The architecture and decorative arts designed in California more than a century ago by brothers Charles and Henry Greene are at last being recognized as among the finest work of the American Arts and Crafts movement. Incorporating European, Asian and Native American influences in their carefully detailed structures and objects, the Greenes considered architecture a design vocabulary for life, infusing their projects with an expressive sensitivity for geography, landscape, climate and lifestyle.
Commemorating the centennial of completion of their best-known commission, the Gamble House in Pasadena, Calif., “The Art and Craft of Greene & Greene” is on view at the Smithsonian American Art’s Renwick Gallery through June 7. Constructed between 1907 and 1909, the Gamble House, an internationally recognized structure, represents the epitome of their style. Edward Bosley, director of the Gamble House, and Ann Mallek, curator of the house, have organized the exhibition.
The largest exhibition of the brothers’ work to date, it examines their legacy through 127 objects representing a variety of their achievements, including beautifully inlaid furniture crafted from exotic hardwoods, artfully executed stained glass and metalwork and rarely seen architectural drawings and photographs. As Bosley observes in the exhibition catalog, the show “seeks to foster access to and appreciation for the genius of two brothers whose work was so elusive, self-effacing and sufficiently out of the ordinary that it was overlooked for decades in favor of more familiar or explainable styles.”
Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene were born 15 months apart into a Cincinnati, Ohio, family with ties to architecture and craftsmen. Revolutionary War hero Nathaniel Greene was their great-granduncle.
Growing up, as later in life, they were two very different people: Charles, the elder, was the dreamer with imagination who liked to paint watercolors; Henry was the practical one.
After their father established a homeopathy practice in St Louis, Mo., the brothers took courses in conventional academics and carpentry, metalworking and other trades at the Manual Training School of Washington University, before heading east to study architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
On the side, Charles and Henry worked as apprentices in Boston architectural firms that were influenced by the work of Henry Hobson Richardson, whose innovative use of shingles and other natural materials stimulated early interest in Arts and Crafts ideas.
In 1893, they moved to California, where their parents were already living in Pasadena. Launching their architectural firm, Greene & Greene, they initially designed everything from stables to houses. During this period, each married and started a family.
Soon after the turn of the century, the Greenes began to design projects marked by the individuality and sophistication of their more expansive works of 1907‱911.
According to Henry’s granddaughter Virginia Greene Hales and writer Bruce Smith, “It was step-by-step progression that involved developing a unique vocabulary, experimenting with materials and forms, finding competent craftsmen who could accurately interpret and execute the work and building a clientele who not only had the wealth to commission an ‘artistic’ house, but also the good judgment to do so.”
Charles was the lead designer for the firm, applying his unique aesthetic to a variety of projects. In his travels, he likely encountered the work of architect-designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Scotland and Gustav Stickley’s simple, “honest” furniture at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. Charles also familiarized himself with the rustic simplicity of Japanese domestic architecture and furnishings through books and other publications. Henry was the construction expert and the one who “got things done.” The brothers always got along in their practice and in their private lives, says Mallek.
Their style became well recognized by fellow architects and in professional journals. Especially remarked on were such key elements as low, wide spreading roof lines and projecting beams; absence of ornamentation and display on the exterior and shingled or clapboarded walls. Their work was regarded as uniquely Californian, with touches of Japanese influence.
The first great Greene & Greene house, the James A. Culbertson House in Pasadena, begun in 1902, was the only house they acknowledged was influenced by Englishman William Morris. Morris’s commitment to hand craftsmanship and designs and ideals involving the production of decorative arts had won him the designation “father” of the Arts and Crafts movement on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Culbertson house is “the earliest manifestation in the Greenes’ work of that magical trinity †an inspiring site, a sympathetic client and an architect willing to dream,” says Mallek. Situated along a dry riverbed, the scenic Arroyo Seco, where Charles designed his own home, Culbertson’s place was built in half-timbered vernacular known as “Old English.”
The standardized exterior gave little hint of the elegant interior, whose design suggested the influences of Japanese architecture and California landscape, and whose decor reflected Morris’s belief that “the complete work of art, the true unit of the arts, is a building with all its due ornament and furniture.”
Furnishings from Stickley contributed to an interior harmony in wood. The doorways and walls of the seven-bedroom house were crowned with Morris-like mottoes such as “The Glory of the House is Hospitality.” A square, patterned lantern, installed in 1910, shows the interest of client and designer in Japonism. The Greenes worked with Culbertson on major additions and alterations until his death in 1915, establishing a precedent for maintaining long and loyal relationships with clients.
The Arturo Bandini House in Pasadena, an interesting early work designed for a Mexican high-roller and his American wife, evoked Mexican California with a single-level, U-shaped structure surrounding an open courtyard reminiscent of the hacienda. In honor of the wife’s American roots, its exterior was made of board and batten siding and split-shake roofing, rather than traditional adobe construction. The Bandini house was frequently cited as a model for the modern California bungalow.
