The home of Berkeley architect Donald Olsen became a city landmark Mar. 5 in a move that marked the embrace of a new era of design.
The Donald and Helen Olsen House, designed and built by the former UC professor in 1954, earned the designation in a unanimous vote by the Berkeley Landmarks Preservation Commission. In bestowing the honor, the commission expanded its focus to include postwar modernist architecture.
Commissioner Carrie Olson said the Olsen House was just the second modernist residence to be landmarked in the city, the first being architect William Wurster’s Jensen Cottage on La Vereda.
It offers a break from “fussy architecture,” she said at the meeting. According to the landmark application, the home’s design features an interplay of solids and voids, bringing forth the idea of minimalism, as articulated in Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s maxim “less is more.”
To the casual observer, the house, at 771 San Diego Drive, has the appearance of a glass box on stilts.
“It has a unique character, which makes it look underdone, but it is not,” said Steven Winkel, commission chair.
Berkeley architect and Planning Commissioner James Samuels, who wrote the local landmark application, mentions in the document that the significance of the building’s design can be attributed partly to the fact that it was built at a “benchmark moment” in residential American architecture of the 20th century.
“Coming upon the Olsen House,” the nomination says, “one is immediately reminded of the revolution which occurred in all the arts at the beginning of the last century, no more forcefully than in architecture.”
It goes on to discuss how revolutionary architects of the early 20th century, including Walter Gropius, Pierre Jenneret, and Mies, broke from the past and designed a completely new genre of architecture, revolting against the “superficial application” of the Greco-Roman orders, Gothic romanticism, Renaissance classicism, and vernacular domestic architecture.