museum, later renamed the Palm Springs Art Museum, in its earlier location on Tahquitz Drive. Clark & Frey worked with the Williams, Williams, Williams architecture firm, which also included E.…

Frey House 1 was built in 1940, as a small 16x20 rectangle, with corrugated metal walls and roof. In 1948, the living area was expanded, a second pool was installed that was partially indoors (surrounded by curving metal walls), as well as additions…

This section drawing shows the addition of a second floor bedroom, with hanging staircase ascending from the living room. The pool is on the left, partially inside the house. The dining room, with its hanging table, is on the right.

In 1960, Frey sold Frey House 1 to a developer who tore the house down, subdivided the two acre lot, and built a few standard stucco houses on the newly subdivided lots. The developer subsequently went bankrupt.

The house was built in 1940-1941 as a very small house, only 16x20. Frey added on to the house in 1948 and 1953. The first addition consisted of an additional living/sleeping area and an indoor/outdoor wading pool surrounded by corrugated metal walls…

In this iconic image, Albert Frey is pictured standing alongside his car, in front of Frey House 1. The unique circular second story with porthole windows was an addition in 1953-1954.

Frey House 2 is perched on the side of the mountain, just above the Palm Springs Art Museum. Frey stipulated in his will that the house was to be given to the Art Museum after his death. The house is occasionally open for tours, usually during Palm…

Frey House 2 is also a small house, perched on a steep slope above Palm Springs. The main feature on the interior of the house is a large boulder, which divides the dining area from the sleeping area. Frey used metal channels on the rock and had the…

This floor plan shows the original plan for the house, with no separate bedroom, just a sleeping area adjacent to the living room. The large oval next to the dining room table is a large boulder, which is the centerpiece of the house.

This portrait of Albert Frey later in life was taken in Frey House 2, leaning against the large boulder, overlooking downtown Palm Springs.

This section drawing shows the steep slope of the building site. The carport is on the lowest level, with pool directly above. The house sits farther up the slope, with the large boulder represented by the dotted line on the upper right.

Architects A. Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey worked together in 1933-1934 to design low-cost structures, like the Aluminaire House. Kocher was the managing editor of Architectural Record, faculty at the University of Virginia and Black Mountain…

In 1934, Frey was sent to Palm Springs to design and build an office building, with an apartment above, for Dr. J.J. Kocher, the brother of A. Lawrence Kocher. The building was designed to take advantage of the climate and featured a courtyard…

The industrial designer Raymond Loewy commissioned Frey to design a bachelor pad and winter getaway in 1947, in Palm Springs. The small (1100 square feet) house features walls of sliding glass doors opening onto a patio and pool. The outdoor living…

The J.A. Lyons house was a large (5 bedroom), sprawling house in the Smoke Tree Ranch development in Palm Springs. With five bedrooms and four bathrooms, the Lyons house was much more grand than some of Frey's other residences.

The Harold R. Newton house on Palisades Drive in Palm Springs was a small house perched on the side of a steeply sloping lot. Multiple terraces created a more stable hillside and provided space for an access stairway.

The Salton Sea was a formerly dry lake bed located southeast of Palm Springs. The area was flooded as part of an effort to irrigate the surrounding area in the early 1900s, and is one of the largest lakes in California. It is also one of the saltiest…

The Adrian Pelletier house in Palm Desert was built as the town was being developed as a getaway for Hollywood stars. Its location near both the Shadow Mountain Club and Marrakesh Country Club was a very desirable location.

Frey and Chambers designed the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway station house (the building at the base of the mountain) in 1963. The Tramway Gas Station, at the corner of Tramway Road and Highway 111, was constructed in 1965 with a distinctive hyperbolic…

A watercolor rendering of the Arts Building, from an aerial birds-eye perspective. This shows the Spanish Colonial Revival influence on the design, with a focus on the red tile roof, courtyards, and patio spaces. Additionally, wind screens made of…

This original drawing depicts each of the four main elevations: west, north, east, and south. The main entrance facade (south elevation) contains the majority of the cast concrete decorative elements. The west elevation shows the pergola and patio…

The black and white photograph shows the front facade of the hotel, with 1920s era automobiles. The caption at the bottom of the photograph: "First structure ever erected utilizing Ancient Maya Art Motifs throughout."

