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Save The Ranch
The Intrinsic Value of Ranch Houses
Hosted by W.A. Sclight, AIA
“Can't Get No Respect”
Today, the Ranch, like comedian Rodney Dangerfield, “can't get no respect.” Critics (and there are many of these) deride “Ranchburgers” as a bland character-less boxes, representative of a socially unenlightened period of conformity and competitive consumerism.
The truth is far more complicated and more interesting.
In the two decades following World War II, Ranch Houses were enormously popular, accounting for nine out of every 10 new homes constructed in the United States. As late as 1970, four of every five new homes were Ranches or the two-story variants called High Ranches or Split-Levels.
Between 1946 and 1964, the era of the Baby Boom, 78 million children were born in the United States. Obviously, Americans needed housing in a big way. Standardization and manufacturing techniques that worked so well arming a nation to defeat Germany and Japan were adapted to build affordable homes, automobiles, appliances and consumer goods for a newly prosperous, mobile and expansive peace-time population, optimistic about the Future and gripped by the idea of Progress.
In this Atomic Age, vast new bedroom communities of tract homes mushroomed into sprawling suburbs
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that a city workforce could now easily reach driving Jet Age-styled cars over multi-lane superhighways.
Madison Avenue's Mad Men were perfecting mass marketing for an America embracing innovation as never before. Suddenly, it seemed, everything should be “new” and “improved,” especially the homes we lived in.
Modern In Every Sense
The Ranch House fit the bill perfectly: in every sense it was “modern.”
Home-buyers, buoyed by VA and FHA loans, wanted up-to-date, efficient, affordable homes; what they got was much, much more.
It was a new Lifestyle, expressed as a residence that was at once familiar, safe, predictable and quintessentially American, while fundamentally departing from most of the earlier housing forms.
This is not to say that the Ranch did not draw inspiration for the past. It did. In fact its huge public acceptance and success derives partly from incorporating the familiar architectural antecedents of earlier styles:
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From Arts and Crafts houses, like those of Green and Green in Pasadena, came the low pitched roofs and large overhangs;
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From the immensely popular Craftsman Bungalows of the 20s, we see a fundamental simplicity and straightforward use of indigenous materials;
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From the Prairie Houses of Frank Lloyd Wright, came acceptance for sprawling low-slung, ground-hugging plans and proportions;
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Wright also contributed another of the Ranch's most distinguishing features, the Carport or attached garage.
The Ranch Changed America (walking south)
This is a cultural as well as an architectural saga, and we can read the story of how the Ranch House changed America right here on Corrigan Street.
The houses themselves illustrate the sharp contrast between pre-war and post-war attitudes toward manners, employment, family, community and especially leisure.
For context, we get the preface as we stroll past the home built at the easterly corner of Hill Street, and a smaller similar home nearby across the street. They date to the first decade of the century. Both are Shingle Style Dutch Colonials, with traditional multi-pane double hung windows, columns and porches.
As we move a little further north on the west side of the street there is a small Depression-era single-story house, what is now called a Minimal Traditional for its lack of complexity or detailing.
Its neighbor across the street is a period archetype, a Tudor. This one is a beautifully preserved example of a 20's middle class residence. Built in the prosperous years before the Crash, its owners very probably owned a car, but you will notice that this house, like its other nearby neighbors, does not have a garage.
The very titles given these house styles reveals the importance of history, tradition and culture derived from our European ancestors. The architectural organization of these homes is hierarchical and relatively formal, especially as expressed by the usual interior layout of discrete rectangular rooms.
Regardless of the Style period, these houses would typically include Entry Vestibules, Parlors and Dining Rooms facing the street. The Kitchen and other Service functions happened at the rear. Stairs to the second floor were held to an exterior wall and usually all the Bedrooms were in the upper story.
After these fine homes were built at the south end of Corrigan Street, residential development further north stopped, eclipsed by the Great Depression and World War II. When building resumed after the war, America transformed, literally opened up and spread its wings.
A perfect Time Capsule (walking north)
Cliff May's Importance
As a nation, America saw itself differently after the war. The Ranch House is a hallmark of this new period. And, Corrigan Street is a perfect time capsule.
Because so many were built, in every region of the country, it is common for most people to think that the Ranch House was entirely a post-war phenomenon lacking a clear linage or intellectual progenitor.
