Calvin Chester Straub (March 16, 1920 – October 21, 1998[1]) FAIA was an American architect known for his significant impact on architecture as both a designer and an educator.
His architectural projects, primarily residential, were published extensively and often featured in lifestyle magazine Sunset, contributing to the shaping of a post-World War II contemporary Southern California style.
[citation needed] Straub and his contemporaries had a common culture — a comradeship born through military training and shared wartime experiences — that inspired a progressive architectural movement.
The community of like-minded architects who were also military veterans included Craig Ellwood (1922–1992), Alfred Newman Beadle (1927–1998), Gordon Drake (1917–1951), Pierre Koenig (1925–2009), Ralph Haver (1915–1987).
[citation needed] Born March 16, 1920, he spent his earliest years in a residence on Nob Hill in San Francisco.
"[4] Upon high school graduation, Calvin enrolled at Pasadena Junior College, where he took courses in architecture and was active in the ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Center) program.
The firm's terra cotta appears in famous Chicago works by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright.
On December 7 of that year, he was in Independence, Texas, with Professor Bill Caudell and two other students looking at old regional buildings when they heard on the radio that Pearl Harbor had been attacked.
[citation needed] In 1946, after his tour of duty, Straub arrived back in Pasadena, California, intent on resuming his architectural career.
He and the school became focused on architectural responses to social issues, such as the population boom in Los Angeles and the need for low-cost housing with limited resources.
Straub's circle of friends included a number of individuals that had never had any construction experience, but who concluded that if they helped each other, they could solve their housing dilemma.
Straub became an "heir of the 'woodsy' Arts and Crafts tradition" being "acquainted with the modernist movement led in the west by Nuetra but initiated by Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe," and, because of his own interests, "accepted it with enthusiasm.
"[7] "Using building materials expressive of the naturalist philosophy of the West, the design theories of the 'Arts and Crafts' Movement, and the functional traditions of the Chicago School, they carried on the development of an 'American architecture' ...
[8] His designs were born of craft, not technology, inspired by natural materials, informed by a personal artistic expression yet firmly committed to principles of humanism, function, responsive to the patron, context and climate; for the pleasure of use.
The Bay Region Style was, after all, about fusion, what Gwendolyn Wright calls "a joyful Modernism that freely mixed local vernaculars with Japanese and European influences, native redwood with industrial materials, compositional order with quirky details."
As an introduction to a retrospective exhibit of his work assembled in 1987, Straub recalled a "Statement of Intent" he wrote as a young architect in the 1950s.
A study of his works should reflect these principles again and again:[2] In Straub's lecture notes prepared for a 1982 College of Architecture, Arizona State University symposium on the American House for "The Historical Development of the Western Home," one recognizes his values.
They also summarize much of the work promoted in that era through Sunset Magazine, and many other Western publications, including Arts and Architecture[10] and its case study program that made Straub and others famous.
These observations by Calvin C. Straub on the Western home perhaps most clearly define his work, his contribution to architecture and that of those contemporaries who shared similar principles.