DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-197183
title: A unifying vision: improvement, imagination and Bernhard Hoffmann of Stockbridge (New England) and Santa Barbara (New Spain)

description: “A Unifying Vision” explores the little-discussed link between two important civic phenomena in America: the village improvement movement, which began in mid-19th century Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and the imposition of Mediterranean-influenced architecture in Santa Barbara, California, instituted a half century later. That connection came in the form of civic activist Bernhard Martin Luther Hoffmann, born in Stockbridge in 1874.  After a career based primarily in New York City, Hoffmann arrived in Santa Barbara in 1919, immediately and directly applying the village improvement tenets his father and community had modeled for him throughout his life. Hoffmann’s organizational work both before and after the Santa Barbara earthquake of June 28, 1925 rendered him a kind of civic celebrity; however, this was a designation he modestly refused to indulge. ❧ As the idea of “improvement” was disseminated across the United States between 1830 and 1910, its basic tenets – basic sanitation, definition of land use, meaningful monuments, planting and horticulture, and general beautification - segued into the home economics movement before being enveloped by small-scale “City Beautiful” interventions inspired by the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. These mutually-supporting activities, bolstered by new technologies, combined with civic education to undergird the very beginnings of the urban planning movement around 1909. Interpretations of the Exposition’s organizational and aesthetic conventions were seen in the pioneering work of Charles Mulford Robinson and John Nolen, among others, from that time forward.  Utterly reflective of the pragmatic, yet aspirational, nature of early American society, the ideal of “Improvement” was advertised perpetually by relocating boosters, writers, and investors as the railroad extended west. ❧ Nowhere, perhaps, were village improvement’s dual premises of selfless volunteerism and the imposition of taste more directly interpreted - or more successfully applied - than through the civic activism of Bernhard Hoffmann and Pearl Chase in 1920s Santa Barbara. A successful professional at mid-life, Hoffmann left his historic hometown of Stockbridge, Massachusetts to join a newly forming class of elites perfectly positioned between San Francisco arts and culture and an increasingly Anglicized Los Angeles. One of these elites was Miss Pearl Chase, a Yankee daughter of New England lineage who, returning as a young woman to Santa Barbara after graduating from Berkeley in 1907, applied herself zealously to the improvement of civic and societal conditions for the remainder of her life, The fiercely independent Chase found a steadying, and highly focused, counterpart in Hoffmann, as they worked effectively together (although often physically apart) for many years. ❧ Among the many Santa Barbara philanthropic and cultural activities with which Hoffmann and his wife, Irene, were involved, it was the completion of three important municipal projects: the Casa de la Guerra with El Paseo; the Meridian Studios, and the Lobero Theater which illustrated the centrality of the evolving Spanish Colonial style in the development of the city’s resonant paradigm. These case studies, and the events surrounding their construction, reveal how the legacy of historical New England village improvement contributed to Santa Barbara’s successful unity of form and image.