Carefree California: Cliff May and the Romance of the Ranch House

http://www.uam.ucsb.edu/Cliff_May.html

The Art, Design & Architecture Museum presents the first major retrospective of the work of Cliff May, the designer who popularized the ranch house and made it an icon of casual California living in the post-war era. Co-curated by Jocelyn Gibbs, Curator of the AD&A Museum’s Architecture and Design Collection, and architectural historian Nicholas Olsberg, Carefree California is part of Pacific Standard Time. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue will examine the modernization of the ranch tradition and its transition from regional designs in adobe, brick, tile, and stucco to the modest wood and glass tract house of the forties, to the near-minimal system-built ranches May designed and sold in the late 1950s and, finally, to his luxury ranch houses. Carefree California is based on the Cliff May archive and also draws upon the archives of more than twenty additional California architects, all part of the AD&A Museum’s Architecture and Design Collection. Through drawings, models, sales pamphlets, photographs, site maps, publications, film and television clips and stills, building toys, and popular magazines, the exhibition will address the opening up of the plan, the emphasis on patio and glass corridor to suggest additional space, and the integration of house and garden. It will explore wartime industry, post-war in-migration, and the federal subsistence and military building programs that set many of the material terms and language for postwar tracts and for May's ubiquitous Californian solution that helped create an important regional identity.