Beaming with Wit and Whimsy

You are greeted by a red front door—maybe the brightest red you've seen all day—in the center of an otherwise bland façade lacking even a window to let you see inside.

But you don't need to see inside; you know what'll be there: an entryway leading to a living room, a rug to wipe your feet, a table to drop your keys.

But no! You walk through the door and find yourself…back outside!

You do a double take.

No, it may not be a laugh-out-loud moment. To laugh like that over a mid-century modern tract home, you must turn to Sacramento architect Carter Sparks, who somehow convinced his bosses—the rather reserved and Republican-voting Streng brothers—to let him design some homes shaped like pyramids, and many homes with planting areas for trees in the middle of the living room.

Eichlers have been known to be witty houses, providing surprises, while evoking sly smiles through their detailing, spatial arrangements, and even their placement on the street.

But wait. Is it even OK for architecture to be funny?

The architects of mid-century Googie coffee shops, with their upswept roofs and Space Age freestanding signs, sure thought so. But those are not houses, places where people seek repose.

Consider, though, the fabulous Queen Anne Victorian homes that dotted the U.S. in the 1890s. Staid critics who lambasted these homes' endless bombast—onion-shaped domes atop spindly Ionic columns; towers festooned with dormers, spindles, brackets, and friezes—would have done better to appreciate the joke.

And how about the Storybook homes of the 1920s that charm to this very day, with their swooping, 'catslide' roofs that evoke medieval thatch, and crenellated towers, where homeowners can scurry to drop vats of hot oil on the heads of invaders?

Ah, but modernism, on the other hand, is all about function, lack of ornament, truth. Where's room for playful in all of that?

William Krisel, whose firm, Palmer and Krisel, designed most of the mid-century modern Alexander homes in Palm Springs, bristled some years back when we referred to the butterfly and folded-plate roofs that so many of his homes bore as "wacky."

"You call them funny roofs, and you wrote an article calling them wacky rooflines. Those are not architectural terms, and I really resent them," Krisel said, adding, "They are architectural forms, and they are good architectural forms."

Still, author Alan Hess reminded us during a recent talk, 'A Century of Progress: The Bay Area Discovers the Modern Muse - 1890-1990,' that modernists in California, especially Northern California, were more inclined than those elsewhere to focus on joy in their work. Hess even cited a First Century BCE Roman architect.