by Garrison Frost

The style of architecture known as Spanish Colonial Revival is probably the most common form of building in the South Bay. One can hardly pass 100 feet down any street without seeing at least some component of the form: red tile roofs, beige walls, heavy detailing and ornamentation.

According to the English architectural critic Reyner Banham, Spanish Colonial Revival is almost more of an assumption than a style in Southern California. “Spanish Colonial Revival [should] not be treated as an identifiable or consciously adopted style,” he writes, “but as something which is ever-present and can be taken for granted, like the weather — worth comment when it is outstandingly beautiful or conspicuously horrible.”

Banham points out that one of the reasons the style is so common is that it is ill-defined and adaptable to almost any need. “Left vague, it serves conveniently to cover a variety of building of generically Hispanic inspiration that has become almost the most natural way of building anywhere in Southern California; any building design that actively engages with the ecological and psychological facts of life in the area has a tendency to emerge with a Spanish Colonial Revival air of some sort, even though there is no single detail of usage at which the historian can point to identify the style.”

Contrary to what Banham says, however, we should not take the style for granted. Although there are certainly a number of elegant Spanish Colonial Revival examples in the South Bay, the form has entered into a phase where it encourages the lazy creation of ugly, soulless buildings. Of our worst buildings, most are Spanish Colonial Revival.

Although the style seems benign, the more one knows about Spanish Colonial Revival, the less attractive it becomes. At first glance, it appears to link the area’s present to its past. But that is not necessarily true. Spanish Colonial Revival, while it does have some precedent, was actually created in the early 20th Century to give this growing megalopolis some historical character.

As David Rieff, author of “Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World,” writes: “The Spanish names that the Anglo founders of Los Angeles chose as street names, as much as the Spanish architectural styles that they favored ... were chosen consciously. Though they were clearly inspired by genuine Spanish colonial buildings, these buildings were as much grafts on the landscape as the (imported) eucalyptus trees that shaded the better neighborhoods.”

Los Angeles critic Mike Davis has written that the Spanish Colonial Revival style is part of “the creation of a ersatz history which, through its comprehensive incorporation into the landscape and consumption, became an actual historical stratum in the culture of Los Angeles.”

It is particularly noteworthy to drive through, say, Manhattan Beach — a city whose only connection to Hispanic culture is Mexican restaurants and nannies — and see mansion after mansion in the Spanish Colonial style. “It was neo-Spanish architectural motifs rather than live Hispanics that were meant to add spice to the images of both Florida and California,” writes Rieff.

Banham argues that the opposite is true, that the architecture does provide a legitimate means to linking old California to its modern counterpart, both historically and ethnically. Nonetheless, as the style becomes ever more distorted by laziness and wealth, one is more and more led to believe that this link has long been severed.

None of which is to say that Spanish Colonial Revival should necessarily be a bad thing to look at. Whatever their intentions, builders have for years created beautiful homes and civic buildings in this style. The task of uglifying the form has been left to more recent developers seeking an inexpensive way to give a little “style” to their cookie-cutter condominiums and bulky ego palaces.

If Spanish Colonial Revival was something of an ambiguous form before the 1990s, it has certainly become more so now — to its detriment. Now we see red tile roofs slapped onto postmodern geometry, massive balcony decoration matched with Craftsman stained glass, beige walls with vinyl windows, elegant arches leading into Cape Cod doorways. The South Bay used to stand out in a good way because it didn’t feel the need to be constrained by some arbitrary regional style. But now we find that Spanish Colonial Revival has become a sort of grid upon which every other style is to be attached like facial features on a Mr. Potatohead.

This problem is only exacerbated by the scale of building that is going on in the South Bay. Spanish Colonial Revival, which supposedly reflects the modest village life of pre-American California, makes little sense on a seven-bedroom mansion with a four-SUV garage. It looks even more ridiculous on the now-ubiquitous two- or three-on-a-lot condo projects.

Of course the last thing we would ever want is some sort of governing board telling architects what styles they can use and how they can use them. God only knows that such a body would only force them to build more tiled roof Spanish Colonials, as the Palos Verdes’ art jury now does.

No, improvement will only come when the people who pay for these buildings — who live and work in them — demand more from the people who design them.

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