2 presentation albums of linen-backed photographs (ca. 1928) from the California Stucco Products Corporation highlighting the architectural versatility of stucco, including richly hand-colored photographs by Mott Studios.

Mission-style bungalows, Spanish Colonial ranches, Romanesque houses, Moorish concert halls, Mediterranean villas, federal-style skyscrapers—stucco does it all, and cheap! So proclaims these promotional albums from the California Stucco Products Corporation, founded in 1927 by O.A. Malone, “the man who put color in California."

While stucco had been used as a building material in America since the 1820s, Malone’s introduction of a brightly pigmented, pre-packaged mix added fuel to American 20th-century architectural revivalism. The material took particular hold of California, in part because of its dry climate (stucco doesn’t hold up to moisture) and the prevalence of lightweight wood-framed houses, which are good for withstanding earthquakes and make a perfect armature for any number of architectural expressions in stucco. Builders could shape wire mesh, suspend it from a wood frame, and apply a stucco skin to create monolithic forms with little relation to the structure underneath. All surface, no substance—architecture for a place where the image holds sway.

The albums include visually arresting photographs of a range of both urban and suburban buildings, mostly in Southern California, including evocative detail images of archways and ornamentation. One album focuses on hand-colored photographs of residences in Mission- and Spanish Colonial- Revival styles, and the other on large-scale public buildings in neo-classical and federal styles.

Typed captions on many of the image versos contain identifying information for the building, details about how the material was applied, and the effect. "This is a replica of the Palace of Legion of Honor Building in Paris, France,” one reads. The stucco was “gone over with an electric vibrating tool, leaving the face as though it had been erected of stone. "The result," says California Stucco Products "is more uniform and lasting than the real stone.” Other captions sing the praises of stucco’s low cost, durability, and fire-resistance—including a handful describing images of burned-down wooden houses the next lot over from “nearly unscathed” stucco ones.

One of the albums contains three fold-out panoramas of school-houses in several styles. The other has a series of 10 detail images showcasing texture effects achieved with stucco. These photographs are striking for their abstract and geometric composition, capturing subtle variations of surface and shadow that call to mind the later works of the California Light and Space Movement or Hiroshi Sugimoto’s seascapes.

The California Stucco Products Corporation still exists today, albeit in Hackensack, NJ.