The sharp-eyed amongst you will have scratched your heads at my idea that Saint Xavier is associated with the California missions. Let’s just say that I conflated two ideas living in opposite sides of my brain without thinking them through: on the one side, the rough thought that Xavier was Spanish, and that he was associated with missionary work; and on the other, my desire to write about the California missions. I assure you that the two are remotely related, but only through the idea of proselytizing and through missionary work, which I heartily object to. Xavier (1506 – 1552) was indeed Spanish, and a co-founder of the Society of Jesus, commonly known as the Jesuits. We can thank these guys for the multitude of Baroque facades in Rome that served as architectural billboards for the Counter-Reformation and that became the model for Catholic missionary work as expressed through architecture through much of the world. I could give you an essay about the Baroque facades of Rome and in the remote places to which these men ventured, which would not be uninteresting, but I remain fixated on the California missions, and they will be the subject of this essay, come hell or high water. You will find this essay to be somewhat personal, and therein the advantage of blogs: I can allow myself to wax personal without my knuckles being rapped by some distant but crucial editor. But with the next and final essay, to appear sometime before mid-December, we will land safely back in the land of historic rambling with Thomas Becket, famous antagonist in an international twelfth-century drama. Onward!
I wanted to write about the missions because they seemed to embody yet another fantasy in the Fantasy-Land that is California, and California formed me; I spent the first twenty-five years of my life in Los Angeles, and my life was framed by fantastic experiences. Disneyland, newly opened, for my fifth birthday. Yosemite and its unbelievable grandeur and the magic of Ansel Adams’ photo studio when I was eight. Hours at the beach with the roar of Pacific rollers obliterating the sense of any other reality. The Sunset Strip and its billboards and clubs in my twenties, and an art scene that encouraged me to take nothing seriously. My knowledge of missions is woven into this haze of romantic pleasures like some scratchy cloth, as one of them in particular was primarily associated with death. Five times I visited the Mission San Fernando Cemetery to bury relatives: my mother in 1961, my great aunt in 1983, my great uncle in 1986, my father in 1988, and my sister’s young son in 1991. Burials are difficult, and it helps when the physical surroundings are soothing. At San Fernando, both the site and the architecture offer solace. Like most California mission sites, San Fernando is located in a valley surrounded by foothills, and the views from the cemetery are pleasant ones. Inside the mission church, the massive blond adobe walls, their thickness revealed by small, high windows, reassure you that you too will endure. In contrast to this simplicity, the gilded retablo, or altar screen, does a decent job of transporting you beyond the earthly realm, and the painted wooden beams, spaced at close intervals, are like a warm blanket overhead.
The missions were romantic to me for another reason: my parents were married at Mission San Juan Capistrano in 1939. 78 years later I bought my house in France for its façade, which reminded me of a mission, naming it Hirondelle in honor of the swallows whose annual migration to San Juan were a celebrated event. My little fantasy was happily given substance when I later observed a French version of California swallows roosting nearby.
Romantic notions of the missions and other aspects of California culture can be seen as products of a specific natural environment. There is an author, Christian Norberg-Schulz, whose books on architecture and landscape were an inspiration to me during my university education. In Genius loci, Norberg-Schulz proposes a schema of four basic landscape types found throughout the world and relates building design to the characters of these landscapes. Southern California would fall into his “classical” category, being in large part a land blessed with a mild climate, clearly defined hills and mountains, even light and transparent air (hold the ironic laugh about smog and smoke for the moment). He suggests that people living in these places can easily comprehend their environment and as a result they feel like partners in nature; they feel freer to exercise their fantasies upon their environment. Just to give you a contrasting example, Seattle and the Northwest where I lived for thirty-five years would be considered a “romantic” landscape in Norberg-Schulz’s lexicon, a moody one difficult to comprehend because of its mountains, vegetation, and cloudy weather. Norberg-Schulz would say that people in the Northwest must first make sense out of this mystery before they could build in it, that they are forced to respond to the forces that seem clearly superior to those of humans.
In the California of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, humans found it easy to impose their wills on the land and indulge their fantasies. Both sides of my family were invested in California myths. My father, born of a farm family in Oklahoma, saw Los Angeles as the land of opportunity for a young accountant hoping to invest in real estate and work for Upton Sinclair’s Socialist Party campaign (paradoxes like these are completely acceptable in LA). My mother’s ancestors had come from Germany to San Francisco in the mid-nineteenth century and then settled in the south after the 1906 earthquake. My maternal grandmother and her two sisters roamed the mountains of the Verdugo Range with their boyfriends in seemingly-endless play. My mother survived early family tragedies by basking in the affection of a godmother who had married a California “don” from an old Spanish family. This couple lived an early-twentieth-century version of Spanish rancho life in the Malibu hills until they lost their fortune. Early pictures of my parents present a studied nonchalance, and even when I became old enough to understand that our finances were quite modest and that there were grave health concerns lurking in the wings, my parents never failed to project a sense of happiness, enthusiasm, and curiosity which I attribute to a California magic potion of climate, natural beauty, and culture.