Colored pencil on board rendering of exterior view of hotel. This presentation board shows the view of the front entrance of the hotel, with shops on either side. The asymmetrical "Mayan" stonework is shown above the entrance, and the sage green…

Colored pencil rendering of exterior side view of hotel on board. This view shows the corner of Foothill Boulevard (old Route 66), and Magnolia Avenue. It features "Mayan" decorative motifs on the corner, and along the side of the building. The view…

The original floor plan for the first floor of the hotel. Stores, barber shop, and coffee shop are along the bottom of the image. The lobby and dining room for the restaurant are in the center. In the upper right-hand corner are four one-room…

This image depicts the front desk in the lobby of the hotel. The "Mayan" themed furniture and the wall accents (including the drinking fountain) were designed by Stacy-Judd. The short staircase led to the private dining rooms for the restaurant.

Colored pencil on board. Rendering of interior of lobby; this shows the original design from August 1924. This presentation board displays the full color effect that Stacy-Judd was trying to achieve with his "Mayan Revival" style. The fireplace is on…

This is a scale drawing of the north and south walls of the Aztec Hotel lobby. The north wall features the detail work on the staircase to the second floor, doorways leading to the restaurant dining rooms, and the front desk. The south elevation…

Black and white photograph of the lobby looking towards the east. The front desk is on the left, with the entrance to the lobby on the right. The stairway on the far left leads to the outdoor patio area for the restaurant. "Mayan" themed furniture…

Photograph of interior of lobby looking towards the fireplace with the front desk to the right-hand side. Cast concrete was used for the "Mayan" forms around the doorways and fireplace. Stacy-Judd painted the murals on the walls and designed the…

This portrait of Barton Myers was taken early in his career in Toronto, Canada outside the residence he designed for himself and his family.

This interior drawing is one of Barton Myers' early student projects. Myers went to the University of Pennsylvania School of Architecture and studied under Louis Kahn. He graduated in 1964.

In 1980, the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency was planning to demolish the Bunker Hill area of the city and organized a competition for a team of architects to design a new urban center. A Grand Avenue proposal was created by developer…

Myers renovated and expanded the Art Gallery-- renovating the existing 190,000 square feet of museum and adding another 100,000 square feet. The renovations included the re-working of buildings dating back to 1817, and to connect the various new and…

For the Bekins house in the Toro Canyon area of Montecito, Myers utilized the same type of steel construction he used in his own nearby house. Myers worked with landscape architects Arcadia Studios to preserve some of the landscape features…

The Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts was the initial phase of building for the Cerritos Town Center development. The arts center was a grouping of buildings designed for theater performances, meetings, receptions, and other gatherings. The…

The Citadel Theatre complex was designed around a pedestrian mall, with the 700-seat proscenium theater, the 300-seat experimental theater, and the 250-seat cinema/lecture hall all having lobbies which opened onto the central pedestrian mall.

Don Watt was the founder of The Watt Group, a retail branding and design consultancy business. Myers designed the Studio building with an interior atrium which included trees.

The Dundas-Shelbourne project was an infill housing scheme undertaken by the City of Toronto's Non-Profit Housing Corporation. Instead of tearing down existing housing stock to build high-rise towers, Myers and Diamond designed 5- to 7-story…

"Vacant Lottery" was a special issue of Design Quarterly magazine which was co-written by Barton Myers and George Baird in 1978. The graphics show the existing buildings in dark blue, new construction in light blue, outside space is orange, and other…

This 1500-seat theater is modeled on Greek and Roman theaters. It overlooks a ravine, which provides a natural backdrop to the stage performances.
The Earl Bales Outdoor Theater is now called the Barry Zukerman Amphitheater in Earl Bales Park.

Ghent Square was a project for the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority. Myers designed townhomes for the northeast quadrant of the square-- the development was sited around a central green space.

