In his prolific, but tragically brief career, Gordon Drake significantly influenced and inspired the direction of post-World War II residential architecture. Working almost exclusively from the west coast, he created a new architecture embraced by post-war middle class America without abandoning any of the rigor of Modernism.

Drake, who was barely 34 years old in 1952 when he was killed in a skiing accident in the Sierras, achieved a body of work enviable to much older colleagues both in quality and quantity, and with such apparent spontaneity to have virtually no rivals in the field of modern architecture.

The reissue of California Houses of Gordon Drake by Douglas Baylis and Joan Parry, richly illustrated with photographs and Drake’s own drawings, includes a new introduction by esteemed architect Pierluigi Serraino. Serraino argues that Gordon Drake’s work is of great value today because Drake, well ahead of his time, understood the structural relationship between architectural design, construction methods, and the environmental impact of architecture. Drake anticipated sixty years ago the environmental threats we are facing in our time. His insight of how wasteful construction can be without a sensitive attitude to the rhythms of nature and how reckless it is to design without human values and concerns are themes that are as modern as today.

The book also includes a new preface by Glenn Murcutt.

Douglas Baylis (1915-1971) was a West Coast landscape architect who was associated with Gordon Drake from 1950 to 1952. Gordon Drake did his only remodeling job for Douglas and Maggie Baylis on their home in San Francisco. He lectured at several universities and was Supervising Landscape Architect to the University of California.

Joan Parry was a young free-lance English writer. She did the research and wrote the book of Gordon Drake for this book. Educated in Great Britain and France, she came to America in 1949 and spent three years traveling throughout the country before settling in San Francisco.

Pierluigi Serraino is a practicing architect in the San Francisco Bay Area. The author of many books on architecture, including Eero Saarinen, Modernism Rediscovered, and NorCalMod. His articles and projects have appeared in Architectural Design, ArCA, Global Architecture, Hunch, Construire, Architettura, ACADIA, and Journal of Architectural Education.