A month ago my husband and I, along with two of our loyal friends, went to Coachella Valley High School, to join in the celebration of its 100th anniversary. The school's steel reinforced concrete walls look very much like they did when I was in school in the 1960s. One feature I enjoyed even as a student was the way the campus was designed around a collection of connected quadrangles. As I recall, a lot of the student life could be conducted outside in the shade of the quads, because the weather wasn’t oppressively hot until June when school was out for the summer.
During our visit to the campus I was struck again with the design features at the entrance; large concrete structures that sweep up and over the roof look like the superstructure of a ship. And the corners of the buildings are rounded as if to cut through the waves more easily.
My understanding is that the architect of the original Coachella Valley High School was E. Charles Parke. So the design features that reminded me of a ship in the desert came as no surprise. It was E. Charles Parke who designed my grandparent’s home in Thermal in 1939. And that home certainly had some ship-like features. There was a round porthole window in the front door, a second-floor deck that wrapped around the east side of the house, rounded corners on the exterior walls, and a glass brick window in the stairway.
Parke was a Canadian, born in 1886, he became a naturalized citizen of the U.S. and moved to California where he set up offices in Riverside and Chula Vista.
Information about Mr. Parke is thin. I can only guess that the man who grew up in Ontario, Canada, was more accustomed to lakes than sand. But when he encountered the waves of sand dunes in Southern California, he couldn’t resist designing around some nautical inspirations.
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