The Kawneer Building is an early and visually prominent part of industrial West Berkeley, and for half a century was the West Coast headquarters of the company that revolutionized storefront design throughout the country.
The factory was conceived and built in 1913 by Francis J. Plym, founder of the Kawneer C0., Architect, inventor, businessman, machinist, cabinet maker. The building not only embodies the highest qualities of industrial architecture of its day, with form intensely following function, but goes further: Plym designed the very product he was manufacturing into the building itself. The twenty saw-toothed banks of skylights stretching the entire length of the brick structure are great-grandparents to today's glass wall architecture; and the glass and metal office building at the north end embodies the company's products of half a century later. In 1954 the Berkeley Gazette called it " one of Berkeley's most artistic manufacturing plants which is used as a model for industry in many places." (5-26-54)
Plym, an immigrant from Sweden in 1871 at the age of two, son of a cabinet maker, leaped from sixth grade education to a degree in architecture from the University of Illinois through sheer drive and ambition. In 1904 he hit upon the invention that would dominate his life and change the face of the world: a resilient metal framing for glass that would make large window expanses possible. The first primary application was storefronts. Wooden framing moved with the weather and rotted, cracking large panes and making the typical storefront look like a fence of windows, often dirty and fogged by precipitation. Plym's design created a storefront of almost all glass, breaking down the psychological barrier between outside and in, inviting customers into the store.
Plym got his patent in 1906 and founded the Kawneer Co., taking the name from the nickname for the Kansas River, "the Kaw", flowing by the shop in Kansas City where he developed his invention.
Not long after, a thousand miles away, San Francisco shook to its foundations and burned. As the city pulled itself from under the great disaster and began to rebuild, Plym presented his product to the architects and contractors who were rebuilding the city, and San Francisco rose with a new face provided by his product and design. A friend soon wrote to him saying that " Market Street ought to be renamed Kawneer Street." Downtown Berkeley and Oakland were soon to follow. Over the following decades, Plym successfully defended his patents and absorbed competitors, and Kawneer single-handedly refaced " Main Street U.S.A."
The Kawneer plant, in Niles, Michigan ( begun in 1907 ), was too far from one of his best markets, so Plym decided to build a plant in Berkeley. The first Kawneer factory, in Niles, provided to Plym by the local Business Men's Association as an incentive to bring industry to the town, was built in a conventional shed design, with side wall windows providing the lighting. Plym was dissatisfied with the design, and the new Berkeley plant gave him the opportunity as an Architect to design the manufacturing building of his dreams, built around the needs of the industrial processes it was to house, using his most creative and advanced ideas and inventions.
Plym was an intensely practical man, who loved tools, machinery, and manufacturing processes. He was not an office executive, but a man who loved spending most of his time in the plant, working and developing his ideas. The plant should be a work space, focused on the activities inside, without constant distractions coming from the world beyond.
To create this condition, he took the opposite strategy he took with his storefronts. Instead of breaking down the barrier between building and street, he increased it: the outside walls of the new factory would have few windows, and the light would now come from above, from the twenty glass wall skylights facing north. This distinctive design feature, apparently pioneered in Berkeley by the Kawneer Building, was destined to become a design feature in industrial architecture. Plym used the same window design in three additions to the Niles plant built in the following decades. The local influence can be seen directly across the street, on the Parker end of Eighth Street: the Kawneer skylights are architecturally reflected in a similar construction, erected later, whose sawtoothed banks of skylights are apparently the direct offspring of Kawneer's.
The Berkeley site was not yet developed into a manufacturing area. It was mostly agricultural, and his new building was the first industrial structure in this part of West Berkeley. The local Architect Plym used was Chester Miller of Oakland, later of Miller and Warnecke, famous for their work on schools. Plym himself was here in 1914, supervising the progress of the work and operation.
As Kawneer grew into a giant corporation, servicing the entire country and expanding internationally, the Berkeley plant continued to thrive as the West Coast headquarters and factory for the next 45 years. Meanwhile the basic Kawneer invention found other applications, as the basis for essential elements in automobiles, aircraft, and refrigerators. By the time of his death in 1940, Plym saw his ideas changing commercial design around the world.
He was succeeded by his son, Lawrence J. Plym, who expanded the Kawneer operations and doubled the size of the Berkeley plant. As related in The Kawneer Story, by Thomas Stritch (1956), " When the sales of architectural products soared to new heights, plant capacities everywhere were taxed to bursting. ….Berkeley, too, was feeling the pressure. A new office building, embodying in itself the foremost Kawneer engineering, was constructed to serve the rapid growth of the architectural growth on the West Coast, and additions were made to the factory until every foot of apace at the present location was covered. " The 1940s and 1950s additions were mostly designed by Albert Froberg, noted for his Art Deco designs in the East Bay, Architect of the Marshall Steel Plant on Telegraph Avenue.
The Kawneer Building additions of 1947-1950, enclosing a parallel space the entire length of the building, followed the same principles of industrial architecture as the original, but in a different style. Here the skylighting is horizontal and scarced: the age of electricity had arrived and internal spaces did not have to rely so greatly on natural light. This increased the number of workers at the plant from 110 to a peak of 250. In the same period, the Dwight Way end of the building was modernized and a new office was added, with a butterfly roof and large glass walls; like the original factory it uses the product in the architectural design, as a continuing display of the unity of form and function.
Further need for expansion finally forced Kawneer to move from Berkeley and find a new home for its Architectural Products Division in Visalia in 1958.
The Kawneer Building was vacant for a year, then bought by the Sealy Mattress Co., which moved their operation here from Oakland and remained until 1972, when it was sold to A.J. Bernard, who divided the factory into 35 spaces of various sizes, which became filled with artisans, small industries, artists, craftspeople, theaters and schools.
Although ownership has changed once more, The Kawneer Building continues to be used in this way, still an integral part of the industrial area and neighborhood that grew up around it, still housing the manufacturing and work spaces for which it was built.