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By Susan Frost, Class of 2015

Bold statement, I know! But when we think about the influence of the 1893 Fair on subsequent architecture, we tend to focus on the Beaux Arts Court of Honor, or the Japanese pavilion. We sometimes gloss over the State buildings.

Burnham stipulated that the State buildings be regional in character. For some, that meant replicating architectural icons, resulting in miniature Independence Halls. For others, it meant a desire to impress. (Unfortunately, the design Washington state submitted to do just that was shot down by Burnham in favor of the more rustic third choice). And for a few, it meant harnessing new ideas. Burnham asked that the California building be “Moorish-Mission” in style, riding the wave of newly strong interest in the old Spanish missions of the west, thereby bolstering a building boom of pseudo adobe structures with arched loggias that persists to this day in the Golden State. Idaho’s design captured emerging Arts and Crafts thinking, and it was a hit.

The Idaho building was sandwiched between Virginia’s Mount Vernon and Montana’s neoclassical box on the edge of the fairgrounds. The architect, Kirtland Cutter, had been designing buildings on the west coast for just six years. His building was wildly popular, visited by 18 million people. American Architecture and Building News wrote “Idaho’s building is not excelled by that of any state structure in the artistic application of the characteristics and features of the state” – and it won a bronze medal emblazoned with an image of Columbus to prove it. Swiss chalet in style, it was boldly simple, unpainted, an overgrown log cabin with overhanging eaves and a broad gable. Inside, rustic details included stone fireplaces, andirons made of bear traps, and Native American artifacts and gemstones.  A clock made out of a frying pan was set to Idaho time. Windows were mica, and newel posts looked as if they had been chewed by beavers. Hinges and handles were made of metal tools and leather straps. It was both a romanticized version of western life, and an embodiment of the tenets of Arts and Crafts philosophy: natural, unfussy, handcrafted, and locally sourced.

It’s impossible to look at pictures of this building without thinking of Greene and Greene’s ultimate bungalows of Pasadena, or the brown shingle style houses of Berkeley. Indeed, the Greene brothers stopped at the Fair mid-move from Boston to Pasadena.

The Idaho building’s coda was splashy. Bidding for the building was brisk at the Fair’s close. It was purchased by Celia Whipple Wallace, the “Diamond Queen”, an eccentric Chicago widow who lived in the Auditorium Hotel and collected rare gems, including the second largest diamond in the country, 42 carats big. Her other Fair purchase was the Tiffany chapel that is now at the Morse Museum. Wallace had the Idaho building reassembled in Lake Geneva with the intention of using it as a vacation home and later a school for orphaned boys. It was never used for either, remaining empty, rumored to be haunted. She eventually swapped it for a rare blue-black Wisconsin river pearl, and it was demolished in 1911.

But the building lived on. Some of the logs were used to build a new municipal pier in Lake Geneva. A wealthy Englishman had the entire structure recreated in Ringwood, England, calling his new country estate “Idaho”. And Swiss chalet architecture blossomed in the foothills of the Pacific coast as the Arts and Crafts movement swept the country.

Photos, from left: The Kroeber House,, Berkley, CA, Bernard Maybeck, 1907 (R. Kehlman photo); The George Wilson Home, Julia Morgan, Vallejo, CA, 1909 (realtor.com photo); The Darling Residence, Greene and Greene, Claremont, CA, 1903 (Hartman Baldwin  photo)

Sources:

Chicagology.com

Freudenheim, Leslie, Building with Nature: Inspiration for the Arts and Crafts Home.  Gibbs Smith, Salt Lake City, 2005

Historylink.org (Online encyclopedia of Washington State History)

Just, Rick, “The Idaho Building”, rickjust.com, 2018 (Rick Just is an Idaho historian and author of Images of America: Idaho State Parks)

Matthews, Henry, Kirtland Cutter: Architect in the Land of Promise, University of Washington Press, 2007

Meyers, Pamela, “The Idaho Building: A Lakeshore Building That Never Became a Home”, history.com, 2018 (Pamela Meyers is an author from Lake Geneva. Sources cited)

Ochshner, Jeffrey, “In Search of Regional Expression: The Washington Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893”, Pacific Northwest Quarterly, 1995

Pcad.lib.washington.edu (Pacific Coast Architecture Database)