Myers designed an open and airy restaurant within the structure of an old warehouse building in downtown Toronto.

Myers designed the Housing University Building (HUB) at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The HUB is a 957-foot-long galleria with retail shops, day care center, recreation facilities, and student housing on the upper floors of…

The Indian Paintbrush production company building is an example of adaptive re-use of a previously under-utilized brick building into modern office space. Myers designed a one-story office complex with a partial second-story, and a rooftop deck.

The Moses Myers House is a historic house museum in Norfolk, Virginia. Barton Myers' ancestors built the house in 1792 and maintained the house through the years.

Myers personal home in the Toro Canyon area of Montecito, sits on 38 acres of canyon land which backs up to the Los Padres National Forest. The house was designed so that if a wildfire were to threaten the structure, the metal walls would provide…

Barton Myers designed and built his first residence for himself at 19 Berryman in Toronto. At the time he was partners in the firm A.J. Diamond and Barton Myers Architects. The house was an infill project on a narrow vacant lot. Myers designed the…

With the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJ PAC), Myers created a multi-building center with theaters, conference rooms, and restaurants to connect existing parts of Newark (a Military Park and the Passaic River) with each other and the new venue.…

The building, at 240 St. George Street in Toronto, was designed to be the office space for the Ontario Medical Association. The building now houses the Consulate General of the People's Republic of China.

The design competition for the civic center of Phoenix placed the main municipal buildings at the center of the city; the Myers plan incorporates the main arteries into how the architecture works with the surrounding area. The low-rise buildings were…

The Portland Performing Arts Center was designed in association with BOOR/A and ELS Design Group. Myers designed two theaters, the 900-seat Newmark Theatre and the 360-seat Dolores Winningstad Theater, as well as offices, ticketing area, and support…

For the Seagram Museum, Myers used the original nineteenth-century barrel warehouse, which had held up to 6000 barrels of whiskey, as part of the exhibition space. He also used wood beams from the warehouse to clad the new structures. At the time of…

The alterations and addition to the theatre building faced the river and a public park, therefore the modifications were made with public access and views in mind.

For the United States Pavillion at the Universal Exposition of Seville (Expo 92) competition, Myers created a series of buildings connected by courtyards, with theaters, exhibition space, and a water wall, all capped by three 'shade sails' to provide…

For this early house on a steeply sloping lot, Myers used pilings to raise the house and create space for a patio or eventual addition.

For this early house on a steeply sloping lot, Myers used pilings to raise the house and create space for a patio or eventual addition.

The York Square project, in the Yorkville Village neighborhood of Toronto, was an urban infill development which revitalized old commercial buildings in an established neighborhood into a new space for restaurants and cafes to coalesce around a new…

The Yorkville Branch Library in Toronto was originally designed in 1907 by architect Robert McCallum, the city architect, as part of a Carnegie library grant. Myers added on to the original Beaux Arts style building, with an addition to the back of…

This is a photograph of a model of the Biological Sciences II building, looking at the north-west corner of the building, with Parking Lot #1 on the left side of the image. The building houses numerous laboratories, offices, and other research…

The Bren School of Environmental Studies is one of the premier environmental science schools in the country, and the only graduate school of environmental management in the UC system. The building itself is also exceptional. The first dedicated…

This photograph of a model of Broida Hall shows a view from the south, with Webb Hall and the Woodhouse Laboratory in the foreground. In addition to classroom and office space, Broida also has two lecture halls. As one of the later works of Charles…

California City was chosen as a building site because of its' proximity to highways, railroads, military bases, and mining. It also was purported to sit on top of an underground aquifer that would never run dry. Smith and Williams, along with…

Despite all of the city planning and marketing of California City, the population did not increase at the rates hoped for by the investors. The marketing of California City was aimed at people in the greater Los Angeles area who wanted to escape the…

California City was designed as a master-planned community, with all of the necessities of life close by: home, work, recreation, and shopping. Smith and Williams were able to start with a blank canvas-- literally the open desert-- to create multiple…

The main recreation area at the center of town was the Central Park. It contained golf courses, swimming pools, and a large lake for boating and fishing. Smith and Williams designed this distinctive shade structure for the end of the boat ramp.