In fact, the first Ranch House -- and even the name -- is attributed to one man, William Wilson Wurster, a Beaux-Arts-trained San Francisco Bay Area architect whose rustic 1928 Gregory Farmhouse in Scotts Valley, CA, earned him an honor award from the Northern California Chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 1929.
The Gregory Farmhouse
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which had no electricity and employed an elevated tower to capture and store water, contains all the elements that characterize the Ranch type in every iteration that was to follow:
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a single-story building organized asymmetrically in an L-shaped or U-shaped plan;
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a low-pitched, cross-gabled or hipped roof with large overhangs;
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rooms arranged to open and flow one into another;
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large, glazed windows and doors positioned to give occupants breath-taking views of the countryside, or intimate glimpses of private gardens, and easy access to a patio or central courtyard;
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blurring the distinction between indoors and outdoors;
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creating spaces suitable for a variety of uses;
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simple unadorned interiors and exteriors relied on a straightforward
use of indigenous materials for texture and contrast.
Tthe Gregory Farmhouse's only truly strong architectural statement was its ground-hugging linearity symbolic of the country's westward expansion and Everyman democracy.
Sunset Magazine, a popular widely circulated publication which fashioned itself as the voice of western living, featured a stylized rendering of the home on its July 1930 cover, showing a man in chaps standing in its courtyard.
Even though no horses were boarded at the Gregory “ranch,” the name was fixed to the style.
Wurster certainly created the prototype, but another Californian, Cliff May of San Diego, is credited with popularizing and mass-marketing the style based on a tiled-roofed, one-story courtyard house he designed for a venture with his future father-in-law in 1931.
It sold easily for $9,500, despite the Depression, and May, who said his inspiration came from the Spanish Mission
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architecture of the home his aunt owned when he was a child, became enormously successful, especially after the war in collaboration with architect Chris Choate and a developer named Ross Cortese.
May designed more than a thousand custom homes, sold plans for more than 18,000 Ranch Houses and during the 50s and 60s designed and developed Ranch House tracts in numerous locations throughout California.
His houses were economical to build and maintain and, best of all, could be easily expanded and changed to suit any site, any region, any individual taste, any Lifestyle. No preceding style had ever been so mutable, and yet so devoid of the traditional domestic status symbols, such as columns, porticos, tall gables and fancy trim.
The Ranch's one extravagance was the large “picture window” facing the street. It first appeared on the “Levittowner” when Alfred Levitt, switching from Capes to Ranches for his tract development in
Pennsylvania, put an eight-foot-wide kitchen window on the street side of the home.
Critics who carped about all that glass on the front of the house offering neither privacy nor views, missed the point. Americans welcomed the opportunity to put up all kinds of displays, from Christmas lights and wreaths to cardboard Halloween skeletons and Thanksgiving pumpkins.
These windows were very often illuminated by the flickering glow coming, not from a cozy fire, but from the bluish glare of a new television. It was the popularity of TV watching, especially among the household's children, that led to a need for a separate “recreation room” to preserve the Living Room for formal entertaining. Thus, the Split-Level was born.
Before the Ranch, American houses, even modest Bungalows, had porches on the front, but did not open to decks or patios on the back.
The Ranch House, with its generous use of glass, especially large sliding glass units, satisfied, or more probably created, a whole new interest in leisurely “backyard living.”
Another departure from earlier forms, was the placement of bedrooms on the front of these new one-story residences. The architectural role of the Front Entry Door was diminished, and Entry Vestibules disappeared altogether--you were greeted right in the Living Room.
The most important front portal was the one for the car to drive into the
attached garage, from which one could gain direct access to the Eat-in Kitchen.
The open plan interiors and all kinds of new convenience appliances made everything and everyone more casual. Gypsum board “sheetrock” replaced plaster, and wood moldings became simple one-piece frames or were eliminated entirely. Slab birch plywood door and cabinet fronts took the place of “old-fashioned” and expensive paneled units.
Interiors had vaulted ceilings and exposed beams with indirect lighting. Done well, these new American homes seemed roomy, informal, light-filled and connected to the landscape in ways earlier residences had never been before.
Take a close look at the gracious Ranch House neighborhood that Corrigan Street evolved into after the war.
Here you will find many well-done examples of the style that still have a fresh relaxed and simple elegance. Some may seem a bit mundane and dated it is true.
But they can be easily refreshed because their simple shapes and minimalist interiors remain very adaptable. Here on Corrigan Street, the cultural story of American in the second half of the Twentieth Century survives for all to read and appreciate.