Harwell Hamilton Harris and the Weston Havens House
The Whole Idea · Organic Lineage
Harwell Hamilton Harris and the Weston Havens House
How a thirty-five degree slope forced a plan architect into the section, and produced the most original wood structure in California modernism.
Every house on a steep hill has to answer one question before it answers any other: what is your relationship to the ground? Dig in, and the hill keeps you. Step off, and you have to invent a structure that makes the stepping-off credible. In 1941, on a thirty-five degree slope on Panoramic Hill in Berkeley, Harwell Hamilton Harris stepped off — and then turned the roof upside down to prove he meant it.
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| Weston Havens House, 255 Panoramic Way, Berkeley, 1939–41 |
Harwell Hamilton Harris was born in Redlands in 1903 and spent his early twenties trying not to become an architect. He quit Pomona College and enrolled at the Otis Art Institute to study sculpture. A fellow student told him to go look at the house Frank Lloyd Wright had built for Aline Barnsdall on Olive Hill. Harris did not see a building there; he saw sculpture that could be walked through.
He planned to study architecture at Berkeley and never enrolled. Instead he went to work for Richard Neutra from 1928 to 1932, drafting on the Lovell Health House, and Neutra talked him out of going back to school. Harris entered the profession the way Lautner would a few years later and by a similar route: through the work itself, under a master, with no degree.
What he took from Neutra was not a style. It was the habit of listening to what a client actually needed. Harris later called his houses portraits of the people who commissioned them — and the Havens House is the one where that method produced something neither man could have arrived at alone.
The Pivot
Harris Was a Plan Architect
This is the part of the story most accounts skip, and it is the part that makes the Havens House comprehensible instead of merely impressive.
Through the 1930s Harris was a master of the well-solved plan. His houses, even the ones on slopes, were conceived looking down at paper. The Entenza House in Santa Monica, 1937, thrusts boldly out into the canyon — and is essentially a one-story scheme. The Lee Blair House of 1939, begun the same year Harris started drawing Havens, went further: three interlocking trays stepping down a hillside. Volumetric, but still a plan repeated at three levels.
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| John Entenza House, Santa Monica, 1937. Harris cantilevers into the canyon — but the scheme is one story, solved in plan. |
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| The Entenza House in California Arts & Architecture. Three years later Entenza took over the magazine, dropped the “California,” and launched the program that would overshadow Harris for good. |
Then came Panoramic Way, and the site would not take a plan. At thirty-five degrees, no arrangement of rooms in two dimensions solves anything. Harris was forced out of his own repertoire and into the section — and in the process out from under the residual influence of both Wright and Neutra. Whatever else the Havens House is, it is the building where Harris stopped composing and started sectioning.
The Client
The Man Who Sent It Back
John Weston Havens Jr. was born four months after Harris, into Berkeley real-estate money as an heir of Francis Kittredge Shattuck. Both men came from California pioneer stock, both were committed to a modernism that would be specifically Californian, and they became lifelong friends. That friendship is usually told as a charming footnote. It is actually the reason the house exists in the form it does.
Harris's first scheme for the site was a plan-driven proposal that stepped down the slope, with none of the sectional invention of what got built. Havens rejected it. He thought it took up too much of the site and was too extravagant, and he sent his friend back to start over.
The masterpiece is the second answer. The first one was ordinary, and the client knew it.
Any practicing architect will recognize what happened next. Constraint applied by someone who understands the work is not an obstacle. It is the thing that gets you past your own defaults. Harris later said that when you are young you want the permissive client, and when you are older you want complexity, because complexity forces you back on your originality. He was thirty-six when Havens sent the drawings back.
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| Harris with the presentation model of the second scheme. |
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| Floor plans and site section. Two volumes, a sunken court between them, a bridge across, and the drop the western wing steps out over. The section is where this house is designed. |
Structure
The Inverted Truss, and Its Four Jobs
Almost every other house on those slopes solves the problem the same way: cut into the hill, let the earth do half the structural work, take the view through a window. Harris did the opposite. He split the program into two volumes separated by a sunken court and joined by a bridge. The eastern volume — entry, carport, maid's quarters — stays anchored to the slope and connects to the street. The western volume detaches and walks out into the air.
The National Register nomination names two radical innovations at Havens: the inverted gables, and the detachment from the hillside. Those are one idea, not two. The trusses are what make the detachment buildable.
The western volume is carried by three inverted triangular trusses — gables turned upside down — stacked vertically: one supporting the flat roof, one the main floor, one the lower floor. A conventional gable puts its apex in the sky and its open mouth toward you. Harris turned each one over so the apex points down and the open face opens upward and outward. Four things happen at once, and they are the reason this is a great building rather than a clever one.
Structurally, the inverted truss gathers its load to a narrow bearing line and lets the floor plates run out over the drop without a forest of posts marching down the hillside. The house does not need the hill. It needs a line.
Spatially, the inclined ceiling formed by each truss aims the room at the view. A conventional gable makes a room that peaks at its center and settles at its edges; you are held in the middle. Harris's inversion makes a room lowest where you enter and highest where the glass is. The section physically points you at the Golden Gate.
Mechanically, the hollow interiors of the trusses serve as plenums for the radiant heating. The structure is the heating system.
And optically, the upper truss conceals clerestory windows that filter direct morning light and indirect afternoon light down into the main room. The same member that carries the roof, shapes the room, and warms it also meters the daylight.
Load, space, heat, light. One element, four jobs, none of them applied afterward. That is the argument of organic architecture stated in framing lumber.