The Bandini house was demolished in the 1960s, but on view in the exhibition is a recreation of a pergola and fragment of the house, which allows visitors to appreciate the scale and materials the brothers used, while demonstrating how they combined Japanese design with Spanish colonial traditions.
Seeking to create a new regional architecture, the Greenes undertook projects in Long Beach for Jennie A. Reeve and Adelaide Tichenor. The former, a blend of West Coast woods and East Coast shingled homes, featured a Tiffany-like, vividly colored, leaded glass entry hall window of impressive dimensions. It was part of the brothers’ first effort at total design of a living environment, decorated with furniture, lighting fixtures and doors of their own design.
Charles’s watercolor talents are showcased in his views of the oceanfront Tichenor house and its expansive courtyard.
The house eloquently reflected the owner and designers’ interest in things Japanese.
As a result of collaboration with Swedish émigré master woodworkers John and Peter Hall, the Greenes’ furniture designs became more refined; they progressed from joinery as craft to joinery as aesthetic structure. A standout example of superior wood craftsmanship and exquisite detailing is John Hall’s dining armchair of 1906, for the Laurabelle A. Robinson House, with a Chinese Ming-era humpback stretcher or “cloud lift” that became one of the Greenes’ signature motifs. When one client complained about costs, Charles told him that he was getting not just a house, but a work of art whose value could never be measured in dollars and cents.
A prime example of the Greenes’ ability to shape architecture and decorative motifs to conform to the contours of the landscape and native plants and wildlife around their houses is the Robert R. Blacker House, Pasadena, 1907‰9. Its ample size †12,000 square feet †gave the brothers an opportunity to explore unifying qualities of materials and their decoration. Each room, says Mallek, “became a complete and self-contained environment, a&⁴otal work of art.” Overall, the Blacker house is considered the most totally integrated of landscape, architecture and interior design of all Greene & Greene houses.
The house was decorated with fine, complementary wood pieces, ranging from armchairs and an entry hall bench to an inlayed plant stand and a flower-full light fixture. Some of these exquisite pieces were sold at a yard sale and, like other furnishings taken from other Greene & Greene houses, are now in private hands and no longer visible.
Arguably the crown jewel of Greene & Greene, the Gamble House (1907‰9) in Pasadena has been preserved since 1966 as a publicly accessible landmark by the University of Southern California School of Architecture. A sprawling, multilevel showcase of Arts and Crafts qualities, located along with the Culbertson and Charles Greene houses to take advantage of panoramic views of the Arroyo Seco, it was commissioned by a son of the founder of Procter & Gamble. The exterior is notable for deep overhanging eaves shading three sleeping porches.
The interior, while not overtly decorative, contains five rugs designed by Charles and made in what is now the Czech Republic, and an exquisitely decorated small letter box. The house underscores the Greenes’ commitment to the sensory and aesthetic qualities of building materials, as well as their practical uses. The furniture in the guest bedroom is made of bird’s-eye maple with its speckled grain, and the porch is paneled with aromatic, resilient Port Orford cedar.
Numerous objects from other Greene & Greene houses have been added to the Gamble House collection.
After 1909, Charles drifted off, preferring his first love, painting watercolors and writing, and carrying out a few design commissions, in Carmel, Calif. Henry continued to work in Pasadena until commissions petered out with the onset of the Great Depression. Of the approximately 140 houses the Greenes designed, 62 have been demolished and another 14 substantially altered, leaving about 60 homes representing their body of work.
In the 1920s and 1930s, their work was largely forgotten. As decorative arts historian Edward S. Cooke Jr observes, “For much of the Twentieth Century,&⁛their] furniture&⁷ent unnoticed; many of their finest examples resided in private hands, and the prevailing tenets of Modernism were unsympathetic to their aesthetic.” The Greenes were rediscovered in the 1940s by a small group of architects who regarded them as forward-looking inspirations for American Modernism.
Recognition for their achievements continued late in their long lives. In 1952, the American Institute of Architects awarded the Greenes a special citation for creating a “new and native architecture.” Henry lived to be 84, dying in 1954, and Charles died in 1957 at the age of 88.
Hales and Smith note, happily, that “acclaim for&⁛the Greenes’] work today has grown far beyond any they received during their lifetimes. It is recognized not only for the heights of craftsmanship and artistry they attained and for their achievement in developing a manifestly Californian style of architecture; but also, most importantly, today their work is valued for its original, individual, artistic style, the result of the combined vision and efforts of [the] two brothers&”
The exhibition catalog, edited by Bosley and Mallek, and including essays by a dozen experts, covers all aspects of the lives and oeuvre of the brothers, and illustrates all facets of their work. Published by Merrell Publishers Ltd, London, it sells for $75, hardcover, and $39.95, softcover.
The exhibition travels to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, July 14 through October 18.
The Renwick Gallery is on Pennsylvania Avenue at 17th Street NW. For information, www.americanart.si.edu or 202-633-1000.
