This folder contains the Fall 2007 (volume 84, no.4) issue of California History. This is the journal of the California Historical Society. Beginning on page 26 of this journal is an article titled, "In a Climate Like Ours: The California Campuses of Allison and Allison." This is an article about the architects James Edward Allison and his brother, David Clark Allison. These are the architects that designed Clarion University's Becht Hall (Navarre Hall). Becht Hall is specifically mentioned in the article, along with a photograph. The photograph of Becht appears on page 40.
Quoted below is the section of the article that specifically mentions Becht Hall, from pages 39-41:
"Under construction in Hollywood during J.E.'s 1903 California expedition was the A.G. Bartlett residence, soon to be touted in the [i]Los Angeles Examiner[/i] as "the best sample of the pure Spanish mission styleof architecture to be found in or near Los Angeles," and as the "fines of all the palatial homes in the Cahuenga valley." J.E. could not have resisted driving out to Hollywood to have a look at the Bartlett place. He must have sketched it, photographed it, or imprinted it upon his memory, for in 1908 Allison & Allison pivoted the westward migration of popular architectural styles and fetched the essence of the Bartlett estate back to the wooded Allegheny Plateau of northwestern Pennsylvania. The result was Navarre Hall (1908), a "dormitory for young ladies" at the Clarion State Normal School, a teacher-training institution on the edge of a forest ninety miles northeast of Pittsburgh. Navarre maintained Clarion's pattern of adding individual buildings in the latest fashion, with no discernible campus plan. The dorm's pale brick facing, and even its red tile roof, were common enough in western Pennsylvania, where the manufacture of clay products was a major industry. Exposed brackets and windows consisting of three vertical panes over a full lower sash typified Arts and Crafts details popular in the region. It was the flourish of its gables - and a massing and proportion drawn from the Bartlett House in Hollywood - that tagged Navarre as belonging to the last stages of mission mania. The building's creamy facade and undulating roofline exude irony: few Allison projects in California would allude so candidly to the mission revival. This residence hall remains something of an eccentricity while constituting a defining moment in the Allisons' practice. Navarre was not only a harbinger of the brothers' imminent transfer to the Southland, but a nonchalant "escapade," the first clear representation from the Allison office of David's sense of fun. Now ivy covered and still in use after nearly a century, it is a playful diversion, a counterpoint to the stolid presence of the Gothic and Romanesque revival campus buildings that were already in place at Clarion when the Allisons were hired to draft Navarre."