As city planners, Smith and Williams designed many different types of buildings used by various parts of the community. The Congregational Church in California City utilized the same stylistic roof and shade structure motif of the recreation building…

In order to attract a wide variety and number of prospective home owners to this planned community, Smith and Williams designed a variety of neighborhood plans to fit different demographics. Some neighborhoods featured wide, park-like lots without…

A rendering of the landscape plan for the campus. This plan orients south at the top of the plan, with the lagoon and ocean at the top and left of the image. Three quadrangles (south, east, and northwest) are shown originating from a central point.…

A photographic print of a birds eye view rendering of a version of the campus plan. The foreground shows the general outline of the residence halls, with the academic and administrative units towards the top of the image. Development on the lagoon…

This grouping of portraits shows the serious nature of Winslow.

The Bliss house was one of Winslow's largest private commissions. The 80 room mansion for William and Anna Dorinda Bliss, at the corner of Olive Mill and Hot Springs Roads in Montecito, was to be their summer residence. The 45 acre estate, named Casa…

Winslow altered the Chapman Park Hotel and Bungalows, which were located on Wilshire Boulevard, in 1936. The hotel had been in business since the early 1900s, and Winslow added details to make the walled garden with bungalow cottages feel more like a…

The Los Angeles Central Library was one of Bertram Goodhue's final projects, which he was working on when he died in 1924. Winslow took over and finished the project in 1926.
The early Art Deco building featured Egyptian friezes and inscriptions on…

The Panama-California Exposition opened in 1915 in Balboa Park, San Diego, as a celebration of the opening and of the Panama Canal a few years prior. The Expo originally picked architect John Galen Howard to design the site, but due to his…

The Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History was designed in a Spanish Colonial Revival style and built along the banks of Mission Creek, just a few blocks from the Santa Barbara Mission. Winslow designed a series of buildings interconnected with…

The Valley Club is a golf course originally designed by renown course designers Alister MacKenzie and Robert Hunter and the American Golf Course Construction Company. The main club building featured a main dining room, men's and women's lounges, as…

A rendering of the Chemistry Building, taken from the southern edge of the East Lawn, looking north. This building echoes some of the extended architectural vocabulary of the late campus standard, with patterned concrete block, dentil mouldings under…

A rendering of what is now Girvetz Hall, before the addition of South Hall to it's western side. The building was also known as South Hall, after North Hall was built in 1962. It was the first permanent home for the Social Science and Foreign…

In 1947, Good Housekeeping magazine published May’s design of a small ranch house for a 60 x 120- foot lot, with the tag line, “Five rooms indoors—five outdoors.” The article boasts that the house is only 42 feet wide and “[t]here is no…

The Cliff May archive contains many personal and professional portraits and publicity images of Cliff May.
The second image was published in House and Garden in February 1957 and shows Cliff May, daughter Marilyn, son-in-law Lawrence Philips,…

The house plans for the "Magic Money" ranch houses could vary between two and three bedroom models, as well as with or without two-car detached garage. The emphasis in these plans is on indoor-outdoor living, as exemplified by the large patio areas…

May first took the plans for his postwar demonstration house to Sunset, asking the magazine to sponsor the building of the house. When Sunset declined, House Beautiful agreed to partner with May on the house. First National Finance Corporation…

Cliff May and John A. Smith formalized their relationship in a contractual partnership to “jointly undertake the construction of dwellings for sale in the vicinity of Los Angeles,” naming May as builder and designer and Smith as financier through…

The idea for Cliff May Homes, a business of selling designs for prefabricated tract houses, was born in 1950 out of discussions between Cliff May and Chris Choate, an architect working in May’s office. May and Choate did field research, visiting…

This promotional image highlights the suburban nature of the Cliff May Homes tracts, with lush landscaping and ample parking.

Cliff May Homes rationallized the building process and used elements of prefabricated building parts to lower costs. This very colorful presentation drawing highlights the attractive exterior of the home.