Donald Olsen (b. 1919) is a prominent Californian architect who has contributed greatly to the residential landscape of California’s eastern Bay Area – above all Berkeley. Constructed in 1954, the Olsen House is one of architect Donald Olsen's earlier works and clearly represents his unique style and architectural language, which often stood out among the works of other popular Bay Area architects at the time. The building illustrates his long-founded personal ideologies regarding aesthetics and construction that challenged local principles practiced by fellow Bay Area architects. By embracing the materiality and stark design guidelines of “International Style” modernism fused with a Bay Area sensitivity to site, environment and use, Olsen’s works reflect a unique synthesis of the two distinct styles. The site was chosen for its picturesque surroundings, and the sloped site presented a challenge that modern building technologies could easily exploit.

1994: Addition of a lower studio level, which had previously been parking space.2003: Addition of a lower level bathroom.

Residence of original architect

As the architect has resided in 771 San Diego Road since its construction, the structure has been well maintained and stands in nearly original conditin aside from tow lower-level additions.

The structure is built primarily of steel, glass and wood in the style of European modernists Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. The house stands two stories high, sited on a slope. The main floor is elevated above the ground on thin steel columns, providing space for covered parking. Olsen's main emphases in this project were transparency and flexible spaces, glazing most facades and leaving the floor plan open. The communal spaces at the front of the house are defined only by furniture and use, not by partition walls. To the rear of the house, private spaces, such as bedrooms, are shielded by the wooded hillside and a restricted use of glazing. All exterior structural elements are painted a simple white, making the structure seem to pop out of its natural environment.

1954

The Donald and Helen Olsen House is sited on an irregular plot of land with a steep incline in the northern Berkeley Hills, adjacent to the wooded John Hinkel Park. The plot was purchased in 1953 after Olsen established his Emeryville office. The neighborhood is suburban in density, but gives a sense of remoteness due to its winding streets, challenging topography and dense native greenery. Because of the slope of the site, the house is perched at the rear end, taking advantage of the altitude and impressive views of the San Francisco Bay to the west. From the street, 771 San Diego Road stands out due to its bright white paint, severe geometry and dramatic glass façade, all of which contrast sharply with the wooded surroundings. The front section of the house has no support beams beneath it, creating an illusion that the house is hovering among the trees. The house is approached from a steep driveway leading directly beneath the upper floor or, alternatively, a sweeping stairway from the street below. A glass-encased black steel scissor stair positioned in the structure’s exact center is accessed through a door that acts as the primary entrance from below the building. The wall behind the stairwell boasts an oil-on-canvas painting by artist Claire Falkenstein. There had previously been parking spaces to either side of this central bay, but the eastern section was built out in 1994 as a studio (fig. 5). At the top of the stairs the floor plan opens to the house’s social spaces – a living room, kitchen and dining room divided by classic modernist furnishings that dictate spatial uses rather than partition walls. The hardwood floors and green surroundings create a soothing, warm ambience unexpected from the exterior view. The southern wing of the house, facing the street, is entirely open and flexible because the steel construction makes the use of bearing walls obsolete, although the spaces have been used similarly throughout their history. As the floor plan progresses north, towards the hill to the rear, the spatial uses become more personal and private – a study along the east wing and kitchen in the northwestern corner, and in the rear southeastern corner, three bedrooms of similar size. Two lavatories are tucked within the central core of the building beside the stairwell. These private spaces are partitioned off by walls and accessed via a hallway, although they still have a ribbon of windows across the top section of the rear wall. The rear façade was extended out onto what had previously been a balcony in 1975. By using standardized and common materials and keeping the scale of the structure small, Olsen was able to keep costs low and stick to the utilitarian philosophy of modernism. The main floor is elevated above a paved car park by 3.5”-wide steel columns, much like Corbusier’s stilt-like pilotis in the Villa Savoye. There are a total of sixteen columns, forming a grid of nine sections that act as the foundation of the main structure, an uncommon method for residential design at the time, and allow for the open floor plan in the living spaces above. The most prominent element of the Olsen House is its ample use of glass. From the street, the house seems to be a levitating glass mass with a few plants and a small marble statue gracing the front window. Each of the primary façade’s three glass plates are 8’ by 12’, spanning from floor to ceiling, while the side elevations use 8’ by 13’4” panels with functional windows set in narrow glass columns between (fig. 3). These are divided by narrow steel mullions that are painted white and mimic the lower columns. The rear façade has 4’ high wooden cabinets at the floor level and 4’ of glass above for privacy and storage. All of the glass is recycled and standardized in size to reduce construction costs. From the interior, a white steel guardrail was installed to create a less dizzying sense when standing at the windows. Interestingly, this house was constructed with drawn sheet glass, as the float glass process, which is most commonly used today, had yet to be standardized at the time of construction. Because of this, the glass walls have slight, yet almost indiscernible surface irregularities. This system is ideal for a shaded space in a mild climate, a the site and locale avoid problems of over heating or heat loss, which would normally be of concern in such a glass heavy structure. This extensive use of glass allows generous ambient light, yet due to the buildings height, surrounding greenery and distance from the street doesn’t impose on the Olsen’s privacy. Instead, it celebrates the modernist concept of architecture as volumes rather than masses and the site’s natural privacy measures.While the design of the house implies that the solid masses are painted steel or stucco-coated concrete, like a Mies or Le Corbusier, they are actually constructed of redwood that has been painted white. The white paint unifies the forms of the steel beams and the wood. This creates an interesting junction between the International Style and Bay Region standards, as well as a challenge to both in that Olsen was using the most economic material in the area – wood – while masking it with paint. European modernists would have opted for a more modern material, such as steel or concrete, which can express their virtues in form and function, while Bay Area architects would never paint over the rich, natural tones of the local wood, embracing its aesthetic qualities. The roof form is additionally built of painted wood as are the beams supporting the cantilevered deck.