Then look at the bridge. It is carried on the same inverted truss as the volume it leads to, with the bottom chord left exposed. Harris shows you the system outdoors, at small scale, on the way in — then encloses it overhead once you are inside. Whether the roof trusses are framed identically is not something the photographs settle, but it would be characteristic: one member type, scaled to its job, demonstrated before it is used. It would also make the heating plenum less an invention than a discovery — the architect finding a use for a void the geometry had already given him.
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| Living room. The truss read from below: ceiling rising toward the glass, heating plenum inside it, clerestory hidden in its upper face. Photo by Maynard L. Parker. |
Sequence
The Walk In
From the street there is almost nothing to see. A seven-foot redwood wall, now under Boston ivy, and the plain carved volume of the two-car garage. The entrance is a section of the fence set at a right angle to the road, and it is easy to walk past.
Through it, the path is the covered bridge. Its sides are high and inclined, so they give you sky and withhold everything below — you cross toward the house with no idea what is under you. The axis runs through the front door under a low ceiling and dead-ends in a freestanding wall. Turn off it, or take the stair down, and you find the kitchen, the bedrooms, the sunken court. Stay on it and you have to go around the wall. Beyond, the ceiling lifts and a hundred-eighty degrees of the Bay arrives at once, with the Golden Gate sitting square on the axis you have been walking since the street.
Compression, then release. Withheld, then given. Harris climbed Orchard Lane — the 1909 stair path that cuts up through Panoramic Hill, in and out of shade, crossing the switchbacks of the road — many times while he was getting to know this site. It is hard not to read the sequence of the house as the sequence of that climb brought indoors.
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| The release. What the whole promenade has been withholding. Photo by Maynard L. Parker. |
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| The sunken court, hidden from the bridge by its inclined sides — originally a badminton court. Note the bridge above: the same inverted truss as the house, bottom chord exposed. Photo by Maynard L. Parker. |
Discipline
Three Feet, Everywhere
Underneath the drama, the house is disciplined by a three-foot grid that organizes it spatially and functionally — the same order of module Wright, Neutra, and Schindler were all working with in those years. Ordinary California framing below, extraordinary trusses above, one dimensional rule running through all of it.
The module is what keeps the inversion from being a stunt. A gesture repeated three times inside a governed dimensional system stops being a gesture and becomes a language. That is the difference between a building with a good idea in it and a building made of an idea.
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| Exterior elevations. The three inverted trusses stacked and read in one drawing. |
The house is clad in redwood, largely unfinished — Harris had been leaving redwood bare since Fellowship Park, bringing the bloom of the wood out with accents of black lacquer and teak rather than covering it. The railings are chain-link fence. The closet doors are Celotex fiberboard, the ceiling panels Johns-Manville Flexboard: ordinary products asked to behave like finish material, which is Schindler's lesson applied without apology. The original kitchen appliances are still in place.
Between the dining room and the kitchen pass-through is a painted world map by Patricia Fudger, made — with the war unfolding — without national borders. The furniture is Aalto and Mathsson, collected by Havens himself on a trip through Finland and Sweden.
Theory
Regionalism of Restriction, Regionalism of Liberation
Harris's most durable contribution may not be a building at all. In his essay "Regionalism and Nationalism in Architecture" he draws a distinction that ought to be standard equipment for anyone who writes about place. There is a regionalism of restriction: defensive, backward-looking, a region protecting its own habits by refusing everything from outside. And there is a regionalism of liberation: a region that becomes the place where a new idea takes hold, because conditions there happen to be hospitable to it.
A region is not defined by what it keeps out. It is defined by what it lets happen first.
The Havens House is the proof of his own argument, and the proof runs through the slope. Nothing here is a local style. Cheap redwood, light framing and the labor that knew how to cut it, a climate that lets a building open to the air, a hillside too steep for anything conventional, and a client with the standing to reject the conventional answer — those are the conditions that made the inverted truss attemptable here and effectively nowhere else in 1939. The house is regional not because it looks Californian but because it could only have been tried in California.
Afterlife
What Survives
In 1957, for the AIA centennial, Architectural Record polled fifty architects and scholars for the hundred most significant works of architecture in the United States. Fourteen were houses. Havens tied for ninth with Neutra's Lovell Health House, and one juror put it beside Fallingwater for the originality of its response to site. Fallingwater and Lovell went into the canon. Havens receded — which is roughly what the building does from the street.
Weston Havens lived in it into his nineties and changed almost nothing. He left it to the University of California, and it is now stewarded by the College of Environmental Design at Berkeley, housing visiting professors and serving as a site for studio work. It went on the National Register in 2008.
It is also a redwood building detached from an exposed hillside in a wet climate, and it has needed repair after winter storms more than once. Houses that step off the hill have to be maintained by people who understand why they stepped off. That understanding is the fragile part — more fragile than the trusses, which have now held for eighty-five years.
Sources
John Loomis, "Havens House: Forgotten Masterpiece of California Modernism," arcCA 01.1, 2001 — source for the rejected first scheme, the plan-to-section pivot, the clerestories, and the 1957 Architectural Record survey. Lisa Germany, Harwell Hamilton Harris (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991). Harwell Hamilton Harris, The Organic View of Design, oral history transcript, UCLA. Harwell Hamilton Harris: A Collection of His Writings and Buildings, Student Publication of the School of Design, North Carolina State, Vol. 14 No. 5, 1965 — contains "Regionalism and Nationalism"; scanned by NCSU Libraries. Weston Havens House, National Register of Historic Places nomination, NPS 05000597, listed 2008. Harwell Hamilton Harris Papers, Alexander Architectural Archive, University of Texas at Austin. Maynard L. Parker Negatives, Photographs and Other Material, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley. Photography as credited; all images remain the property of their respective photographers.
Architectoid · The Whole Idea · Sullivan → Wright → Neutra → Harris
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