The missions were not created in an atmosphere of nonchalance, but their architecture came to represent—much later—a simple sensuality that is one of the best parts of California life. They do have a saint associated with them, the Franciscan Father Junípero Serra (1713 – 1784), whose feast day is August 28. He wasn’t canonized until 2015, and his sainthood was hotly contested, with good reason. By the time Serra became the front man for the mission operation in Alta (“upper”) California, he had already served as head inquisitor in Mexico City, and had also taken part in the expulsion of Jesuit missionaries from New Spain under the orders of the Viceroy of Spain in 1767. And then, his management of the missions…
I was never so naïve as to think that the missions were simply the product of altruistic motives, such as that suggested in the saccharine title of the book listed below (A Rosary of California’s Early Spanish Missions for the Indians, etc.), but still, it was a shock for me, in looking for recent articles, to land on one entitled California’s First Mass Incarceration System. Ouch! It is now known that the missions were indeed a sort of incarceration system. The California native tribes were generally docile and easily attracted to the missions through gifts and promises of prosperity. Serra, however, never respected them fully as human beings. He considered them “people without reason,” or gente sin razón. Although a Spanish Law of 1542 forbade Native American slavery, once baptized, natives were not allowed to leave the mission to visit their family or villages unless under guard. It seems that in some cases, natives were even put in cages (noted in the Madley article below). There is plenty of detail about the abuses exercised by the Franciscans and the Spanish military, and also much documentation about resistance from the oppressed, which were swept under the carpet until recently. It’s not a pretty picture, and as usual, it’s linked to a complicated game of thrones amongst the major chess pieces of sixteenth and seventeenth-century world powers.
The Spaniards are known for their conquest of parts of South America and of Meso-America, and for enslaving (despite the sixteenth-century law) Indigenous people starting in the fifteenth century. California as we know it entered into the picture about 1760 when British, Dutch, and Russian colonists began to eye this prize stretched along the Pacific Ocean. Spain then employed Franciscans and their military to colonize the coast and facilitate the “spiritual conquest” envisioned by Father Serra. The original idea was to secularize the missions after a ten-year period and distribute land to the natives who had worked it, but like the “best laid plans…” the story didn’t end that way. Beginning in 1769 with the foundation of Mission San Diego de Alcalá in the south, Junípero Serra then moved up north to Monterey to found Mission San Carlos Borromeo the next year, and over the course of the next fourteen years and his lifetime, he founded eight other missions along the coast. Other Franciscans continued to fill in the blanks until 1823 to ensure that a mission was planted every thirty miles or so (a day’s ride), until there were twenty-one missions from San Diego to just north of San Francisco.
Each settlement included a misión, a presidio (or fort), and a pueblo (or town), and as you may have guessed by now, some of the mission sites generated what are now the major California cities. It was often the case that the secular interests of the presidios and the pueblos conflicted with the spiritual ideals of the mission, to the extent that some missions were physically moved to avoid the troubles, but never very far away as they were the economic base for the settlements. The Franciscan project was not only to convert natives but also to use them as free labor to exploit the vast tracts of land they were given by the Spanish Crown. Wikipedia gives some statistics: by 1832 the missions collectively held roughly 150,000 head of cattle, 140,000 sheep, 15,000 horses, 1,600 mules, 1,700 goats, and 1,100 pigs. Certain missions became specialized industrial centers; Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa fabricated tiles, San Luis Rey was known for its wine, and San Fernando Rey de España for its metal work.
Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, and the missions were regulated by a governor for Alta California. Funding increasingly dwindled and in 1834 most of the mission lands were sold to private parties, and became absorbed into huge ranchos, and in 1850, when California became the thirty-first state and Spanish and Mexican land grants were called into question, some of the mission lands were returned to the Church. But the missions had seen their heyday and many of them slid gradually into ruin. They would slumber for fifty-plus years, until heritage and revival movements found value in restoring them, and the “California Mission” style of architecture came roaring onto the scene.