Donald Olsen embraced the building technologies of International Style architects - steel pilotis and plate glass - while taking advantage of local resources, namely redwood used for the span of the floors and roof, supported by steel columns. These materials allowed for the simple geometries and open space of the house, which doesn't rely on exterior masonry, wood framing, or other support walls for the interiors.

With the rise of modernism, architects often took their need for personal shelter as an opportunity to both experiment as well as advertise their unique style. Something that sets the Donald and Helen Olsen House apart is that the couple has lived in the building since its completion, a rare situation for a modern single-family residence in our highly transitory society. While the Olsen House, as with most of Olsen's houses, is set in a suburban context, his designs, like those of many of his contemporaries, hardly fit the classic American suburban mold. The majority of well-known Bay Area residential architects designed unique homes for individual clients rather than filling in blank landscapes with prefabricated reiterations associated with the postwar period. Unlike a typical postwar, production-line suburbs of outlying areas, the homes of Olsen and his contemporaries also tend to break normative spatial layouts. Many male modern era Bay Area architects were married to equally successful and creative women, including Donald Olsen’s wife, Helen, who is a talented graphic designer. Rather than portioning off domestic spaces, such as the kitchen and laundry rooms, the use of flexible floor plans, glass walls, and open spaces, modern Bay Area residences challenged domestic roles by literally breaking down their walls. Additionally, the informal layout of the social spaces – an exposed kitchen, versatility in use and exposure to the public street, all break down earlier traditions of middle class living. In this way, these buildings were not only modern in their aesthetic, but in their social attitudes as well. Donald Olsen’s design also overcomes these challenges of privacy, livability and function that Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth house struggled with. The design was economy-driven, taking advantage of standardized materials to cut costs. His glass façade is out of public view, and the installed curtains are rarely seen drawn. He also worked with the incline of the site, letting the hill provide a natural barrier for privacy. His spaces fit standard needs – a communal family space, service spaces such as the kitchen and laundry, a quiet study with some privacy, access to the outdoors via the patio, and secluded bedrooms. A coffee table in the living space exhibits a collection of knick-knacks from Don and Helen’s travels, plants are scattered through the house, bookshelves are cluttered but neat. The space feels lived in, human.

Olsen designed nearly fifty residences throughout the Bay Area during his career, providing an idiosyncratic taste of another mode of modernism to the region. The International Style never took off in Northern California as it did in the East Coast or Southern California, leaving Olsen with few commissions. While the warmer tones of wood paneling and exposed post-and-lintel construction of Second Bay Tradition architects drew a broad audience, Olsen often felt the designs lacked spatial drama and preferred the volumes and forms of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. His houses were aimed to inspire intrigue and excitement, but his stark white pallet and rigorous geometric forms only appealed to academics. One architectural guidebook refers to nearly all of his residences as “Harvard Boxes.” European-inspired modernism was not entirely foreign to Bay Area streetscapes at this time. Richard Neutra had designed four single-family residences in San Francisco in the late 1930s that reflected an International Style aesthetic, but as he continued to design in the area, Neutra’s sensibilities adapted to regional influences while his southern designs spoke more to the European-influenced standards of their region. Raphael Soriano, hailing from the office of Neutra and a graduate from the USC architecture program, moved to Marin County from Southern California in 1953 after great success with his 1950 Case Study House #21, which employed an heavy use of steel for the basic structure, a practice that was very new and experimental for residential design in the United States at the time. Like early Neutra designs, Soriano’s reflected his Southern California tastes, employing glass walls, steel pilotis and spaces that merged interior and exterior – a distinctive California luxury. Architectural historian Esther McCoy called Soriano a “steel man in a wood country,” perhaps setting a precedent for Olsen. Like Olsen, Soriano received few commissions in the Bay Area, and even fewer survive to this day. The second and third Bay Area traditions have many similarities in basic design concepts with European modernism – open floor plans, plate glass windows, exposed structural elements, simplified geometries, and perhaps most important, both were ripe with social resolve. The rifts between the two schools of thought, however, ran deep. While “International Style” designs were often interpreted by the environmentally conscious Californian designers as overly academic and uninviting, Olsen felt that Bay Tradition homes weren’t as engaging or progressive as his design tenets. While a Second Bay Tradition house fits in holistically along a forested Berkeley drive, an Olsen house could as easily be located in Dessau, Germany, as it could be in the Bay Area.

Olsen's personal residence has become a beacon of the successes of modernism in Berkeley, recently gaining its place on both the National Register for Historic Places (2010) and local landmark legislation (2011), one of the first mid-century residences to do so in Berkeley. Although Olsen was at times an architectural pariah for mistreating redwood and his penchant for white paint, provided a healthy and challenging dose of International Style designs in a place of historic charm and regional modernism which strove to blend with its surroundings. His design reflects a moment in history where architects were faced with the opportunity to experiment with new materials and technologies and the challenges of shifting social orders and needs.

Because of Olsen's prominence in the architectural sphere of the Bay Area, his personal residence stands as the prototypical example of European modernism in Northern California. It follows the key design tenets of the International style, while sensitively interacting with its site and meeting the needs of its long-time residents. The house is small in scale, entirely unostentatious, but holds a strong stance as a marker of Olsen's challenge to Bay Area standards of its time.

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