William Henry Weeks was a second-generation architect, the son of a Canadian builder-architect. He was born in Charlottetown on Prince Edward Island, and at the age of fourteen moved with his family to Denver, Colorado. There he studied architectural design at the Brinker Institute and began his apprenticeship as a draftsman. He designed his first important building, the 1895 Garfield Institute, in Wichita, Kansas. By 1897 Weeks had relocated to Watsonville, California, the headquarters of the Spreckels Sugar Company beet processing plant, where members and high-ranking employees of the Spreckels family were among his early clients. Seeking to attract larger-scale commissions, in 1904 Weeks established an office in San Francisco. He was among the earliest of California architects to envision a regional practice and by 1926 maintained offices in San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose.
Week's reputation was that of a consummate professional who delivered his multitude of projects on budget and on time. While he is not remembered as an exciting designer, he was capable of a certain flamboyance, as may be seen in the Casino and Natatorium he created for the Santa Cruz Boardwalk in 1906 and 1911. The design of these buildings may have been influenced by architect Joseph Gather Newsom, with whom Weeks collaborated on the early phases of the project. Unsympathetically altered in the 1950s, these buildings once resembled exposition buildings such as those at the Chicago and San Francisco Fairs of 1993 and 1894 respectively. Eclecticism reigned as the dominant architectural expression in America between the 1880s and the 1930s, and Weeks' work reflects many diverse aspects of that aesthetic. His earliest Watsonville projects derive stylistically from the waning Victorian era and generally speaking embrace the Queen Anne sensibility. By 1906 he was working in an elaborate Mission Revival style, although an occasional commission would reveal a Richardsonian sensibility. His elementary school projects invariably embraced the Mission Revival, Tudor Revival or Collegiate Gothic styles. His high schools, business blocks, and banking "temples" offered the opportunity to explore main-stream classical themes deriving from Beaux-Arts classicism. During this period, California was becoming more appreciative of her Spanish / Mexican / Mediterranean roots, and a preference for buildings designed in these styles emerged as the California standard, so buildings deriving from classical roots were less common.
Buildings in the Beaux Arts style were generally large-scale civic structures including city halls, court houses, libraries, train stations and schools. It was also the style of choice for banks. The style is characterized by axial formality, the relatively large scale of the structures, and the lavishness of the materials employed: cut and carved granite, inlaid marbles, and patinated and/or polished bronze. The style emphasized the use of details derived from pattern books of classical architecture and found a receptive public audience following the Chicago World's Colombian Exposition of 1893, whose designers had legitimate Beaux Arts roots. Beaux Arts classicism became the dominant mode for the most prestigious civic buildings in the US These monumental buildings often had large areas of unarticulated window wall between the base and the classical cornice, leading some architectural theorists to see the movement as a precursor to the modernism that was to follow. As the style fanned out from Chicago, Washington, D.C. and New York to the cities of the West Coast, "correct" interpretation was found to a greater or lesser degree to be dependent upon budgetary considerations and the architectural education and design skills of the architects who used the style. The Bay Area's first Beaux Arts building was Albert Pissis1 brilliant Hibernia Bank of 1892, and this building set a precedent that California architects have aspired to ever since. California architects known for their Beaux Arts banks include Pissis and John Galen Howard, who studied at the Beaux Arts, and Bliss & Faville among others, who apprenticed in offices guided by Beaux Arts principles. In the early decades of the 20th century, William Week's catalog of styles included a subdued Beaux Arts classicism as seen in his projects like the Elko Nevada County Court House, the People's Bank of Santa Cruz, and the Banks of San Leandro, Arcata, and Palo Alto. His high schools for San Mateo, Burlingame, Willow, Santa Cruz, Eureka, Woodland, and Santa Rosa all featured a relatively sleek interpretation of the Beaux Arts style. His Modesto Public Library may be considered his most successful and innovative building in this style. Most of these buildings were built in the late teens. One of the "secrets" to his prolific practice was his formulaic reuse of a successful floor plan that required only new exterior elevations to give each project a semi-unique expression. This tendency to reuse a floor plan is found in many of his school and library projects and a few of his bank buildings, including the San Mateo Bank, which is a refinement of his better-known Santa Cruz People's Bank of 1910. Weeks expressed his belief that certain styles were appropriate for school buildings - his preferences included Mission, Classic (Greek) and Gothic. In an article about architectural styles for school buildings he wrote: "An historic style is more appropriate for the school than the original types that are usually short-lived and seldom bear repeating." His work indicates that this philosophy carried over into his bank projects.
By 1924, when the Bank of San Mateo was designed, Weeks was 58 years old, and the head of a large and successful practice. That year he also opened a branch office in Oakland, assisted by his son Harold H who had become his father's business partner, and two years later Weeks and Weeks opened another branch office in San Jose. Under the partnership, the firm's already exemplary reputation as specialists in school work was expanded to include a series of Spanish influenced Art Deco towers including the Hotel Palomar (1929) in Santa Cruz, the Medical-Dental Building (1927) and the Hotel DeAnza (1931) in San Jose, and the Benjamin Franklin Hotel (1926) in San Mateo. The senior Weeks' role became one of traveling administrator, and the firm's design work was produced by skilled designers in each office. As one of the oldest and largest architectural firms in the state, large public projects provided the bulk of the firm's work. When seen against this background, the Bank of San Mateo was a minor commission. This relative lack of importance combined with a relatively modest budget is expressed in the building's absence of refined proportion, detail, and materials that characterized the firm's earlier bank projects. Here, columns had been replaced by pilasters, granite had been replaced by cement plaster or terra cotta, and bronze had been replaced by painted steel. The resulting building still referenced its classical roots, but its expression had been marginalized. Among the published records of the firm's work, the Bank of San Mateo appears to be the last of the projects produced by the Weeks firm to utilize classical motifs. Harold Weeks, who had studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, is credited with leading the firm into new stylistic directions, and within a couple of years the practice would leave behind the classicism that had been an important part of the firm's design philosophy, for the pursuit of an Art Deco-based modernism. - NRHP