The rogue element (2016

The term "regional," first invoked by Lewis Mumford and then reinforced (as "critical regionalism") by Kenneth Frampton and by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, attaches to Bay Regional architecture. Richard Fernau rejects the label, pointing to Eudora Welty's contention that "regional" is an outsider's terms. Fernau and Laura Hartman's eponymous firm is part of a lineage that gathers up its senses of the place, values openness and flow, and is wary of the overly predetermined. Living here on the Pacific Rim, you're immersed in it yet ever aware of what's beyond you and behind you.

The heart of this monograph on the firm's houses is Fernau's lead essay, which could serve as a tutorial on how to practice architecture as he and Hartman see it—with place and improvisation providing valid, potent bases for design. The pioneering Berkeley-based wine dealer Kermit Lynch shares their view of the role of place in creative practice. According to Lynch, author of Adventures on the Wine Route, viniculture and winemaking combine art, craft, and science with nature: the grapes, soil, and climate matter, but the rest is human and improvisational—skill, experience, nose, and luck.

Fernau compares their design process to modern dance, another improvisational and collaborative art. He compares their houses to collage in their use of materials, their fabrication, and the way they incorporate the "rogue elements" that place itself provides. And he points to the vernacular as evidence of how people adapt to a place as it changes and they change with it (and vice versa). This reminds me of William Morris's anti-scrape movement, which saw place of human habitation as evolving records to which successive dwellers contribute. Fernau mentions the architect Joseph Esherick's "ordinary"—like William Wurster punching a window "randomly" in a façade to frame a view, ignoring any imposed order. ("We don't hang windows from a clothesline," Esherick told Chuck Davis.) His uncle Wharton used to ask him, "What would a farmer do?" It led Esherick to see hedgerow windbreaks and old coastal barns as precedents for his Sea Ranch demonstration houses.

Fernau and Hartman started their firm in a garage near Bernard Maybeck's house and studio in the Berkeley hills. Fernau notes his influence. What struck him was the way that Maybeck played with spaces to achieve what Peter Buchanan calls a "loose fit" suited to a casual, open, unfolding existence that's set in a place, not against it.

When the weather was good, Maybeck worked outdoors under a canvas canopy and slept on a porch.

Fernau + Hartman's houses have the variety and maturation you would expect from a decades-old firm. The houses take the settings seriously. Fernau describes living there with his clients, their shared experience of it giving each house its specificity. Yet the process he describes continues long after a house is finished and occupied. The unfolding experience of a house in its setting gives it added depth and character. Such subtlety may be harder to see at a distance.

Theirs is a teaching office, another Bay Regional tradition. An elaborate list of the houses' teams both shares the credit and makes it clear how many young designers benefited from the collaboration, starting their own practices or rising to prominence in other firms.

A review of Richard Fernau's Improvisations on the Land: Houses of Fernau + Hartman, Monacelli, 2015, written for ARCADE34:1, 201