Let’s take the time machine back to the Spanish invasion of the Americas in the sixteenth century to get a grip on the roots of this style, and I hate to say it, but sometimes I really do think that all roads lead to Rome. The Jesuit Order, which would have an enormous influence on the architecture of the Americas, was founded in 1540 by Pope Paul III to combat the Reformation, and their mother church, Il Jesu, was built in Rome shortly thereafter. Il Jesu was mostly about façade as theater, consciously striving to attract those tempted to stray from Catholicism with its architectural antics. Here was a façade solidly based on classical proportions but dressed for a party, with seductive curves, deep niches, exaggerated scale, broken pediments, and god knows what else you might find tucked into the corners. And because Il Jesu was the mother church of an order that covered the globe with its missionary work, guess what? Soon after the Spaniards arrived in South America, Il Jesu wanna-bes were springing up like mushrooms. The monks had brought copies of Sebastian Serlio’s wildly popular encyclopedia of architecture with them to give them the patterns needed. But of course there were differences, delightful ones IMHO. The native masons were among the most skilled the world has known, having, among other projects, projects like Machu Picchu under their belts. In addition, the Jesuits had landed in a country of exotic and abundant flora and fauna, and their MO being to ease conversion to Christianity by assimilating local imagery, we find Il Jesu facades heavily adorned with beautifully carved representations of native plants and birds, and sometimes even local deities (slightly disguised with a borrowed Christian persona).
This practice made its way northward to what is now Mexico. Monastery and mission buildings might be simple in the ensemble if funds were limited, but an effort was made to concentrate resources on a glorious façade, even if it meant importing masons and stone from far away. Thus we often find, on the facades of these Meso-American churches, a curious mixture of smooth adobe walls framing a central entry panel that is a veritable explosion of classical and Henri Rousseau-jungle-like carved elements.
For Father Serra and the Franciscans in Alta California, the funds and resources were much more limited. California natives built mostly with wood and brush and some mud; the benign climate enabled them to live “lightly” if you will, and they were not peoples to build grand monuments like the Aztecs, Incas, and other tribes of the south. They didn’t have the masonry skills to carve elaborate facades, and the Franciscans didn’t have the money. So, the missions were for the most part simple adobe structures with thick walls, small openings, and simple roofs. When the occasional classical element was added (because after all, the Franciscans had brought their little pocket copies of Serlio with them), it seemed shockingly out of place. Just one look at the façade of Mission Santa Barbara will tell you how that works out.
The mission revival movement was helped by a variety of events. Perhaps the most visible amongst them was the California Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Foreign visitors were favorably impressed, and soon style books and historical studies about the Spanish and Mission styles of the Americas were circulating in Europe. The editor of the Los Angeles Daily Times in the early 1900’s, Charles Lummis, promoted the restoration of the missions for their importance as a unified body of California’s oldest buildings. In 1904 a French journalist writing in Figaro described the Mission Style as the only “truly original American style.” Influential European architects such as Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra who emigrated to the US in the early-twentieth century had seen these studies and Schindler in particular adopted some elements of the style in his early work.
In A Guide to the Styles of American architecture, the Mission Style is differentiated from the Spanish Colonial Style by its simplicity. It is expressed by plain thick walls, arched openings, and low-pitched tile roofs, and is eminently appropriate for the southern California climate. Begin adding frou-frous like domes, Moorish curves, and tiles, and you enter into the realm of the Spanish Colonial. The “modern” architects of the Los Angeles of the early-twentieth century embraced the Mission style for its simplicity. They found therein a “positive morality” in the words of Reyner Banham, an architecture with a lack of “mechanistic pretensions…of [that] ferocious introspection that gives European work of the twenties its air of angst…”. I’ll lean back on Norberg-Schulz for an explanation of this angst. So many architects of the International School came from northern European “Romantic” climates, and they had no choice but to feel angst in the face of their challenging environments. This is all very complicated, but I’ve run out of space to carry the discussion further!
I’ll sum up by proposing that, once again, we have an architecture that was rescued from associations with sins of the past by new and ever-changing perspectives.
Stay tuned for the next story, to arrive in your mailbox sometime before December 29.
References for Weeks 48 through 52 Part I: Missions: California Dreamin’
Websites:
California Missions Foundation. This is a site with fairly well-balanced points of view, and beautiful illustrations of the missions:
https://californiamissionsfoundation.org/
Books and articles
Please note that sources listed here may be available in more recent editions.
Banham, Reyner. Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Pelican: 1971.
Gebhard, David. Schindler. London: Thames and Hudson, 1971.
Haskell, Albert G. A Rosary of California’s Early Spanish Missions for the Indians on El Camino Real, from Original Paintings by Will Sparks. San Francisco: Otto Press, 1940.
Lowman, Hubert A. The Old Spanish Missions of California. Hong Kong: LMG Crocker International, 1989.
Madley, Benjamin. “California’s First Mass Incarceration System: Franciscan Missions, California Indians, and Penal Servitude, 1769-1836,” in Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 88, No. 1, pps. 14 -47.
Norberg-Schulz, Christian. Genius loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture. New York: Rizzoli, 1980.
Whiffen, Marcus. American Architecture Since 1780: A Guide to the Styles. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969.
W48 through 52 Part I: The Missions: California Dreamin'
En avant!