Joseph Esherick’s Oral History Illuminates an Architectural Icon
Joseph Esherick passed away December 18, 1998, at the age of 83. |
Joseph Esherick received the American Association of Architects Gold Medal in May 1989. He “profoundly shaped the profession he serves and the landscape he loves,” reads the citation. The Cannery, Sea Ranch, Monterey Bay Aquarium, UC Berkeley’s YWCA and Child Study Center — such influential northern California spaces are unmistakably Esherick, as are hundreds of handsome private residences.
An 800-page interview with Esherick by Bancroft’s Regional Oral History Office is the most recent in a series of ROHO interviews with architects that reaches back to the 1959 interview with William Charles Hays, architect of Doe Library. We have also interviewed William Wurster and Vernon DeMars, who, with Esherick, were founders of Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design.
Esherick’s firm, Esherick, Homsey, Dodge & Davis, put its stamp on Wurster Hall, and EHDD currently has the challenge of the Wurster Hall seismic retrofit. The remodeling and underground addition to Doe Library is also an EHDD project. Thus oral history and campus architectural history are entwined.
Other oral histories in the series, including those on Julia Morgan, religious architecture, and landscape architecture, have created a rich primary resource at Bancroft.
Choosing Esherick for an oral history was obvious: he is the area’s most important architect.
How to fund the project was the next question. We received generous support from several Esherick clients: Ernest Gallo, Richard and Rhoda Goldman, and Maryanna Shaw Stockholm. Support also came from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the College of Environmental Design, and the Department of Architecture.
In October 1994, when I began to interview Esherick in his office in San Francisco, EHDD was finishing work for the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, the remarkable orange and watermelon-colored state archives building in Sacramento, and projects for Stanford University and Mills College.
By contrast, Esherick, who had just celebrated his 80th birthday, and who is immensely proud of EHDD, was volunteering time on an elementary school in the Tenderloin, designing new houses for old clients, and showing historical slides at EHDD bag lunchs, believing that the ideas of Bernard Maybeck, Julia Morgan, Walter Steilberg, and John Muir are relevant in the ’90s.
A tall man who dressed in khakis, button-down blue shirts, and Cal sweatshirts, Esherick appeared both bashful and authoritative. Those qualities reflected his Philadelphia Quaker background and mentors who were builders, men who knew wood.
Wanting to hear all he could tell me about his mentors and how he thinks about architecture, I asked Esherick about the results of a 1962 study of creativity in architects. He objected to the study, saying, “There are lots of people who don’t speak very well — old craftsmen, for example. Many of those people have creative surges and attitudes, but they can’t explain it very well.”
I pursued that and he warned, “I would hate this thing to come out like, ‘this is the formula.’ I’m pretty unconscious of what motivates me and what does what. I spent a whole damned lifetime avoiding being owned or categorizable.”
What the oral history tells us about Esherick is that simple observations, getting information from all senses and sources, observing light and prevailing winds, noting what a new client reads and where, are all keys to doing good architecture.
I asked how he had evolved his way of helping clients articulate what they want. He said he stumbled a lot in the beginning. “Later on it became more conversational. I picked up less specific information and more anecdotal information. Meanings get plugged into things in very subtle ways. I kind of figured out what happened after it happened.”
Esherick had good relationships with his clients, and they came back for more houses. “The architect’s role, to my mind — I mean the ethical architect’s role — is the classic professional role of not doing what you want to do, but being of service to your client,” he told me.
This Esherick oral history is a stew of ideas and influences, thickened with descriptions of houses and clients. About his architecture it has been written, “it appears to deliberately slough off its ego and bequeath much of its interpretation to others. It is continually pointing beyond itself rather than towards itself.”
Esherick said of that comment, “A house isn’t like the body of somebody who fell in a glacier and gets frozen. If there is anything I hate, it’s finality of ideas.”
With that stern caveat, the reader is invited to understand the process of one of the Bay Area and America’s great architects.
To order a copy of Esherick’s oral history ($123 plus $4 shipping), call (510) 642-7395.
Suzanne Riess is a Senior Editor at the
Regional Oral History Office.
Volume 114
Spring 1999
Table of Contents
Bancroft Launches Bioscience Program with Stellar Symposium March 12–13
From the Director: Just what is it that you do, exactly?
The Business of the Humanities The “Trade”— what it is and how Bancroft uses it
The Thrill of the Chase Or, How the Biography of Poet Jack Spicer Came To Be
“The Times, They Are a’ Changin’” Bancroft Launches Free Speech Movement Archive
The Many Uses of Bancroft Collections
Joseph Esherick’s Oral History Illuminates an Architectural Icon
Where Do You “Find” Mark Twain’s Letters?
1999’s Keepsake: San Francisco in the Early 1850s
Bancroft Fellows Research Women and Space, Tobacco and Chocolate
